Ethics, Aesthetics and the Historical Dimension of Language: The Selected Writings of Hans-Georg Gadamer 9781441164902, 9781474204255, 9781350278332

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Ethics, Aesthetics and the Historical Dimension of Language

Also Available from Bloomsbury Hermeneutics between History and Philosophy, Hans-Georg Gadamer The Beginning of Knowledge, Hans-Georg Gadamer The Beginning of Philosophy, Hans-Georg Gadamer A Century of Philosophy, Hans-Georg Gadamer Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer

Ethics, Aesthetics and the Historical Dimension of Language The Selected Writings of Hans-Georg Gadamer Volume II By Hans-Georg Gadamer Edited and translated by Pol Vandevelde and Arun Iyer

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc ­First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Bloomsbury, 2022 Pol Vandevelde and Arun Iyer have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Translators of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 1900–2002, author. | Iyer, Arun, translator. | Vandevelde, Pol, translator. Title: Ethics, aesthetics and the historical dimension of language / by Hans-Georg Gadamer ; edited and translated by Arun Iyer and Pol Vandevelde. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. | Series: Selected writings of Hans-Georg Gadamer ; volume 2 | Translated from German. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021035890 (print) | LCCN 2021035891 (ebook) | ISBN 9781441164902 (hb) | ISBN 9781350278332 (epdf) | ISBN 9781350278349 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Language and languages–Philosophy. | Aesthetics. | Ethics, Ancient. Classification: LCC B3248.G32 E5 2022 (print) | LCC B3248.G32 (ebook) | DDC 111/.85–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021035890 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021035891 ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-6490-2 ePDF: 978-1-3502-7833-2 eBook: 978-1-3502-7834-9 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents ­ cknowledgements A ­Translators’ Preface Translators’ Introduction ­I Language and Ontology (by Pol Vandevelde) ­II The Situated Truth of a Work of Art (by Arun Iyer)

vii viii x xi xxv

­Part 1 Ancient Ethics and Practical Philosophy 1­ ­2 3­ ­4 ­5

The Socratic Question and Aristotle (1990) Aristotle’s Protrepticus in Consideration of the Historical Development of Aristotle’s Ethics (1928) Heidegger and the Greeks (1990) The Idea of Practical Philosophy (1983) Reason and Practical Philosophy (1986)

3 9 27 39 47

­Part 2 Aesthetics 6­ ­7 ­8 9­ ­10 ­11 1­ 2 ­13 ­14

On Poetics and Hermeneutics (1968/1971) The End of Art? From Hegel’s Doctrine of the Pastness of Art to the Anti-art of Today (1985) The Place of Poetry in the System of Hegelian Aesthetics and the Question of the Pastness of Art (1986) Conceptual Painting? On Arnold Gehlen’s Time-Pictures (1962) On the Reading of Buildings and Paintings (1979) Poetizing and Thinking as Reflected through Hölderlin’s Remembrance (1987) Goethe and Mozart – the Problem of Opera (1991) The Lynceus Tower Song in Goethe’s Faust (1982) What Makes Goethe’s Language Natural? A Congress Contribution (1985)

55 65 77 87 95 101 113 121 127

­Part 3 The Dimension of Language 1­ 5 Language and Understanding (1970) ­16 The Theory of History and Language (1987)

141 153

Contents

vi 1­ 7 ­18 ­19 ­20 ­21 ­22 ­23

Of Teachers and Learners (1986) Heidegger and Language (1990) Homeland and Language (1992) On the Way to Writing? (1983) Voice and Language (1981) Hearing – Seeing – Reading (1984) Reading Is like Translating (1989)

159 163 177 183 193 203 211

Notes Appendix: Glossary of German Terms Glossary of Ancient Greek Terms and Expressions Glossary of Other Foreign Terms and Expressions Works Cited by Gadamer

217

Index of Names Index of Subjects

265

245 249 255 257

269

A ­ cknowledgements As with all significant projects, there are too many people to acknowledge by name. We only want to mention Andrew Ashenden and Philip Sutherland for their help in preparing the text, Nicholas Korchowsky and Aneesa Akbar for their work on the index, Devanshi Iyer for helping us with some of the translators’ notes and Frédéric Seyler for his advice on several points pertaining to the translations. We also want to recognize the strong, constant and generous support of John Beach, who, as a former student of Gadamer, is dedicated to the dissemination of his work.

T ­ ranslators’ Preface This second volume of The Selected Writings of Hans-Georg Gadamer follows the same spirit, methodology and principles as the first volume, Hermeneutics between History and Philosophy. The twenty-three essays collected here, written between 1928 and 1992, revolve around three issues which remained central for Gadamer: ancient ethics in its first formulation by Plato and Aristotle as a practical philosophy of human action, aesthetics understood as a reflection upon the being of the art and, lastly, the historical dimension of language, what he calls Sprachlichkeit and which constitutes the medium in which thinking takes place. The volume is organized in three parts, each dedicated to one of these three issues. The first part ‘Ancient Ethics and Practical Philosophy’ includes five essays from 1928 to 1990, showing the original understanding of practical philosophy Plato and Aristotle had, which did not oppose theory and praxis, as we tend to understand them, but attempted to carve out a place for reason at the level of human affairs, which is not submitted to the strictures of theoretical reason. Gadamer is adamant in defending Plato against the way he has been represented, even by Aristotle himself, as the author of the two-world theory, separating the world of ideas from the visible world. In his defence of Plato, Gadamer also shows in several essays, especially ‘The Socratic Question and Aristotle’ and ‘Aristotle’s Protrepticus’, that there is no break between Plato’s theory of ideas and Aristotle’s views but a continuation. The second part ‘Aesthetics’ gathers together nine essays from 1962 to 1991, which show Gadamer’s skills at their best in interpreting paintings, musical pieces, churches and poems. These essays show us how art is a site of truth which is situated and totally mediated by society and tradition, through detailed and illuminating analyses of the works of Goethe and Hölderlin, the paintings of modern artists such as Kandinsky, Klee and the cubists, church architecture and the music of Mozart among others. In doing so, Gadamer departs from his early assessment of Goethe in Truth and Method, returning to him in three different essays. These analytical essays complement his partial acceptance and partial rejection of Hegel’s end of art thesis in the two essays on Hegel, as he continues to argue defiantly for the relevance of art as the site of an irreplaceable truth even in the age of modern science. The third part ‘The Dimension of Language’ includes nine essays from 1970 to 1990 examining different facets of what Gadamer calls the ‘dimension of language’ and emphasizing its ontological valence. By combining arguments and illustrations, these essays treat specific phenomena, such as reading and hearing, analyse specific connections, such as between language and understanding, language and history and language and the homeland. The concrete nature of these essays makes them easily accessible and offers the support needed for Gadamer’s striking claim advanced in Truth and Method that being is language.

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As in the previous volume, we have inserted the pagination of the original German text of the Gesammelte Werke in square brackets in the body of the translation. We have completed the bibliographical references of Gadamer’s citations and provided the English translation of the works he cites in German. For readers interested in a close analysis of Gadamer’s text, we have given the German word or expression in square brackets when used in a technical sense or when Gadamer reaches into the resources of the German language to come up with new plays on words. These terms are put together in a glossary of German terms in the Appendix. We have also translated all the ancient Greek words Gadamer uses and put the translations in square brackets after the first occurrence of the word in an essay. The same has been done for most of the foreign terms and expressions Gadamer employs. Although many of these terms will be known to most readers, we wanted our translation to be accessible to all readers. These Greek and foreign terms are also collected in two separate glossaries in the appendix. As part of the same effort at making the text transparent and accessible, we have inserted ‘translators’ notes’ either to complement what Gadamer says allusively or explain a point he only sketches. We have also added a list of all the works cited or quoted by Gadamer. Despite Gadamer’s reservations about the use of translations and his conviction that scholars should always resort to the original texts, we shall hope that all of the tools we have provided would alleviate his concern by allowing readers to keep track of the technical terms he uses, to be alerted to the allusions he makes, to understand the plays on words of which he is so fond and to understand his cultural references, all of which grant his texts their thickness and richness as both literary essays and lively deliveries. A translation does not replace a voice in a living dialogue but may strive to be the space of a re-enactment in which readers not only have the content of what was written in German but also a feel for the manner in which it was meant and delivered.

Translators’ Introduction Gadamer’s essays in this volume provide remarkably clear insights, which not only complement and illustrate his views on ancient philosophy, aesthetics and language but also present novel insights while nuancing, amending or correcting what he said elsewhere. In the first section, Pol Vandevelde lays out the connection between the essays on ancient philosophy of the first part of the volume and the essays on language of the third part. In the second section, Arun Iyer focuses on the essays on aesthetics of the second part, showcasing the originality of Gadamer’s positions on art and its role in our life.

­I

Language and Ontology (by Pol Vandevelde)

Many essays in this volume, whether about ancient philosophy, aesthetics or language contribute to Gadamer’s untiring efforts to salvage a concept of language against the dominant view in our tradition which has seen it as a means of communication through propositions. For Gadamer, it was a fateful decision to focus exclusively on the kind of logos which can be true or false, as Aristotle does, calling it logos apophantikos, which we have understood as ‘proposition’, in the sense of a sentence which says something about something and can be either an affirmation (kataphasis) or a negation (apophasis).1 The exclusive focus on logos as the site of thought and the corresponding dismissal of language as a mere accessory to thinking, which Aristotle simply calls ta en tē phōnē, the ‘things in the voice’,2 turns thinking into a kind of autonomous activity of the mind, which in modernity will become the ‘acts of the mind’, independent in their execution from the means used for the articulation of thought and independent from the historical and cultural life of those who engage in these ‘activities’ of the mind. The logos which became the mark of the human being (as a zōon logon echon, as Aristotle defines it, or animal rationale, as it was translated into Latin) was exclusively regarded as ‘reason’ understood as ‘rationality’. This metaphysical decision of considering logos (which can also mean ‘speech’ or ‘discourse’) as ‘reason’ was reinforced in modernity when theoretical reason became the means of enlightenment, as opposed to, for example, ‘practical reason’, which Aristotle himself had elaborated in his ethics. The result for us has been that ethics has become an academic discipline occupying itself mostly with solving moral puzzles. Gadamer laments this twofold separation of thinking from life and ethics from the good life – the euzōia and the eupraxia, which form the unity of what Aristotle calls aretē, leading to happiness (eudaimonia).3 This effort to reconnect what was not separated for Plato and Aristotle is in no way a return to the Greeks or a renewal of Greek philosophy. It is rather an attempt to ‘re-enact’ what the Greeks experienced but without claiming to ‘re-live’ it in a Diltheyan manner. The notion of ‘enactment’ (Vollzug) with its counterpart, re-enactment, comes from the early Heidegger, who was so influential on Gadamer. Re-enactment means re-effectuating what went into the thought process of those philosophers we try to understand and may be the hallmark of a philosophical hermeneutics, which does not aim at the reproduction of a content of meaning nor at a revival of past views. Both retrieval and renewal would still be guided by current interests and could thus not really challenge the present. The re-enactment which

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Gadamer pursues in several essays in this volume aims at freeing us from our own situation so that we can envisage new possibilities for the many problems Gadamer mentions, whether about our treatment of the environment, about the increasing power of the sciences in regulating our life or about the kind of art we enjoy. One way to fight this disconnectedness in our life or the loss of what Dilthey called the ‘connection of a life’ (Lebenszusammenhang) is precisely to recover an understanding of language as a dimension in which we live and articulate our thoughts, what Gadamer calls Sprachlichkeit. It is the dimension in which we can make sense of the world around us and thus of ourselves. As he says, ‘language is the element in which we live, as fishes live in water’.4 We live in a world and, as Heidegger argued, ‘world’ in fact means a dimension of human existence (before being a place or a container) so that human beings themselves are such by having a world, not facing it but dwelling in it. They have what Gadamer calls an ‘orientation in the world’ (Weltorientierung), which takes the form of a ‘dwelling’ (Einkehr) in language.5 The dimension of language thus represents for human beings the factum of being in the world, but in a transcendental sense, analogous to Kant’s factum of freedom: just as there would be no morality without freedom for Kant, there would be no meaningful world without language for Gadamer. With such an ontological valence, the ‘dimension of language’ includes more than language as a system of signs, a faculty of the mind or a propositional means of communication. Prior to the system of language, prior to the individual units of language, there is a situation in the world in which people interact. As the fundamental dimension in which people live, language carries with it a basic ‘agreement’ [Einverständnis] among human beings at the practical level, even before any word can be uttered.6 This view of language as that which embodies a fundamental agreement has significant consequences for the task of interpretation. Gadamer takes issue with Schleiermacher’s views that non-understanding is at the origin of understanding and interpretation. Instead, Gadamer claims that any disagreement is predicated on a prior fundamental agreement: ‘we must deliberately disentangle the phenomenon of understanding out of the privilege given to the disruption of understanding if we really want to bring into focus its place in the totality of our existence as human beings and also our social existence as human beings. Agreement is presupposed where there is a disruption in agreement’.7 This original ‘agreement’ even when people disagree or are in conflict, specified as a dwelling in language, represents a fundamental being-together with other human beings. When Gadamer says that ‘language is dialogue’,8 it is not as a kind of conversation which one may initiate with another person but rather as an exchange which had started long before we were able to speak and in which we find ourselves, articulating our common space.9 This is why Gadamer can say that ‘we are the ones who speak, none of us and yet all of us – this is the mode in which “language” exists’10 or that ‘there is no first word’. For ‘to talk of a first word is in itself contradictory’.11 Several essays in this volume provide helpful conceptual elucidations but especially welcome concrete illustrations of how language is a dimension of life and thus how unmysterious and yet profound and original Gadamer’s views are. When Gadamer claims in Truth and Method that language is an ‘experience of the world [Welterfahrung]’12

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or that ‘whoever has language “has” the world’,13 it all sounded like a continuation of Heidegger’s pronouncements around his motto that ‘language speaks’ and we, human beings, just respond. The novelty of the essays included in this volume lies precisely in showing, first, that Heidegger is not the main source for Gadamer’s views on language. In fact, Gadamer can help us understand Heidegger himself better, for Gadamer provides some of the missing links for understanding Heidegger’s pronouncements, especially with regard to the connection between language and human life.14 His essays on ancient philosophy in the first part of this volume and those on language in the third part, in particular, provide a significant complement to Truth and Method with regard to the view stated strikingly there that ‘being is language [Sein [. . .] Sprache ist]’15 or that ‘being that can be understood is language [Sein, das verstanden werden kann, ist Sprache]’.16 While these formulations held the promise of an explanation of how language is linked to ontology, they left many puzzled readers with a slight whiff of interpretive idealism. Several essays in this volume clarify the formula ‘being that can be understood is language’ by showing that it is neither a qualification of being which would restrict the being in question to the being which is understood, thereby leaving a remainder, namely that which would be, albeit not understood; nor is it a condition for ‘being’ so that, for something to ‘be’, it would need to be ‘understood’. Rather, the formula is about the bridge which allows both things (what is) to overlap with the life of human beings and the life of human beings to be lived through interactions with things in the world. For establishing the connection between language and being, Gadamer needed to connect the ontological make-up of things (or the world) with human beings so that language could be, as he characterizes it in Truth and Method, ‘the horizon of a hermeneutical ontology’.17 Plato and Dilthey offer him the means to fulfil this task. In his meditation on the good, Plato shows us, especially in Gadamer’s reading of the Philebus, that the goodness of things – the good governing their make-up or their ousia – is the same good as what makes a human life a full unity. Dilthey’s philosophy of life offers Gadamer the means to show that life itself is a form of articulation in which a sense is formed of things, the world and oneself. This connection to Dilthey is addressed in the second section of this introduction by Arun Iyer, especially with regard to aesthetics. I will focus on how, according to Gadamer, the fundamental dimension of language can be made intelligible in its genesis as well as in its conceptual relevance only through a study of ancient Greek thought, especially Plato. I will then examine some illustrations Gadamer gives of this dimension.

The formative role of Plato Gadamer’s deep immersion in ancient Greek thinking18 gives him the means to articulate an ancient worldview within a contemporary setting. Plato occupies a special place in Gadamer’s work. In ‘Of Teachers and Learners’, he mentions Plato as one of his four teachers (along with Hegel, Heidegger and Jaspers).19 By showing how in Plato the world itself or things are ‘configured’ by understanding without being reduced to what understanding produces, Gadamer provides a background for Heidegger’s views

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on language but takes away the idealistic accent of Heidegger’s views of a sovereign ‘understanding’ as the key component of human existence. This is the true depth of many essays in this volume with regard to language, which show the intimate connection between his studies of ancient philosophy and his views on language, thus offering a significantly nuanced complement to the views presented in Truth and Method and other works. From the perspective of his intellectual biography, there is some irony in how Gadamer established himself as a scholar of ancient philosophy. As he himself acknowledges, after finishing his dissertation and hoping to do his Habilitation shortly after, Heidegger’s critique of the quality of his work in 1925 coupled with his overpowering philosophical persona caused Gadamer to change his career path. He realized the need for a firm foundation for the sake of his future in the profession and he turned to philology and ancient philosophy, under the guidance of Paul Friedländer. He became, as he says, ‘well grounded in classical philology’20 and was ‘certified as a classical philologist’ after a state exam in 1927. As he explains, the ‘genius’ of Heidegger was ‘overwhelming’: ‘This is why I became a classical philologist. I had the feeling that I would be overpowered by the superiority of this thinking if I did not find my own proper ground on which I could stand perhaps more firmly than this powerful thinker could himself ’.21 The numerous essays he has written in this field certainly prove that he succeeded in finding his bearings. As a matter of fact, he has provided the philological fundaments for some of Heidegger’s insights into Plato’s and Aristotle’s philosophy but, more importantly, he has demonstrated the continued relevance of ancient Greek philosophy for contemporary concerns and the need for contemporary philosophy to re-examine its own history. Whether it is in his studies of practical philosophy or in his constant efforts to recover Plato’s original views beneath the distortions caused by Aristotle’s critiques, which Gadamer qualifies as ‘almost malevolent’,22 he shows us how much our technologically driven culture could benefit, for example, from Plato’s consideration of the idea of the good. It is also in his reflections on Greek practical philosophy that Gadamer sees a way to bridge the gap between the theoretical and the practical level. Logos is not merely a theoretical account over against a world of things, as if things would be bereft of intelligibility prior to this account, as if they would be ‘irrational’ when not placed under a theoretical gaze. Rather, logos already inhabits the world of things at the practical level in which things are ‘good for’ something so that praxis as an action in the world with or against other people also articulates the world and thereby gives it a certain intelligibility, which can be discerned and made conceptual in a logos of thought as discourse or argument. Through Plato’s considerations of the good, Gadamer finds an original position for human beings. Instead of being confronted with a self-contained reality – a world already made of well-delineated ‘things’ – humans are themselves part of the paste of things, as it were. In the process, Gadamer also finds in the Greeks his expanded notion of language as the achievement of logos, especially for Plato: both an articulation which comes from the mind (noūs) of human beings and an articulation of things, of their ousia, which Plato explains through his theory of ideas or forms. Plato’s Philebus23 has been especially crucial for Gadamer, which was the object of the second part of

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his Habilitation under Heidegger in 1929 and published in 1931. This research definitely marked, if not oriented, the subsequent development of Gadamer’s thought both as a continuation of and a counterpart to Heidegger’s thought.24 The Philebus gives Gadamer the means for establishing a connection between reality and human life without reducing one to the other. This is where, I submit, Gadamer found the ontological valence of the dimension of language, which is at the basis of his future claim that being is language.25 Let us briefly see how. Gadamer’s analysis of the Philebus is detailed and somewhat complicated. I only focus on some of the hermeneutic decisions he makes, which lead him to understand Plato as saying that there is a logos in reality which the human logos can comprehend, with the consequence that this sameness of logos on the side of reality and on the side of the human mind is also the sameness of ‘being’ and ‘being understood’. Among the hermeneutic decisions Gadamer makes in his reading of the Philebus, four seem to me paramount. The first one consists in connecting the two discussions which take place in the dialogue: about the make-up or genesis of things and about the make-up of life. The latter is the crux of the dialogue, which discusses the question as to whether knowledge or pleasure is the most important component of a good life, Socrates defending the view that life is a composition or a ‘mixture’ of knowledge and pleasure.26 Inside this broad discussion, Socrates broaches the question of the make-up or genesis of things or beings (ousia). In this discussion, he also uses the notion of ‘mixture’, which he ascribes to a world-maker, a demiurge, who produces things. Both mixtures of the human life and of things are good if they are mixed according to a good measure or in a good proportion. Although Socrates does not specifically connect the two discussions of a good life and the genesis of things, Gadamer does and understands Plato as saying that the way things are constituted (in a good proportion) is correlated with the way human beings live their life (in a good proportion) so that the ontology of the world – at the level of how things are made by a demiurge – overlaps with the way human beings live their life. The connection between the being of things and human life is provided for Gadamer by the idea of the good. For a thing to be definite means to be ‘good’ (in the sense of being a good mixture). The good is thus operative in the thing. Gadamer claims that the ‘idea tou agathou [idea of the good]’ is not to be understood as the ‘view of the good’ [‘Anblick’ des Guten], as if there were something like the good of which there would be an idea. The good is ‘beyond being’ (epekeina tēs ousias), as Plato famously says in Republic 509b, in the sense that it is not something. It is not an ousia which could be an object. Rather the idea of the good is a ‘looking to the good’ [Ausblick auf das Gute].27 Those who look to the good are in fact guided by what guided the formation of the thing in the first place. The idea of the good allows human beings to understand what a thing is when they are attracted to the good which guided the demiurge himself in the making of the thing. Thus, instead of a ‘substantive determination of entities’, as it still is in the Republic, the idea of the good in the Philebus, Gadamer claims, is the condition for the intelligibility of things. As what guides and makes possible the understanding of being, of ousia, the idea of the good ‘makes everything that exists understandable in its being (Philebus 517c)’.28

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This fact that the good makes intelligible is not just an epistemological characterization of the good. It connects the good of the thing with the good we pursue in life. This is why Gadamer sees a relation between the two discussions in the Philebus about the genesis of things and the make-up of a good life. The mixture which life is (of mind and pleasure) is the ‘point of view’ from which the thing is seen as good, and this means understood. As he says, the purpose of the second schema – life as a mixture of mind and pleasure – is to explicate, conceptually, the perspective under which entities are produced or understood as things that are produced. For this explication, then, a standpoint within the very intention of mixing is adopted. The mixture is seen from the point of view of the mixer. Its constitutive moments are the structural moments of the good, as it is understood as what the agent of the mixture has in view.29

The second hermeneutic decision consists in understanding the ‘mixture’ which produces a thing as a mixture of ‘ideas’ or ‘forms’ (eidē in the technical Platonic sense). Against those who consider that Plato in the Philebus (as well as the Timaeus) had abandoned the theory of forms or ideas, Gadamer strongly believes, first, that Plato never abandoned it but more radically that he never held the view that ideas are separated from the visible world. He faults Aristotle for having caricatured Plato’s theory in the form of a ‘two-world view’, probably as a convenient exaggeration by contrast with which he could present his own views more easily. As Gadamer declares, ‘to oppose the common interpretation of Aristotle’s criticisms of the doctrine of ideas, and to attack also the substance metaphysics of the Western tradition, has been the goal of my writing in this area’.30 His essay on the Protrepticus in this volume testifies to this. Instead of an abandonment of the theory of forms, the Philebus, Gadamer argues, is ‘an attempt at theoretical explication of that doctrine’.31 He thus understands the four components which are mixed (the infinite, the finite, the mixed and the cause) as ‘forms’, which keep something together as a being (ousia). To say that a being or ousia is a mixture of ideas shows for Gadamer that an ousia is not the participation in a single form outside this world. Forms or ideas are rather ‘in’ the thing as a mixture so that they provide the thing with its ‘form’ (eidos) in the customary meaning of the word: the outlook. This giving of form or this ‘forming’ gives visibility to the thing, proving, for Gadamer, the ‘inseparability of eidos from its visible appearance’.32 The view that an ousia, being, is the result of a mixing takes away the mystery of being as a fullness or a magical moment contrasted with non-being. Being is in fact the result of a becoming and actually means ‘coming-into-being’ [Werden zum Sein] in the sense that ‘it is being that has come to be [gewordenes Sein]’.33 Once a thing ‘has become’ (is a good mixture, in Socrates’ metaphor), we have something definite, an ousia or a being, which then ‘is’. The third important hermeneutic decision Gadamer makes concerns one of the components of the mixture made by the demiurge. In Socrates’ doctrine of the four kinds, besides the infinite, the finite and the mixture, there is the cause, which is for Plato the mind (noūs) of a demiurge. On the basis of the fact that this cause is mentioned as one of the components of the ousia – thus not external to it – Gadamer sees it not as an

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efficient cause (the demiurge’s mind), but as the ‘reason for’ or the telos governing the making of the thing so that, if we, in our logos, understand this ‘reason for’ (what it is ‘good for’), we understand its logos coming from the demiurge as the good proportion of the mixture. What makes a thing definite or ‘one’ for Plato (in Gadamer’s reading) is the fact that the mixture of the elements has been made in the right way, that it is a good mixture and this is described by measuredness or proportion, which, Gadamer says, is the meaning of logos.34 The logos as proportion of a good ousia is thus amenable to being understood in a logos of the human mind and thus expressed as an ‘account’ of what things are. The logos as proportion thus nicely provides the linchpin between the ontological level and the epistemological level, at which the human mind gives an account (logos) of this proportion by ‘understanding’ ‘the perspective under which entities are produced’.35 The sameness of logos indicates that we cannot separate the epistemological perspective from the ontological perspective for the simple reason that the good at the level of the production of entities cannot be differentiated from how it displays itself to the human mind as good. The advantage of this interpretation is clear. Although the human mind obviously did not cause things to be, as the demiurge did, it can in fact start from the encounter with what is and try to arrive at the demiurge’s mind by understanding the telos of the making of mixtures. The temporality of the genesis can thus be hermeneutically inverted. Because we do not have to get inside the mind of the demiurge, we can start with our human mind and seek to understand what things are ‘good for’, that is to say, the good proportion which keeps the ousia as one. In transposing a genesis of being into a ‘reason for’ or transporting the production of reality (by a demiurge) into the space of reasons, as it were, Gadamer can hermeneutically assimilate the logos insufflated by the demiurge into the ousia (as the good measure of the mixture which ‘constitutes the being of the entity [Seiende]’36) with the logos which the human mind gives of what the thing is good for. There is thus no difference, in principle, between being and that which is understood. Gadamer can then conclude: ‘the ontological sense of “coming into being” [“Werden zum Sein”] is that of the comprehensibility and determinability [Verstehbar- und Besteimmbarsein] [. . .] of the being of the world in its becoming’.37 Once the human mind has grasped the good that a thing possesses, it has grasped ‘what’ the thing is so that the logos produced by the human mind (noūs) can claim to be a stand-in for the ousia. Gadamer makes a fourth fundamental hermeneutic decision in his reading of the Philebus. The logos – the good proportion of the thing from the perspective of the demiurge and the grasping of this proportion by the human mind – is language. This Platonic insight that there is already an articulation in reality (following the metaphor of a genesis or mixture), which is not just intelligible but susceptible to becoming discursive in a human logos, lies at the foundation of Gadamer’s views on the ontological claims of language. Gadamer uses Socrates’ very words to reinforce the connection between the logos as proportion and the logos as the dimension of language. As Socrates explains in the Phaedo, he became disillusioned by the promise of other philosophers, such as Anaxagoras, that the mind could know the true cause of things in the so-called ‘elements’ (water, air, earth, fire) or that reality could be contemplated directly, such as looking at a solar eclipse directly. He then came to realize that the mediation of a logos

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is needed, that he should, as Gadamer puts it, ‘investigate the truth as it is mirrored in the logoi’.38 After following those we call the ‘pre-Socratics’, Socrates takes his ‘second best journey’, which he characterizes as a refuge or flight into the logoi: So it seemed to me that I should take refuge in theories [logous] and consider the truth of the realities in these [. . .] Well anyway, that’s the way I started out and every time I put forward an argument that I judge to be very strong, whatever seems to me to agree with this I take to be true, both regarding causes and all the rest, and whatever doesn’t I take to be not true (99e-100a).39

As Gadamer insists, this ‘flight’ or ‘refuge’ into the logoi does not amount to abandoning the search for ‘the alētheia tōn ontōn (truth of things)’. It is only ‘the rejection in principle of naïve, unreflective methods of investigating and explaining natural events’.40 It is merely an acknowledgement that this search for a principle in things which remains the same is done through language.41 Language understood in this broad sense as a dimension of human existence is both the proportion and the grasping of the proportion. Language thus underlies both the appearing of any being – as what provides stability – and the articulation of the revelation of this being – as the fluid in which changes occur. One can in fact find in language what Socrates seeks: a principle that remains the same, on account of which the entity is conceived in what it always is. The identity of what one intends is presupposed as the sameness of the eidos, and thus one conceives, in the unity of cause or reason, the manifoldness – previously beyond the reach of comprehension – of the changing entity that presents itself differently to the senses from one time to the next.42

Against this Platonic background we may now read with less surprise and more understanding what Gadamer says in Truth and Method about Sprachlichkeit. The dimension of language is, in fact, the translation of logos. It is both the form taken by the grasping of reality and the proportion which lies in a thing, making it one and thereby allowing it to be, so that it can be addressed, thought and talked about. With this background in mind, it may be less shocking to read in Gadamer that language is an ‘experience of the world [Welterfahrung]’.43 We may even hear an echo of the Philebus when Gadamer writes: ‘That which comes into language is not something that is pregiven before language [kein sprachlos Vorgegebenes]; rather, the word gives it its own determinateness [Bestimmtheit]’.44 Even when Gadamer speaks of ‘the language that things have’, he adds a Platonic corrective: this language ‘is not the logos ousias, and it is not fulfilled in the self-contemplation of an infinite intellect; it is the language that our finite, historical nature apprehends when we learn to speak’.45 Gadamer’s affirmation with which we began that ‘being is language, i.e., selfpresentation [Sichdarstellen]’46 or that ‘being that can be understood is language’47 now appears in its full significance. It is not a mere pronouncement but rather a complex and original conclusion won through a long dialogue with Plato. Language is in fact

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the fabric of life and this in turns lends credibility to some of Heidegger’s mantra-like formulas about language.

­The Dimension of Language: Some Illustrations Several essays in this volume provide very instructive illustrations of how the dimension of language is the element in which life is lived in the transitive sense. I will only mention two such experiences, particularly revealing: language as dwelling and language as inscription. In ‘Homeland and Language’, Gadamer makes a connection between language and dwelling through the experience of the homeland, which he characterizes as being ‘immemorial’, from beyond time (Unvordenkliches),48 a term he borrows from Schelling. The homeland is not just a place of residence but belongs to the flesh of people by informing all their thoughts, habits, tastes, feelings, emotions, etc. It scripts people to the point that they may be recognized as foreigners abroad simply by the way they behave, walk in the street, greet others and certainly eat, what Gadamer calls their ‘orientation in the world’. We acquire the ways of finding our bearings in the world when we learn our first language, our ‘native’ tongue. ‘It is really the totality of what is familiar, the mores, the practices and the customary world which is permeated by our own language’.49 This is how, Gadamer, says, ‘language belongs, first and foremost, to the immemorial nature of the homeland’.50 Language is so rooted in the soil of the speakers that it permeates their ways of speaking and thus of thinking. He gives the examples of Hegel, Heidegger and Hölderlin whose ways of speaking he associates with their Swabian origins. This rootedness in the Swabian region with its specific dialect, Gadamer says, ‘instils’ in them ‘an unmistakable linguistic gift’51 which consists of ‘a mysterious intermingling of tonal sonority and lexical meaning’.52 For example, Hegel’s expression ‘the pastness of art’ (Vergangenheitscharakter) is, according to Gadamer, ‘a very Swabian formulation, as one must indeed concede, not quite sparkling with wit and dazzling with elegance, but of rather shocking coarsenes. It hits upon something essential and will perhaps appear even more essential to us if we reflect upon it even longer and recognize in it the question of our day’.53 After Heidegger and under the influence of Hölderlin, Gadamer describes different experiences of exile. For example, he tells us how emotional it is to come back to one’s homeland after an absence, hearing one’s mother tongue again, the sounds of which bring back a whole world. If language has such an inner connection to the homeland, a distortion of language may entail a feeling of not being at home and even a possible internal exile. Gadamer sees the rise of the sciences as the sole model of ‘rational’ discourse and thus the sole source and guarantee of the truth as causing such a distortion of the homeland. While the focus on the propositional aspect of language has increased the efficiency of communication and the clarity of representations of facts and states of affairs, scientific discourse has also lost its allegiance and accountability to the life-world and has itself become hostage to the technological ‘progress’ it generates.

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Gadamer uses an argument of retorsion to show that scientific discourse by its laser-like focus on specific aspects of reality – those that are representable in quantifiable and measurable terms expressed in propositions – has become blind to its own motivations, such as the desire to master nature and manipulate it for specific purposes.54 The reason for this blind spot is precisely that these motivations are not measurable and quantifiable. Scientists abstract themselves from the world they test in their experiments, as if they were not present as persons and citizens to their theories, hypotheses and measuring instruments; as if there were no ‘experience’ in their ‘experiments’. By abstracting themselves from their existential ‘experience of the world’ and reducing this experience to a mere set of ‘experiments’, scientists fall into a kind of schizophrenia. Because science does not give them the means to recognize that their propositions are ‘contextualized’, let alone the means to assess the interests which motivate their research,55 scientists are prone to be guided by a will to power, whether economic or political, and pursue the mastery of nature and of the many aspects of life while sincerely believing to be motivated only by enlightenment and the progress of humanity. This is, Gadamer believes, what may force some people into an internal exile. On the one hand, the scientific logos, which only obeys its own logic, has divorced itself from the very logos of the articulation of the world at the level of human actions and interactions. On the other, because of its utility to political and economic forces, for which it cannot account, this scientific logos has also dismissed other forms of discourse, such as the human sciences, as ‘unscientific’ – or having ‘ten percent scientificity’, as it was said within the Vienna Circle.56 By presenting the scientific logos as the only ‘rational’ one, science has forced other discourses to justify themselves ‘scientifically’, with disastrous consequences for the human sciences, as Dilthey saw. The human sciences would lose their ability to bring to light the human ‘experiences’ and thus the hermeneutic decisions at the basis of the theoretical constructions of the sciences. The unilateral trust in what is ‘scientific’ has forced all forms of ‘understanding’ into the straight jacket of scientific ‘explanations’ through quantitative methods and models. The second important illustration Gadamer gives of language as a dimension of life concerns the manners in which language ‘inscribes’ us into the fabric of life so that we become through language part of the flesh of the world. The general character he gives of this inscription by language is in the form of an engram. As he repeatedly insists, dialogue takes precedence over the individual voices of the dialogue partners. A question may throw the person speaking off topic and suddenly launch the dialogue in a new direction. What he adds to this ‘event’ of the dialogue is its ‘inscription’ in the sense that we speak in our own voice, mean what we think and express what we want to say in a retrospective manner, as it were: we speak from the position of those who have been granted a voice in a dialogue but this dialogue started before what we specifically think or what we want to say. With this dimension of writing – what he calls Schriftlichkeit – Gadamer implicitly reveals the profound challenge which he saw in Jacques Derrida’s views on ‘writing’ and his resulting project of ‘deconstruction’.57 Gadamer understands this as a sceptical challenge to his philosophical hermeneutics: if there is an ‘inscription’ of everything we say and do in the factum of a pre-existing agreement or a preceding dialogue to which

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we connect when speaking and thinking, interpretation by definition cannot recover this transcendental dimension. Interpretation has to accept that it can never justify itself, that all its criteria of evaluation, standards of validity and claims to provide the ‘meaning’ of a text are themselves interpretive. Interpreting would then only mean to append a new text to the one allegedly interpreted. It could only be a ‘graft’. This was Derrida’s fundamental attack on presence – being present to one’s own thoughts, repeating the self-same content of meaning – and his embrace of ‘dissemination’ as a law of the redistribution of sense, against any possibility of ideality in the sense of a content repeatable across contexts without loss. While acknowledging the challenge and thus taking it seriously, Gadamer also claims to be able to respond to it. He starts by granting that there is indeed an articulation at the basis of writing, reading and hearing, recognizing the legitimacy of Derrida’s general notion of ‘inscription’. ‘Is it not the case that something like a tendency to set into a fixed form is always already included in the usage of words?’.58 Yet, he rejects the consequence Derrida draws from this, namely the fact that any content of meaning as being inscribed in a system or context cannot be repeated in its identity separated from this context. Gadamer wants to show that inscription does not amount to being bound to an original context but is only the fixing of what was a dialogue and allows this dialogue to be re-effectuated. Thus, the original inscription of any meaning into some semiotic means can be brought back into the orbit of a dialogue. Gadamer believes that he can accommodate all the effects of writing which Derrida highlights without accepting the sceptical consequences that meaning is always ‘disseminated’, that interpretation cannot be ‘of ’ an original text but is only another text ‘grafted’ onto the original, that the intention of speakers and writers is never confined to what they ‘want to say’ because they themselves are only a ‘function’ of language in the sense of an instance of what is, in its nature, semiotic. Gadamer reminds us that the Greek word grammē, which we find in ‘grammar’, actually means ‘line’, like an engram. The engram or inscription, which language is, takes several forms, which some of the essays in this volume describe: speaking is a form of ‘phrasing’, speaking is an engraving in memory, reading is a participation in writing and hearing is a virtual reading. Once we recognize the difference between language as a system of signs, as a faculty of the mind, as a channel of enculturation, on the one hand, and what Gadamer calls the ‘living use of language’, on the other, we realize that, in this living use, the unit is not the word or the sentence but, Gadamer says, the ‘phrase’. Like in music, speaking takes shape in ‘phrasing’ through ‘formulas and formulations’,59 in the sense that we do not create new ways of speaking but connect to previous uses in the form of repetitions with a renewal or a twist. We phrase differently and sometimes others ask us to do it, to ‘rephrase’ what we just said. The phrase is what gives language its ‘liveliness’ (Lebendigkeit). This is, Gadamer says, what Luther succeeded in doing when translating the Bible into vernacular German and, in the process, contributing to giving the German language its unity. He was guided by how the common German people speak or, in his own expression quoted by Gadamer, by ‘looking into the people’s mouth’ (dem Volke auf Maul schauen).60 Phrasing also inscribes us into the social fabric by giving us a style, which makes us recognizable. Gadamer shows an appreciation for Goethe’s language, especially his use

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of ‘subdued turns of phrase’, which Gadamer calls ‘conviviality’, in the sense that ‘these are expressions which bring a moderation of a convivial kind into the expression of one’s own opinion and temper the righteousness and dogmatism of asserting them’.61 Besides phrasing, speaking is also an engraving in memory. Gadamer likes to tell us the story of King Theuth’s reaction to the invention of writing as recounted in Plato’s Phaedrus.62 When presented with writing as an aid to memory, the king saw it instead as a weakening of memory because people, instead of keeping for themselves what really matters, will lazily entrust it to an external written record. However, memory is itself, Gadamer shows, an engraving. ‘Mnēmē, memory, the engram in us, must be acknowledged as the first form taken by the dimension of writing which engraves itself in the psyche’.63 This writing as engraving in memory is not so much about retaining the past for the sake of its preservation as it is about preparing the future. When writing was first used, as Gadamer reminds us, it was not to produce beautiful works of poetry but to secure a common agreement in the form of contracts or treatises: ‘the oldest documents of humanity, as we must admit to our chagrin, are for the most part not exalted works of the intellect, but commercial agreements or tax lists, at best tablets of laws’.64 For the purpose of those inscriptions was less backward-looking – to encode an original speech situation for the sake of encoding it – than forward-looking – to secure an agreement already passed with ‘a forward focus on the implication of what has been established’.65 Gadamer sees inscriptions on tombs as having an analogous function: ‘inscriptions on graves must have had a similar documentary character, which we find in all cultures: it serves the continued life of the dead in the memory of the living’.66 He also gives the example of speeches being written down not for private reading but as the support used by the orator who will present it publicly, as already mentioned in the Phaedrus (an admirer of Lysias carries with him a copy of Lysias’ speech). These examples indicate that ‘there is [. . .] no strict separation between the dimensions of orality and of writing’.67 Both rely on a common inscription or engram. On several occasions, Gadamer conveys how impressed he was by what the research into the epic poems discovered in the Balkans in the 1930s.68 These poems had survived only in oral form. Yet, since they survived, they had to benefit from the support of some ‘inscription’, even orally. ‘I do not only mean what is obvious in relation to mnemonics, as, for example, metre, padding lines and the like. What also belong to the techniques of mnemonics are the repetitive formulas, recurrences which have the sense of fixing in a definite way the uniqueness of the recurring presentation’.69 He sees songs and epic narratives as ‘a kind of written recording in memory’ and links it to what Plato says in the Philebus (39b): ‘it is mnēmē which “inscribes” the logoi in our soul’.70 All this shows that the repetition which is intrinsic to writing – what Derrida calls ‘iterability’ – involves a special kind of ideality. It is not the ideality of what actually happened as a content, as Derrida believes, which would indeed not be iterable as such when separated from the context in which this occurrence is inscribed. Rather, it is the repetition of what was realized or ‘enacted’ in the first occurrence. The inscription, in other words, is not so much of a fact or of a content but of an act, making this inscription itself an event. Thus, the inscription does not only make repetition possible as a re-effectuation of what is inscribed but also the re-enactment of the act and thus the

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happening of an event. This was Dilthey’s problem, according to Gadamer, when he was hoping to find units of meaning in ‘lived experiences’, which could be repeated or, as he says, ‘re-lived’. Gadamer’s solution is that an inscription or engram does not fix the ‘lived experience’ as a content but keeps track of the event by connecting the present of the interpreter to the present of the object interpreted so that the event (of a poem or a painting) acquires a new future through the interpretation (this is examined in the next section of this introduction by Arun Iyer in its relation to art). The Sprachvollzug, the enactment of language, is not the performance of language in the sense of an act performed by speakers but is language itself as an existential dimension of human beings. Thus, neither are we those who enact language or perform speech acts nor is it language which ‘speaks’ by itself. Because language represents this dimension in which we dwell in a fundamental agreement with other people, making our world common, the ‘enactment of language’ is an event in which we are ‘staged’, as it were, or, as Gadamer says, we participate in a ‘play’.71 This is how inscription is for Gadamer a feature of dialogue. The inscription nurtures the dialogue not as a substitution for it as if writing could reproduce the living dialogue which once took place, but rather in the sense that writing as an engram allows for and promotes a new creation72 when readers re-effectuate a dialogue, for example, when reading Plato or Luther. Inscription allows a work to remain a living work. Reading itself participates in some form of inscription. Just as in speaking we do not only use conventional and already intelligible words and sentences, but ‘phrase’ what we want to convey, we do something analogous when reading. Reading obviously depends on an inscription or a first writing but it is not a mere deciphering of signs. ‘Reading is not spelling out. As long as we are spelling out, we cannot read’.73 Gadamer gives the example of a teacher asking a student to read out a sentence. If the student has not understood it, listeners will not understand it either.74 In order to read out a sentence intelligibly we need to know where the sentence is going, so to speak, however vaguely, so that we know how to group words together and find the right intonation of the sentence. While there is a backward-looking moment in reading – following with one’s eyes the letters and the words and reawakening their meaning – there is also the forward-looking act of re-effectuating the sense of what is written. All this is determined by the meaning of the whole sentence which we need to anticipate, however approximately. This structure of anticipation is the structure of understanding itself. ‘Reading is a quiet way of letting something speak again, and this presupposes the anticipations of the understanding’,75 which is made possible by the fact that I only understand what someone says to me if it responds to what I anticipate, if it is ‘an answer to a question’.76 The same is true for a written work. If I do not feel addressed or questioned by what I am reading, I will not understand it because it will not speak to me or respond to me. ‘Reading always already presupposes definite anticipatory processes for grasping the meaning and has, as such, a specific ideality in itself ’.77 This is why reading is a form of ‘acting out’ or what Goethe considered ‘a kind of performance on an inner stage’78 in the sense that the reader actively stages the reading so as to make it alive, even in silent reading. Actors on a stage represent another illustration of how reading is an inscription. To some extent, actors ‘recite’ the text which had been written for them and, yet, they

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cannot just read it in their memory. Good actors ‘reproduce a genuine act of speaking so that we forget that it was written for them in advance’.79 By contrast, Gadamer says, bad actors ‘always leave us with the impression of merely repeating something out. They start a second too early – a well-known phenomenon in theatre – and we can never get rid of the feeling that they already know the next word when they speak’.80 While such actors might have a good memory of their lines, they have eliminated any re-enactment and thus any genuine act of speaking in which people formulate their thoughts. For speaking is not reciting the expression of already formed thoughts in our mind but navigating several semantic possibilities through the choice of words in order to articulate even for ourselves the clarity of what we think. Works of art and architecture offer another illustration of inscriptions to be read (Arun Iyer examines this in the next section). Besides speaking as phrasing, as engraving in memory and reading as participation in writing, hearing itself is a form of inscription. Hearing is not simply taking in words but, like reading, re-effectuating the sense of what has been said. Our tradition has certainly granted seeing a paradigmatic role for making sense of the world around us. It started, as we saw, in Plato with the notion of eidos, which is the outlook of a thing, or idea, the external form of something, with the metaphor of the sun and light as the revelation of truth. Yet, Gadamer cites Aristotle who also granted some articulating power to hearing because, Aristotle says, ‘hearing can receive human speech whose universality surpasses everything’.81 Hearing the logos means absorbing intelligibility. Just as in reading we can spell out without understanding, in the case of hearing we can ‘merely hear something’ (abhören). But we can also hear in the sense of ‘listening to what is said’ (hinhören). ‘Listening to’ means ‘going along’ with what is said by reenacting the voice behind the words. Reading with understanding is this ‘listening to’ as making a voice speak in the text. Literary texts, what Gadamer calls ‘eminent texts’, are precisely those whose voice we listen to when reading them. ‘I thus hold the connection between literature and voice for absolutely essential wherever we have literature in the eminent poetic sense. Yet, the form in which the voice is present here does not have to be the materialized voice but is primarily something in our imagination’.82 This voice which readers re-enact is not the historical writer’s voice but the articulation of that which reveals itself in the text for the reader so that the text ‘speaks’ again, as in those new translations of classical texts in which old-fashioned words and hackneyed expressions have been replaced by current manners of speaking, letting these old texts speak to us ‘in our language’, and this means in the ‘dimension’ in which we live. With these essays on ancient philosophy and the dimension of language, we now have a full and coherent understanding of Gadamer’s fundamental conviction, from his Habilitation until his later essays, that language has an ontological valence. These essays provide the missing steps in the arguments presented in Truth and Method for a philosophical hermeneutics. They show at the same time how original his views are and how enlightening they are for the provenance and intelligibility of Heidegger’s sometimes cryptic statements about language.

­II The Situated Truth of a Work of Art (by Arun Iyer) Gadamer’s Truth and Method makes it absolutely clear to us that the hermeneutic nature of experience can be grasped pre-eminently only in our encounter with a work of art. For this encounter is hermeneutic experience distilled into its purest form. In fact, all of Gadamer’s intellectual endeavours can be viewed as an attempt at showing how this experience, so starkly evident when we are confronted with works of art, is a primordial feature of human existence. But this should not lead us in the slightest into thinking that he is merely interested in using the experience of art as a means to a larger theoretical end. For Gadamer never stops reflecting on the nature of art and its indispensability for life. This is clear even in Truth and Method, where his engagement with art takes place within the framework of a greater theoretical goal of articulating the nature of hermeneutic experience. As we will see, his later reflections collected in this volume resonate in this abiding conviction about art, even as he departs from some of the arguments of his magnum opus in developing the more embryonic ideas in it about the nature of the truth in art, the dialogical understanding of art and the nature of artistic creation, in large part through his close engagement with leading figures in the history of Western art and literature. His choice of literary figures and his choice of artists indicate his undying motivation to press upon us the significance of the situatedness of the non-conceptual truth of art.

Against Aesthetic Differentiation The trajectory exhibited by Gadamer’s thinking on art in the articles collected in the present volume can be comprehensively understood only if we begin with Truth and Method. There Gadamer sets out to rediscover in all its fullness the manner in which we experience works of art, arguing against the shallowness to which this experience is relegated by scientific modernity. What is the nature of the shallowness that infects our experience of art with the advent of modern science? In order to understand this, we need remind ourselves of Gadamer’s view of the nature of modern science and the cause of its success. Modern science is first and foremost a method and the success of modern science is the success of its method. Once method and the application of method attain predominance in the thought of modernity in light of its dazzling successes, all reflection on art happens under the shadow of this rationality of method.

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The new rationality of method, reflected in both the rationalists and the empiricists as well in Kant who supersedes them, reduces the engagement of human beings with the world to a relationship between subject and object. In this context, whether we speak of the objectification or the subjectification of art, what we really have, according to Gadamer, is the transformation of the work of art into an abstraction cut off from any connection to life. The work of art becomes a correlate of a new kind of experience – aesthetic experience, an experience that is sensitive to the aesthetic properties of an object. The artist also becomes an abstract figure who, free from all societal bonds and all ties to the world, begins to inhabit his or her own space. Gadamer calls this abstraction that sets into our conception of the work of art and the artist, aesthetic differentiation. In stripping it of its material, social and political being, aesthetic differentiation is an ontological depreciation of the work of art. This depreciation can take two forms: the work of art and beauty in general become a mere object of taste from which we can expect nothing but a titillation of the senses, judgements about which are completely subjective and hence incapable of becoming matter for serious discourse (the empiricist view) or it is elevated to a realm beyond all sensation, giving it a significance of its own that has no correlate in the concrete world in which we exist and making it the object of a new science, aesthetics (the rationalist view).83 Gadamer shows great appreciation for Kant, who grants the judgements of taste an intellectual dignity, differentiating them from judgements of practical and theoretical knowledge, like the rationalists, and at the same time acknowledging the place of the work of art in nature as a creation of genius, who as a favourite child of nature, works in a spontaneous and unconscious way similar to nature. The work of art is thus not tied to any mundane purpose and it is created solely for its own sake like the creations of nature. It is this autonomy of aesthetic experience and the work of art that is carried forward by Kant’s contemporaries, especially in the concept of aesthetic consciousness found in Schiller and Goethe until it culminates in Dilthey with the concept of lived experience (Erlebnis). In Erlebnis we come face to face with the whole of what is given in a finite experience. It is a transcendent experience, teleological in nature in which the completeness and the finality of what is given is connected to an instant in the individual’s life, the instant of experience. Erlebnis resists psychological reduction. It is not a mere sensation and not a part of the flow of streaming sensations which constitute the psychology of the individual. It is rather a break, a rupture in the regular flow of experience, a break into the unknown, the uncertain. It is an adventure that takes us out of the regularity that dictates our flow of experiences. Dilthey interposes this concept against the ahistoricity of empiricism and the distance of objectification it introduces between the human being and the world. And yet, in cutting us off from the regular flow of experiences, lived experiences, for Gadamer, are still caught in the same framework of aesthetic differentiation that arose with the advent of modern science. The entire tradition beginning with Kant and ending with Dilthey is simply unable to do justice to the work of art. Of course, the work of art is autonomous and cannot be subsumed under any mundane purpose. Of course, judgements appreciating beauty are neither scientific observations nor moral judgements. And yes, the transcendental understanding of genius radically differentiates it from the work of the scientist, which is based on a method and on intuitions that

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can be methodologically replicated. Yet, in Gadamer’s estimation, all Kant and his successors do is to render philosophy mute before a work of art, for there is no way of understanding what the work of art is. All we can say is that it is the creation of genius, the outcome of a magical event. Moreover, the appreciation of a work of art has to rely on the same genius, for it would require the same kind of spiritual excess to both create and appreciate the spirit of the artwork. In the absence of any discursive criterion for what constitutes a work of art other than the magic of genius, art falls prey to what Gadamer calls a hermeneutic nihilism. We can see how the triumph of modernity for Gadamer is also the triumph of the Babellian inability to speak in relation to the work of art, as society reels from the lack of a common vocabulary to discuss it. Indeed, to discuss and create a work of art is to necessarily alienate oneself from society and to speak and work exclusively in terms not commonly understood. Gadamer is eager to show that the outcome is the result of a fundamental misunderstanding of the work of art. How does he set about his task? He does it by attacking the very foundations of what he calls aesthetic differentiation – the subject-object distinction which governs all of our relationships to the world. Aesthetic consciousness, founded on the subjectobject distinction, disfigures the work of art beyond recognition in order to make it amenable to consciousness. Indeed, Gadamer wishes to re-concretize the experience of art so that the work of art is no longer an abstract correlate of a conscious state but once again reconnected to the life of human beings. How do we understand the concrete being of the artwork in positive terms? We understand this concrete being as a presentation of a unique truth which has been confiscated from it by the advent of scientific modernity, a truth which is not by any means a variation or a pale facsimile of the methodological correctness one finds in the sciences. As we will see, such an understanding of art goes beyond anything we find in the rationalists.84

The Work of Art as Play and Dialogue Play and dialogue are the two concepts Gadamer employs in order to develop an account of the truth of art in positive terms in its connection to life. Both of these concepts refer to phenomena that exhibit a repetitive to-and-fro movement, between players in the one case and between dialogue partners in the other. Let us begin with the concept of play, which Gadamer develops at great length in Truth and Method. The concept of play implicates two kinds of individuals: the player who plays the game and the spectator who watches the game. Every play exhibits a to-and-fro movement between the players or teams playing against each other, from which even single-player games are not exempt, which also involves the spectator who plays along. Even if the spectators are not physically present and the players play behind closed doors as we see in these COVID-19 affected times, there is an indispensable aspect to the play that is always open to the spectator. Without this openness to the spectator, there can, in principle, be no play. Preceding the player and spectator, the play constitutes both, so to speak. As a phenomenon, play defies the subject-object structure. Neither the player nor the spectator is the subject of the play. The play is not an object, for the play does not stand opposed to the player like object to the subject.

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However, the player who plays the game is also orthogonally aware of him- or herself playing the game just as the spectator who watches the game also plays along, more involved than the players are.85 Yet, neither the player nor the spectator grasps the play and conceptualizes it in the manner of an object. The player and the spectator participate in the play, which constitutes the horizon of their consciousness, indeed their limit. Just as a player is a player only through playing, so the spectator too is a spectator only through playing along. Without playing along there is no spectating. When we speak of understanding in this context, be it that of the player or the spectator, we are not speaking of a subjective act of grasping which is conceptual in nature. We are speaking of an event in which the spectator and the player participate and undergo a transformation and, in this transformation, arrive at a kind of understanding, which takes the form of a self-realization, not the grasping and the domination of conceptual understanding, characteristic of the sciences. How does this concept of play illuminate the being of the work of art, the relationship between the artist and the work of art as well as that between the spectator and the artist in a way that departs from the Kantian tradition which has no real answers to these questions other than to point to the cult of genius? The scholarly discussions on the concept of play have focused mainly on the more obvious redefinition of the experience of the work of art from the spectator’s point of view and the way it gives a non-subjectivist account of the artist, especially in the way Gadamer dissolves the distinction between seriousness and playfulness.86 Yet, what is still to be adequately discussed are the equally interesting insights into artistic creation and the nature of the relationship of the artist to the spectator entailed by the concept. In equating the artist with the player Gadamer never explicitly mentions but strongly implies a comparison between art and sport, the primary exemplar of play.87 No sport or game, with very few exceptions, seems to have had a single inventor that we could all name,88 and even in the cases in which it did, such as in computer games or game shows, we hardly ever identify the sport or the game by its inventor. There is a reason for this: a sport comes into being in and through the playing itself. There is no sport which we know to have been elaborately conceived in the consciousness of an inventor, before being played out for the first time. Indeed, this aspect of play that we see in sports and games completely disarms the idea of the artistic genius and the aesthetic consciousness that goes hand in hand with it. It makes it possible to conceive of the artist in a very different way, as someone who plays and gets caught up in play. Seeing the artist as a player leads us naturally to some stunning realizations. The player always needs something to play with and this ‘playing with’ brings in the concrete world which the player inhabits. The players have to mark out a space, need to use different objects, try this and that, keep increasing the challenges they pose to themselves. In most cases it is not a single individual, but two or three individuals who start playing around and as they play around the play starts making demands upon them, so to speak, leading to subsequent modifications they introduce into the playing to make it more pleasurable, more challenging or whatever the case may be. These demands are not necessarily the demands of the player, these are demands that the play makes upon the players once they have entered the sphere of play. In short, a sport comes about only through playing around and playing with something and someone.

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By contrast, when it comes to art, we identify works of art most commonly by the names of the artists who produced them. We indeed deify these artists and struggle to understand how it is that they come to produce their works. The biography of great artists, their habits, their quirks are a great source of delight for the educated masses. But this is precisely what Gadamer seeks to push back against. As in sport so in art, artists bring in the world they inhabit into their work as they begin to play around. Artists bring the traditions they have imbibed, the materiality of the world in which they live right into their work. The work is thus of a material and social nature. It is not an abstraction cut off from the connections of life and engendered by a consciousness that has transcended, nay, alienated itself from its surroundings. The work is mediated by tradition and by the materiality of the world inhabited by the artist. As part of this world, the work enters into various relationships with it, relationships which cannot be characterized as purely aesthetic. This is how Gadamer is able to overcome aesthetic differentiation by means of the concept of total mediation. By total mediation he means that the work is immersed in a tradition even in going against it. It is a constant mediation of the past and the present. Contrary to what is suggested by aesthetic differentiation, there is no work of art without this mediation. Now, we can see why Gadamer makes no real distinction between the composer and the performer as well as between the playwright and the actors in Truth and Method. For if we draw the implications of the concept of play carefully, we come to realize that the composer is only someone who begins to play around but the play needs to be continued by players. In many cases the players in their playing introduce improvisations that probably did not even occur to the composer. We know of Rudolf Barshai, the conductor at the Moscow Chamber Orchestra, rewriting Shostakovich’s string quartet no. 8 into a chamber symphony. We also know of Franz Liszt, first and foremost a performer, a virtuoso at the piano, transcribing all the great Schubertian lieder compositions and the Wagner overtures for the piano, transcriptions that may not have occurred to either Schubert or Wagner. Every work of art is thus a result of a collaborative effort and not just an act of isolated individual inspiration. As we will see later, this is an insight that will govern several of Gadamer’s future writings on individual poets, painters, composers, in which he will show how they found themselves in a particular milieu, had to interact with and were influenced by the times and places in which they lived so that their work was not just the result of their independent genius but equally the result of the traditions and ideas they inherited and the people who touched their lives. In the same manner, Gadamer also blurs the boundaries between the artist and the spectator, for the spectator has to play along with the work and this playing along with the work is essential for the constitution of the work of art. In a certain sense, there is a profound kinship between the sensibility of the artist who plays and the spectator who plays along. How is this kinship between the artist, the performer and the spectator possible? This kinship is possible only because they all belong to a common world and their activities are mediated by a common world. The work of art is nothing but the manifestation of this kinship. Hence the work cannot be attributed exclusively to any one of these three. On the one hand, the work of art grants the artist, the performer and the spectator their respective status. On the other hand, the work of art is possible only

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because the artist, the performer and the spectator are willing to listen to demands of the play in which they are immersed. We can also now understand why Gadamer chooses to describe a work of art as transformation into structure (Verwandlung ins Gebilde). Gadamer is very keen to emphasize that the artwork emerges in the course of playing. It is not just the final product of the activity of the artist, whether we deem this activity conscious or unconscious. This does not mean that the work is independent of the activity of the artist either. Of course, the artist has to play but he is also taken in by demands of the play and these demands go beyond the confines of his own individual subjectivity. One therefore cannot locate the origin of the work in the confines of an unaffected consciousness. Although play involves the artist, it also involves others, namely, the performers and the spectators who figure in the transformation into structure  – the emergence of the artwork. This structure has a permanence that goes beyond the activity and subjective consciousness of the artist in the same way as it goes beyond the performer and spectator. What does the permanence of the structure consist in? The permanence of this structure consists in a presentation (Darstellung). Since play has no other purpose outside of itself than that of self-presentation and self-realization, art itself is nothing but self-presentation. The manner in which the work of art presents itself in the performance arts is different from the way it presents itself in the plastic arts and architecture, which is still different from the way it does it in the literary arts. But whatever the manner of self-presentation, all art presents something for us to recognize. Gadamer retains this Aristotelian insight through all his works. However, seen from within the framework of play, what we have in the work of art is a double presentation. The work of art has to present itself but in presenting itself it presents something that we recognize in its essence. It is only art which is able to bring out the essence of that which it presents. Art is thus able to ontologically augment what it presents us through its self-presentation.89 Here we can defend Gadamer against the charge that his account of the artwork favours the classical definition of beauty, conveniently overlooking those forms, periods and works which depict, even celebrate the ugliness of human existence. For Gadamer understands the beautiful, not as a quality of the work of art but as its very being. He again follows Aristotle here who speaks of the capacity of art to represent even the ugly in a beautiful way. The beautiful in this context is not a superficial quality of the work, but the ontological distinction of the artwork by which it is able to grant an ontological surplus to what it presents so we may recognize the very essence of what is presented. That is the reason why the artwork is nothing like an imitation of reality and its beauty, understood ontologically, encompasses the ugly along with the entire insalubrious side of existence. There is thus no strict separation between the beautiful and the ugly, the gruesome and the loathsome side of existence. This is the fundamental implication of Gadamer’s defence of the classical cannon of the beautiful in his 1971 review essay sharing the title of volume III of the series Poetics and Hermeneutics ‘The Arts no longer Beautiful’ edited by Jauss.90 The cognitive act of understanding involved in this experience of recognition is not conceptual. As we will see, concretely elaborating upon this non-conceptual

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recognition in the experience of the work of art will become an abiding concern of Gadamer’s later essays. Gadamer’s essays interpreting Goethe’s poems found in this volume clearly illustrate this. This concern also animates the questions he poses on the translation of literary works in the many essays collected in this volume. We now come to the second concept Gadamer uses for approaching the truth of art, that of dialogue, which he understands as a dialectic of question and answer, but which is very cursorily connected to art in Truth and Method. While discussing Collingwood as a precursor, Gadamer links the understanding of a text to the understanding of a work of art, telling us that the work of art can be understood only as ‘an expression of an artistic idea’,91 which can be discovered if we arrive at the question to which the work of art is an answer. Gadamer does not say much on this until his 1979 essay ‘On the Reading of Buildings and Paintings’,92 where he develops at length this conception of the work of art as answer to a question. Gadamer begins the essay by stating that he has analysed the structure of understanding as the structure of question and answer, liberating it from its association with method and thus uncovered a form of understanding that is not based on method. He wagers that this structure of understanding which is operative in a dialogue between two well-meaning individuals is also operative in our engagement with works of art. Indeed, the entire essay is a defence of the claim that the work of art is a partner in a dialogue, which speaks to us, only if we are willing to listen. Here we reencounter the cognitive nature of art as it emerged in the context of play. However, the cognitive nature of art, understood here in the context of dialogue is its ability to tell us something, to show us something in speaking to us, which illuminates the work of art in a very different light. As a transformation into structure occurring in the to-and-fro of play, the work of art sweeps in the artists, the performers and the spectators into its space of self-presentation. It is play and the work constituted in play which form the horizon of the artists, performers and spectators. However, in the case of the dialogue, the work and the spectator are partners and it is the dialogue which forms their horizon. Although Gadamer in The Relevance of the Beautiful identifies play and dialogue,93 it is quite clear that the play which consummates in the transformation into structure (as discussed in Truth and Method) and this new play of dialogue are not really one and the same. The reason for this is simple. The concept of play includes the very creation of the work of art in a way that dialogue does not. To enter into a dialogue with the spectator, the work already needs to have been created, the transformation into structure must have already occurred. The work is now only in need of understanding. The concept of play thus implies a continuity between creation and understanding; it blurs the strict lines between creation and understanding in a way that dialogue does not. We can see why the concept of play is more amenable to illuminating theatrical works and works of music which require to be performed each time and which are constituted temporally. From the examples Gadamer offers to illustrate these concepts, we can also see why the concept of dialogue, on the other hand, is more amenable to illuminating paintings and buildings as well as the written works of literature which are constituted spatially. In Truth and Method, he uses the example of music and theatre to illustrate the concept of play. When he goes on to discuss painting, architecture and literature, he substantiates his thesis of aesthetic non-differentiation not directly through the concept of play but through other conceptual distinctions.

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Indeed, the concept of play loses its centrality when the discussion moves on to painting, architecture and literature. In On the Reading of Buildings and Paintings, he uses buildings, paintings and literary works to illustrate the dialogical relationship to the work of art. The concept of dialogue is what gives us a new imperative in our relationship to the work of art: to make the work speak. Two crucial ideas come to the fore in these two concepts of play and dialogue. The first is that the experience of the work of art is cognitive in nature. This is because the work of art presents us with something to recognize. It does not merely imitate reality. It presents reality to us in such way as to be able to realize its essence in a nonconceptual manner. Thinking through the lens provided by the concept of dialogue, we can say that to arrive at this knowledge is to make the work speak, to make it respond to us by asking it the right question. Continuing with On the Reading of Buildings and Paintings, Gadamer chooses the example of Giorgione’s The Tempest. He shows us that the question we need to ask the work of art is a hermeneutic question: What does The Tempest represent? This question is not the same as: What do the various objects in The Tempest refer to? The latter is an iconographical question and answering it will not really tell us anything about what the painting represents. It would be the same as saying that van Gogh’s painting of sunflowers represents sunflowers. Simply tying what is presented in the painting to a referent in the real world does not at all tell us what the painting represents. In Gadamer’s view, doing this would be the same as saying one understands Hamlet after having read each word in it sequentially. Reading each word sequentially and understanding what each word means is still not going to tell us what Hamlet means and what it truly presents. This is what makes a dialogue with a work of art so difficult. We need to be able to differentiate what seems like a right query from what is actually the right query. This leaves us with two questions of our own: How do we experience the answer to the questions we pose to the work of art? How is this answer, which the work of art gives us, non-conceptual in nature? If the cognitive nature of our experience of the work of art is the first crucial idea that emerges from the concepts of play and dialogue, we now come to the second crucial idea. It is that the creation of works of art is a collaborative process implying the sheer situatedness of this creation in this world. As we saw, Gadamer pushes back against the cult of genius, for he resists elevating the creative process beyond the realm of understanding, just like he does when dealing with the work of art. As we see, especially in the case of architecture, the architect is always concerned about making an intervention and shaping the space that we inhabit. This space is not an abstract space, it is a concrete physical and social space. So, any vision of an architectural structure is steeped in the constraints posed by this world on the architect. The creative consciousness of the architect is not an aesthetic consciousness, for there is no aesthetic vision that is not already engaged with the extra-aesthetic dimension of human wants, social pressures, financial and time constraints. The architectural idea is always an answer to a question which comes from a social-political-cultural space in which one finds oneself. This is precisely what Gadamer illustrates with the example of the St. Gallen Cathedral in On the Reading of Buildings and Paintings. Two questions arise here: How is the artistic vision situated; how does it grow from within this situatedness,

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this situatedness in a tradition, in a social world? How is the work of art never the achievement of a transcendent, quasi-divine being but rather the work of fellow human beings, who are influenced by us, who speak to us, are even sometimes in awe of us, who want to be friendly with us, who above all, even when stammering, even in the muteness manifest in their works, want to be understood?

The Truth of a Work of Art As the articles collected in this volume show, Gadamer’s choice of Goethe and his constant going back to Goethe, his choice of Hölderlin, his constant preoccupation with the question of the reading and translation of poetry, his engagement with twentieth-century art and his preoccupation with Hegel’s end of art thesis, seem motivated precisely by the need to answer the four questions posed by these two ideas: How do we experience the answer to the questions we pose to the work of art? How is this answer non-conceptual in nature? How is artistic vision situated in a tradition, in a social world? How are artists never transcendent, quasi-divine beings but rather fellow human beings who are influenced by us, who interact with us as fellow human beings and who strive to be understood by us? In Truth and Method, Gadamer places Goethe firmly in the tradition of the Erlebniskunst, putting him in league with Schiller as a proponent of aesthetic differentiation, resulting in a sharp distinction between the age of Goethe and the aesthetic non-differentiation he proposes there. But in his later essays, particularly in his 1985 essay titled ‘What makes Goethe’s Language Natural’,94 Gadamer wrenches Goethe from this close association with Schiller and the doctrine of aesthetic consciousness, seeing him instead as an advocate of naturalness in art, by which he understands art’s continuity with the rhythms of everyday conversation, its avoidance of explicit artfulness, its retention of a certain lack of polish and its exhibition of a certain kind of raw dynamism. In his 1982 essay, ‘The Lynceus Tower Song in Goethe’s Faust’,95 Gadamer distinguishes what he calls the intrinsic melody of language in lyric poetry from the melody which is externally imposed on a lyric. Here Gadamer has Schubert’s Goethelieder in mind, which were compositions where he set a number of Goethe’s poems to music. But lyric poetry is language which is already song. It is in no need of music. The singer of a poem which has been set to music does not have to read; whereas the reader of lyric poems already sings. In lyric poetry we have a musicality without music, if by music we only understand that which is different from language. This inherent musicality of language, its tonality and melody, when brought to the fore, like in a lyric poem, gives us something to recognize and understand; it is a bearer of knowledge, a knowledge that is there for us to attain. This is a knowledge that defies conceptualization, which cannot be translated into concepts, cannot be independently conveyed by the conceptual language of philosophy and science which would then render the poem obsolete. This is why Gadamer differs from Hegel, when he shows how art can never be rendered obsolete by the absolute knowledge contained in the philosophical concept.

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It is the lyric poem that Gadamer produces as his exhibit number one against this Hegelian thesis. In his 1986 essay ‘The Place of Poetry in the System of Hegelian Aesthetics and the Question of the Pastness of Art’,96 Gadamer painstakingly uncovers the ambiguities in Hegel on the relationship between poetry and philosophy. He shows us how difficult it is for Hegel to demote poetry below philosophy. Hegel is finally able to demote it only by completely overlooking the linguistic density of poetry and by equating it to another medium for concepts. Gadamer takes particular exception to Hegel’s claim that poetry written in one language can easily be translated into another language without any remainder, which is again possible only on the basis of a wilful blindness to language in poetry. In his 1991 essay, ‘Goethe and Mozart – the Problem of Opera’,97 Gadamer once again takes up Goethe’s poetry, this time a fragment that continues Schikaneder’s libretto for The Magic Flute. Gadamer discusses at length a passage involving a conversation between two netherworldly beings discussing the vanity of human existence. Gadamer highlights Goethe’s use of rhyming words, in particular, between vergebens (in vain) and the genitive construction of the noun leben (life), lebens (of life). Here the rhyme allows vergebens to echo in the word lebens, the echo showing the inner connection of futility to life, which is not a conceptual connection. But this connection is as convincing if not more than any conceptual argument connecting futility and life. In the same essay, Gadamer distinguishes Italian opera from Mozart’s musical theatre, placing the latter, of which The Magic Flute is an exemplar, above the former. He does this on the basis of the argument that the principle of Italian opera is total fragmentation. It is merely a succession of musical numbers put together without real thought to the unity underlying them. The pathemata, the emotions stirred by the music, play a central role in Italian opera and every performance is nothing but a succession of emotional states with no unifying principle. This is what distinguishes Mozart’s musical theatre from opera. For Mozart was able to provide an underlying unity to Schikaneder’s libretto with his music, even if this unity was not perceivable to his audience at the time and they treated it like any other operatic performance. Implicit in all of this is Gadamer’s central idea about art itself. Art is not just a titillation of one’s senses. Art is something to be understood. For art to be understood, it has to have an underlying unifying principle, an underlying sense. Understanding is always a recognition of a unity underlying the diversity of appearances. In this sense Mozart’s musical theatre and Goethe’s poetry have a unifying principle, the only difference being that the unity, the sense of the libretto comes from the music, which is external to it. The libretto is itself unable to give itself a sense without the aid of music. By contrast, lyric poetry is able to stand on its own. Its sense comes from the very rhythms of the language in which it is written. But more importantly in both instances, the sense does not come from conceptuality but from some extra-conceptual dimension of music (in the case of music theatre) or from the very musicality of language itself (in the case of poetry). It is the same insight into the non-conceptuality and indeed the concrete specificity of artistic truth that animates Gadamer’s critical review of Gehlen in his 1962 essay titled ‘Conceptual Painting? On Arnold Gehlen’s Time-Pictures’.98 Gadamer meticulously takes up all the instances of modern art selected by Gehlen in his book, to counter

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his basic thesis that modern art is nothing but an application of concepts and theories picked from philosophy, psychology and other disciplines. He shows how each of these paintings has an inner unity, a sense and a truth despite the fact that they are not loquacious like classical paintings. The loquaciousness of classical paintings comes from the fact that they contain objects which we readily identify and of which we can instantly speak. Modern art, by contrast, deliberately expunges all references to the everyday world and closes itself to the viewer. It refuses to speak in the apparently easygoing way of classical art. But this does not mean that its muteness is not revelatory of a truth, a concrete truth. More importantly, it does not mean that we evacuate it of its specific identity as a presentation and simply see it as an instance of a theory or a concept borrowed from other disciplines. What is the nature of this knowledge, this truth, this sense which art conveys? In his 1982 essay on the tower song in Goethe’s Faust, Gadamer describes this truth of poetry as an impotent truth. Its truth is established beyond all objection but it is not the kind of truth which can be marshalled by a human being for a particular purpose like what we find in the sciences, which can be applied for a certain purpose like the dominance of nature. This is a truth, which because it is so concrete, because it is so closely constituted by the very musicality of language in the case of poetry, resists translation into other languages. This is why, in his 1989 essay ‘Reading Is like Translating’,99 Gadamer deems lyric poetry to be simply incapable of being translated but only of being re-poetized. Where methodological rigour and correctness rule the roost, Gadamer concedes in this essay that translation is not even needed when he writes: ‘In the case of many a research book or textbook, what matters is again not so much the art of writing and thus the art of translating, but sheer “correctness”’.100 In the various scientific disciplines, where we are only concerned with correctness and where conceptual understanding is paramount, all that is required is conceptual transposition. However, in the case of literature and poetry, where translation is needed, translation is paradoxically also impossible. This is because what translation demands is the transmigration of the soul of one language into another. If this were to actually happen, then the language into which we translate would no longer exist and what we would have is a new language altogether. At the same time, if this were not to happen, then we would not have a translation but merely another poem in the host language.

The Artist’s Creation If all art conveys an understanding, then all artistic creation is a wanting to be understood. This wanting to be understood on the part of the artist attests to his or her connectedness to the society and its traditions which are operative in him or her. This is the Aristotelian lesson which Gadamer never forgets and on which he bases his staunch resistance to the individualistic cult of genius. Because artists want to be understood, they are already part of a community which includes their audience, who also seek to understand. There is thus already a community between the artists and their prospective audience so that the work of art emerges from this community. It is

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this insight that pervades Gadamer’s interpretation of Hölderlin’s Andenken in his 1987 essay titled ‘Poetizing and Thinking as Reflected through Hölderlin’s Remembrance’.101 The poet, who speaks in the first person in this poem, may or may not be identified with Hölderlin, even if biographical reasons may be brought to bear for this identification. What is really significant, however, is how Gadamer interprets the relationship between the poet and the seafarer. He does not see the poet as a vanguard and he does not see the poet’s self-proclaimed task of founding that which abides as something which elevates the poet over the rest of humanity. Rather, Gadamer connects the experience of the poet to that of the seafarer and sees the poet’s task as something memorializing what is already achieved by the seafarer. Indeed, the poem is nothing but an expression of the poet’s awe for the seafarers. It is thus not a result of an aesthetic idea, which has no coordinates in the concrete reality of the poet and which is conjured up out of thin air, so to speak. Rather, the regular experience of the seafarers, the to-andfro movement which governs their lives, their departure from and arrival back to the port city of Bordeaux where they reside, the constant conflict between memory and forgetfulness, is witnessed by the poet, who sublimates this experience by presenting it to us in his poem, granting a permanence to the regular yet fleeting experiences of these seafarers. We see something similar in Gadamer’s reading of Goethe’s work. Goethe’s work represents for him a sublimation of the conviviality which pervades everyday conversations in polite social settings. In such everyday conversations, we are always willing to give our partners the benefit of the doubt, never placing our view with an adversarial vehemence. Rather, we use locutions like ‘maybe’ and ‘like’ to temper the sharpness of our views, even when they are right. It is precisely this conviviality which Gadamer finds embodied in Goethe’s work. If Goethe represents the friendly loquaciousness of the bourgeoisie he hailed from, Hölderlin, especially the late Hölderlin represents the opposite, the inability to speak. In a very short untranslated 1983 essay whose title translates to Hölderlin’s Contemporaneity,102 Gadamer tells us that Hölderlin embodies the wisdom of stammering and speechlessness, which is always on the lookout for the right word but never succeeds in finding it. In this, his poems encompass the very essence of language. But this unsettledness of stammering and speechlessness as well as the serenity of talkativeness can only be made sense of from a certain standpoint, namely, that of the situatedness of the poet and artist in a social world, the world in which they strive to be understood.

Art and Propaganda If Gadamer’s hermeneutic project is focused on the distinction between art and science, keen as it is to give art its rightful place as a site of truth in an age dominated by the methodical accuracy of modern science, it seems only fitting to ask what it has to say about a related distinction between art and propaganda. Can Gadamer’s hermeneutics make a space for art with equal keenness in an age where the creation and dissemination of propaganda aided by modern communicative technologies and the internet have only become easier? We know that the distinction between art and propaganda is as old as the oldest reflections on art. One of the major thrusts of Plato’s

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criticism of art is based on our inability to distinguish between art and propaganda. In the Ion and in the Republic Plato speaks of how rhapsody can cause the spectator and the artist to abandon all reason and give in entirely to their emotions. Such an audience could be persuaded into assenting to anything. Hence Plato’s desperate step of banishing most poetry altogether from the ideal republic for fear that it could manipulate the listeners and readers into giving up on rational action altogether. His student Aristotle answers the challenge posed by this distinction by keeping art under the permanent supervision of a technical rationality that comes from Aristotle’s own philosophical reflections, so that art can be of service to society in a pedagogical role. It is in relation to this distinction that we can also find a positive motivation behind aesthetic differentiation. Aesthetic differentiation can be seen as an equally desperate attempt at trying to separate art from the religious and the political. Was it not trying to protect art from being used as a handmaiden by the church and the monarch for their own propaganda? When the new aesthetic consciousness that is nurtured by aesthetic differentiation frowns upon commissioned art and encourages the artist to be independent and work for this art and art alone, it is again trying to ensure that the artist does not become an unwitting tool of propaganda. Aesthetic differentiation can thus be seen as an attitude that seeks to rehabilitate the work of art from its exploitation in society. It is happy, it seems, to see art become irrelevant rather than risk its exploitation in propaganda. This defence of aesthetic differentiation, of course, echoes the Habermasian criticism of Gadamer for his defence of rhetoric. In that debate Gadamer rightly criticizes Habermas for treating rhetoric as a mere technique rather than an integral aspect of the very being of human discourse, which cannot be simply wished away.103 The implication is that rhetoric may of course be used to make language cover up the truth but the same rhetoric is also needed for making language reveal the truth. It is self-contradictory to dream of a truth shorn of all rhetoric. In the same way, we can say that the immersion of art into human life and society belongs to the very being of art so that it is equally pointless to dream of art separated entirely from human life and society. The implication here is that human life and society may exploit art for ulterior motives turning it into an instrument of propaganda, but it is also only in the flow of human life and society, in its connection with other facets of human existence, the religious, the moral, the political, that art itself acquires its full existence. However, things are not so easy here. One only needs to think of Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings of pineapples for the promotional work of Hawaiibased fruit company Dole Pineapple and Rothko’s refusal to have his murals adorn the Four Seasons Hotel in New York. Are O’Keefe’s paintings of pineapples which feature in the marketing campaigns of the notorious Dole Pineapple, art? Or are they just pure propaganda? When Rothko says that those who would choose to eat at the Four Seasons Hotel would never choose to look at his murals, did he mean to say that his art would no longer be art on the walls of the Four Seasons Hotel? In our own time, what do we say of those statues of slave traders, slave owners, of the monarchs and explorers who perpetrated genocide on the natives in Central America and Africa which are being pulled down or moved into museums? Are these actions simply desecrations of works of art? Or are they the much-needed political initiative to remove decades of racist propaganda from public spaces? The answers to these questions are easy for

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those engaged in political struggle. But how do we make sense of these answers as reflective beings who need meaningful and lasting answers? Here Gadamer does leave us a clue: that art even though it is connected to life, connected to society, still assumes an autonomy, still speaks for itself, still continues to speak through the ages. That is to say, art, even though it is connected to the other facets of human existence and the purposes at play there, is still its own purpose. It does not receive its purpose from any other facet of human existence. This is how Gadamer understands an eminent text. Now, when we are speaking of propaganda in relation to art, we are speaking strictly of the use of art for purposes completely external to it, where the external purpose suffocates the work of art and prevents it from achieving its purpose: self-presentation by which it presents something abiding for recognition. This leads us to the question of the extent to which a work of art can be suffocated, the extent to which it can be prevented from self-presentation, which in turn implies that somehow every piece of propaganda contains a work of art waiting to burst out if only we were to untether it from the purpose to which it has been subsumed. But is this implication correct? Are we not first assuming the existence of a work of art which we then imagine is twisted into a piece of propaganda? It indeed seems correct to say that from a hermeneutic standpoint the meaning of a work of art can never be completely exhausted by the propaganda to which it is put to use. However, can we conceive of pieces of propaganda which contain no work of art, which are simply propaganda through and through? That is to say, the piece produced receives its purpose entirely from the external motive for which it was commissioned to the extent that if that purpose were to cease to exist, there would be nothing to redeem. It would be entirely lacking in autonomy. The piece would not speak, not because it is mute or speechless. For speechlessness and muteness are themselves modes of speaking. The piece of propaganda would not possess the capacity to speak on its own. In the absence of ulterior motives, it would be transformed into a dumb object. Could these dumb objects masquerade as works of art? Is this not the best way to understand those statues of the slave traders, monarchs and travellers which have been pulled down so recently? Does this mean that some genres of art are more amenable to being used as propaganda than others? Are architecture and the representational arts, painting and sculpture more amenable to propaganda than nonrepresentational arts like music? Are abstract painting and sculpture, because they are non-representational less amenable to propaganda than representational art? Does that make modern art less propagandistic than classical art? Or does the neutrality of modern art in the face of social life make it more propagandistic than classical art, which clearly took sides? These are again knotty but crucial questions which may not be answered to our satisfaction by hermeneutics. Maybe the practitioners of Marxist theory, of psychoanalysis and certain strains of post-structuralism who accentuate the ruptures between the classical and modern and more crucially the ruptures within society itself, its internal struggles, the justice of these struggles and who understand art itself as a site of struggle, a struggle for the truth, would provide more satisfactory answers. Yet, these questions themselves would simply make no sense to an aesthetic consciousness viewing all works of art as pure aesthetic objects. The very fact that these questions are meaningful from the hermeneutic standpoint, which acknowledges the

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need for us to answer them as a society speaks to the salience of Gadamer’s hermeneutic treatment of art. If there is one upshot that we could take from Gadamer’s myriad engagements with art in this volume, it is his tireless struggle to show us the abiding relevance of art, not through the generality of theory but through concrete engagement with artists and their work. In this, he constantly points us to the situatedness of the artwork and the corresponding situatedness of the artist. Gadamer has indeed very rightly zeroed in on the fundamental problem of aesthetic differentiation, which captures the basic attitude to art in the post-enlightenment West. Aesthetic differentiation in wanting to do justice to the art in the work of art banishes it from the concrete world in which it is created and in which it has its place, to the realm of the aesthetic, transforming it in the process into the object of an aesthetic consciousness, which can access it only in an aesthetic experience, an experience which has nothing in common with the way we experience the world daily as social beings who have inherited this world mediated by tradition. By cutting off the work of art from its connection to life in a bid to save the art in it, aesthetic differentiation ends up giving up on the very relevance of art. Gadamer’s hermeneutics operates within this paradox. When art was relevant, it was not treated as art per se. It was treated as an object of religious adoration, as a symbol of political power or in some other way, but not as a work of art per se. When the work of art begins to be recognized as art per se, the same gesture also seems to strip it of its relevance. So, if art has to be relevant, the work of art has to be more than art. It is this ‘more’ that Gadamer’s hermeneutics seeks to recover in the artwork.

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­Part One

Ancient Ethics and Practical Philosophy

2

­1

The Socratic Question and Aristotle (1990)1 [373] If we want to understand the development of the idea of practical philosophy in the Greeks, we need to realize that Plato and Aristotle come to us in two fundamentally different forms of philosophical texts. On the one hand, there are sophisticated dialogues which call up Socrates or one of his peers into the living present. On the other hand, there are the dry lines of a mind finding its articulation in the work of thought and the words of teaching. One is literature in the sophisticated sense of the word. The other is a material which is hard to decipher, which first awakens us to a life of thought. Both present the same task. The two types of text, like two forms of speech, converge in the same effort to give an account and thus to lead the Socratic question to its truth. To each type of text there corresponds a specific kind of content. On the one hand, we have in Plato’s dialogues the flow of conversation in the manner of a living anamnēsis [‘recollection’], which awakens a foreknowledge and trains the mind to retain that which is known. It is only through such retaining that what is known is raised out of an indeterminate context to its specific determination. There is an inner unity of anamnēsis and diairesis [‘division’, ‘separation’], of the awakening and the drawing out of the idea from a not yet illumined ground, on the one hand, and the execution of this thoughtful remembering which produces differences, on the other. This inner unity presents itself not only in the propositional form of question and answer, of argument and aporia, but at the same time as a being-together of human beings, whose words are addressed to one another and find in this process their ultimate validation. It is a communicative event which not only first brings the words to their proper truth through the exchange and the commonality of the dialogue. It also brings the human beings, who encounter each other in this manner, first into what is proper to them. Everything seems to be dominated by the Socratic question of the good. Like in a marvellous reciprocal reflection of one thing in another, soul, city and the universe appear in this Platonic recollection as great images of that good which the Socratic question pursued and the answer to which constantly eluded his contemporaries. Thus, we have a horizon for questioning which is drawn out in a new reality and presents itself to us half in logos [‘reason’, ‘discourse’], half in muthos [‘story’] [374]. It is not, first, a logos, which then finds its coronation in a muthos. In each of its steps, it is both thought and story, logos and muthos. On the other side, we have the work of Aristotle. Here, too, we have on occasion a series of arguments and analyses of fascinating significance and possessed at the

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Ethics, Aesthetics and the Historical Dimension of Language

same time of stylistic force. Philological researchers have diagnosed such passages – perhaps correctly – as quotations from genuine literary works by Aristotle which are lost to us. His flumen orationis aureum [‘golden stream of eloquence’]2 was famous in antiquity. What we read, however, is usually a carefree elliptical motley of notes, which all come from a language which is alive. These notes originate from a language which is alive and circumscribe semantic fields within this living language, delineate semantic directions and strive in this manner to bring thought to concepts. Insofar as it is about taking up the Socratic question of the good, these texts endeavour to bring to concepts the good in human life as a prakton [‘what is made in action’], that is to say, in the whole concreteness of praxis [‘action’]. We are thus confronted by two forms of text, two ways of shaping the work of thought, which seek an answer to the same question. Already as a novice, I was aware that the task which lay here was to think the question of the human good as it is posed in Plato’s Philebus, in the artful fiction of mixing a potion of life, along with the Aristotelian analysis of how human existence interprets itself in its pursuit of the good. It concerns the presence of the Socratic question in Aristotle. Subsequently, I have often asked myself this question, especially in light of the works of Leo Strauss, and attempt an answer here. One must approach the Aristotelian ethics not so much by asking in what respect Aristotle tried to differentiate himself from Plato and the Platonic Socrates. Instead, one should rather ask how Aristotle took up the intellectual heritage he received from Socrates through Plato and endeavoured to integrate it conceptually into his thinking. We can already see the extent to which this question grants us an appropriate access to the practical philosophy of Aristotle at the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, in which he develops the programme of a practical philosophy. His enquiry into the good as that which is the concern of all human activity, whether of the enquiring intellect or of human beings acting practically, shows us that Aristotle was completely aware that he had to take custody of the Socratic-Platonic heritage. The good appears as that for the sake of which humans seek knowledge and make choices. Aristotle does not demand, like Plato in the mouth of Socrates, an account from those he encounters. He seeks to give an account to himself and to those who listen to him or read him. To give an account means to be ready to give an answer. The way Aristotle gives an answer allows us to recognize our own questions in him. [375] What we have here is a twofold question which still continues to appear here as one, as in Socrates. It is obviously, on the one hand, the question which arises in the course of practical life and seeks to find what is good, what is right in one’s own choice and decision. On the other hand, there is a kind of awareness of what right action and rational knowledge are at all, and what they alone can be. Thus, our reflection is divided from the very outset into these two interconnected questions, which are yet again also separated from each other, concerning the practical knowledge of human beings and the thoughtful reflection, which has human praxis, behaviour and knowledge as its object. The latter is the business of a philosophical ethics. In contrast to human practice, the justification of the philosophical-theoretical undertaking is a task which goes with philosophy. How can philosophy serve practical reason and, at the same time, be a knowledge of the universal? Or should philosophy merely satisfy itself in a conciliatory knowledge of life, in the way it became the signature of ethics later on in the Hellenistic period? We

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are thus prompted to return to Aristotle and request him for clarification about the sense of a philosophical ethics and a foundation or justification for such an ethics. For this, we certainly have to begin with the question concerning practical knowledge itself. The view that aretē [‘excellence’, ‘virtue’] is knowledge has been taken to be a Socratic ‘doctrine’ since Plato. What does Aristotle tell us about this? For this, we have to begin with the sixth book of the Nicomachean Ethics (or was it originally a text of the Eudemian Ethics which has been handed down to us only in such a garbled form?). The sixth book sets itself the task of disentangling the conceptual structure specific to the element of logos to which the more precise analyses of ēthos [‘character’] always boil down.3 We can be persuaded that no universally applicable rules can be laid down when we are asking what the right life is for each of us and how we must act. Yet, it seems quite unsatisfactory that what emerges as the final answer is always only this: ‘as the correct logos recommends it’ or ‘as the spoudaios [“honest person”] will say’ or even ōs dei [‘as it must’, ‘as it fits’]. What does logos mean here, and how does this logos relate to the ethos? The relationship between ethos and logos shapes the architecture of the ethics lecture. It is the result of an analytic work, as it seems, already through Plato and in the Platonic Academy, to have become the set range of their tasks. Aristotle explicitly refers to this Platonic preparation when, in the thirteenth chapter of the first book of the Nicomachean Ethics, he points to the exoterikoi logoi [‘exoteric discourses’], in which the difference between the logon echon [‘having reason’, ‘having speech’] and the alogon [‘without reason’, ‘without the capacity to speak’] is introduced by distinguishing two parts of the soul. In this regard, it is significant – what Aristotle stresses even more explicitly in another passage – [376] that this talk of the parts of the soul is fundamentally imprecise and inadequate. In fact, one may well speak meaningfully of parts of the body, although one must ask oneself whether it is appropriate here to say that one smells with the nose. One no doubt smells with the help of the nose but it is not the nose that smells. Already in the Theaetetus Plato made this absolutely clear. In any case, this is still clearer of the parts of the soul that it is always the whole soul, the entire living human being, who is involved in one or the other of its existential possibilities. One is always wholly there when one feels, desires or thinks. Even in the division of the soul into parts, which Plato justifies with artful vigour in the Politeia [The Republic], it should not be forgotten that the possible division is subordinated to the citizenry which is ideally one and the city which is ideally one. This means that the ideal of a city fundamentally consists in the fact that, in the city, the parts, the classes – or however we may call that which constitutes the citizenry of a city – live in harmony and not in dissension and divisiveness, and in the horrors of civil war. It is precisely in the same sense that we must start from the harmony of the soul and from the unity of the human beings. This harmony can be interpreted conceptually in its normative orientations, on the one hand, along the lines of ethos and, on the other, along the lines of phronēsis [‘practical wisdom’]. Here, too, what is essential is not the division, but the unity. In order to illustrate the pure aspectual character of these two aspects, Aristotle himself mentions the distinction between the concave side and the convex side of a curvature. The task which Aristotle has set for himself for the foundation of practical philosophy is thus, in the first place, to elucidate this inner connection which exists

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Ethics, Aesthetics and the Historical Dimension of Language

between a knowledge of what is practically right and the ethos, the being which human beings have developed and which was already pre-formed. It is thus not a knowledge for everybody. It is not a knowledge which one can acquire through learning. We encounter this knowledge only in the situation in which we human beings always already find ourselves when acting and as those who have already been acculturated by society. To this extent, the distinction between the dianoetic and the ethical virtues is an analytical separation of what is not separable, and this is the real truth of the Socratic question about the being and the knowledge of the good.4 If this is the case, then among the necessary distinctions in the way knowledge is acquired, which are the objects of focus here, we must make a twofold distinction. One is the distinction between, on the one hand, the kind of theoretical [377] knowledge, which knows how to recognize that which is in its unchanging truth, and, on the other hand, precisely the practical kind of knowledge where the very object of knowledge is that which one has to do. In this case, we must be dealing with beings which are susceptible to change. This is surely the first distinction between theoretical knowledge and practical knowledge. This sounds quite straightforward, almost like a new version of the classical Platonic distinction between being and becoming. But is this enough? Are we not led astray by this Platonic distinction? Is the practical knowledge which we are inquiring into really a knowledge of what is changing and changeable? Here one may feel pressed to differentiate the knowledge which we find so essentially fused with ethos, from that other knowledge, which concerns the production of something. Artisans make something by virtue of their knowledge and abilities in that they transform a material which is changeable. The one who acts has the good in mind. Thus, we see two main points crystallize: the distinction between theoretical and practical knowledge and the distinction between technical and practical knowledge. Both distinctions are developed by Aristotle on the basis of a stock of words which Plato himself certainly employed deliberately but still without making the real distinctions. To differentiate between them is the real task of the conceptualization which Aristotle undertakes here in the sixth book of the Nicomachean Ethics. We will see from the analysis itself the benefit conceptualization can bring. Perhaps we will also see what is to be given up and lost in the process. While keeping in view the goal of specifying what practical knowledge is, let us follow the precise analysis of the five forms in which the Greek language managed to speak of a perfect kind of knowledge. These are technē (the ability based on knowledge), epistemē (science), phronēsis (practical knowledge), sophia (wisdom) and finally noūs (reason) (if it is permitted to use this questionable equivalent for the Greek word noūs). In the treatment of these five key words for perfect knowledge, the Aristotelian art of drawing distinctions proves its worth. It also affords us an opportunity to consider the benefits and the losses of the turn to a conceptual way of speaking. What is lost is undoubtedly the inexhaustible plurivocity which the poetic word, for example, always carries with itself. In the Platonic artwork of the Socratic dialogue, the poetic word contains truth which can never be fully exhausted by the concept, even when the conceptual word carries something of the semantic ramifications which the word possesses when alive in a language. Aristotle’s art of drawing distinctions has its model in Plato’s diairesis, his dialectical art of making distinctions, which culminates in a dialogue. Yet, in Plato

The Socratic Question and Aristotle (1990)

7

this always remains bound to [378] the event of coming to an understanding, which is often coloured by irony. Aristotle’s conceptual analysis, for its part, is certainly not to be understood as a form of demonstration, as apodeixis [‘demonstration’]. It can only be that which leads us along, epagōgē [‘bringing to oneself ’], to the specific meaning of the things under discussion. However, this conceptual analysis must make differentiations and satisfy a sharper claim of conceptual stipulation, more than what is in place and required in the Platonic dialogical event. Aristotle is thus led here to clarify his position by separating epistemē as science from technē as the ability to make something or the knowledge of how one makes and produces something. Against this, Plato had retained in his dialogues the solid fusion of the two concepts, which he found pre-existing in language use. The Aristotelian enterprise becomes even clearer when he attempts to separate phronēsis and sophia from each other, even though sophia undoubtedly had no exclusive connection to the theoretical attitude in the way the Greeks used language. Thus, what gets lost here is what language knew, when the inner connectedness of epistemē, technē, sophia and phronēsis is given up. What emerges as a benefit, though, is that practical knowledge, the ‘knowledge-for-oneself ’, stands out clearly as a very different kind of knowledge. In the Aristotelian analysis, we can only find an echo of the commonality in the obscure concept of the noūs, which has precedence over the logos, to the extent that it is the common root of all the ways of being knowingly conscious. However, Aristotle’s fundamental preoccupation shows itself above all when he sets technē apart from phronēsis. For example, we can read the challenging statement: ‘of phronēsis there is no lēthē, no oblivion’ (Nicomachean Ethics Z5, 1140b29). It is as if one had an intellectual guiding representation in the virtue of practical knowledge at all, similar to what otherwise belonged to learnable knowledge, especially that of technē. Here, evidently, the setting-apart of phronēsis from technē is supported by the fact that forgetting and unlearning are denied to phronēsis and can only happen to a knowledge which is learnable. This certainly points us in the direction of moral reasonableness, the sensitivity to what is binding, which we might call ‘conscientiousness’, without thereby being able to offer an adequate concept. I once told Ilting5 that in 1923 Heidegger made a remark about this distinction of phronēsis and lēthē, according to which phronēsis knows no oblivion. Heidegger said: ‘this is conscience’. This prompted Ilting to protest, and yet this provocative remark at the time made it clear how difficult it was for Aristotle to work out an adequate conceptualization for practical knowledge. The concept of conscience familiar to us is generally known to have been first coined in the Hellenistic period and its further development in Christianity through the word suneidesis [‘conscious awareness’] (conscientia). Even then, it still remained free from all Christian-pietistic overtones. Yet, anyone who [379] recalls the Socratic dialogues must recognize the connection between the Socratic giving of an account and the internalization of the moral understanding of the self in Christian doctrine. We find a similar kind of process revealing the difficulties of conceptualization in Aristotle in his intentional shift in the meaning of the concept of sunesis [‘insightful understanding’]. In this case, Aristotle manifestly seizes on an expression for a purely intellectual capacity, for learning effortlessly, that is to say, for the understanding which takes place in learning. Now, Aristotle shifts the meaning of sunesis in a

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Ethics, Aesthetics and the Historical Dimension of Language

completely different direction. It now means an insightful understanding. To show understanding when someone else needs it has its place in the field of phronēsis ​​ and moral-ethical relationships. This is what Aristotle wants to show. For this, the proximity of other expressions comes to his aid, namely, gnōmē [‘right opinion’] and suggnōmē [‘indulgence’, ‘forgiveness’], which we can render in German roughly as Einsicht (‘insight’) and Nachsicht (‘indulgence’). All of this brings into play the field of epieikēs [‘equitable’], of what is fair, that is to say, the consideration of fairness and the judgement about human ethical behaviour. This is how the new Aristotelian art of drawing distinctions succeeds in replacing the poetic means by which Plato practised the Socratic elenchos [‘refutation’] and let us feel its moral effects. Aristotle succeeds in bringing everything to conceptual statements. The famous knowledge in virtue6 of Socrates is thereby brought to its true meaning. This becomes fully clear at the end of the sixth book of the Nicomachean Ethics, which is about phronēsis. If we look at the critical debate with Plato, which Aristotle undertakes in the field of metaphysics or ‘first philosophy’, the art of drawing conceptual distinctions becomes particularly valuable. In his critique he indeed makes it clearly evident that the true sense of eidos [‘form’] can only consist in the fact that the eidos constitutes the being in beings. In so doing, he only dissolves a false hypostatization of the idea. In addition, through his kind of critique, he also blocked the proper reading of the Platonic dialogues for a very long time. Now, it is Aristotle who polemically exaggerated this two-world theory and precisely by attacking it he dogmatically strengthened it. Later, in a completely different inward looking spiritual attitude, Plotinus interpreted the same two-world theory in a totally new way, making it the setting for a great drama involving world and soul.7 The Platonism of Plotinus and its takeover by Augustin thus achieved a new productive influence, always accompanying as an undercurrent the scholastic form of Christian philosophy, which experienced its culmination under the aegis of Aristotle. In scholastic philosophy, the manner in which Aristotle legitimates with Aristotelian means the Socratic-Platonic insight into the unity of all virtues indeed becomes explicit. The Aristotelian project of a practical philosophy remains [380] much closer to the fundamental Socratic-Platonic intention than the Aristotelian critique of Plato’s theory of ideas suggests. In his critique, we are dealing with a style of Aristotelian argumentation of a consciously critical and argumentative nature, which, so to speak, fundamentally refuses to consider the author, in this case Plato, in his own real intentions. The great model of all true dialogue, of taking the other partners not in their weaknesses, but in their strengths, and to continue the dialogue in a productive way is precisely Plato. Aristotle undertakes his criticism of the chōrismos [‘separation’] of the ideas on the basis of his physics. Yet, one should not fall back on the fantastical escape route of declaring the Platonic Parmenides un-Platonic (e.g. as a Megarian response). One would also have to give up the Statesman, whose doctrine of the metrion, the right measure and all its applications, does not fit with Aristotle’s critique. It is thus not Plato, but Aristotle who is the initiator of the two-world theory, and he is responsible for the lasting disfigurement of Plato’s image beyond neo-Platonism. Thus, for Plato as well as for Aristotle, there still remains for us to conduct a productive dialogue with them. The level to which Hegel had taken this dialogue, it seems to me, has not again been reached up to this day.

­2

Aristotle’s Protrepticus in Consideration of the Historical Development of Aristotle’s Ethics (1928)1 [164] In his book on Aristotle2 Jaeger attempted to view the totality of Aristotle’s writings from the standpoint of Aristotle’s own intellectual development.3 He was thereby continuing what he had begun in his essay on the History of the Genesis of Aristotle’s Metaphysics4: to overcome the prejudice that the writings of Aristotle transmitted to us are fundamentally literary unities, whose manifold compositional flaws confront philologists with the task of establishing the authentic form of the individual ‘work’. For Jaeger, by contrast, these compositional flaws become the starting points for an analysis which takes a completely different methodological direction. He detects in these flaws, precisely in their provisional form, the traces of different phases in Aristotle’s evolution and attempts to exhibit in them the legitimacy and intelligibility of a development. He provides the basis for this attempt through a penetrating interpretation of Aristotle’s early writings. In his efforts to assess these fragments with respect to the question of Aristotle’s development, he had a predecessor in the person of Jakob Bernays, who was no less penetrating. Bernays had written a book on the Aristotelian dialogues ‘in their relation to the rest of his works’, in which he not only sought to give a colourful depiction of the Aristotelian dialogues, so famous in antiquity; he was also explicitly looking for the relations between Aristotle’s practical and dialogical works. Yet, he came to the conclusion that the loss of the dialogues robs us of any means of gaining an insight into the gradual development of Aristotelian thought. Jaeger renewed this attempt under completely different and more favourable circumstances. For one, he was not dependent on the sparse fragments alone. His analysis of the Metaphysics and the insight he gained from it into the manner in which the treatises were assembled put him in the position to approach the fragments of the early writings with a definite question. [165] In addition, he had at his disposal new and very important material for the interpretation of the early works themselves. The discovery of large parts of Aristotle’s Protrepticus in excerpts collected by Iamblichus – still unknown to Bernays – has unimaginably expanded our knowledge of Aristotle’s early writings.5 There is one question above all which has gained salience anew through this discovery. It is the question of whether we have to believe the ancient testimonies claiming that Aristotle had already battled the Platonic doctrine of ideas in his dialogues. Jaeger seeks to prove the implausibility of these testimonies in a

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Ethics, Aesthetics and the Historical Dimension of Language

penetrating interpretation of the Protrepticus fragments. Obviously, even after the discovery of the Protrepticus fragments, it was still a matter of dispute (e.g. by Diels) whether a ‘Platonic period’ had to be really assumed in the literary production of Aristotle. Yet, Jaeger believes that he is finally able to settle this question in his book. The Protrepticus appears to him to be a sufficient basis in order to confirm once and for all the interpretation of the other dialogues in terms of a ‘Platonic period’, so as to make intelligible the development of Aristotle from there to the latest shape taken by his thought. He grounds this primarily in the numerous connections between the Eudemian ethics and the Protrepticus, which susbstantiate the claims made of late on various accasions, that the Eudemian ethics is authentic and allows us to see in it the connecting link between the position of the Protrepticus and the Nicomachean Ethics. Now, what is remarkably typical in Jaeger’s work is that it essentially strengthens its power to convince us by showing how all the different moments in Aristotle’s thought consolidate in the direction of the logic of a continuity if one applies to all these moments the criterion of a proximity to and a distance from the Platonic position. These moments are: the Platonism of the fragments, the authenticity of the Eudemian Ethics, the multiple layers of the Metaphysics (and the Politics), none of which would suffice on their own to provide an indisputable basis for a real history of the development of Aristotle. This is the procedure constantly used by Jaeger for adducing evidence: all puzzles and discrepancies disappear the moment we see them from the perspective of a historical development. Thanks to this methodological consistency, Jaeger’s book leaves the readers with the impression that there is a great unity in Aristotle’s work. However, it would be hardly worthy of the scientific status of this brilliant attempt if one were simply to take for granted that what Jaeger presented with such bold resoluteness, namely, a comprehensive picture of Aristotle’s development, could serve as a firm basis for all further future research. Rather, critical reading is the most important presupposition for a fruitful treatment of such a work. This should not be understood as speaking in favour of any empty scepticism. Such scepticism is at best confined to a very modest function: to keep awake our sense for the openness of possibilities [166]. Rather, only a doubt grounded in the facts under discussion can claim scientific heft. This is especially so for a book such as Jaeger’s, which, for most points, presents the material investigations themselves and not only their results. Nevertheless, it is a requirement for objective criticism that we first methodologically bracket the concordance and impressive unity of the total result so that what the individual moment really accomplishes for the overall justification comes to light. Thus, we need to examine in what follows whether and to what extent the remnants of the Protrepticus are capable of supporting the view of a historical development in Aristotle. Insofar as Jaeger’s reconstruction of the development of Aristotelian thought claims to open finer possibilities for understanding Aristotle, it becomes the duty of critical research to verify how much is yielded by the possibilities opened up by Jaeger for understanding Aristotle when it comes to an objective understanding of the issue. In this regard, Aristotle’s Metaphysics is in a very different situation than the Ethics. Within a purely factual interpretation, the Metaphysics reveals itself as a collection of various investigations, whose arrangement into a coherent unity indeed betrays certain factual motives but these motives alone cannot make the work intelligible. The situation

Aristotle’s Protrepticus (1928)

11

is completely different for Aristotelian Ethics (and this is primarily the Nicomachean Ethics). Here, the composition and the literary form offer only insufficient assistance for an interpretation based on a historical development. In contradistinction to what we see in the Metaphysics, the attempt to take these ethical investigations together as a unity is not plagued by any such difficulties. Even the crudeness of the composition we come across in the ethics does not in itself demand an explanation in terms of a historical development. It can rather be understood mostly on the basis of factual motives.6 In the field of the Ethics, it is not some puzzles in the composition of this text that are supposed to be solved by the consideration of a historical development. Rather, it is also one of the most daunting problems in Aristotle research, namely the position of the Eudemian Ethics, for which Jaeger would like to open up new and promising ways through such consideration. The attempt to reconstruct the development of the ethical thinking of Aristotle is based above all on the Protrepticus (and on it alone; for the other fragments do not offer anything on this matter). [167] On the trajectory of the historical development of the problem treated from the Protrepticus to the Nicomachean Ethics, the Eudemian Ethics presents itself, according to Jaeger, as the connecting link required by the history of that problem. Jaeger also believes that he can prove the authenticity of the Eudemian Ethics through its literary connections to the Protrepticus. Up until now, one could have doubts about the status of the Eudemian Ethics, but now we have two points which fix the path taken by Aristotle’s development, the Protrepticus and the Nicomachean Ethics, whose authenticity is not in doubt. On this basis, it is no longer difficult to recognize that the Eudemian Ethics is not situated in the extension of this trajectory but falls between its endpoints. (p. 248) The developmental sequence Philebus, Protrepticus, Eudemian Ethics, Nicomachean Ethics has an irrefutable historical logic. (p. 248)7

The goal of the investigation which follows is to put this thesis to the test. Its main object will have to be the Protrepticus, given the significance it has for Jaeger’s thesis defending a historical development. First, let me say a few words about the transmission of the text. In a detailed analysis of Iamblichus, Jaeger sought to show that the entire sequence of excerpts by Aristotle quoted in Iamblichus goes back to a single text, precisely the Protrepticus. Jaeger may not have really put all doubts to rest. The fact that Iamblichus had plundered the Platonic dialogues in a colourful series of excerpts remains one example against Jaeger’s claim. However, he rightly emphasized that the diversity of the argumentative motifs transmitted by Iamblichus in no way compels us to accept that they come from various sources, since the protreptic intent of this diversity clearly represents the unifying bond that holds them together (Jaeger, p. 78). When it comes to the reliability of these excerpts, they cannot give us the exact organization of the original, as Jaeger convincingly demonstrates. However, conversely, we cannot put this organization on the count of extraneous motives introduced by Iamblichus. This is what the Plato excerpts of

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Iamblichus teach us. From them we clearly get to know the way Iamblichus works: he collected all the protreptical parts of the Platonic dialogues, organized them according to their main themes and renders them again by reformulating what was dialogical into continuous discourse in a manner which is skilful and intelligible, although overly wanting in its style. He leaves out Plato’s broader depictions or condenses them and regularly leaves out the illustrations of the arguments by examples.8 [168] However, he consistently sticks closely to the thought.9 We thus have every reason to consider Iamblichus to be a reliable transcriber. This is also true of the excerpts of Aristotle, even if in this case we can often clearly sense the hand of the transcriber. Thus, I am not convinced by the reasons for which Jaeger, in some cases, is more inclined to trust another transmitted text than that by Iamblichus. For example, Jaeger uses Proclus (in Eucl. p. 28, 13 Friedl.10) as a counterevidence to contest the Aristotelian origin of the argument drawn from the ‘effortlessness’ of philosophy (Iamblichus, p. 40.16 P). Is this rejection so certain? We have the following in favour of Iamblichus: 1. The fact that we are dealing here with a thoroughly protreptic theme; 2. the division of the section along the lines of ktēsis [‘acquisition’] and chrēsis [‘usage’] goes back, factually speaking, to the Euthydemus; thus, by its literary form it goes back most probably to Aristotle. What this proves for the disputed passage is that we are dealing here in fact with ktēsis (and not, as Proclus’ citation gives us to assume, the kath’ hauto haireton [‘the desirable in itself ’]). 3. If we indeed credit this theme as such to Aristotle, then ‘effortlessness’ is not meant here in absolute terms, but rather relative to the incalculable worth of philosophy (See 37, 24 Pist. 4). We find in Aristotle in the most diverse of contexts both the reference to rhadion [‘effortless’] and epiponon [‘laborious’] (eg., De anima 407 a 34, Metaphysics 1074 b 28) and the positive connection between the acquisition of epistemē [‘knowledge’, ‘science’] (= manthanein [‘to learn’]) and hedonē [‘pleasure’] (e.g., Nicomachean Ethics, Ēta 13, 1153a, 22). Jaeger’s position on the original meaning of the allegory of the Islands of the Blessed (Iamblichus 53.3; Jaeger p. 73ff.) also seems to me to be incorrect. Iamblichus is as little in the dark about the methodological meaning of the allegory as Cicero. It is just that the methodological meaning is, for him, a different one. If we wonder about which nuance fits better in the context of a protreptikos [‘exhortatory’, ‘persuasive’], whether it is the emphasis on the omission of the ‘ethical’ virtues (Cicero - Augustine) or whether we find there the authentic reward for our phronēsis [‘practical wisdom’] (namely: to be able to live there), everything speaks in favour of Iamblichus. Nowhere in the remainder of the Protrepticus is there explicit talk of the ethical virtues in opposition to phronēsis. By contrast, Iamblichus’ phrase [169] fits most aptly in the whole protreptic process of demonstration, whose concluding thought moreover is without doubt Aristotelian (54.2 = 40, 4 Pist.). However, Cicero’s version, in particular, is in strict opposition to the passage in the Politics H 1334 a 31, an opposition which may indeed be explained only by the fact that, for the Protrepticus, what is discussed in the exposition of both is only philosophy and absolutely not the virtues (see Jaeger p. 297, note 1). Cicero obviously made the freest use of the topos [‘topic’]. In light of these facts we cannot, as Jaeger does, appeal to Nicomachean Ethics Kappa 4, 1178 a 24 ff. The fact that the question in the Nicomachean Ethics is about the difference

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between theōria [‘contemplation’] and ethical virtues only points to the gap which separates ethical research from a free protreptic. There is still a third point on which I would like to put in a good word for Iamblichus. In the manner of Hirzel and Hartlich already before him, Jaeger rebukes Iamblichus for the complete lack of coherence of the beginning of Chapter VI (37, 3–22). Nobody will be in disagreement if by this we mean a rebuke of the literary and artistic inferiority of Iamblichus’ method of excerpting. Yet, it is to miss the intention of the one who makes those excerpts if one rebukes him in this way. Jamblichus did not mean to put together a textbook in which the classical pieces of protreptic philosophical prose would be collated. Rather, he wanted to record in an organized and clear manner all the important arguments from the classical philosophical protreptics (but not only from them, see Iamblichus, Chapters ll–1V).11 He may not always have succeeded in this task of deliberately excising the context of his sources for the sake of creating a new coherence, which, for our literary judgement, is indeed sterile in the extreme. In any case, he proceeded in this direction and an unconnected juxtaposition of arguments was for him in no way yet a lack of coherence. It is the same in this case. What he found new in Aristotle beyond the Platonic Euthydemus, he put together and provided a clear enough [170] organizing perspective: the reference to the politikos kai praktikos bios [‘the political and practical life’] (37, 2 Pist.). This is how the first argument (37, 2–11) ends with the proof of the necessity of philosophy for the politeuesthai [‘to participate in the affairs of the city’]. The second argument (37, 11–22) was for the chrēsthai pasi (epistēmais) kai epitattein [‘to make use of everything (all the sciences) and master everything’], thus also for the praktikos bios. However, enough of those details. Jaeger aptly stated what is essential: that Iamblichus’ series of proofs do not merely reproduce the organization of the Protrepticus but are organized by Iamblichus in his own way on the basis of Aristotelian themes. It should be added that Iamblichus overall contented himself with collecting only the positive steps in the protreptic process of demonstration, and omitted all the objections and counterarguments, whose existence is attested to us by the fragments handed down to us elsewhere. As favourable as our judgement may be about Iamblichus’ reliability in regard to what he says, we still do not know how much he does not say. However, what is most important is this: if the whole series of Iamblichus’ proofs originates from the Protrepticus, as Jaeger has made probable, what results from this is decisive for the literary character of the Aristotelian presentation. Neither the juxtaposition of the most varied proofs nor the absence of a uniform terminology, nor even the absence of an actually scientific critique is to be essentially ascribed to the form the transmission took (the objections transmitted in the fragments 51, 52 [Rose12] are not the remnants of a critique; for, they are not based on science, but are directed against philosophy and science itself). Rather, these features are manifestly already characteristic of the Aristotelian Protrepticus. This, however, compels us to look not for any philosophical position in the Protrepticus, but for the position of philosophy itself. The methodological preliminary explanation in Iamblichus (7, 12–18 Pist.) is thus also to be linked to the Aristotelian Protrepticus, that is to say, to the literary genre of the protrepticus in general. Even Aristotle’s Protrepticus must have seen its task to consist

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in this: ‘to encourage philosophy and push for philosophizing, in any possible way, without openly deciding in advance for a particular position, but rather in such a way that one praises all of them for what they have in common, elevating them above the affairs of human beings in a general and popular protreptic form’.13 If this is the case, then we must exercise caution from the very outset in our effort to find in the fragments of the Protrepticus the picture of a definite phase in the development of Aristotle’s philosophy. A Protrepticus is not an ethics, not even the prototype of such. What cannot shoulder the burden of the concept cannot in turn be assessed by the measure of [171] the concept and understood from the standpoint of a conceptual development (what else is philosophical development?). This will now have to be shown in detail. The philosophical interpretation of the Protrepticus which Jaeger gives is divided into three main points: 1. The history of the concept of phronēsis, 2. The ideal of an exact ethics, 3. The theory of ideas of the Protrepticus (Jaeger, pp. 80–102). 1. According to Jaeger, the history of the concept of phronēsis clearly shows that the Protrepticus is still rooted in the soil of Platonic metaphysics. For, here phronēsis is still noūs [‘reason’, ‘mind’], the authentically divine in us, a metaphysical and speculative thinking. Now, according to Jaeger, in the Nicomachean Ethics (Zēta) Aristotle explicitly took all theoretical meaning out of phronēsis and sharply delimited it against sophia [‘wisdom’] and noūs. That is to say, he gave back to phronēsis its customary semantic field as confirmed in the use of the language. The reason for this lies in the fact that for Aristotle, after he abandoned the theory of ideas, theoretical and practical reasons are no longer immediately one with each other. If in the Protrepticus the Platonic concept of phronēsis in the theoretical sense is still dominant, this means that Aristotle has not yet given up the metaphysical foundation of the theory of ideas. This is what Jaeger argues. Is this extended meaning of phronēsis really bound to the explicit presupposition of the Platonic theory of ideas? At first blush, already in light of the oldest history of the word, this is hardly likely. In poetic as well as philosophical speech, phronein [‘to have good judgment’] and phronēsis [‘good judgment’] are mostly employed in a general sense, which cannot be confined without force to either a purely practical or purely theoretical activity of the mind. It is only in Plato, however, that this twofold use of the word is philosophically grounded through the project of the theory of ideas to the extent that ideas are as much objects of contemplation as they are the models for action; ideas are thus ‘the unity of being and of value’, as Jaeger says. When Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics reserved for phronēsis the narrower meaning of ‘practical reason’, we can indeed detect in this his rejection of Plato, that is to say, the separation of the ethical problem from metaphysics. If he limits a celebrated philosophical coinage in such a way to a purely ethical meaning, adopting in the process the prevailing vulgar use of phronimos [‘having good judgment’], it is because he is guided by an inclination to develop a specifically ethical conceptual language. And yet: what follows from this for the factual use of language in Aristotle? For him, language usage and scientific-terminological determination do not coincide in any way. In Aristotle, as in any historical period when speech predominates over writing, what is terminological is not the established [172] form of common speech. Only what is thematic can always be terminologically fixed. Speaking in terminological terms as the

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sole manner of speaking is simply absurd, for it is precisely through semantic features which are not thematic and not limited terminologically that the communicative function of concrete speech is exercised. Thus, we see in Aristotle, not only in the Protrepticus (where, in fact, the practical meaning of phronēsis is also not absent), but also, for example, in the Metaphysics and the De Anima, that phronēsis is always again synonymous with epistēmē and noūs. Yet, nobody would want to conclude more from this than an external influence of the Academy. We can see quite the same thing in other concepts, such as epistēmē and technē [‘craft’, ‘technique’]: where they are treated thematically (in the Nicomachean Ethics, Zēta 3 and 4), we find them terminologically fixed and most sharply set apart from each other. In factual language, though, Aristotle does not submit in the slightest to these conceptual terminologies. These facts invite us to wonder whether the reasons, which allowed the Greeks to use the word phronēsis in the broadest of senses, are not rooted in a factual context, which was generally determining for Greek philosophy and found in Plato’s doctrine of ideas only a special philosophical justification. If it is so, then there is another obvious explanation for the difference in the use of phronēsis in the Protrepticus and in the Nicomachean Ethics. In the Protrepticus Aristotle does not pursue the goal of determining ethical concepts in their specifically ethical valence. Here he confines himself to generally recognized facts and employs the most general philosophical use of language possible for formulating the proofs he develops out of these facts. The factual context in which this broad use of the word phronēsis is rooted is, briefly, the following. Before the diversity of the structure of the phronein in the domain of action and knowledge, the commonality of its ontological character predominates: noūs, phronein, logos [‘reason’, ‘speech’] are the distinguishing features of human beings in relation to animals.14 Phronēsis (in the narrower Aristotelian sense), as well as theōria, is one of the ways in which the noūs, the divine in us, operates. The fact that both are nonetheless structurally different from each other (and not only through the fact that what phronēsis accomplishes stands in the service of the prattein [‘to act’]) was not and could not lie within the scope of research as long as the research did not seek a really [173] ontological determination of the difference between the being of the world and the being of that which human beings situated in the world achieve. (When we consider the purpose of the Protrepticus, it is not surprising that it is similarly indifferent to these problems. A nice example of this indifference is 56, 2–12 Pist.). Only a specifically ethical questioning can really determine this structural difference in noein [‘to think’]. Only such a specifically ethical questioning recognizes the particular and problematic ontological character of what human beings have to deal with in action and into which they enquire, because it really concerns the question of what we ought to do. Plato still spoke of the ideas ‘of the’ agathon kalon dikaion [‘the good’, ‘the beautiful’, ‘the just’], that is to say, he ascribed to them the same being of the universal, of the ever-present, as to the ideas of worldly things. Correlatively, the grasping of this ever-present was for him something unitary, whose application to concrete doing was certainly presupposed in the Socratic unity of virtue and knowledge, but was never seen as a real problem of application, never as the problem of how the knowledge ‘of the’ good becomes concrete in practical decision. (The position of the Philebus within what is called Platonic ‘ethics’ will have to be briefly touched upon below.) In the Aristotelian ethics, by contrast,

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(precisely because it aimed at being a real ethics whose object was concrete human action and not something universal), it was to become an essential point to ask how and what kind of logos could serve the concrete task of finding out what was right in each case. It is in the context of such a specific task that the terminological specification of phronēsis takes place in the Nicomachean Ethics. Now, it is indisputable that the Protrepticus does not go into this core ethical question. Must this fact (in consequence of which phronēsis is used atypically in the Protrepticus) be interpreted as an adherence to the theory of ideas? Is it not rather a simple expression of the fact that the Protrepticus does not constitute any scientific ethical research? Certainly, even within a Protrepticus, a genuine protreptic motive can be developed from the difference between sophia [‘wisdom’] and phronēsis, as the author of the neo-Platonic excerpt 34, 5–36, 24 Pist. (whom Jaeger identifies as Porphyry) did. Yet, the Iamblichan excerpts are instructive not only through the explicit transition from the transcendent paraklēsis [‘invocation’] of the neo-Platonists to the protropai pros ton politikon kai praktikon bion [‘exhortations to a political and practical life’] (37,1 Pist.). They are instructive above all through the factual content of the following arguments: the inclination of Aristotle’s Protrepticus was on the contrary to recommend philosophy equally on the basis of theoretical as well as practical need. However, such a protreptic had no incentive to engage with the particular ethical questions indicated above. Although we cannot demonstrate it, we may surmise, in light of Iamblichus’ method and the other later protreptikoi, that it was precisely this form of the protreptic which determined the character of literary genre of the protreptikoi logoi [‘exhortatory arguments’] during the time of Aristotle. [174] Obviously the goal of such protreptikoi was not so much to produce a unitary protreptic demonstration but rather, as indicated by the extensiveness of themes in the Aristotelian excerpts, to list as exhaustively as possible and in as manifold a variation as possible everything that could serve any kind of protreptic purpose. 2. At the same time, these considerations teach us how awkward it is to want to derive an ethical methodology from a protreptikos. However, let us first hear what Jaeger extracts from the excerpts on the question of method. He believes that the old Platonic ideal of a mathematically exact method is still at play here in the ethics, against which Aristotle explicitly turns later on, in the Nicomachean Ethics. In this view, we have at the beginning of Aristotle’s ethical investigations the Platonic problem of measurability and the measuring standard of moral phenomena. ‘Only that he later rejects universal norms and acknowledges no other measuring standard than the autonomous conscience [Gewissen] of a morally cultivated personality, a conscience which is certainly not “exact” in the epistemological sense’. In the Protrepticus, according to Jaeger, the position of the Philebus still dominates entirely: the question is not about the greatest advantages of a technē, but about which technē possesses the greatest accuracy, clarity and truth. Jaeger relies essentially in this regard on Iamblichus p. 55, 1ff. He believes to have found the formulation of the ideal of an exact ethics, against which the Nicomachean Ethics Alpha 7 turns later, in every way. There, ethicalpolitical science, in reference to the degree of exactness to be demanded from it, is explicitly compared, not with the geometer, but with the carpenter. The basis of this interpretation is irrefutable in its negative aspect: Chapter X of Iamblichus’ Protrepticus reveals nothing of the fundamental methodological

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considerations in which Aristotle secures the peculiarity of ethical research in the first book of the Nicomachean Ethics. Yet, the protreptic process of demonstration which Iamblichus passes down to us can hardly be compared to a scientific methodology at the opening of an ethics. There, the interest in the degree of exactness to be required is motivated with regard to ethical investigations, which were to be characterized in their claim to a scientific nature. A similar methodological and critical motive is lacking in a protreptikos. Let us look at the rest of the Aristotelian Protrepticus in Iamblichus. Nowhere is the intention to link to the protropē [‘exhortation’] a kind of introduction to philosophy with its scientific methods and disciplines. In a similar way, from the demonstration of Chapter X, it cannot be said that the theme of exactness appears in the full weight of its methodological and critical validity. To the contrary, the theme of exactness is at the service of the leading protreptic theme. It is consistent with this state of affairs that the opposition to the stance of the [175] Nicomachean Ethics, emphasized by Jaeger, does not openly extend to the relations of thought and language. Even in the Protrepticus the politician is not compared with the geometer, but with the tektōn [‘carpenter’], and the intention guiding this comparison is absolutely not to show how much more exact a scientific politics is than the technai [‘crafts’] – this would be a real opposition against which Nicomachean Ethics Alpha 7 could be directed. Rather, the situation is the following. As the technē of the tektōn [‘the craft of the carpenter’], in its tools, is oriented towards nature itself and no one can be a good master builder if he or she does not use these tools and instead just keeps gazing at the houses which are already there. In a similar way, looking at nature itself is also required for politics and not merely imitating existing laws and constitutions. Only in the manner of auzēsis [‘augmentation’] (‘how much more yet’) is the difference in exactness used in this regard. In the foreground stands what is common: the requirement of a proper intuition of the object. Against the objective blindness of a purely superficial imitation and comparison, the intuition of phusis [‘nature’] itself is demanded of a properly philosophical politics. We can see most clearly how disparate the tendency of the comparisons with the tektōn here and in Nicomachean Ethics Alpha 7 is in this: here in the Protrepticus, the tektonikē [‘the carpenter’s craft’] is just used as an example of a relatively exact technē (just as Plato uses it in Philebus 56b). By contrast, in the Nicomachean Ethics Alpha 7, the tektonikē is an example of a context-specific restriction of the ideal of (mathematical) exactness. Here, we have a comparison to less exact technai, there in the Nicomachean Ethics Alpha 7, we have, by contrast, a comparison to exact mathematics. Thus, we should not envisage a direct polemical relation between Nicomachean Ethics Alpha 7 and this passage of the Protrepticus. Nevertheless, the difference which Jaeger observed is in fact perceptible in a really common tendency here and in the Nicomachean Ethics. The passage in the Protrepticus shares the polemical tendency with the concluding chapter of the Nicomachean Ethics (Kappa 10). Both discussions are obviously directed against the sophists and rhetoricians, who see their political business in a cheap compilation of laws from existing constitutions. The Protrepticus counters the latter with the philosophical intuition of phusis itself as a requirement, speaking of the horoi [‘limits’], which are taken from nature itself, pros hous krinei ti dikaion kai ti kalon . . . [‘according to which

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to judge what is just and what is beautiful . . . ’] (55, 3). Conversely, in the Nicomachean Ethics it is empeiria [‘experience’] which the sophists lack: dunasthai theōrēsai kai krinai ti kalōs ē tounantion [‘to be capable of studying and judging something as being well done or in the opposite manner’] (1181 b8). If we set aside for the moment what the positive sense of the formulations in the Protrepticus is, it is in fact negatively still clear: the Protrepticus does not aim at the cultivation of the critical instinct in political praxis [‘action’], which the Nicomachean Ethics demands. It is required in the Nicomachean Ethics because what is presupposed for the fruitfulness of theoretical learning only emerges in the concrete engagement with things. The same difference becomes clear from the passage excerpted by Jaeger from the Politics Delta 1 1288 b 40. However, even this passage still stands in polemical solidarity with the Protrepticus. Here as well as [176] there, working with actually existing model constitutions is rejected as objectively inappropriate. Additionally, we may hardly assume a direct opposition between the two passages, for the Protrepticus does not really reject this theory of the state ‘because it is too close to empirical reality’ (Jaeger, p. 274, ft. 1), but because this sort of transposition without objective philosophical insight is unphilosophical and practically unsatisfactory. Indeed, even politics stresses the necessity of philosophical expertise (the knowledge of the eidē [‘essences’]!), but what is lacking here again in the Protrepticus is any emphasis on the empirical foundations with which any philosophical politics must reckon.15 Thus, Jaeger’s conclusion is reasonable enough: these clear differences between the Protrepticus and the later thought of Aristotle represent a significant opposition in terms of a historical development. The Protrepticus is still fully rooted in the soil of the Platonic ideal of the utopian state and of a geometrically exact ethics. However, let us ask which Plato it is, in whose direction these testimonies of the Protrepticus appear to point? Jaeger emphasized how for Plato science is measuring and he accurately established the traces of this theme of measurement even in the latest formulations of Aristotelian ethics. Now, it is significant that this thought of the art of measurement was developed in Plato with the inclination towards scientifically mastering the realm of becoming. The parallel concept to that of measurement is the concept of mixture. In the Statesman as well as in the Philebus, we see the problem of the scientific mastery of factual existence formulated in the task of an appropriate mixture determined by a measure. It is in this manner that the late Plato sought to reconcile the theme of exactness, given with the ontological primacy of the ideas, with the recognition of the factual ‘impurity’ of reality. What Aristotle later established about the theory of ideas and in particular about the idea of ‘the good’ is that they are useless for concrete human action (and knowledge). This state of affairs found clear expression in the formation of the Platonic dialogues. In those places where the Statesman draws the image of the true and knowledgeable statesman in relation to political realities, what immediately comes out is how full of life this knowledge must be, how versatile and superior to a statute it is, how much it is oriented towards the kairos [‘the right moment’] and the peculiar tasks of the constantly new reality. By contrast, statute and law, rigid as they are, are only a temporary expedient in comparison to true political tasks and do not fundamentally exhibit this commensurability with the object which is required in terms of true knowledge.

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[177] Now, we also miss this insight of the late Plato in the piece from the Protrepticus in question, if we take it as a full-fledged testimony for a methodological and scientific position. What is in question here is the lawgiver as if this were absolutely the only form of scientifically political action. And nowhere is this problem of the application of the insight into the true ideal of ‘nature’ presented as a problem. Furthermore, if we accept with Jaeger that the demarcation of the akribeia [‘exactness’] of philosophical politics from the exactness of the technai betrays the dominance of the mathematical ideal of exactness in ethics, then the comparison with the late Plato here too leads to remarkable conclusions. Admittedly, the Philebus in fact develops the idea of the exact measure as the guiding perspective in the theory of science and explicitly overturns the primacy of the pure, the unmixed, the exact when it comes to practical value. Yet, the idea of exactness is applicable in a strangely broken way to the passage in the dialogue itself on the problems of phronēsis and hēdonē [‘pleasure’], thus precisely for ethical problems. The goal of the entire investigation is to delimit the claim of phronēsis and hēdonē to the goodness of factual human existence. Only in a mixture of both may we seek this good in life. The guiding scientific thought of the primacy of the pure and the exact now finds its application in the production of the right mixture. The idea of measure is indeed constitutive for the goodness of this mixture, and precisely because the idea of the good is determined primarily by the character of measurability. Yet, this idea of measure is in no way determinative for the components of this mixture, even when isolated. It is not only the pure, exact ones among the epistemai which are included in the mixture. The inexact sciences (pseudēs kanōn! [ ‘the deceiving measure’]) also prove to be indispensable ‘if one only wants to be able to find the way home’. The idea of exactness, which was decisive for the scientific character as such, thus turns out plainly not to be a guide when it comes to the application to the ethical problem and the constitution of the good in factual human life. Rather, only in relation to the mixture as a new unitary whole does the idea of measure come up again. Thus, even the Philebus testifies to how Plato strives to implement the concept of science which he had developed in applying it to concrete experience by adjusting and modifying it. Now even here in the Protrepticus we see nothing which would show that Aristotle was concerned with this problem of application. Should we really accept that these problems did not exist for him? That, at the time his teacher and master was deeply mired in the problematic of the theory of ideas, he, Aristotle, would oppose this problematic by blindly holding fast to the dense theses of the Phaedo? This is an even less possible presupposition, as we [178] know that even the Protrepticus treats objections which were derived from the practical uselessness of the theoretical science of ideas (fr. 52 Rose). Jaeger (p.  91) thinks that these objections were handled in terms of the Philebus in such a manner that the ‘more precise’ has to be viewed as the ‘higher’ without any consideration for practical value, that a little bit of pure white is more than a lot of impure white. This view is improbable not least because the context in which these Platonizing thoughts are found is determined by the title ōpheleia [‘utility’]. Consideration for what a philosophical politics accomplishes is thoroughly emphasized in the foreground: nomoi bebaioi kai praxeis orthai [‘stable laws and right actions’] 55, 24.16 The unproblematic simplicity with which Aristotle discusses the

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fact that philosophy may be ‘theoretical’ but still of the greatest value for praxis (56, 12ff. Pist.) allows us rather to draw the following conclusion: in utilizing the themes of the theory of ideas in his protreptic argument, Aristotle did not commit himself to the metaphysical position of the theory of ideas, but only wanted to produce with these the simple proof that philosophy is necessary for a politics appropriate to the situation. 3. When we examine the explicit terminological content of this process of demonstration, we also find a confirmation for the absence of any theoretical claim in what Aristotle presents in a Platonic manner in this Chapter X of Iamblichus’ Protrepticus. It is certainly undeniable that the linguistic formulations here are to a large extent reminiscent of the theory of ideas and its terminology. However, if it is correct that the entirety of Iamblichus’ excerpts belongs to a single Aristotelian text, the Protrepticus, then a glance at the remaining parts of the Protrepticus in Iamblichus shows us that the terminological status of these arguments permits us to conclude nothing about their place in Aristotle’s historical development. These arguments say nothing about a unitary scientific terminology. Rather, we see the terminological content change from argument to argument. Moreover, all these demonstrative processes betray the tendency not to burden these demonstrations with terminology as far as possible. What a familiarity with Aristotle’s treatises leads us to expect in specific instances is missing. For example, in the main part of Chapter VII (42, 5ff.), Aristotle introduces the term energeia [‘being at work’, ‘actuality’] for the specific sense of ergon [‘work’, ‘task’], which he develops there (oude . . . outōs ergon [‘no task . . . as’] 43,9). However, we find that the word energeia is used not only in the same chapter, but also in other contexts (Chapter XI) as a specific terminological term. This precludes [179] us from giving this fact the significance of a historical development. What is lacking is simply the strong consistency of terminological usage. Furthermore, we see, for example in Chapters VII, IX and XI, trains of thought which are consistent with the Aristotle of the treatises, down to the smallest conceptual and linguistic turns of phrase. The occasional deviations in thought and conceptual looseness are each time motivated by the protreptic theme (e.g. the concept of tuchē [‘chance’] 49 Pist. and Physics Bēta 5, 67) and do not constitute together a unity of content at all. What connects all those trains of thought in Iamblichus is rather the very diversity of their content in the pursuit of the same protreptical goal. The platonizing Chapter X certainly does not stand out among them in all its conceptual and linguistic peculiarity. Thus, what matters is not, as the opponents of the ‘Platonic period’ in Aristotle tried to do, to prove that the linguistic formulations, which here sound so Platonic, find occasional correspondences in the Aristotelian treatises.17 Rather, the question is whether this mode of expression is suitable for accentuating the peculiar meaning of the argument without, in addition, committing the author to specifically philosophical presuppositions. If this is so, then the use of Platonizing expressions as well as of Platonic thoughts is completely appropriate to the protreptic tendency of the whole, for which tendency it is characteristic ‘to urge philosophizing in any manner possible’. Now, we can see clearly the objective reason why Aristotle not only sees the comparison of the politician with the carpenter positively, that is to say, why he brings out their common relationship to nature itself, but also emphasizes the

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difference: precisely for the sake of that which concerns him protreptically: for urging a proper relation to what matters, the comparison with the carpenter is not entirely sufficient. For, carpenters do not invent their tools themselves and when they use those tools, they do not know and do not need to know anything about the specific properties of nature on which the tool is based, for example, about the fact that the plumb line always provides the perpendicular. If we ask carpenters, they always answer only in terms of their own practice, how to make it, how to handle it and how to calculate it. They do not have available to them the real knowledge, that is to say, the insight into the aitiai [‘causes’]. Such a separation between real knowledge and knowledge drawn from praxis and confined to the needs of praxis does not exist for the true politician. Political technē must be philosophical, that is to say, its exercise cannot [180] be oriented towards empirical models but is autōn tōn akribōn mimēsis [‘imitation of the same exact ones’]. The fact that its performance is here called mimēsis can be understood from the fact that this technē itself is no pure intuition, but technē (see 55.8 tōn men allōv technōn . . . [‘of the other crafts’]) and, like all technē, it is an imitation of phusis. Now, the ontological primacy of this prōta [‘the first’] is included in the expression auta ta akribē [‘those things themselves which are exact’], and even more in the Platonic explanation in the sentence which follows. However, this ontological primacy is essentially related to scientific knowledge in Plato just as here. These ‘exact ones themselves’ are the aitiai and archai [‘principles’], which, as the ‘first’ (prōta), make possible the most exact epistēmē. This fundamental structure of epistēmē, of bringing out of the archai that which follows from them, justifies the properly philosophical beginning of the investigation into these archai. In Aristotle all philosophical science is a research into archē. This is why we find the same thoughts in the second chapter of the preoemium to the Metaphysics. Jaeger showed us that it is such a close correspondence that we can infer a direct literary use of the Protrepticus.18 Certainly, the specifically platonic phrases (auta [‘themselves’] and mimēmata [‘imitated things’]) are avoided. Yet, the fact that the ideas of the Protrepticus are suitable to the Aristotle of the Metaphysics teaches us precisely how secondary the Platonic features are, even for the protreptic core of the protreptikos argument. To be sure, Aristotle, in his ontological speculation, denies an independent being to universal concepts and, even more so, the claim to depict authentic being. However, he remains true precisely to the dominant meaning of the archai for philosophical research, even in those places, where he does not grant them, as he does in the case of ethics, the character of the dioti [‘because’], of the aitia (as in Nicomachean Ethics Alpha 7). Even the universal significance of the archai of the proteron kai husteron [‘what comes first and what follows’] for philosophical research is also described in Chapter VI of Iamblichus’ excerpt. Even there, in the illustration of the relation between the condition and what is conditioned, Jaeger wished to trace a testimony of the Platonic spirit in Aristotle. Aristotle illustrates this relation by the ontological dependence of the line on the number, of the surface on the line, of the body on the surface. Aristotle also cites this doctrine later on, but never as his own, and explicitly criticizes it in Metaphysics Nu 3, 1090 b 5. However, it is clear that even here this doctrine is used only for illustrative purposes, [181] as in Metaphysics Delta 8. This is clearly shown in the composition of section 38, 1–39, 8 of the Protrepticus. We have the announced

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line of demonstration peri tōn dikaiōn kai tōn sumpherontōn [‘about what is just and advantageous’], on the one hand, and peri phuseōs te kai tēs allēs alētheias [‘about nature and all other truths’], on the other (this is how it should be divided and not into three terms, as shown by what follows. Jaeger sees it differently, p. 86, note 1).19 This line of demonstration is introduced by a general discussion of the more precise cognizability of ‘what is better’ compared to ‘what is worse’, of what conditions compared to what is conditioned. Here is the controversial example. First, in 38,14 with ōste [‘in such a way that’] begins the application for the first term. Second, in 38, 22 begins the application to the second term. (Besides the purely physical theories, the Pythagorean theory of numbers and the academic theory of ideas are also touched upon there in 39.4, both as examples.) The interpretation I have attempted of the Platonizing Chapter X of Iamblichus does not wish to renew Bernays’ and Diels’ efforts to explain away the Platonic element in the Aristotelian fragments. My interpretation rather seeks to show positively how even the Platonism of the controversial fragments serves a protreptic purpose, which is just as much Platonic as Aristotelian, because this purpose simply does not make any claims at the level of a scientific philosophy, at which there exists an opposition between Aristotle and Plato. Everyone will admit that Aristotle did not battle Plato’s theory of ideas in all of his literary publications. It is obvious that he did not do so in the Protrepticus. Jaeger demonstrated that here (as in the Eudemus) Aristotle referred to the theory of ideas. However, we know nothing about whether he advocated the theory of ideas here or elsewhere. If we nevertheless make the unfortunate attempt, as Jaeger does, to carve out a scientific and philosophical dogmatics from the Protrepticus, such an outcome remains unfruitful for the proper context of the history of the problem, even if we set aside all doubts about the critical sources. No matter how we may acknowledge Aristotle’s position towards the theory of ideas at the time he wrote the Protrepticus, what we can acquire from this work on this topic does not in any way reach the level at which Plato’s late dialogues already treat the problem. For the philosophical development of Aristotle, especially of his ethics, a consideration of Plato’s Philebus must be necessarily decisive because there (as in the Sophist and the Parmenides), we find the very critical motives already at work, which are familiar to us from Aristotle’s critique of Plato. Now, one could nevertheless object that even the critiques of Plato in Aristotle’s theoretical treatises did not appreciate the positive tendencies of the late dialogues [182]. Rather they are always directed at that form of the theory of ideas, which is essentially known to us only from the earlier Platonic dialogues (the Phaedo and the Republic), but with which Aristotle was obviously familiar from the oral and written teaching of the late Plato. This fact shows us that the later dialogues (the Parmenides, the Sophist, the Philebus) with their dialectical discussion of the difficulties in the theory of ideas did not undermine the essential basis of Platonic metaphysics. However, this says nothing against the methodological demand to see the development of Aristotle’s philosophy in line with these quite extrinsic works of Platonic theoretical labour. This is so not only because we do have these extrinsic works and not Plato’s authentic teaching, but because it is the critical themes of these dialogues which, from the standpoint of the history of the problem, present the preliminary stages of the late critique by Aristotle.

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Now, the problem of the development of Aristotle’s ethics is complicated by the fact that we also have, besides the Nicomachean Ethics, the Eudemian ethics, whose authenticity is disputed. According to Jaeger, the Eudemian Ethics plays a mediating role between the Platonic normative ethics of the Protrepticus and the late form of the Nicomachean Ethics. In the chapter on method in the Eudemian Ethics (A 6), the methodological position of the Protrepticus is indeed already criticized, but still not as radically as the Nicomachean Ethics does later on, which explicitly combats the demand for the exactitude of geometrical treatment. We have seen that nowhere does the Protrepticus (not even in Chapter X) allow for conclusions about philosophical methodology, since it constantly and only makes the case that one must really philosophize. The significance of experience for philosophical politics and ethics is not contested there, but simply not considered. What is contested is only any bad experience, which believes to be able to satisfy best the needs of praxis without philosophical insight. Neither the Eudemian Ethics nor the Nicomachean Ethics present themselves as an advocate for this kind of ‘experience’. Rather, in both ethics, ‘experience’ is something entirely different from the half-science of the sophistic theoretician of the state, a half-science, which is combatted in the Protrepticus and likewise criticized in the Nicomachean Ethics (Kappa 10). Experience is the ground on which the philosophical science of the practical realm is only possible at all. This is because it is only on the basis of experience that the validity claim of the philosophical view can be understood in the correct qualification. Now, if one compares the chapters on method in the two ethics with one another, it is absolutely clear that the Nicomachean Ethics stands at a higher level with respect to its insight into the specificity of the ethical method. However, the question is whether the methodological reflection which the Eudemian Ethics actually presents gives expression to an original position which is substantially divergent. This can be doubted for good reasons. For, even the Nicomachean Ethics, precisely as a philosophical research, as a [183] research into archē, wants to give an account of the primacy of the ‘that’, of factual reality. If what characterizes the Eudemian Ethics as ‘philosophical’ is questioning back behind the ti [‘something’] towards the dia ti [‘why this?’], towards the aitia [‘cause’], then this ethics is distinguished from the position of the Nicomachean Ethics only in the methodological formulation and not in the method itself. The Eudemian Ethics simply seeks to apply the general meaning of philosophical research in Aristotle to the particularity of the methodological situation of a philosophical ethics, to which even the Eudemian ethics is sensitive. For the limitation needed for its task, the Eudemian Ethics makes use of a logical insight which it explicitly borrows from the Analytics. The question still arises here as to whether this methodological discussion, which is composed of a series of well-known Aristotelian themes, has really emerged from a proper objective reflection, or whether it is only an attempt to grasp in a formally sharper way the scientific character of ethics, which the Nicomachean Ethics described for the purposes of its own investigation. This is, however, a scholastic matter: to tighten and to formalize, without thereby really delivering the intuition of the matter.20 Is the practical method of the Eudemian Ethics thus really different from the method of the Nicomachean Ethics in the manner in which the former is more strongly ‘normative’? This is how, in fact, Jaeger believes that he can describe the relation between the Eudemian Ethics and the

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Nicomachean Ethics as a historical problem by using the Protrepticus. He establishes a close kinship between large portions of the first book of the Eudemian Ethics and the Protrepticus. The conclusion that this kinship presents precisely the methodological and objective intermediate position between a Platonizing ethics and the Nicomachean Ethics is fascinating. Yet, the matter looks different, it seems to me, if we adduce other parts of the Eudemian Ethics, for example, the analyses of aretē [‘excellence’, ‘virtue’] in Book III, for what stands out in the comparison between the Eudemian Ethics and the Nicomachean Ethics on these points is not a substantially deviating tendency, but the preference of the Eudemian Ethics for tightly formal expression, antithetical formulation, schematization. The Nicomachean Ethics, for its part, works with a view to what is substantially particular, which nowhere falls prey to an exaggerated schematizing (e.g. aidōs [‘shame’] here and there). One will hardly think here of a more mature recasting at the hands of the same author. Rather, we will find that [184] what is substantially new and precisely incomparable in the analyses of the Nicomachean Ethics has been submitted to a reworking that systematizes and is at the same time unavoidably impoverishing. If this is the case with the analyses of aretē, then one will not be able to see any substantially significant tendency in those features observed by Jaeger but rather the persistent sway of the same formalizing and schematizing hand. In order to prove the authenticity of the Eudemian ethics, Jaeger also leans on the literary relationships between the Eudemian Ethics and the Protrepticus. He believes in this way to be able to settle the much-disputed question of the exōterikoi logoi [‘exoteric discourses’] once and for all. This fact alone that the relevant passages of the Eudemian Ethics can be related to the Protrepticus seems to me sufficient neither to secure the interpretation of the formula as a literary citation, nor to support the authenticity of the Eudemian Ethics, for Jaeger just cannot simply expect to interpret the passage in Physics Delta 10 in terms of the literary citation. There, the logoi follow by themselves. It is also striking that almost all of these alleged citations refer to entirely elementary diaireses [‘divisions’, ‘separations’]. Citations of this kind do not usually occur even in our bookish age. Furthermore, it would be strange if Aristotle really had in mind his published writings, which indeed had definite titles, in this general formulation. In this regard, Diels, in my view, has irrefutably shown that Politics 1323 a 21–35 corresponds to Nicomachean Ethics 1098b 9–18, which is characterized as ta legomena [‘what has been said’, ‘opinions’]. Similarly, De Anima 432 a 25 is to be placed alongside Nicomachean Ethics 1102 a 26, but this is far from relating these diaireses of the psuchē [‘the soul’] back to an early Aristotelian writing. To be sure, Jaeger’s observations speak against Diels’ interpretation. In light of the other numerous relations between the Eudemian Ethics and the Protrepticus, this relationship is in fact also obvious for the ‘citations’. In fact, the form of this citation retains much that is remarkable. In itself, the formulation comes close to suggesting that the writings, which are alluded to with this formulation, form for the author a substantial unity. What does this unity consist of if Eudemian Ethics Bēta 1 suggests the Protrepticus, but Alpha 8 suggests a critique of the doctrine of ideas? If we envisage all these moments together, then Diels’ interpretation still has a lot in its favour, especially since it also explains Physics Delta 10. One will only have to concede so much that the literary writings of Aristotle, above all the Protrepticus, would strictly speaking belong entirely to what Diels identified as the semantic field

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of the formula, and would have been likewise generally familiar and decisive for the preparatory formation of students, like the general preliminary notions of the age. Yet, even if the Eudemian Ethics was really supposed to quote downright the Protrepticus, what would this prove for the authorship of Aristotle? That even Eudemos had the opportunity to use and cite the Aristotelian Protrepticus in such a manner cannot be seriously contested [185] (A student citing his teacher as ‘we’ still happens even in very literary times). The problem of the authenticity of the Eudemian ethics can hardly be solved otherwise than from an interpretation guided by the Nicomachean Ethics. For only in such an interpretation will we find out whether the Eudemian Ethics can really be accorded the status of a unitary objective position. Jaeger makes use of this presupposition for the connections he observes, but this presupposition would first have to be proven. The investigations of the two ethics so far have not, at any rate, been able to throw light on the incomprehensible aspects of the Eudemian Ethics.21 The position of the Eudemian Ethics on the problem of phronēsis remains a puzzle as before. The word is largely found in the theoretical, Platonic sense, but the word is also not without an entirely explicit demarcation from the concept of epistēmē (Ēta 13). What is equally puzzling is the theonomic aspect of this ethics. The fact that theological perspectives come through will not go well with the clear concordance with the Nicomachean Ethics in other respects. Last but not least, the composition of the whole, the transition from one object to another, is a problem which should be difficult to explain without reference to the Nicomachean Ethics. In any case, the attempt to classify the Eudemian Ethics in terms of a historical development encounters its main difficulty in this: the entirety of its ethical and theological doctrine provisionally still exhibits a confused picture, which does not become more comprehensible through the fact that individual elements lend themselves to an assessment in terms of a historical development. The tasks set by Jaeger’s thesis for research consist in no longer explaining only individual aspects of the Eudemian Ethics, but the whole work, and considering not individual features, but the whole of Platonic ethics as well as the late Aristotelian ethics. Availing of Jaeger’s construction uncritically for this explanation would misperceive the fundamental difficulty of the task, which is this: it always depends upon the very delicate decision as to whether the affinity with the Platonic position is an originally substantive position or the expression of the very decline from the high point of the Aristotelian position and its opposition to Plato, characteristic of the course of Greek ethics in the ensuing period. (Research in this direction has since resulted in the three Aristotelian ethics representing variations of the same [186] fundamental doctrine. It also appears as if the three books (5–7) common to the Eudemian and the Nicomachean Ethics originally belonged to the Eudemian Ethics. (See the great commentaries by Franz Dirlmeier22 and the newest correct analysis by Anthony Kenny, The Aristotelian Ethics.23) The doubts I had about the authenticity of the Eudemian Ethics seem untenable to me today, but not my doubts about Jaeger’s construction of a historical development, which has found multiple followers.)

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Heidegger and the Greeks (1990)1 [31] The topic ‘Heidegger and the Greeks’ has consistently occupied me for a long time. This topic receives a very peculiar emphasis when I choose it before a circle of specialists who have pursued their studies to a great extent in other countries and have also lived with us as guests in Germany and in German universities. What thrusts itself immediately as a particular perspective is the following: what is it really about Heidegger which elevated him to such a privileged object of study in the global philosophical community at large? And this despite all the protests against Heidegger’s political involvement in the disastrous events of the Third Reich, which is again occupying the global community anew, and also despite the resistance coming from the languages of science, which are of a different kind. In all the enthusiasm for translations and all the insight into their necessity, we should be clear amongst ourselves that we cannot enter into a real philosophical exchange by way of translations. As is well known, the question as to whether philosophy can be transmitted at all through written means has been debated at least since Plato. At any rate, it is uncontroversial that we cannot reach any genuine exchange on the basis of translations when it comes to philosophical dialogues. What I would like to do is to try to conduct a dialogue. A gathering of such a kind with so many people always has its proper life in the arcades and in the garden or in other places, where we can isolate ourselves for individual conversations. Only then can the suggestions and points of contention which may arise in such conversations lead to real exchanges. I also do not imagine that the words I want to say can conjure up a genuine dialogical situation, in the way the great dialogical poet Plato, for example, understood how to conjure up Socratic dialogues. I last treated the topic ‘Heidegger and the Greeks’ in the festschrift for Dieter Henrich regarding Plato in 1986.2 [32] Yet, if I have chosen to treat this topic again, it is not only because of the special occasion on which we gather here, but also because of a new motivation. Our knowledge and our points of access to this topic have changed dramatically in recent times. We can now discuss the topic ‘Heidegger and the Greeks’ on a wider basis than ever before – and on the basis of authentic texts by Heidegger himself. Thus, I hope it will also be noted about me that I was able, given the changed circumstances, to put some matters in a different light. The change in the circumstances rests above all on the fact, deserving of our gratitude, that we can now read the young Heidegger from the 1920s, thus the beginnings of the maturing young lecturer, in two volumes of the ‘Complete Works’ [Gesamtausgabe]. To this text there also belongs the lecture course,

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the first one that I myself attended in Freiburg in 1923, naturally with insufficient understanding, which bore the perplexing title Ontology. Hermeneutics of Facticity.3 Now, in the meantime, two new elements have been discovered fairly simultaneously. The original typescript of the young Heidegger of 1922 has been rediscovered under the title ‘Indications of the Hermeneutical Situation’ as ‘Introduction to the Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle’. Additionally, it is covered with a large number of very important handwritten additions. I already knew of this text since the beginning of 1923 and at the time it was the motivation for me to travel to Freiburg where Heidegger was teaching as a young lecturer [Privatdozent] and assistant of Husserl. In 1922, I had myself just finished with my doctorate in philosophy and was still young. In this connection, I have to note that after the First World War, the requirements for doctoral dissertations were a lot more modest so that even my own dissertation could be really seen more as an initial preparatory work – let us say, a good master’s thesis. (It had honourably disappeared into the mausoleum of oblivion until it was recently exhumed in the meantime in the state library in Munich.) In these years from 1922 to 1923, my teacher Paul Natorp, the significant scholar and thinker of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism, one day gave me this typescript by Heidegger to read. I can hardly describe how this text affected me as I read it for the first time. In Marburg we all inhabited the conceptual language of neo-Kantian and transcendental philosophy. As a young student I was myself in the closest of friendships with Nicolai Hartmann [33] and had learnt a lot from him. It concerned the historical problematic of neo-Kantianism and the break from the systematic thinking of neo-Kantianism, which Nicolai Hartmann was carrying out at the time in his initial works after the First World War. It was in this condition and circumstance that I read Heidegger’s typescript at the time. It was so different! When I re-read it today, I can barely bring to full life in my memory how different it was for me. Today, I rather find it quite subdued and even restrained in the flow of its language, in its neologisms and in its pointed and provocative expressions when compared to the forcefulness of Heidegger’s style later on. I had preserved all this well in my memory and yet it sounds different to me in many respects, even when I recognize many passages of the manuscript word for word. This manuscript was rediscovered very recently by Ulrich Lessing among papers at the Dilthey archives. And now for the first time we have it in its complete wording.4 Until now, we were missing not only the last seven pages (in ‘my’ copy), which I must have read at the time. Now, it contains in addition a whole programme for interpreting Aristotle, which Heidegger was preparing at the time (1922). The manuscript was produced at the behest of Natorp who wanted to become familiar with Heidegger’s works on Aristotle. In fact, it is on the basis of this manuscript that Heidegger became professor at Marburg. Even today, I am completely astonished that Natorp recognized the genius of the young thinker in this text. For Natorp, all this must have been much newer and stranger than for me, an immature, curious and receptive young student. Natorp still lived entirely in his own linguistic world of neo-Kantianism and had also studied Aristotle from such a standpoint. Obviously, he did not read Aristotle in the Thomistic-scholastic manner, but rather in the style of modern philology. Natorp now found in these fifty pages a preliminary report on the interpretations of Aristotle,

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which Heidegger had clearly written in much haste and presented to Natorp. I have just re-read this preliminary report for the first time. Truth be told, I have myself become another person in the meantime and have moreover found support in the rich material which Heidegger shared in his later lecture courses and works on Aristotle. His interpretations of Aristotle, prepared at the time, have not yet become well known. They should probably be made available in the ‘Complete Works’, within the limits permitted by the manuscripts. What was really so revolutionary in these early texts by Heidegger, of which we now know? For me at the time – and I cannot say this forcefully enough – everything was new but especially the language. This was [34] a thinker who strove to carry out the movement of thought in the Greek text on the basis of the spoken living language. Since then, we have come to know the new style of Heidegger’s presentations as a far too rehearsed Heideggerean German. Starting out at the time, Heidegger was still in transition, as he says in a handwritten preliminary remark on the manuscript: it attempts ‘to hold a position in the middle’. By this, he means a position between the conceptual language of metaphysics familiar to us and the language of facticity [Faktizität]. The word ‘facticity’ is itself already an important testimony. It is a word which clearly is meant as a rejoinder [Gegenwort], a word against all that was fashionable in German idealism, such as consciousness, self-consciousness, spirit or even the transcendental ego of Husserl. We immediately detect in this word ‘facticity’ the new influence of Kierkegaard, who had been shaking up contemporary thinking since the First World War. We also indirectly detect the influence of Wilhelm Dilthey with his constant question cautioning against historicism, which he directed at the apriorism of neo-Kantian transcendental philosophy. In this sense, the fact that the complete text of Heidegger’s early writing had now been found among papers at the Dilthey archives is not a bad coincidence, but something well-grounded in terms of historical influence. We can now see more clearly in these decisive years of the 1920s the path taken by Husserl and Heidegger, as well as the phenomenological movement, in their most specific development, from the Logical Investigations to Husserl’s work on the Crisis and from Being and Time to the late Heidegger after the ‘turn’. This development of phenomenology was without question spurred on by the challenge of historicism, especially since the time Heidegger participated in this development. The question was the following: how can we think of something like an abiding philosophical truth within the flow of transformations pertaining to history? From the very outset, Heidegger’s manuscript is permeated by the tone which attaches to the word ‘facticity’. The historicity of human existence manifests itself in its character of being always unique [Jeweiligkeit] and this human existence, which is always unique, is constantly confronted with the task of elucidating itself in its facticity. In his lecture5 Klaus Held retraced the manner in which one of the fundamental categories of the late Heidegger is withdrawal [Entzug], which is a motif we know more or less from Schelling. The fact that reality withholds itself is what first makes the emerging into existence and [35] manifestation meaningful and possible. This is the real point of the hermeneutics of facticity – however remarkable it may sound: in the factum [‘fact’] of existence there must lie an understanding and existence itself is hermeneutic. Originally, factum and

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‘facticity’ were opposed to all vérités de raison [‘rational truths’] and designated, like the fact of reason which freedom is, all that which we cannot explain and only have to accept. When I think of the theological use of language and its echoes in the Easter faith, then we see more than ever that we have here an insurmountable limit of all that can be historically established and objectified. Now, I would like to expand a little bit on this hermeneutics of facticity, which is the second subtitle of the lecture of 1923. I would like to show how the thinking of this brilliant young Heidegger was already on its way towards breaking away from the early period of his own education and studies and how he knew to ask a question which was as general as it was radical and which must immediately concern anybody who is at all open to reflective thinking. Yet, before discussing this point, I would like to preface it with a remark. It is particularly important to me in this hour (and it has strengthened my resolve to come here) that we do not gather here only with representatives of the philosophical thought in the European cultural world but also have among us partners from other cultural worlds, who do not belong to the Greco-Christian tradition of Europe and yet participate in our world as connected to us. They no doubt bring with them their own historical, social, moral and religious experiences. They are themselves thus constantly on their own way, as we are on ours, when, from our own respective tradition, we are striving to raise our facticity to a more conscious and conceptual clarity. It is about time, I believe. In this society in which we live today and in light of its planet-wide standards and global problems, even thinking must, as must all our conversations, lead us beyond the narrow limits of traditions and seek a worldwide exchange. As he expressed himself then, by ‘hermeneutics of facticity’ Heidegger meant ‘elucidation’ [Erhellung]. He means that existence elucidates itself, becomes clear. This is how he also occasionally characterizes the Aristotelian phronēsis [‘practical wisdom’], for instance. We will have more to say about this. Indeed, where do we begin? Where do we end? We could say one thing beforehand: what is a beginning here and what is an end? Are they not ultimately the same? For what is called beginning here certainly does not mean the beginning of our world in the sense of modern cosmology, but it means the beginning of our human questioning and reflection on the sense of life and on our history, on its beginning, its first problems and its deepest experiences – and [36] also on the impasses into which all this has led us, for we still do not know how we will come to terms with it and whether we will learn how to master the ecological impasse, for example. So much has happened in this connection which we have to accept as our destiny, as any factum. Heidegger wondered in the same way: what did this first beginning mean and how does it look? He addresses this point especially in the new volume, Contributions,6 a text written in the 1930s, between 1936 and 1938, in which years Heidegger, after withdrawing from his political engagement, attempts to delineate a kind of programme of his new thinking, the programme of another beginning. Obviously, this is connected with the knowledge that a beginning is not something distant and of little concern to us. Here I must quote Heidegger himself: ‘a beginning has always already gone over us and away from us’. I have indeed my doubts whether the expression used by Held is appropriate when he says that we can set a beginning. In this, I am perhaps still more

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Platonic and believe that anamnēsis [‘recollection’], the emergence in recollection out of a primordial knowledge, is the only form in which thinking begins. Inasmuch as thinking remembers, it remembers that which is reflected in a long history of morals, life, suffering and thought of humankind, which has taken many forms of linguistic expression in words and sayings, in songs and the configurations of the plastic arts. Now, any thinking, even if one is not informed of the Greeks or by a learning which comes from a good humanistic education, can gain enlightenment and conceptual clarity from one’s own linguistic tradition. This seems to me to be a great possibility and it is from this perspective that I would like to approach the Greeks in order to show how the young Heidegger attempted to develop his radical questions from the hermeneutics of facticity, that is to say, from the experience of his own life and in recognizing the experiences of his own life in the experiences of the Greeks. This was a bold and farreaching enterprise. And yet it concerns our very own world. This is perhaps clearer today than it could have been for the young Heidegger in 1922. At least since his essay on ‘The Age of the World-Picture’ from 1938, which he could no longer publish then,7 Heidegger took up again and deepened the problems which Being and Time had left behind. When Being and Time appeared in 1927 there were for me some points on which I could not follow Heidegger. For example, I could never accept his etymologies without resistance. This was clearly the philologist in me who knew all too well that an etymology mostly has [37] a very short lifespan of perhaps thirty years at most. After that, it is already obsolete and rejected by science. This seemed to me an insufficient basis to answer Heidegger’s questions, which were so radical. Heidegger conceded to me that etymologies are never supposed to prove something but that they inspired him and served as illustrations. Let us set the etymologies aside and deal with what Klaus Held presented to us in his contribution on the role of situatedness [Befindlichkeit] and how nothingness [das Nichts] comes to be experienced in anxiety, terror or boredom. At the beginning of his late Freiburg period, Heidegger had explicitly given expression to this language of ‘nothingness’. Held also drew attention – and quite rightly in the context of his talk – to ‘astonishment’, to this standing and being astonished. I am citing some verses from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, where we see that astonishment is always a comparative. Whoever is astonished always stands ‘more astonished’. This is how Rilke speaks of the potters on the Nile whose masterly abilities, inherited from a long past, keep astonishing us. To stand astonished is always to stand more astonished. Ultimately, Heidegger was able to rediscover this even in Plato’s and Aristotle’s thaumazein [‘to wonder’]. In 1921, Heidegger began to renew his studies of Aristotle intensively. He began at the time not only by reading the main works of Aristotle anew. He began first of all with the Rhetoric, in which situatedness [Befindlichkeit] is thematized in the wellknown context of the second book, because the speaker must arouse the affects – an old doctrinal point in the Greek theory of rhetoric. This point was then taken over by Plato in the Phaedrus and elaborated by Aristotle in his lectures on rhetoric. It is from being situated that existence rises to self-elucidation. Now, theoretical cognition is certainly only one way in which existence elucidates itself. We can say with Klaus Held that contingency has become our Western destiny,

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a contingency which cannot be excluded from the histories and fates of human beings. I agree and only expand upon it when I say that what emerged at the time was mathematics, was the capacity of thinking, which culminates in providing proof. This is the genuine beginning of science in the Greeks. Van der Waerden in particular has shown this in his beautiful book on Erwachende Wissenschft [Science Awakening].8 He shows how the development of a logic of demonstration [Beweislogik] is what is decisive. Yet, it will be good to start with the self-elucidation [Sebsterhellung], which expands in its entire scope out of the praxis of life and later becomes the theme of practical philosophy in Aristotle. Aristotle carefully demarcated this practical philosophy in relation to theoretical philosophy. Yet, we can see how both are implicated in each other; how the [38] practical impetus underlies everything: being after the good and how the desire for knowledge drives us forward. These are the first sentences of the Nicomachean Ethics and the Metaphysics: all human beings desire knowledge and all praxis [‘action’] and methodos [‘investigation’] are after the good. Thus, the practical basis for both is not theoretical. It has to do with the self-elucidation of factual existence, the hermeneutics of facticity. Heidegger had already sketched this relation between theoretical knowledge and practical knowledge in his early typescript. Heidegger announced three chapters in the sketch for Natorp. This will be confirmed later on by his manuscripts. Three elements were essentially at play. The first one is the role of practical knowledge. This is a point which I have especially taken up to the extent that I have reawakened the concept of phronēsis [‘practical wisdom’] for the philosophical dimension of hermeneutics. At first, Heidegger only mentioned phronēsis in his programme as the condition for possible contemplation, for all theoretical interest. He dealt primarily with the first two chapters of the Metaphysics. In this regard, Leo Strauss’s testimony is worth recollecting. This significant political thinker was so fascinated by Heidegger’s lectures in Freiburg at the time that he immediately went to his friend and mentor Franz Rosenzweig to tell him that he had just experienced something which had not yet existed in German lecture halls. He believed Max Weber to be an amateur compared to this. As we know, Max Weber was a powerful phenomenon. When he came to attend a lecture in Heidelberg, a place where he had not been able to lecture for a long time because of his nervous ailment, the speaker already began having misgivings and almost started to tremble. Then, after the speaker’s own lecture, Max Weber stood up and gave a much better talk, a brilliant one on the same topic just off the cuff. This ‘amateur’ Max Weber was truly not so lacking. The same was the case with Werner Jaeger in Berlin. In the eyes of Strauss, everything in Jaeger was only paper, in comparison to Heidegger. The relation between theory and praxis in Greek thinking possesses a most complicated structure and must be completely dissociated from the modern ways of speaking and the trivial problem of the application of theory to praxis. At any rate, it was a mistake to infer, for instance, from the concluding chapter of the Aristotelian Nicomachean Ethics, that Aristotle, despite his otherwise well-known pragmatic and political interests, was ready to concede to the Academy and to his teacher Plato, in placing the ideal of a theoretical life above the practical. If we for once interpret the conclusion of the Ethics really precisely, we rather see that the theoretical life as the highest form of life is a life for the gods. For human beings [39] there is only a life

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founded on praxis, in which the elevation to the theoretical life becomes subsequently possible as a form of improvement. There simply can be no separation of theory from praxis. This is the reason why Aristotle can say: ‘all human beings strive naturally toward knowledge’. Here striving comes first and pure contemplation only develops out of it. This is what the young Heidegger saw at the time. Nevertheless, we have to pay attention to this: Heidegger – and even the younger Heidegger – indeed thematizes the foundation of facticity, grounding thereby the Aristotelian introduction to metaphysics in the fundamental role of praxis. Yet, even then Heidegger puts the emphasis on pure contemplation and eventually on what he will call later the question of being. Nevertheless, even this should not be misunderstood. The young Heidegger who was troubled by his questions about Christian faith had purportedly already at that time seen the limits of the Greeks in this turn towards pure contemplation. At any rate, even when he sought the beginning of our history in the Greeks, he did not do it as a humanist, not as a philologist or a historian, who follow their tradition without question. He was rather obeying his need to be critical, given his own existential distress. It seems as if he had already at the time divined the fate [Geschick] of the West in its entirety, as he formulates it first theoretically and provocatively in ‘The Age of World-Picture’, in order finally to work out the general perspectives, which place the mere return to the Greeks under the glare of a critique. The step towards metaphysics was the first step on the path on which the history of the West was moving towards its present culmination. Heidegger described this culmination as an oblivion of being [Seinsvegessenheit] and an abandonment of being [Seinsverlassenheit]. He immediately recognized our destiny in the primacy we grant to the productive know-how with which we use the forces of nature in order to facilitate our own life. Yet, at the same time we have the other demand which, given this fateful direction taken by human civilization, today requires to be justified on the basis of the concept of ‘management’ [Haushalten] and the virtues of management. We have all become aware of these matters and we all know this from practical life: we must learn how to manage what we have in terms of resources. There are limits here. These are the ecological limits which have been raised to consciousness universally today and which we have to defend. Professor Cho has recently laid this out in an interesting work on Heidegger.9 As Heidegger grasped more and more clearly this beginning in the Greeks in its significance for determining all of our destiny, he also had to place the argument with Nietzsche in the foreground, for Nietzsche was the most radical critic of the step [40] Western thought took towards metaphysics. This is how Nietzsche shadowed Heidegger’s later phase of thinking as a challenge. The first step led from the Greek beginning to Aristotle’s metaphysics. This was subsequently followed by the turn brought about by Christianity as it formed its own doctrine of faith on the basis of the Greeks. The theology of creation belonging to the Jewish tradition and the Christian message of salvation were transposed from Greek into Latin concepts. This recasting of the Greek beginning by the dogmatics of the Roman Church then stands behind the broader fateful turn of the West, which leads from the ‘Church’ to modern science. This clearly is not about science as such. What is at stake is rather that a mode of thinking, which is the hallmark of scientific research, is not the only one and cannot

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be the dominant one when it comes to how humanity takes care of itself spiritually. There is no question that the Greeks themselves were a nation of artisans of the first rank, great at invention, great at enterprise and great at accomplishment. In the way the Greeks use language, it is not even possible to express the difference between the so-called artisan and the so-called free artist. In both cases, we are dealing with the genius of technē [‘craft’, ‘technique’], whether we call Archimedes a brilliant researcher or a marvellous artisan. Now, my thesis is that we all should see in the Greeks a kind of model for us as we philosophize in the age of science. Their thinking is not completely marked by the same aggressive spirit of construction with which modern science forges ahead. Thus, the way they think their orientation in the world10 is not under the pressure of the methodological concepts of modernity, of its pathos for certainty and its ideal of finding proofs, which all animate modern science. The Greeks certainly knew these motivations. Yet, they developed their orientation in the world under the guiding thread of a language which still grew out of the more original praxis of life and had not yet been transformed into other languages and other realms of experience, such as the Latin of the Roman empire and of the Christian Church. Their language was not yet marked by the abstract scientific culture of modern times. This is precisely the point at which Heidegger has been path-breaking for us. He loaded the words of our language with conceptual functions and refreshed the life of the language of thought in a new way. Consequently, by using these words from the standpoint of the linguistic experience of humans, a lot begins to speak, which renders vivid for us what a concept conveys. Let me give you examples. It was like a revelation for me to learn from Heidegger that the Greek word for ‘being’, ousia, which Plato and Aristotle use, in fact means the possession of farmers, their landed property [Anwesen], everything [41] which farmers have at their disposal in their work and in their business. Now, it is not a discovery of Heidegger that ousia has this original meaning. This can already be found in Aristotle, the master of those who are there to know. The same can be found, for example, in the catalogue of concepts in the Metaphysics, book Delta. However, Heidegger was the first to grasp again what was still self-evident for Aristotle, namely that our concepts develop out of the words of our language and thus carry, like a mark on their forehead, the hour of their birth into the life experience of human beings. Thus, we have learnt to see through Heidegger that ousia [‘substance’] means ‘coming into presence’ [Anwesenheit] and involves a temporal sense. In fact, we can especially see in other languages, and above all in the languages which do not belong to the sphere of European culture, how the natural use of language always echoes in the realm of utterances belonging to poetry and meditation. In an interesting exchange here we have discussed, for example, how in Chinese tao actually means ‘way’. All of a sudden, we are not separated from present-day China by a continent and by centuries or millennia if, for tao, the Greeks use the word methodos, which means the way one has to pursue. This Greek word is obviously not for the Greeks the modern concept of scientific theory. Heidegger liked to say ‘ways’ [Wege] instead of ‘works’ [Werke]. Now, Heidegger is certainly not universally admired for the linguistic style of his thinking. He is in this regard often mocked, ridiculed or at least criticized. As news of Heidegger’s death reached Oxford, a leading English scholar

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said: ‘the clown is finally gone!’ Nevertheless, Heidegger’s style of thinking found a historical resonance in the world, as we could all testify by our presence here. Even such a resistance against his manner of speaking is a testimony to it. Conversely, for the present, many of the works coming from abroad incite a resistance within us when we see them working with concepts such as ‘realism’ and ‘idealism’, as if there were only the world of modern science and the theory of knowledge belonging to it, whether it be understood as nominalism and eventually positivism or as a transcendental philosophy grounded in the ‘fact of science’. Many of the conceptual words in which the tradition of philosophy expresses itself have also been primarily transmitted in a Latin reformulation, despite their Greek origins. This demanded a significant new step, which Kant took. He was the first to produce a great philosophical work in the German language and no longer in the Latin of the Middle Ages. This marked a watershed. We get a feeling for what this signified especially in Hegel, for example, who, despite all the artificiality of his conceptual language and his ways of thinking, possesses a rare linguistic power. If anything, he even shares such a power of language with Heidegger himself, and not only because of their common [42] Swabian undertones. Like Heidegger, this rightly yields him something powerful in the construction of his concepts. I am reminded of the well-known structure of the Hegelian Logic. In its second part it treats the doctrine of essences. Here we have to prick up our ears so that we can notice that essence [Wesen] is not simply essentia [‘essence’], the Latin translation of ousia. We also learn this from the first beginning of the Hegelian Logic, namely that something else echoes alongside here. Hegel was the first to integrate the teachings of the preSocratics into the ontological question of metaphysics and made thinking begin with being, nothingness and becoming. This already indicates what ‘essence’ properly is. It is a temporal category. Today we speak of corruption [Verwesen], but also of estate [Anwesen], and also of throwing oneself around [sein Wesen treibt] and that something is a truly dreadful state of affairs [Unwesen]. There lies in the word ‘essence’ [Wesen], as in all its derivations, the always all-pervading coming-into-presence [Anwesenheit], as an almost imperceptible something: ‘there is something there’. In his interpretation of Hegel, Heidegger conducted his struggle with the tradition of metaphysics, always reducing Hegel to his metaphysical tradition. But in so doing, I believe that he sometimes, in his opposition to Hegel, did not hear what Hegel himself was saying. Now, I am now very far from believing that here it is only about the linguistic power of German and that we can find access to the Greeks only through it. The situation is clearly not so different for those who come to us from other cultural spheres and other linguistic worlds in order to do philosophy with us. They too must assimilate Heidegger’s message themselves. It is not sufficient to see how we have done it in the case of a Kant or a Hegel or a Heidegger or how they have taught us to do it by demonstration. It is truly not about repeating Heidegger’s language. Heidegger always decisively rejected this. Initially, he was so conscious of the danger of such repetition that he called the essence of philosophical statements a ‘formal indication’. By this, he wanted to say that in thinking one can at best point in a direction. One must open one’s own eyes. Only then will one find the language which says what one ‘sees’.

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Heidegger was himself inspired above all by the return to the Greek language and, in his provocative manner, he occasionally called Greek and German the only languages in which one can philosophize. With this he had in mind the tremendous task of undoing as much as possible the Latinization of Greek concepts in philosophizing. This is no small task. An example illustrates this. In Greek there is nothing corresponding to the concept of the will, voluntas [‘the will’]. What one can say for this in Greek would be something like boulesthai [‘to want’] or something similar, which opens a semantic field of a totally different [43] dimension than voluntas or ‘will’. In this word we have boulē [‘advice’, ‘counsel’], that is to say, ‘advice’, to take counsel, to consult, to get together and figure out what would be the best, what would be feasible. This is then what one ‘wills’. I have in my possession a letter of Heidegger in which he speaks plainly of the ‘devilry of the will’. Therein lies the whole energy which drives us forward, which made us great, but which also led us to the limits at which we must worry about striking a balance with the other forces of human life. When I look at what is common to theory (pure contemplation) and praxis (practical life), I venture, for my part, to call upon the linguistic power of one word. I mean the word ‘wakefulness’ [Wachsamkeit]. Wakefulness is clearly at work where we strive for the pure contemplation of theory. Yet, it is as much at work in the wakefulness with which we try to find out what is good, which always has to be what is better or what is best. Aristotle called this wakefulness phronēsis. Without doubt, theory and praxis, in this originary domain of Greek linguistic usage, are something totally different from what we mean in the modern discussion of the relation between theory and praxis, in which ‘praxis’ is demoted to a mere application of theoretical knowledge. This reminds me of the farewell party which the young Heidegger held for his Freiburg students in the Black Forest before his departure for Marburg in 1923. I remember a pile of wood burning up there on the Stübenwasen. His farewell address began with this: ‘being wakeful [wachsein] before the fire of the night. To the Greeks . . . ’. The words still ring in my ears and I recall what follows: there was talk of fire and light, clarity and darkness and of the mission of human beings to stand between this unconcealment [Entbergung] of being and its withdrawal. This was a Greek starting point in a talk by a Heidegger full of youthful energy. What does it mean to be wakeful? In his Metaphysics Aristotle characterizes the divine being, the highest being as constant wakefulness and presence [Gegenwärtigkeit]. This is the distinctive feature of the divine. We all know the last paragraph of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia, which cites this passage of Aristotle in order to say what the ‘spirit’ is. ‘Spirit’ is certainly no Greek word. Yet, it is precisely an example of how we learn to think with the language of the Greeks. This is how Heidegger taught us to see that the being of the divine is ‘motility’ [‘Bewegheit’]. Motility is not movement. Its opposite is not rest. Motility is the being of what is moved. When Plato in the Sophist (but also elsewhere) likes to play out the exclusive opposition between stasis [‘rest’] and kinēsis [‘movement’], rest and movement, what comes out eventually is something totally different, which is what being is. Being is the intertwining of both. Aristotle’s genius found the Greek word for this. In his Physics he thematized beings in their motility and [44] asked about the being of these beings. For this, he found the incomparably fitting expression of energeia [‘being at work’, ‘actuality’], which literally means ‘being at work’. The word thus designates a being active, which does not first

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lead to the work until the work is itself there, as that which is complete, as the telos. This is not how it looks like in nature. What is moved by nature is always on the way from nature to nature. Whether it is a seed or a germ, a flower or a rotting fruit, all this is there ‘at work’. What has happened to us that energeia became an expression for energy? Let me draw some consequences. What we can learn from the Greeks is certainly not an answer to everything that worries us. One only has to think of the problem of death, which found its own central place in Christianity. Other religions too have given their answer to the question of death. The Greeks did it with their knowledge of Hades and the Isles of the Blessed. What an endless sorrow of parting strikes us before the imposing Greek funeral steles, which date back to Plato’s time and always move us in a new way. This too is an experience of death, although not one belonging to our own history. In his Hymns to the Night11 Novalis contrasted this experience powerfully with Christian proclamation. Nevertheless, any language is a self-interpretation of human life. Heidegger had this in mind from early on with his project of a ‘hermeneutics of facticity’. Such elucidation is always gained from an existence avoiding itself, which is what we are. This happens in all languages. To that extent, we all have the same situation as our starting point for thinking. It is problematic, for instance, when in several countries in Africa the French language offers the only possibility of bringing the thoughts developed in European philosophy to the people living there. The language of the people there, in which they elaborate their own experience of the world, does not – not yet? – have the possibility of transposing itself into French. Perhaps one day, technological processes everywhere will more or less merge into a uniform language of communication. This will not be of much help. Philosophy is not a mere system of communication. It only begins at the point where we move beyond what is only the formal aspect of signs, symbols and conventions. This holds true even for us, in the heart of Europe: we must move beyond the formal use of our conceptual words if we want to bring our own experience of the world to concepts. This insight was the basis of the journal Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte [Archives for the History of Concepts], which I founded at the time together with Joachim Ritter. The goal was not to increase our erudition, but to sharpen our sense for the tones and overtones which resonate in our conceptual words when they gain a voice. In my view, Heidegger was the greatest when it came to understanding how to hear words [45] according to their secret provenance and concealed present. When he had to interpret ‘texts’, then I often had difficulties with it, because he violently bent the texts to fit his own intentions and, in the process, gave voice to the background knowledge of words. Yet, what appears to me to be the lasting heritage he left us and what unites us all here is the fact that he simply knew how to liberate the plurivocity of words and the inner gravitational force of the living use of words with its conceptual implications, while also sharpening our sense for them. This was the positive sense of the word ‘deconstruction’ [Destruktion], in which there are no echoes of ‘destruction’ [Zerstörung]. Anybody can detect this, even if they have only learned German with difficulty or master Greek only imperfectly. It is not about adopting a vocabulary or following rules, but about a constant construction of a horizon and an openness to the other, which any language enables,

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every time we seek to come to an understanding in it. In this regard, Heidegger initiated something truly path-breaking by revitalizing all at once the capacity for thought and the linguistic imagination. In my view, this compensates for all the weaknesses in light of which philologists often feel superior to Heidegger. For example, two dozen translation mistakes were discovered in a Heideggerian translation of a Greek choir song. Nevertheless, these mistakes, while causing real distortions in the texts, have produced more for the understanding of the text as a whole than what professional research has ever done. This is what I indeed experienced in Heidegger’s interpretations of Hölderlin. I have probably found this or that unacceptable in them. Yet, the proximity, the density, the immediacy with which Heidegger made these verses of Hölderlin speak to us were something to learn from. Not to imitate what Heidegger did, but to use language in such a way that it brings its wisdom to expression. Here is an example. It is a poem by Stefan George, which he addressed to his friend, the Dutch poet Albert Verwey. The poem celebrates the Friesian landscape and speaks of the ‘sound of the tremendous sea’ [Geräusch der ungeheuren See]. Has anybody, German or non-German, ever noticed that Geräusch [‘sound’] comes from Rauschen [‘roaring’]. It is the roaring of the waves which the poet captures in the verse in such a way that it surrounds us. In its own way, thinking is constantly on the lookout for the word which speaks out to us in such a way. Certainly, we all have always to take the measure of our opening to the world by starting with our mother tongue, from which the right word will come to us. This is the word in which what is meant will appear to us, whatever the language of concepts may be. Thinking happens in words and concepts, just like poetry happens in words and images. Nothing like a mere tool is used here. Rather, something is brought to a light in which ‘it worlds’ [es weltet], to conclude with a word of Heidegger.

­4

The Idea of Practical Philosophy (1983)1 [238] It is generally known that the idea of practical philosophy was developed by Aristotle in contradistinction to Plato’s teleological mathematics of the Good. This teleological mathematics shimmers through in the mythical narration of the Timaeus as well as in the Socratic genre [Sokratik] of the Philebus.2 In the field of human affairs (of the anthropinon agathon [‘human good’]3 or rather the prakton agathon [‘the good realised in action’]) it corresponds to what Aristotle in the field of natural things (of the phusei onta [‘things which exist by nature’]) had opposed to the Platonic metamathematics as meta-physics, as an ontology of kinoumena [‘things moved’] and of its culmination in the kinoun akineton [‘unmoved mover’]. Yet, practical philosophy also has its metaphysical basis. It is the metaphysical distinction of human beings to possess logos [‘reason’, ‘speech’], to be able to choose and to have to choose and, for this reason, to have to know or have to find ‘the Good’ in every concrete situation. The Aristotelian expression for this is: the human being as free citizen has proairesis [‘choice’]. Now, Aristotle distinguishes two forms in which such knowledge of the Good attains its perfection, technē [‘art’, ‘technique’] and phronēsis [‘practical wisdom’], which are based on the distinction between poiēsis [‘making’, ‘production’] and praxis [‘action’]. Making this distinction already belongs to the subject matter of practical philosophy and is treated in the sixth book of the Nicomachean Ethics. To know of the means to the given goals and to know one’s way around the means is a knowledge of the Good, namely as what is useful (sumpheron). However, if it is also a hexis meta logou [‘a disposition accompanied by reason’], thus a technē, then the Good itself is still presupposed and is not itself in question. No professional questions whether the knowledge and ability they have is good for the general public (as koinē sumpheron [‘useful for the community’], as dikaion kai agathon [‘just and good’]). This kind of questioning rather belongs to one’s own praxis and to the political praxis, both of which include the ‘knowledge of the Good’ as what must guide praxis in its decisions. What kind of knowledge is this, though? If one examines how the topic of ‘practical philosophy’ is introduced at the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, one will find no clear answer to this question. Already the first sentence [239] names ‘knowledge in general’ (technē, methodos [‘investigation’]) with the concrete knowledge of the Good (praxis, proairesis) in the same breath (homoiōs [‘similarly’]). The line of thought of this introduction then subordinates the entire realm of technai to the realm of the politikē [‘the political sphere’], and what is presented in this way, is, so to speak, a system of

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the practical sciences (hai praktikai tōn epistemōn 1094b4 [‘the practical among the sciences’, ‘the sciences concerned with action’]). This means that the question an individual has and the knowledge an individual can have of the good would be something with which one must be satisfied if the need arises. It would, however, be better to know what is good for the (whole) people (ethnei) and (all) states (polesin). However, it is already clear from the plural polesin that we are dealing with the question of ‘knowledge in general’ and that the theme here will be solely an individual ethics.4 What follows is in fact a discussion of the methodical character of practical philosophy in general as a scientific-theoretical question. It is a discussion that does not address the distinction between individual ethics and politics. What we would really like to know, however, is something still different, namely, how this practical science5 – ethics or politics – is related to the practical knowledge of which the individual makes use hic et nunc [‘here and now’]. As we learn from the unfolding of the Nicomachean Ethics (Book X), praxis is not poiēsis and phronēsis is not technē. We also recall that Aristotle speaks explicitly of phronēsis politikē [‘practical wisdom with regard to human affairs’], of the reasonableness [Vernünftigkeit] of the statesman and the politician. He is also absolutely clear that such a practical knowledge cannot be acquired by successfully attending his lecture on ‘politics’. We are not dealing with a relationship between theory and ‘technical’ application, if practical philosophy is understood correctly. Now, the discussion of method in the first book at the very least gives an indirect answer to our question in the sense of a cautious limitation of what can be taught in the field of practical philosophy. This already presupposes education in the learners (as well as in the teachers), that is to say, a habituation and a matured cultivation of modes of behaviour (ēthos).6 As we learn in what follows, there is no ēthos [‘character’] without logos [‘reason’, ‘speech’]. This is indeed the point of the whole structure of the Nicomachean Ethics, namely that ethical virtues are inseparable from the dianoetic virtue of phronēsis. (We will later see that the inseparability from phronēsis even [240] applies to the other dianoetic virtue, sophia [‘wisdom’].) This is all presupposed in concreto [‘concretely’] if a praktikē methodos [‘practical method’, ‘method of action’] is to make sense at all. The beginning and the principle (archē) is here the ‘that’, the hoti.7 All conceptually universal philosophia [‘philosophy’] can at most facilitate the individual in reaching the goal (like a tag that is pinned to the goal, skopos, a goal, a ‘pin’ – old German: a nail – which helps archers in hitting the mark, so that they hit the ‘black’ centre of the target board).8 One will perhaps still continue to ask: how can practical philosophy, which is still theory, facilitate that? Does morality (to speak with Kant: the feeling of duty; or to speak with the British: the moral sense9) need philosophy at all? Since Kant had recognized that Rousseau had brought him to the right path, it is clear that this is a core question of ethics. Aristotle does not pose this question explicitly, as Kant does at the end of the first section of his Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals.10 Yet, in the end an answer to this question is implied even in his ‘practical philosophy’. We need only to rid ourselves of the prejudice that Aristotle had given us the choice of an alternative with his doctrine of the two dianoetic virtues11 when he put the theoretical life (Kappa 7) before the second-ranked practical life (Kappa 8). We are not placed before a choice of whether we want to be gods or human beings. The relationship

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between theoretical and practical reasonableness [Vernünftigkeit], sophia and phronēsis is rather that of a reciprocal conditionality. This is made clear in the thirteenth chapter of the sixth Book of the Nicomachean Ethics and it is from this vantage point that the explanations at the conclusion of the Ethics, which celebrate the ideal of the theoretical life, must be understood. Because we are human beings and no gods, the ‘second best life’ of praxis is thus not something which those living a life of theory may ignore. But, conversely, there are no practical persons who also do not theorize (only that they do it mostly badly). The conceptual distinction of sophia as only a theoretical virtue and phronēsis as only a practical virtue is artificial and is made by Aristotle only for the sake of conceptual clarification. It has no basis in the linguistic usage of the time, as Aristotle’s own use of language confirms.12 For the method of practical philosophy, this means that we have to start with the legomena [‘what has been said’, ‘opinions’], the general doxai [‘opinions’] about the Good, eudaimonia [‘happiness’] and the aretai [‘virtues’]. Everyone has his or her own view about this even if it is often the case that one borrows the views of others. Even then, it is right to say [241] that one claims a universal ‘knowledge’.13 One claims to know what is right. One claims to be sophos [‘wise’] or to think what the sophos says. Philosophers can clarify and arbitrate the conflict over these things, the amphisbētein [‘to have a disagreement’] by means of their theoretical aids and instruction – by means of conceptual thought. This is the sense of ‘practical philosophy’. Surely, all theoretical instruction about the practical already presupposes aretē, whose tupos [‘outline’] can be grasped in concept. Here, I am in complete agreement with Kurt von Fritz: the question is not about imprecise concepts but about concepts which are imprecise in their very essence. It is well known that Aristotle had repeatedly warned against the illusory precision of arguments in the realm of the practical, which do not do justice to the hoti [‘that’, ‘the fact that’]. It is only a matter of the oikeios logos [‘germane argument’] alone.14 Only those who themselves have a place in ‘society’ – and this means in their polis [‘city state’] – are in a position to see through spurious arguments in their untenability. Only they can learn it and become a pepaideumenos [‘educated’] and avoid apaideusia [‘lack of education’], that is to say, they can be ‘critical’ (krinein kalōs [‘to judge well’]). Aristotle goes so far as to hold it explicitly true even for ‘politics’. Those who have not cultivated their political reasonableness as citizens of a state cannot use the knowledge of the universal reasonably, for example, the ideal of a state constitution or a broad collection of political constitutional forms. Aristotle says this in a notable passage,15 at the end of the Nicomachean Ethics, before he makes the transition to his Politics16 (Nicomachean Ethics Kappa  10) in order to ward off the professional (‘sophistic’) theoreticians of the state. I cannot discuss the difficult question of this transition here. The mass of manuscripts collected under the title ‘Politics’ itself presents multiple compositional problems. It also does not fulfil the announcement that is to be found at the end of the Nicomachean Ethics. However, there can be no doubt that the limiting conditions which Aristotle discusses there for the art of law-making are also valid for ‘politics’. For the modern theory of science this is something hard to swallow. What is presupposed in the ethos [‘character’, ‘habit’] and the logos of the life lived here and now is supposed to be taken for ‘knowledge’? What a terrible threat of subjectivism, [242]

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relativism and historicism! And yet, how does the situation in the so-called human sciences, the ‘humanities’ [‘humaniora’], truly look? If we were to apply the concept of science taken from the natural sciences rigorously to the historical sciences, there would be nothing much remaining of the latter. This has been very well illustrated by the ‘Viennese’ Viktor Kraft17 when he granted the historical sciences at most ten per cent scientificity without any consideration to what he may be missing. The modern social sciences would not think differently if they themselves were only able to satisfy better their own ideal of science, without remaining, for good reasons, on the general level of scientific prognostication which, for instance, long-term weather predictions in meteorology possess. Here just like there, there are too many marginal conditions for applying a universal lawfulness. In the long run, a compensation for the current situation cannot fail to appear and it seems to me that Aristotle’s practical philosophy is the only model that remains available to us for this purpose. In their opposition to the modern concept of science developed by Galileo, Huygens, Kepler, Newton and conceptually formulated by Descartes, humanistic studies have indeed found support in the tradition of rhetoric and its arsenal of topics, of plausible arguments (Vico). Later on, psychology (Spinoza, Schleiermacher, Dilthey) took their place. However, I believe we have done well in limiting the validity of these adaptations of the historical method to the methodology of the natural sciences as well as restoring its epistemological right to the tradition in which we stand, in which all thinkers stand, whatever tradition it may be. For the tradition of rhetoric this standing in tradition was self-evident. It constituted the sense of the topics, of the use of loci communes [‘common places’]. We, by contrast, must justify this through explicit hermeneutic analysis. We will thereby grant to the critical rationality, which is common to all the sciences and all the rational comportments of human beings in the world, its complete right. However, we must remind the theoreticians of this critical rationalism as well as the logicians, analysts of language and the information theorists that their rational procedures and especially the methodological instrumentation which they polish and constantly refine, are only able to exercise a secondary function. Their procedures and instrumentation do not help at all to pose the questions that occupy us as mortal humans, as bearers of cultures, as representatives of traditions. Even less can they deny these questions their legitimacy, eliminate them or reduce them. They arrive too late for this. Preceding all this, there is the hermeneutic dimension, within which the dialogue of humanity has proceeded since its historical beginnings and which today opens into the culture of human beings growing together on a global scale. [243] This dialogue confronts us all constantly with the other, with what is alien, with the foreign and the new. Now, precisely because we ourselves are not anybody and anywhere, but are ourselves who we are, it first makes us aware of who we are and what can become of all of us. Aristotle does not seem to me to belong only in the more general sense to the great dialogue of humanity, which is true of all the great classical thinkers. Rather, even his ‘practical philosophy’, the masterpiece of this genius of reasonableness [Vernünftigkeit], leads us into the open. He intentionally separated practical philosophy from theoretical philosophy but precisely in doing this he opened up theoretical perspectives to which we should today devote our attention again. We should do it today, in the critical

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situation of a human culture seduced by our all too unbridled application of our scientific and technical abilities. The fact that the ‘that’ (to hoti) can be a beginning (principle) alongside other beginnings of the highest universality, such as the principles of logic and metaphysics, binds human beings back to the ordered patterns of life – human beings who see themselves exposed to the risks of the will to know and the ability to do. As beings who are social and build states, human beings have created and constantly create anew for themselves such ordered patterns of life in rational ways. For, human beings are rational [vernünftig], even if they are often unreasonable [unvernünftig]. However, as reasonable [vernünftig] beings they know how to choose, that is to say, they use their critical faculty in small as well as in large things and in this way produce a constant transformation of the ordered patterns of their life. It is not just ethos which determines them – it is also logos and that means: their knowledge and thought. Aristotle had granted noūs [‘reason’, ‘mind’] the last word in both directions – that of the highest universalities as well of the ultimate particularities. In both forms of the logos – the highest will to know and the rational having to choose – the noūs holds sway. Even practical reasonableness [Vernünftigkeit] is a form of rationality [Rationalität], as Aristotle shows, insofar as he describes practical deliberation according to the logical model of the syllogism. And Chaim Perelman, whom we miss today, in his works on ‘rational [vernünftig] argumentation’ had also adduced present-day experiences of the legal system as evidence. He was able to take recourse to the way the French language is employed as it aptly distinguishes between rationalité [‘rationality’] and raisonnabilité [‘reasonableness’]. Even the way we use German, there is something that sounds similar for what matters to us, what I paraphrase with ‘reasonableness’ [Vernünftigkeit]. What is revealed here is the wisdom of spoken language in not letting itself be confined to the alternatives of ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ shaped by one-sided presuppositions. In order to do justice to the accomplishment of the Greeks, we must first and foremost visualize clearly the conceptual exigency in which [244] philosophy found itself when it was beginning, for it wanted to acquire from spoken language the appropriate concepts for theoretical and practical knowledge and for the relationship between noūs and logos in both realms. Unlike us, the Greeks certainly did not have to struggle with the concept of rationality [Rationalität] constricted by the concept of method, which has dominated modern science and philosophy. However, it was a far more enormous task for the Greeks. It was about making arable a never-beforetrodden field of language. Kurt von Fritz made this clear for the concept of noūs with his painstaking work in etymology and conceptual history, which leads right up to classical philosophy.18 In the classical period, the philosophical construction of concepts really emerges for the first time, with Plato battling against the ideas of the sophists and with the turn to the logoi [‘arguments’]. In the Phaedo Socrates is depicted as the one who nurtures the promise which Anaxagoras’ ‘introduction to the concept of noūs’ held out for him, a promise which, according to Plato, was frustrated. Plato certainly did not do justice to Anaxagoras with this depiction and he also did not simply want to. In fact, one cannot doubt that Anaxagoras was himself well aware of what his talk of the noūs entailed. It designates the task of a conceptual analysis. As a matter of fact, the same task resonates time and

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time again in Plato’s dialogues, but it is only in Aristotle’s treatises that it reaches its real and quite laborious development, and precisely in relation to the concept of noūs. This word had been quite familiar for a long time in the way language is generally used. However, for philosophical thought there were real chasms to bridge – and this is truly the case for us. Eleatic philosophy and its use of the word noūs have surely been omnipresent since Plato. However, in the course of the Latinization of the Greek conceptual language, we ended up finally with the anaemic concept of ‘thinking’. The Cartesian ‘cogito’ would then become central through the philosophy of identity developed by German idealism, initiating the construction of an idealistic system as the principle of selfconsciousness with its monopoly of certainty. It is, thus, doubly difficult for us to see the Aristotelian conceptual construction in its true horizons and the indefatigable aporetics, with which Aristotle works, and to interpret it in a productive manner. We must really return to Anaxagoras. Luckily, in the case of Anaxagoras and thanks to the industriousness of Simplicius, we have truly extensive quotations, which familiarize us with the text of Anaxagoras mentioned in the Phaedo. These quotations make us realize that [245] the Platonic Socrates does not do justice to the secret teleology which becomes perceptible in the text of Anaxagoras. Here, noūs is introduced as the only ‘pure and unmixed’ being and as the impetus that sets the becoming of the world into motion. We have a depiction of how, in the shapeless primordial sludge, all separation and differentiation happen through the noūs and how the order of the world in all the multiplicity of its forms (ideai) is constituted. The motion triggered by the noūs, thus, leads to the separation of what can be differentiated, thereby leading finally to even something like a differentiation. For the Greeks, this is just found unmistakably in the word ‘noūs’ in their feel for the language. Noūs was thus the emergence of the ‘there’, which is what the word meant from the very beginning and which is confirmed in Eleatic thought. From there, Plato manages to draw out the ‘noetic’ dimension of numbers and figures, and to arrive at the ideas and ‘the Good itself ’. Now, Aristotle develops the conceptual implications. Psychē, which means the beinganimated [Lebendigkeit] of what is living, has the distinctive feature of ‘separating’ (krinein) and moving (kinein). Thus, ‘separating’ already merges into ‘differentiating’. Herein lies a problem which has remained fundamentally unresolved and is constantly present in Aristotelian thought. It concerns the transition from physics to metaphysics, which is expressed in the sense of noūs: noūs comes ‘to the door’ (thurathen) from the outside and spreads itself like light, so that all the differences in the world become visible. This is characterized by Aristotle both in the text on the emergence of living beings and in the anthropology of the De Anima as the eternal and immortal part of the soul, hinting thereby at the divinity of the immortals.19 However, we should not say that it was such late religious adaptations which forced Aristotle towards metaphysics. It is rather obviously the opposite. In the still quite early Protrepticus, physics already presupposes the opposition between dunamis [‘potentiality’] and energeia [‘actuality’] as a completely common concept: as a concept of energeia, which means motility [Bewegtheit] without movement.20 This is a conceptual construction belonging to physics, which then leads to ontotheology in Book Lambda

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of the Metaphysics and is fundamental in the Ethics. We must observe here how Aristotle still in the De Anima has no other categorial possibility of characterizing the role of noūs in human beings than the conceptual pair noiein [‘to know’] and paschein [‘to be affected’, ‘to suffer’] – which mean ‘acting upon’ and ‘being acted upon’. We see exactly the same thing in a characteristic passage of Plato’s Sophist: the Sophist indeed notes the inappropriateness of ‘acting upon’ and ‘suffering’ for cognizing, [246] but can only produce a rhetorical argument for avoiding it (The Sophist 248d ff.).21 What begins here finally continues in the Latinization of the term as actus purus [‘pure act’] and writes the Christian history of dogmatics. By saying this I do not aim to describe the development of Aristotle’s views nor to assign him a place in the construction of a system belonging to modernity. I doubt whether the Aristotelian treatises, and above all the Metaphysics, can be completed as suggested by the scholastic philosophy of the late Middle Ages and most certainly by the counter-Reformation with its introduction of the concept of system. In light of this conviction I also do not find any particular problem in the conclusion of the Nicomachean Ethics. It is clear that holding the ideals of the theoretical life in high esteem quite self-evidently belongs to the context of the practical doctrine of eudaimonia, with which the ethics lecture of Aristotle and his doctrine of the ideals of life begin. Here too, as in the Metaphysics, a theology is sketched out, starting with human life and the wondrous experience that the human being has in the acquisition of pure theoretical knowledge. This theology remains compatible with popular belief and the official divine cult. And if Aristotle, for the sake of conceptual clarity, separated sophia and phronēsis as the virtues of theory and praxis, we will have to reflect more than ever on the hidden unity of the two, which the genius of the Greek language has preserved for us. ‘Wisdom’ manifests itself in the theoretical as well as in the practical realm and consists ultimately in the unity of theory and praxis. The word sophia says this. Aristotle will then remain a privileged partner of our dialogue. By contrast to modernity’s ideal of mastering the world through knowledge and ability, Aristotle represents for us the ideal of reason, the ideal of a rationally ordered and intelligible world, in which we have to live.

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Reason and Practical Philosophy (1986)1 [259] The grounding of a philosophical ethics is indeed an exceptional problem which does not fully exhaust the true extent of the metaphysical tension between reason and contingency. Nevertheless, there is something particularly questionable about the subject of ethics when it comes to philosophy’s claim to say what is universally valid. It is all too obvious that there are multiple forms of human life and multiple aims in life. This multiplicity distinguishes the human world fundamentally from all the other forms of life which characterize our planet. From this, it is understandable that the doubts about the universal mastery of reason find nourishment time and time again when it comes to the question of the good. The Greeks already knew the good as something which comes in many shades. The controversy concerning the good has such deep roots that reason has always been demarcated everywhere on the basis of the contingent, which occurs without giving us the possibility of anticipating or inferring it in thought. It is also not by accident that the concept of contingency was first given shape in the Christian philosophy of creation, which involves the universal validity of the determination human beings receive through the history of salvation. What can the grounding of an ethics as the task of philosophy mean at all? Is ethical pluralism ultimately the sole universal which thought can fathom here? It may look that way if we consider the stunning convergence exhibited by the highly varied contributions to this colloquium on the topic of the manifoldness of rationality – whether it is about Foucault or Mannheim, about Husserl, Levinas or Heidegger. This came to light not only in the discussion between Waldenfels and Peperzak, for instance, but in almost all the contributions. Perhaps we owe this convergence to the fact that all of us are serious about phenomenology. For, what is phenomenological thinking if not a training in anti-dogmatism? On this basis, perhaps we can proceed a few steps further. When it comes to the subject of ethics, we should definitely read even our great role models, Plato, Aristotle and Kant, in the same spirit of such an anti-dogmatism. The real problem seems to me to be the following. What does the grounding [260] of ethics mean? Peperzak was right when he said that it is not self-evident that there is such a grounding at all, for in any case a grounding, which finds its support in something otherworldly and extra-moral, is always exposed to the objection that dependence on such conditions runs counter to the sense of ethics itself. This is why I would like to begin from the fact that no foundation of morality can be meant by all that we find, for example, in so-called metaphysics, whether it is the theory of the self-realization of the human being in Aristotle or the Kantian theory of the crossover of moral philosophy

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into the realm of metaphysics, which is forced by moral experience itself. It seems to me unfair to Kant to consider his idea of the metaphysics of postulates as a calculation of how much virtue is worth. Kant never meant this. What he meant was simply that even in the light of actual experience, we can still understand the sense in which the tidings of Christianity can promise us something like happiness [Glückseligkeit]. At any rate, whosoever does good for the sake of happiness does not act in the sense of the Kantian grounding. During our discussion I often had the impression that one needed to put in a good word for Kant. This is not because I belong to an older generation which still experienced the dominance of neo-Kantianism in the philosophical professorships in Germany. I may have read the Critique of Pure Reason when I was about eighteen years old, but I certainly only understood that which the Breslau neo-Kantians made out of it. Rather, what first genuinely influenced me was what irrupted at that time as a new way of thinking in the dominant neo-Kantianism. This influence came especially through my reading of Kierkegaard. Today I believe that I did not understand Kierkegaard as much at the time as I understood certain lasting insights of Hegel through Kierkegaard and along with him. Nevertheless, Kierkegaard’s fundamental motif, his critique and polemic against universal mediation, which found its sharpness in the ‘Either-Or’ of the ethical stage, was decisive for me. When I met Heidegger later, I was in this way prepared for many things. Everything was up in the air. Those returning from the war brought an experience with them, which at the time lent Kierkegaard’s claim against Hegel a new relevance. My personal encounter with Heidegger was for me a particularly fortunate stroke of fate. He was himself inspired by the sharpness of Kierkegaard’s critique of idealism and he was at the same time himself a master thinker and a master teacher who was in a position to bring students to other master thinkers. I realized this again at this conference in Trier. The questions, which we have discussed with one another, take their departure from fundamental presuppositions, which Aristotle had famously made. I mean this only in the sense in which Levinas emphasizes the concept of le dire [‘the act of saying’], for example [261]: one cannot renew the concrete contents and the atmosphere of the time as such, in which the conceptual presentation is embedded, but one extracts the intention lying in what is said. On many grounds Aristotle was a particularly appropriate guiding thread. In the end, as we all should have noted, philosophical ethics begins with the Platonic-Aristotelian answer to the Socratic question. In fact, the Socratic question came with a rather unbelievably challenging assumption, namely, that no one knows what the good is. No one could seriously concede not knowing what the good is. Yet, this is precisely the foundation and presupposition of the whole Socratic-Platonic dialectic. Everyone claims to know the good. We must therefore be able to draw it out from each other insofar as, by refuting opinions, we unmask false and hasty dogmatisms and assumptions. What is carried out in a dialogue is an act of awakening recollection, anamnēsis [‘recollection’]. No one can escape this, whether in metaphysics or out of metaphysics. Now, Plato’s Phaedo certainly offers something like a programme for metaphysics. I am thinking here primarily of the famous passage in which Socrates explains: let us say, someone were to explain to me that the reason why the earth stands in the middle and

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the stars revolve around it is that it is better for it to be so; now, if I were to understand this in the same manner I understand why I am sitting here in prison, having rebuffed all proposals to escape, then that would be knowledge to me. The Physics of Aristotle, upon which the Metaphysics is constructed, is in fact the execution of this programme. Does this not ultimately mean, though, that the priority does not lie in metaphysics but in the Socratic question and the answer to this question provided by the life and death of Socrates? I would like to say this first as a preface to all our reflections on metaphysical thought. Perhaps, MacIntyre is indeed right, although the way he presents the argument does not satisfy me, when he reminds us that this question arose not quite in the tragic age of the Greeks, but only after the birth of tragedy. The momentous breakthrough of Greek tragedy consisted in the fact that eleos and phobos, pity and fright, which seize human beings, brought them to the shattering experience that they are humans, hence mortals and not gods. It was only afterwards that the Socratic question was ignited by the fact that this fundamental human experience was covered over and distorted by a new pseudo cultivated knowledge, a new paideia [‘education’]. I thus begin my reflections with the thesis that all real thinkers who have something to say to us in the area of ethics, and whose words we can transform into a dire, have presupposed the autonomy of ethics and thereby its independence from metaphysics. In the case of Aristotle, this is completely unambiguous. We may ask how far this autonomy of ethics in the age of metaphysics can continue to be preserved. [262] However, it seems to me undeniable that ethics, even as a metaphysics of morals, cannot seek its grounding anywhere else than in the self-interpretation of the life through which we all live. Here I would like to recount an autobiographical story. When I came to Heidegger inspired by my reading of Kierkegaard, I learnt to read the Nicomachean Ethics like a Kierkegaard come to life again. The Nicomachean Ethics is indeed really a critique of a dogmatic concept of the universal good and of a metaphysical system. In the eyes of Aristotle, it is in such a system that the good in Plato was mediated through mathematics and cosmology. This is just like what in Kierkegaard’s eyes happened in Hegelian thought. If we begin here, then it means that the practical philosophy which Aristotle developed has been rather constituted as a counterpart to theoretical philosophy. This is in no way to deny that metaphysical teleology in Aristotle includes everything that is, and thus also the life and work of human beings. When Aristotle describes the good in human life, this does indeed have the general structure of the ‘for the sake of which’, which even the Physics (in its execution of the programme of the Phaedo) possesses. This is just like in Plato, where the myth of the Timaeus encompasses the ideal state of the Republic. However, it is not in order to resemble the universe that human beings founded the constitution and societal order. And yet, it does not mean that we have here a conventionalist grounding of ethics, which brings the state of nature to an end. Rather, it is the logos and its distance to the ‘object’ which in fact make conventions possible in the first place and include the sense for what is useful, for what is instrumentally rational [das Zweckrationale], just as for the law. We can already see how much Aristotle, along with Plato, engages with the Socratic question of the good when we examine the argument Aristotle advances in the famous passage from the Politics (A2): the human being is defined as the living being which

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is distinguished by language.2 Here we have a peculiarly fast transition. The passage makes it clear that ‘having language’ implies a distance and, with this, also a sense for time and thus a sense for what is useful, for that which contributes to something, without itself being already pleasant as such. Now Aristotle continues: ‘ . . . and for what is just and unjust’. Aristotelian ethics has attempted to show how this transition from the useful to what is right can be really carried out and made undeniably clear. One does not have to put everything on the shoulders of phronēsis [‘practical wisdom’] in the sense of an instrumental rationality. The doctrine of phronēsis stands in ethics and ethics is the doctrine of ethos [‘character’]. Ethos itself is a hexis [‘disposition’] and hexis is a comportment, which withstands pathē [‘passions’, ‘sufferings’]. This is the anthropological basis of Aristotelian ethics. In my view, it is nothing but the demythologizing and conceptual elaboration of the Platonic utopian state. In that state, [263] as we know, everyone follows the logos [‘reason’] because the establishment of the whole is so wise that no one can do something wrong. With this, what Plato really showed us is that ethos is the basis from which alone we can develop the sense for rationality in our human existence. The same holds for Aristotle. Even the life dedicated to theory and its highest actualization, sophia [‘wisdom’], depends upon it. The sixth book of the Nicomachean Ethics is well and truly, as Aristotle explicitly says, nothing other than the interpretation of what it really means to say that we, as a human society, live in an ethos, that is to say, in an agreement that is binding. When we are dealing with the distinction between ethos and dianoia [‘thought’] or, to put it differently, with what is determined by the emotions and what is illuminated by reason, we find that they are two aspects of the same thing, which are most closely connected and inseparable. Whether one calls it dianoia orektikē [‘a thought involving desire’] or orexis dianoetikē [‘a desire involving thought’], according to Aristotle they are equivalent. In the case of phronēsis we are not dealing with a rational process of following rules. Even the rule of the golden mean and its grounding is a pure description of what the human being, who has to choose the good, does. This is precisely why what is at stake is the fact that the good cannot determine our action in rational pre-givenness, but only gains its concretion in this inseparable unity of ethos and dianoia. This implies that the pluralism of the forms and configurations of ethos in fact belongs to the essence of the fundamental constitution of human beings. This is not first a consequence of modern relativism, historicism, fragmentarism or however else we want to characterize the undeniable fundamental features of our own situation in the world. In establishing the theoretical foundation of that which alone can be practical philosophy, the Greeks already thought about the multiple forms which the concretion of the good can take as well as about the commonalities among these forms. In the form of mores [Sitten], these commonalities are the results of the task of choosing the good. If one takes these matters seriously then one must limit the common talk of the intellectualism of Greek ethics, at least in the case of Aristotle. Indeed, one will also see the doctrine of the parts of the soul developed by Plato in a different light. As I have sought to show,3 Aristotle must also have had a retrospective influence on our understanding of Plato insofar as he explicitly modifies the discussion of the parts of the soul in his text De Anima. More precisely, he pushes the difference between

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the parts of the body and the parts of the soul to the limit where the concept of part cancels itself out. This is precisely about the constant task of interpreting the ancient thinkers in their true relation to things despite the primitiveness of their linguistic and conceptual [264] means. That is to say, we should not read them dogmatically. Certainly, the argumentative situation has changed in light of the modern concepts of science and proof. Yet, it seems to me, there is a palpable misunderstanding made by many interpreters in the case of Kant when they underestimate the moral affect of respect in its significance and mistakenly connect the categorical character of the moral law with the concept of instrumental rationality.4 This also has its consequences for the difficult question of the sense in which practical philosophy could bring the two aspects of the theoretical and the practical into a genuine connection. I have always been drawn to the fact that Aristotle was fully aware of the exceptional conditions which come into play when we reflect theoretically on the conditions of practical reasonableness [Vernünftigkeit].5 What we have here is really a peculiar relationship which can be described as the transition of practical rationality into a universal reflective form of rationality. This certainly does not mean that the philosophy which has to do with praxis would itself already be practical reasonableness and should itself be understood as phronēsis. What it really means is that the possibility of a philosophy of praxis finds its foundation in the reasonableness which is itself already included in praxis. In this sense, Aristotle can say: the point of departure, the archē [‘beginning’, ‘principle’], the principle of practical philosophy is the hoti, the ‘that’ and this ‘that’ means not only action itself but also the inner clarity, which belongs to all action based upon proairesis [‘choice’], upon the choice to make a decision. It is thus always already a self-interpretation of life which serves as the starting point and the basis of the conceptual formation of practical philosophy, with its generalization, schematization and typification. This may have already led to a dogmatic calcification in the revival of Aristotle’s thought in Antiquity, all the more so with the expansion of the scholastic form of metaphysics and philosophy. Naturally, this is completely true since the new tension made its way into philosophy, which is connected to the emergence of the ‘empirical sciences’ and a philosophical consciousness corresponding to them. This has mainly reduced the sense of theory insofar as ‘theory’ refers antithetically and restrictively to the constructive ideal of production [Machen]. Praxis [‘action’] is simply understood as the application of theory. This also plunges the task of a philosophical ethics into a new ambiguity. Aristotle could still conceive of pure theory as a highest praxis [265] (Politics H3, 1325b15ff.).6 By contrast, when the justification of the rationality of morality seeks to assert its autonomy against a concept of rationality coming from the Enlightenment, this justification must venture into an entirely different context of discussion. It becomes a critique of any dogmatic moral philosophy, which forces itself into moral consciousness and into the philosophical justification of morality. From there stems the well-known tension between reason and sophistry as well as between moral and technical consciousness, on which Kant’s Grounding of the Metaphysics of Morals had to reflect. As much as Kant himself stands on the ground of the Enlightenment, he still provides a critique of the enlightenment on this point, which is decisive for ethics. It always amazes me that we have not managed to appreciate

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this achievement in its true and valid extent in present-day discussion. Well before the nineteenth century introduced particularizations along the lines of national states, it was the late eighteenth century which developed a sentiment for humanity in its fundamental right. On this point, going beyond Kant seems simply incomprehensible. Obviously, we need more thought to clarify what it means that there are many configurations of ethos in the field of practical philosophy. I cannot persuade myself that the emergence of historical consciousness, which turned out to be the greatest corrosive force for the tradition of metaphysics, possesses a corresponding significance for moral consciousness and the legitimacy of practical philosophy. In this field, the manifold configurations of ethos are rather visible from the very outset, as I have already tried to explicate at the beginning in the discussion of the concept of the good in Greek philosophy. It is true that Aristotle himself had only occasionally – especially in the question of natural right, of the phusei dikaion [‘what is just by nature’] – made some mentions about the distinctiveness of legal systems in relation to what is right (both of which are included in the concept of dikaion [‘just’]). Still, as things stand, there can be no doubt that his description of the essence of ethos is indeed informed by the world in which he lived and which delineates the horizon around him. Yet, any possibility for a practical philosophy is based on the space which has already been opened for philosophical thought, a space which is grounded upon the existence of ethos, of solidarity, of a commonality which is beyond question and has no need of grounding. In this sense, it seems to me that our discussion about the fragmentary character of all language games and discourses is also only the proliferation of an experience, which has always already found consideration within practical philosophy and which must resist the false claims to absoluteness which is connected with the concept of science in the modern sense. The rationality of human praxis and the rationality of practical philosophy do not come up against the contingent [266] as if it were something other than these rationalities. Both rationalities are grounded in the facticity of praxis, which is the reality of our life, and not in the derivation from a principle, as it corresponds to the logical ideal of proof in science.

­Part Two

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On Poetics and Hermeneutics (1968/1971)1 [58] Lyric Poetry as the Paradigm of the Modern2 In its first volume, the research group on ‘Poetics and Hermeneutics’ discusses in a very informative way the emergence of the realistic novel – an event of epochal significance. This has been done predominantly through the lens of the theory of the novel and of the transformed concept of reality reflected in it. The impressive second volume treats lyric poetry as the paradigm of the modern age. This is again an event which clearly stands out and gives the theory and praxis of hermeneutics its task. In terms of the radicalness of its break, this event is hardly behind the turn manifested by the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century as seen through the lens of the novel. This time, we are dealing with the transformation of the lyric poem, which has been so abruptly pushed out of the Western tradition of art in the last 100 years that it drives the interpreter to the edges of hermeneutic nihilism. Can we still understand ‘modern’ lyric poetry at all or better: can we understand it unambiguously? Or are different equally justified interpretations available in such a way that they all coexist with each other, are even intertwined with each other and precisely with the ‘intention’ of dazzling us hermeneutically? For the point here is not what is ultimately the case with any work of art, namely that its interpretation is infinite, the standard for a correct interpretation uncertain and all interpretations one-sided and susceptible to being superseded. Rather, the question is whether one may proceed in such a way as to seek or presuppose a standard of correctness, or whether the hermetic lyric poetry of the modern age strives after an inconsistency of ‘meaning’, which turns interpretation into an entirely new kind of enterprise. It belongs to the particular appeal of this volume that it attempts to test the theoretical discussion with a practical example, which is best possible precisely in the case of lyric poetry. The collective interpretation of the poem ‘Arbre’ [‘Tree’] by Appolinaire3 brilliantly brings to the fore the theoretical anticipations guiding the interpreters in their hermeneutic praxis. Two camps become apparent: one side believes [59] that understanding and interpretation are unchanging tasks and is only sceptical about the possibility of fulfilling these tasks; the other side goes so far as to elevate ‘plurivocity’ to a methodological principle. Hans Blumenberg’s theoretical contribution about the ‘poetizing of language’ would not contradict this if we concede what is anyway necessary, namely, that this description of ‘poetizing’ by means of ‘multiplying meanings’ only focuses on the extreme case of

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the modern and the levelling of language which it discovers. However, we are still led to doubt whether starting with the polished common language of everyday life and rising over it by ‘poetizing’ can ever lead to the ‘word’ of lyric poetry. Blumenberg’s description seems to me to overlook the fact that the tendency to univocity, which he ascribes to ‘scientific language’, is not at all true of a ‘language’, but only of the tiny part of a vocabulary which is called terminology. The ‘limit-event’ of incomprehensibility, which he describes as the opposite pole, is conceived from the standpoint of the fictional concept of a univocal language. Is this really the ‘limit-event?’ Does it not have its true place ultimately in what Valéry, in his description of language, deems as the ‘small change’ we use in our everyday life?4 In its scientific function, language approaches the limes [‘limit’] of an exchange of signs and gestures deprived of speech and is barely a language. It seems phenomenologically illuminating to me that if we take our departure from the ‘language of exchange’, whose function is carried out jointly by a whole host of factors pertaining to the process of coming to an agreement, the proper essence of language remains underdetermined. Obviously, this does not mean that now we could simply presuppose poetry as the original language, as Vico did, without falling into an inverse un-phenomenological dogmatism. However, we are methodologically required to seek out such ways in which language functions, which cannot appear in mere behavioural relations and mere transmission of information. As examples of such ways, we have cursing and blessing, perhaps also invocation (not only the invocation in prayer, but as an invocation directed towards the invisible. Let us note that the visible can also be reached by making a sign). Where language is like this, it is free from the function of referring to something, which can also be presented in other ways, and language manifests itself in its genuine function. Herein lies, it seems to me, our access to poetic language. Everything we emphasize about poetic language by comparing it with everyday language may be true, particularly its plurivocity. Yet, everyday language does not become poetic by stripping away the specific ‘impurities’ of everyday life and surrendering its pragmatic univocity. It is the other way around. Language does all of this because it is poetic, that is to say, because poetic language performs its own self-presentation, it asserts the polyvalence which in itself belongs to language. In fact, it is rather only from here that we can appropriately describe the modern poem. This is because, from the ‘prosaic’ to the ‘reportage pieces’, the word material of a modern [60] lyric poem can be truthful and sometimes possesses a rather crude univocity. Yet, we ultimately have a linguistic structure in itself ‘standing’ before us, inimitable, harmonious with itself, presenting the understanding with an inexhaustible but unambiguous task despite all polyvalence. If we think of the poem by Apollinaire, it is clearly exasperating that we cannot even figure out, for example, whether it is the friend, the tree or perhaps an ‘alter ego’ which is addressed with the ‘you’. The fact that we should not superficially ‘understand’ the elements of composition, which include Lyon, Leipzig, the Trans-Siberian and the ‘beautiful negro’, does not mean that the poem is as plurivocal as it appears in the interpretive contributions presented in the volume. What I find missing in  this discussion is an attempt that goes against all these different contributions and specifically presents that about which there was no disagreement. This is, in my

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view, what Henrich’s remark most definitely accomplishes, without thereby granting a hermeneutic primacy to the ‘prima vista’ [‘first glance’]. Jauss has this critical expression: as if we were dealing with a ‘classical’ art form – and what if we were dealing with it? Or better: even if the flight from pre-existing forms begins to play out with the limit event of incomprehensibility and if the twilight of interpretive possibilities clearly strives after Baroque effects, is this really ‘the’ case of modern lyric poetry and would it make its essence known? This would be exactly similar to declaring Vasarely as ‘the’ modern painting. Even then, the stimulation of such discombobulating overlapping phenomena, as constituted by Vasarely’s ‘Alphabet’,5 does not yet make up a painting as such. Otherwise, a textbook of Gestalt psychology would offer an aesthetic pleasure. The hermeneutic task in relation to painting and poem, which work with such stimulating effects, consists precisely not in descriptively capturing this stimulation, but rather in the descriptive interpretation of that which makes of an image operating with such stimulating effects a real image and of a poem a true poem. This does not seem to me to be any ‘classical’ presupposition which is no longer valid, but the very implication of the anticipation of sense, which comes as always with any linguistic structure, indeed with any claim to ‘art’. The interpretation of Trakl by Wolfgang Preisendanz mixes in another problem, which is similar: the variation and the new poetizing of pre-existing poetic forms, which can go as far as using citation as the element of the new formation (Ezra Pound). Here, we can agree that ‘meaning’ does not refer to something meant and hold that the elucidation of the new ‘formation’ will not be impeded by such pre-existing forms. Preisendanz indeed establishes the influence of Heine on the early Trakl and how it is overtly clear that a poem such as ‘Verfall’ [‘Falling’] (1913) is formatively influenced by the ‘voice’ of Stephan George even without the name being mentioned. With this, Preisendanz succeeds in bringing to the fore Trakl’s genuine later voice in which all the formative influences, even the [61] motifs of the Hainbund,6 receive their precise place. The fullness of the ‘Recurrent’ underlines, in any case, how little it is about the ‘poetizing’ of the language ‘unpoetically’ directed towards univocity. It rather concerns a new univocity acquired by the poetic word. In this regard, I can only read with scepticism the informative contributions about the ‘obscure style’ of the modern contained in this volume. This is despite all the doctrinally pious assertions which seek to bring out what is incomparable in the modern by contrasting it with the other, the older, the traditional. The problem of the modern seems to me to be far more a problem of aesthetics than a problem of art itself. The essential problematic of an aesthetic of the modern, as this group of researchers, who are predominantly oriented towards poetry, sees it, is to me grounded in the leading position, which the plastic arts assumed in the aesthetic thought of modernity. This leading position of the plastic arts, which has been long in the making, places conditions upon poetics which are difficult to satisfy. Greek ocularity and the use Plato made of the concept of eidos [‘form’, ‘aspect’, ‘essence’] and mimēsis [‘imitation’] dominate the whole of aesthetic thinking. Now, language is not ‘material’ in the same way as marble and bronze or lines and colours are, out of which the optical world as well as the pictorial world of art are constructed. Certainly, the

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latter are not ‘dead’ matter, for there is a history of seeing and the values of optical stimuli and the effects of images which are attributed to seeing. Along with this historicity, there is also the rhythm of what fades away and of the sensitivity to contrast, which pervades artistic creation and the history of taste. Yet, optical ‘material’ can be readily turned into the material of sculptural composition. In painting and the plastic arts, the pre-existing forms coming from the pictorial tradition’s adherence to content can be completely abandoned or at least completely unsettled, up to the caption [BildUnterschrift] which has become common with the modern. A correspondingly radical separation of speech from its referential connections to objects, by contrast, does not seem possible. The composition out of bits of meaning which characterizes the obscure poem of the modern is also something of a shaking up of all objective meanings. Certainly, the commonality of all forms of art has a wide reach, wider than we indeed recognize today. However, it is about aesthetic theory and how incommensurable the concept of material and its formation are in the realm where this formation is always already in process, such as in the use of speech and in the overall integration of all that is said and all the manners of speaking in the ‘spirit’ of language. Here the meaning of a pre-existing form plays a fundamental role. Even if art could be explained and conceived without the concept of mimēsis, it is certainly not language. We learn to speak by repeating what others say and we cannot escape from this teaching throughout our life. Hence, what pervades poetry, it seems to me, is not only a rhythm of fading away [62] and sensitivity to contrast in the form of this constantly increasing collection of samples of speech, generated by what the poet writes. There is also a constant movement of growing familiarity and of feeling at home with these innovations. Obscuritas [‘obscurity’] is itself nothing other than the invitation to make oneself at home [Einhausung]7 in such a way. Obviously, language has another, more intimate relation to memoria [‘memory’] than all that is optical. Even a painting which we have looked at for a long time exhibits a powerful familiarity when we see it again unexpectedly years or decades later. It is just like seeing a human being, a city or a landscape again. Now, all of this is a seeing again. By contrast, the poem and the linguistic work of art in general, as a text which is heard or read, are always already something like a remembrance with regard to each individual word, even when it is read or heard for the first time. This means that the word is always already at home in the treasure house of memoria and has its place there, which it never abandons: the place of thought. Poetry, as the art of the word, is a different kind of art from the other arts and poetics is a theory of art in a different sense. Poetry, even the most incomprehensible, exists in an act of comprehension and for a comprehension. The close connection between poetry and philosophy is based upon this fact.8 It seems to me that this relation is far from being sufficiently appraised in aesthetics. This connection has not become fruitful, at least in the use of concepts. This is true even and especially for Hegel’s aesthetics. Henrich devoted a highly stimulating and original contribution to Hegel’s aesthetics, in the attempt to make it applicable to the modern. Or better: to rethink it from the standpoint of the modern. Henrich takes his point of departure in the double motive of Hegelian aesthetics. On the one hand, we have the pastness [Vergangenheitscharakter] of art, which is

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to be taught only in the sense that art is no longer the highest manifestation of the truth because the truth found its home in Christian faith and thought. According to Henrich, this means, on the other hand, that art becomes something different, after the reconciliation between being and the self has taken place in the speculative concept. In possession of the complete self-certainty of the spirit, art, according to Henrich, is something necessarily new: the self-movement and the self-satisfaction of the spirit engage in playful presentation in the medium of intuition [Anschauung]. This is the present and the future of art. This prognostic motive is also present in Hegel’s aesthetics and is amenable to a development which allows us to understand not Rückert or Overbeck, but today’s ‘modern’.9 Following Heinrich, the ‘modern’ is in a restricted sense really something new in contrast to the classical tradition of art – just as philosophy itself could no longer be the same after Hegel’s completion of speculative idealism. Nonetheless, in all its novelty, the modern is the clear fulfilment of that which had arisen since the death of Hegel and Goethe. [63] In order to obtain this from Hegel’s approach, Henrich coins the concept of the ‘immemorial mediation of being and self ’. Out of this concept, he deduces the partial character of modern art. In modern art the Platonic tradition’s claim to represent [Darstellungsanspruch] – admittedly in such a way that the essence does not appear anymore – joins together with the pure performative character of creation, to which positivistic aesthetics has oriented itself. As the immemorial unity of self and being, modern art does not calmly call upon either the self-movement of the self or a pre-existing reality. It rather reveals the problem which the being of the self itself represents. This can be illustrated in modern forms of configuration, for example, in narrative, which proceeds purely as the inner movement of subjectivity without the ‘path going through the second reality of things’, or conversely in the tendency to trace all reality back to the self, like, for example, in collages. Reflectedness becomes the reflectedness of the artwork itself in that it has itself as its own theme. Now, Henrich does not go so far as to exempt the new potentiality which has permeated the work of art in the modern from all formal conditions which constitute artistic quality everywhere and from time immemorial. He names such abiding properties of the artistic character of the work: calmness, order, how things fit into the unity of life and meaning, harmony, reconciliation. However, he believes, the art of the modern turns the rigour of form upon itself. ‘Breach of form becomes the principle of composition’ (p. 30). This is descriptively illuminating. Despite this, I must admit that the theoretical significance of these modern forms of art does not seem so great to me. In the end, the elements of any individual artistic creation are always so intended that they have to exercise a stimulating effect. All stimulating effects stand under certain laws of fading, contrast, echo, attractiveness and elegance. In short, the transitory nature of the value of stimulation belongs to the essence of stimulation. Thus, the modern can be described rather well from the standpoint of the specificity of the means by which it achieves its stimulating effects. However, even if these means may be hardly traditional, the way art is made out of them and what art is appear to me to be no different from what went on before. Preisendanz’s concerned question about what will become of older art appears to me to be all too justified when we listen to the theory of the modern which is advocated here. And yet, the question is baseless.

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Even Henrich in light of this question had to expand the concept of the modern into something indeterminate and infinite. So, I wonder whether Henrich would not have done better to take up Schelling, to whom he in any case owes the talk of immemoriality [Unvordenklichkeit] and who saw in art the organon of philosophy. Hegel’s highly casual prognosis about the art of his contemporaries appears to me to be, in any case, too [64] narrow a starting point for rendering Hegel relevant again.10 The focal point of Hegel’s aesthetics lies in conceptualizing art as a form of truth – or better: as a series of forms. This series of forms is the differentiation and integration of the ‘ways of viewing the world’ in a philosophical history of art. The theory of the pastness of art is no historical thesis but rather a philosophical truth, whose conceptual implications should be developed. There results from this, it seems to me, a point of view which is better suited to move Hegel’s aesthetics beyond itself and make it relevant for the modern. I mean the relation of poetry to philosophy, which is suggested in Hegel but never really developed. Obviously, the pastness of art is not valid for poetry in the same sense in which it is for Greek sculpture. The arguments of classicism do not really apply to it. Hegel actually always has the religion of art of the Greeks in mind as he thinks of Winckelmann despite painting, music and poetry receiving priority in that order, according to his own theory. One can ask whether this must not modify the pastness of these arts and, above all, that of poetry. If one sees that the concept and, with it, philosophical knowledge, is the measure of all truth, then it implies that the poetic word, because of its implicit conceptuality, is particularly close to the philosophical concept. The hierarchy of the arts is nothing arbitrary. It co-founds in its way the measure of the truth which is valid here. This is comprehensible enough in Hegel. Even if it is mostly in Shakespeare that Hegel sees the truth of the poetic art documented – even as ‘objective humour’, whose significance Henrich so strongly elevates – the proximity of the word and the concept remains a general distinction of poetry. Since, in poetry one works with a spiritual material of signs, which is of fluctuating sensuousness, without the meanings also fluctuating as a result, it would be worth appraising it for once as a counter-model to the pictorial conceptuality, which dominates aesthetics. Something particularly interesting develops in the discussion of the question concerning the theoretical avant-gardism of romantic poetics and the practical obsolescence of romantic poetry. Even here, though, I cannot withhold the doubt as to whether the obvious virtuality of conceptual expressions does not produce an effect which wrongly acts as an impetus for theory. What is meant is always indeterminate and hence capable of being fulfilled in many ways. What is explicated is by contrast fixed and thus starkly exposed to obsolescence. [65] The Arts No Longer Beautiful11 The title ‘The arts no longer beautiful’ is a programme, indeed a provocation. It expresses a tendency to abandon the concept of the aesthetic and the traditional concept of art in order to confer a new legitimacy upon the phenomenon of the present.

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The arts no longer beautiful: the preamble to the volume is arguably far from the tendency which is visible in its conclusion. Two scholarly essays by Gerhard Müller and Manfred Fuhrmann investigate the ugly, in particular the disgusting and the gruesome in ancient literature. Their discussion reveals a tendency to dismantle forcefully the aesthetic integration which connects these limit-phenomena of the aesthetic to the core of the artwork and to discover a kind of precursor to the arts no longer beautiful. In fact, in the case of the classical authors, such as Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, it is highly noteworthy how great a space of play there is within which the canon of the beautiful, the noble, the heroic or the divine can be grounded and diversified by the ugly, the cruel and the gruesome. As we know, this is even more so for ancient comedy, which conjures up divine joviality from the ugliest. Manifestly, in order to understand these phenomena, it is necessary to strip away the Platonic-Aristotelian moralizing (and what corresponds to it by way of the Christian heritage). That was Gerhard Müller’s specific claim and the discussion proceeded accordingly to the ‘theological’ sense of Greek poetry and the question of how the liberation of what is realistically ugly comes about. The more detailed theological interpretation of the problem remained richly controversial, primarily between Blumenberg and Taubes. The second contribution made by Manfred Fuhrmann, consisting of solid individual studies devoted to the Silver Age in Latinity, presented well thought-out observations on the disgusting and gruesome, as encountered mainly in Latin literature. Yet, this seems to me to provide nothing for the problem of the arts no longer beautiful. It can only mean that a die-hard classicism and a corresponding deformation of the Christian element reveal their difficulties here. One can formulate an alternative: either everything is meant ‘theologically’, and this means social-critically, for example, Lucan’s Pharsalia or the Christian horror of martyrdom, or it is ‘aesthetically integrated’. In either case one gives up on any rational insight. Obviously, it is not so easy even for a historically trained mind to suspend its well-cherished concepts and find what is obviously rustic with all its metamorphoses as self-evident as it is. All of this has little to do with the actual theme ‘The arts no longer beautiful’. [66] The second theme was the illegitimacy of the didactic poem. Fabian makes a highly convincing presentation of how the poetic recognition of the didactic poem was made difficult by the Aristotelian disqualification of Empedocles from the genre of the epic and by the Aristotelian concept of mimēsis [‘imitation’]. He also shows that it is only with Renaissance poetics that the theory of didactic poetry came out into the open. We may draw the following conclusion: the didactic poem may even be a limitphenomenon of the aesthetic but it still has great popularity. This shows us indirectly that ‘art’ is simply not so ‘purely’ aesthetic, even when it is still ‘fine art’. The third theme could lay claim to a favourite philosophical interest: the aesthetic as the limit-appearance of history. Kracauer’s presentation discusses the problematic of general history in relation to the fact that representations of ‘particular’ history correspond better to the claims of scholarly research. In opposition to the well-known Crocean critique of the claims to history made by all history which is particular and not universal history, Kracauer pursues a precisely opposite perspective. Because, in the narrow sphere of questions of a ‘particular’ history, the determining factors are rather manageable and verifiable, ‘particular history’ appears as scientifically

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legitimate whereas general history appears as a mere aesthetically enhanced narrative. However, was Croce still not ultimately correct? In the case of a particular history pursuing a particular theme, is that which speaks to us of ‘history’ at all not ultimately less the ‘logical’ data sequence of a development, for example of a style, than precisely the temporal moment in it? For the sake of this temporal moment, history, whether ‘general’ or ‘particular’, cannot do without the narrative ‘And now . . . ’. It seems to me a strange consequence of the positivistic theory of science that here what is essentially historical is pushed entirely into the aesthetic. However, Kracauer must be explicitly lauded for not being blind to the fact that, despite all the problematizing of ‘general history’,12 history still possesses a legitimate meaning for ‘non historical ends’.13 Now surely: what would ‘historical ends’ be?14 What would ‘means’ be? 15 Kracauer’s presentation is bookended by two contributions from historians. Christian Meier describes the ‘religious’ serenity with which Herodotus grants necessity as well as chance their right in the great event of the Persian wars, calling it the ‘deficit in historical accounting’. What does ‘religious’ really mean here? Taubes has rightly expressed doubts about the appropriateness of this concept when it comes to Herodotus. With a fine sense for the change from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, Reinhard Koselleck examines (in the historian Archenholtz, who is not quite a great choice) the notion of chance as the residue of motivation in historical writing. It is somewhat perplexing that he only thinks of the historical theology (of Hegel and Droysen) for the historicism of the nineteenth century and accordingly [67] ascribes to this historicism the complete dismissal of chance. This seems to me to exaggerate, to the point of a false obviousness, the knowledge, acquired long ago and emphasized by Erich Rothacker, of a secret kinship between the hostile brothers, Hegel and the historical school. It is certainly due less to the ‘presentations’ than to the way the question is itself posed, that one does not really gain any wisdom from the discussion of the role of chance in history. What ‘chance’ is, is treated here as a clear entity. ‘Pure chance’ is contrasted so absurdly to all that is caused that it naturally must then be liberated from this artificial purity. Thus, it is supposed to be recognized in Herodotus as a mere poetic ornamentation; or because it is chance only in a particular perspective and things ‘actually’ would still have their well-understood causes; or even that things would have turned out as expected even without chance. Here a recollection of the analysis of chance in the Aristotelian Physics should have warned against such an abstract conception of chance, which has neither an aesthetic nor a historical reality, but only the spectral reality of a bad and unreal abstraction. Chance can always be thought only in causally conceivable connections as a kind of accidental cause. In what sense does the aesthetic manifest itself here as the limit appearance of history? It is indeed the old criticism which Count York had already made of Ranke that for him ‘nothing could become reality’. This emerged as what is proper to historicism in opposition to the moralistic paradigm which was applied to ‘histories’ in the age of the Enlightenment: ‘history’ is liberated from all teleological thoughts of an

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end, which succumbed to critical dissolution, so that every appearance and epoch are immediately directed towards God. Precisely because of this, the unity of history only retains an aesthetic consistency. However, this means that the essential inconsistency which applies to the course of history is covered over aesthetically. Jauss says in the discussion: ‘here it becomes evident that, in opposition to the original question which was posed by the colloquium, it is not chance (fortuna) in the historiographical context, but rather the “dispelling of any contingency” which must be seen as the aesthetic limit-experience in the historical’. The statement lays bare the false abstractness of the concept of chance which frames the discussion: without the teleological preconceptions of the understanding – the ‘course of things’, ‘salvation’ [Heil], the ‘final condition’, the unfolding of the possibilities proper to creatures, the continuity of perpetuation or even ‘classless society’, or the state without domination, the whole discourse of chance has absolutely no determinate sense anymore, and ‘chance’ in any case does not have to be what is purely without cause. [68] What one takes from the further discussions, most prominently, when one reads the contributions of Jauss and Taubes on Christian aesthetics or the contributions of Hempel, Tchizewskij, Rotermund, Dieckmann or Maurer in fact does not seem to me to correspond to the question proper to this discussion. The arts no longer beautiful of today do not become more intelligible from the standpoint of the history of Western art, as it is placed before our eyes here. What is successfully proven is simply that there were all kinds of art and art theory, which found a home outside a classical canon of beauty. But who really doubted that? Auerbach’s research on mimēsis treads on fertile ground. However, it seems to me that the problematic of the arts no longer beautiful of today is really not clarified by it. Moreover, the conceptual basis is often rather shaky and leaves us in confusion as to what the concept of the aesthetic really means. This is the case, for example, with the discussion of obscenity in the Middle Ages. The ‘pure essence of the obscene’ sounds to me once again like a dummy concept, which does not exist. The question ‘Can the obscene be made aesthetic?’ seems remarkable to me. Is the obscene as the content of the statement – and, more than ever, the obscene joke – not always already aesthetic? The other contributions which follow come closer to the relevance to the current situation, which this volume seeks, particularly the contributions of Preisendanz, Marquard, Iser and Imdahl. Thus, Heine’s ‘travel letters’ are in fact a new ‘genre’, in which ‘no integral unity of an art world radiates’ because Heine seeks so much to weave his political desires into this writing. Preisendanz’s analysis of these interweaving makes indirectly clear the kind of artistic height Heine’s art had reached. Preisendanz is, in my view, right to resist the talk of the limit-phenomenon of the aesthetic. Where is the core region of the aesthetic supposed to lie? In French classicism? To me it seems to lie most likely in what Hegel called the ‘religion of art’, that is to say, in the Greeks, who had arrived at the complete exteriority and visibility of the divine. One could also call it the presentation of the ‘holy world’. However, for the Hegelian theory of romantic art, which lets ‘exteriority reign free’ (and this means: which knows no ideal), what results from this is precisely the pastness of art. It does not seem to me justified to establish the concept of the ‘arts no longer beautiful’ from

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the single standpoint of the dissolution of the aesthetics of genius. Either Hegel’s talk of the pastness of art means the end of the classical religion of art – and this corresponds to the substantial scope of the studies presented here – or it means the ‘modern’ of the post-Hegelian epoch. Then, Hegel’s theory of the romantic art form is no longer the right framework. Marquard (like the many [69] who invoke Hegel on this point) does not take seriously enough the fundamental meaning of Hegel’s statement, which also means to include the whole of post-classical art.

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The End of Art? From Hegel’s Doctrine of the Pastness of Art to the Anti-art of Today (1985)1

[206] For us, the theme ‘end of art’ does not simply mean the same as what it so often meant in the life and in the development of Western art, namely, the reaction of a generation to the way things were changing, especially matters of taste, that which a younger generation considers appropriate. It is mostly the older generations who reject new art, shaking their heads as if it were the end of all good taste and real art. Today, we are obviously dealing with a deeper rift [Bruch] and disruption [Einbruch], with a more radical questionability and doubt, which demand that we all appraise the situation in a thoughtful way. What compels this question in today’s industrial age is fundamentally the decline of cultivated society and its aesthetic culture. We seek resources to think this process. This rift is certainly not only a break [Abbruch], but like any rift something which can become the seeds for a new growth. When we wonder where we will find the intellectual resources to manage this task, Hegel in particular comes to mind. He is the first to have formulated the theme of the end, not only for art, but in a much wider sense. Hegel, this intrepid Swabian, had claimed to have grasped in his own thought the completion of the entire intellectual and spiritual history of the West, nay, of the history of humanity in general. He was convinced that history in a certain sense is at an end, to the extent that there could be no more doubt and discussion whatsoever about the principle under which world history has taken its course. The path to freedom for all is what constitutes reason in history. This is Hegel’s famous theory, of which we may say that it has with sound judgement made us truly aware of a principle which reached its ultimate triumph with the French Revolution, but which had essentially entered the world with Christianity. That every human being [207] ought to be free and that there ought to be no slaves and no slavery is beyond dispute. History consists in the attempt to realize this ideal. This is what Hegel taught us. That is why world history, in the age of revolutions striving for this realization, goes especially further than the struggle of one domination against another and the struggle to free oneself from domination – a struggle whose end cannot be foreseen. It is not only the end of history which appears doubtful to our real experience. The same is true of the end of metaphysics, which was first proclaimed by August

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Comte at the beginning of the nineteenth century under the heading of ‘positivism’ or philosophie positive [‘positive philosophy’]. He proclaimed: ‘the age of metaphysics is at an end. We have entered the age of science’. This is what it said and was reaffirmed over and over again. In our century, Martin Heidegger finally took the same thesis to its culmination, so to speak, by also conceiving the end of philosophy altogether, like Nietzsche’s vision of the last human. In this end of philosophy, Heidegger sees us approaching a state where we generally do not feel the need to ask the question concerning being in the age of technological perfection, and that another kind of thinking becomes necessary. I would like to take up these three pronouncements of the end – the end of history in Hegel, the end of metaphysics in Comte and the end of philosophy in Nietzsche and Heidegger. I would like, in particular, to turn to the intellectual resources offered by Hegel’s assertion about the pastness of art [Vergangenheitscharakter]. It is a very Swabian formulation, as one must indeed concede, not quite sparkling with wit and dazzling with elegance, but of rather shocking coarseness. It hits upon something essential and will perhaps appear even more essential to us if we reflect upon it even longer and recognize in it the question of our day. If, according to Hegel, it is knowledge and science that make ‘art’ something past, then ‘science’ is for him not this breathtaking progress of the empirical sciences, which we associate with the slogan of positivism. Science is rather a comprehending summation of all our knowledge, which in an ultimate sense, as the science of the concept, as ‘philosophy’ itself, has even taken over the task of art and presents a higher form of spiritual consciousness. In Hegel, the thesis of the pastness of art means this fact that, in the classical epoch of Greek sculpture, the divine immediately presented itself in the phenomenon of art as the truth itself. Even the age of a God beyond this world, such as Christianity and its message, could participate in this truth of the divine in the form of remembrance and the nurture of memory. It is the so-called romantic arts, as they were called in the language of Hegel’s [208] time, particularly painting and music, and no doubt also the general art, poetry, which preserve this reverberation of the memory of the gods in the age of Christianity. Understood thus, Hegel’s doctrine of the pastness of art does not essentially mean that art does not have a future anymore. It rather means that art is in its essence already of the past even if it may continue to bloom in whatever future. Art is from the outset taken over by another possibility of spiritually grasping the truth. In substance, Hegel saw this possibility in the message of the New Testament when it speaks of the ‘adoration in spirit and in truth’. Thus, his own philosophical doctrine claimed to have elevated the truth of Christianity into the concept. This bold thesis of the pastness of art intends far less to be a critique of the art of his own time than is generally bandied about. However, in this epoch to which Hegel belongs, which for us is above all the epoch of Goethe and which for philosophy means the period of the philosophical movement from Kant to Hegel, it is still no accident that indeed art is granted a favoured place of interest in the whole business of the human search for the truth. Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics belong to those works of his that have determined most profoundly the thought of the time to come. In any case, among his lectures, it is those on aesthetics, which, through a dazzling reworking of the writing by one of his own students, are

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rendered so readable that Hegel is able to speak like a teacher who has an answer to the living questions of his listeners. When Hegel wrote his books, his Phenomenology of Spirit and his Logic, it was for a very narrow circle of people who were capable of devoting themselves to thought. It was similar, for instance, to the case of Heidegger in his later phase, as he delivered his enigmatic essays to the world, which remained largely cryptic, by contrast to the compelling force of his actual voice when he addressed his audience in his teaching and in his talks. Taken as a whole, Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics present an answer, which can even render the expression ‘pastness of art’ determinate. Hegel sees in art the presence of the past [die Gegenwart der Vergangenheit]. This is the great new distinction which art has in fact acquired in all our consciousness. This is confirmed not least in the way we use language. It is only in the nineteenth century that the expression ‘art’ begins to acquire its narrow and non-ambiguous sense, designating what one had to distinguish explicitly earlier as ‘fine art’ [schöne Kunst] from the other human arts, handicraft and mechanical art. ‘Art’ as the presence of the past is not simply an aspect of this emergence of a historical [209] consciousness, which essentially received its initial formulation in the Christian conception of the history of salvation and found its final expression in the secular history of salvation in the age of the enlightenment, to which we can also add Hegel’s entire construction of world history. What is conveyed in the romantic critique of the enlightenment is something else. It is the new consciousness of the otherness of all that is past and this consciousness forces its way through at the end of a long tradition of metaphysics like the whole perspective of the history of salvation. At this moment, ‘art’ signifies something new. Through the essential simultaneity of all art we become conscious of something which represents an ultimate superiority over history. This found in a certain sense its first, hidden self-consciousness in the Hegelian thesis. In any case, something decisively new came to the fore at the time in the nineteenth century and determined the progress of art. It was the end of the great self-evidence of the Christian-humanistic tradition. What was lost as a result was the muthos [‘story’] common to all. By ‘muthos’, I do not understand the ‘ceremonial’, what laypeople customarily associate with this word. It is also not the religious counter-concept to the true God of Christianity. Muthos should only mean here: that which one narrates, and narrates in such a way that no one may even doubt it, so much does it say something to us.2 Muthos is that which one can narrate without anyone putting it into question as to whether it is also true. It is the truth which connects everyone, in which everyone understands one another. This is what precisely came to an end at that time – this selfevidence of the Christian-humanistic tradition. To know that this is the case we only need to look around us. It is the end of the last architectural style common to our Western civilization, the end of the Baroque and its offshoot, the Rococo. Since then there is hardly anything anymore that manifests itself in architectural sensibility and dominates as an architectural style – at once universally integrating and binding upon an entire epoch. There is a multiplicity of architectural forms and styles, which exist alongside each other. It is significant that the first architectural form, which has shaped public buildings as a style was at the time Classicism. Already the name indicates the artistic inclination towards an older model. One thinks of Munich and Klenze.3 This first form of architecture is followed by other

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efforts to renew it by connecting it with the Baroque, the Renaissance, the neo-Gothic and even the Romanesque in our railway stations. What architecture reveals to us here is valid in general. The self-evidence in which a public consciousness expresses itself in public buildings lies here. Whether it now concerns the way religion or [210] the political regime orders life or even simply the new vivid feeling of industriousness and civic virtue, buildings are for us works of art. Yet, long ago they were at the same time works in which all people recognized themselves. Thus, there was essentially no aesthetic distinction which enabled the connoisseur and the expert to acquire a discretionary distance to distinguish, in the creations of architecture, painting or music, between the art which was at work here and the message and pronouncements which gained a presence in these works. Muthos  – again in the most prosaic sense, to utilize in this case the concept which I have suggested – was valid for all forms of art. In my own investigations, I have introduced for this purpose the technical expression of aesthetic non-differentiation.4 In this expression, the question is not whether someone made the distinction and someone else did not. Both participated in the same art. Thus, we ask what is novel when art knows itself to be art. We must ask such a question if we want to clarify the question of today, namely, whether art stops having to be art. The question of the truth of art is posed in a new sense as soon as art is no longer subordinated to other spiritual needs, but is conscious of itself and we are conscious of it as art. Only since art is thought as art do we come to question that which for a long time answered itself. This is also how we have to understand the situation in which Heidegger renews the question of the truth of art and speaks of the setting-into-work of the truth in the course of the deconstruction [Destruktion] of the Western metaphysical tradition. What is in focus here is the entirety of art’s past and present. Today, when everything is taking on global dimensions, the question will be asked with a new breadth because all distances, whether temporal or spatial, have been turned into the nearness of a new presence and everyone makes claim to it all at once. From now on, we are dealing with a dual form in which art encounters us. In the age of historical consciousness, art must, so to speak, look in both directions, on the one hand, to the presence of the past, which makes all art contemporaneous and, on the other hand, to the art of our own time, which alone is contemporary with us. This has become a tense relationship. The more the aesthetic and historical culture spread in the nineteenth century and in our own, the greater was the tension felt. Contemporary creation steps more and more into the shadows of the great past of art, which surrounds us as the present. Think, for instance, of how contemporary music, as a precaution, has been moved to the middle of the programme, so that no one comes too late and no one leaves too early. This is a symptom. Something is expressed in this for which no one is to blame. It is the tension which takes hold of our whole consciousness of art [211] and which is getting more and more pronounced in our century. We only have to think of the explosion of painting at the beginning of our century, the emergence of objectless painting or the slogan of anti-art, which today gives expression to our resistance to both the industrial society with its general reproducibility and the cultivated society of yesterday. We would like to question Hegel again. In his Aesthetics, the standpoint of art holds complete sway. This is seen at once in the treatment which the concept of natural beauty

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receives. From the standpoint of art, natural beauty possesses no independent character anymore. We are constantly looking at nature with the eyes of the creating artist. This is a profound change. The background of the experience of nature constituted by the theology of creation or cosmology has been completely dissolved to the point where it is no longer creation, whose grandeur and sublimity touch human beings, but the soul’s response, which can grant us nature, especially in its being undisturbed by the human will. The fact that natural beauty and the determinations, which Kant had abstracted from it, offer their services, unsolicited and unwanted, to the aesthetic theories of the present as the example of Adorno illustrates, is based upon the confusion between taste and art. Hegel defined the so-called beautiful in art as the ‘sensuous appearance of the idea’. This is certainly not supposed to formulate a definite stylistic ideal, but rather a philosophical statement about what art as art always is. To this extent, we must ask how this definition is also to be understood for the post-Hegelian epoch and for our time. The way in which this definition circumscribes the concept of the beautiful through concepts clearly contains a most extreme opposition, that between the sensuous and the idea. The distinction made in Platonism, the separation of the mundus sensibilis [‘sensible world’] from the mundus intelligibilis [‘intelligible world’], of the sensible world and the spiritual world clearly underlies the Hegelian conceptual language. Moreover, what presents an immediate connection to Plato is the reconciliation of the two worlds which is supposed to lie in the beautiful. The beautiful is even the appearance [Erscheinung] of the good. It is the sensuous appearing [Scheinen], the sensible appearance [Schein], the splendour which pours over what appears, so that it appears [erscheint] and shines [scheint] as an ideal form. The sensuous appearance of the idea in this way essentially declares the congruent unity of that which is in itself completely separate, namely the idea and the appearance. It is also really what we all admire in the great stylistic epochs of art’s past and what we equally experience in light of what has succeeded in the present: this indistinguishable, undifferentiated unity of appearance and content. This certainly sounds at first like the stylistic ideal of classical art: that God is present in the appearance of the sculpture. Yet, the present of what is [212] common to all is understood even today in the appearance of art over and beyond all levels of education and intellectual status. This common present experiences the same present in the form of divine and mythical contents. Let us think in this regard of Bach’s Passion, which brings together in the space of the church the lovers of high music as well as the real members of the Christian community in a common experience. Or let us think of Greek theatre, whose written texts still offer inexhaustible material for the education of generations and to the intellectual acuity of the learned. Yet, this theatre had in its thrall the whole of the public of Attic theatre, from the artisans to the societal elite. It is the aesthetic non-differentiation, the participation in what is common, which alone makes this solidarity in reception possible. The congruent unity between idea and appearance remains in a certain sense a valid definition of the beautiful in art. It certainly no longer exists in the nineteenth and the twentieth century as something self-evident which is borne out by a general consensus. Not even through the detours of a contrived politicizing, for instance, in the course of the aspiring nationalism of the nineteenth century, do we see such a kind of

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self-evident commonality in the pronouncements of art. This is without doubt a loss and, like all losses taken to heart, there is also a need that corresponds to it along with an effort to win back what is lost. Modern art is marked by the quest for the common and the self-evident. By ‘modern art’ I mean here not only the post-modernity of today but also not just the ‘modern’ of the early twentieth century. I mean all of it together. The modern and the most modern belong to it. What has been produced out of the pseudo-historicism of the nineteenth century are all new ways of venturing, new ways of creating. The artist is borne by the consciousness that a ‘pronouncement’, a new way of bringing-together, oriented to the common, to the true which unites all, must succeed. From this one grasps what must have led to the cultivated society, to the form of appearance of the bourgeois culture of the nineteenth and twentieth century, after the self-evidence of the pronouncements of contemporary artistic creation was lost. One readily understands – and it is an unmistakable symptom of this loss – why indeed the phenomenon of kitsch emerges under these conditions. If I see it correctly, there is kitsch only since there is the yearning for the common, which is no longer there as a self-evident presupposition for everyone. One thinks, for example, of the self-evidence with which in the great history of painting the representative image of the emperor with all his attributes, now so distant from us, the horse, the suit of armour and the marshal’s baton, somehow fits the stature of the emperor so closely. [213] Or in the sacred painting which, in all the changes of interpretation, never operates like a disguising or a masking because it includes the self-evidence of sensuous appearance as the self-evident expression of religious worship. It is only when such a self-evidence no longer exists that there is an anticipation of the effect, which we associate with the phenomenon of kitsch. Aspiring to do art in this way and wanting to propagate it might still be a noble goal. The kitsch which is made to serve noble ends is not better than that which is only intended commercially. One should not consider kitsch just as a negative concept of quality. A work of lesser quality does not need to be kitsch. So, I believe that there can be no kitsch where there is no concept of art, which has been established as its own standpoint, in separation from all other commonalities. It has nothing to do with the level of the artistic configuration as such. In peasant art with all the imitations discernible in it, there is no kitsch. Rather, what is reflected, for instance in reverse glass painting, is the self-evidence of common contents, be they of a religious or profane nature. The stimulus for such a naïve artistic exercise lies precisely in something coming to appearance as if by itself, which in the efforts of the artist in today’s world only finds its fulfilment in the rare cases where a work succeeds. A successful work of art is always a successful attempt at uniting what has fallen apart. I may illustrate this with an example: in the poetic work of the Paul Celan, whose creative powers were literally consumed by his task. It was the task of letting something like music, a new mutual play between that which cannot be brought together, emerge from fragments of sense, fragments of tone lying alongside each other like debris. In the rare moments in which a reader really understands the poem in its inner unity, there is suddenly something universal present there, something that holds as self-evident. From this, I am reading off what has changed and what has remained. There is no common unity of style anymore, as cultivated laypersons feel it so starkly in contrast to the great periods of the art of the past, to the point that they are not able to make out

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the personal style of specific artists at all. Now, it rather appears that style does not exist but becomes what is sought, and it is a long process of searching until contemporary artists manage to find their own signature style, since a self-evidently valid tradition is no longer binding. The signature style is precisely one that is theirs but still readable. It is obviously a task for both sides, for the artist who seeks a legible signature style and for the reader who must get used to the signature style and what it says, so to speak. This example teaches us that it is precisely the break-up and dissolution before which we stand today which sets art its task. Let us illustrate this with some of the great artists of the nineteenth century: now, [214] even classical themes can receive a new actualization [Realisierung], which we may not admire as much in the Nazarenes5 as, for example, in Feuerbach6 or in Marées.7 Conversely, a new chromatic magic can be discerned in the railway station. In this way, the alienated classical or the estranged modern can be overhauled into a new unity, and this certainly becomes a task not only for those who create, but even for those who receive the work. It is the lack of selfevidence which should here acquire a new power of persuasion through the artistic form of the work. This can be first understood comprehensively from Hegel’s pronouncements. This is why I begin with Hegel’s answers. This becomes absolutely clear in painting. We have here a new arbitrariness of an experimental sort already manifested in the choice of motifs. Even when old mundane contents re-emerge or old forms are taken over and transformed, they dare to venture something new. What is always demanded is the overcoming of estrangement, not only from the one who creates but also from the one who receives the work. The history of modern painting demands from the painter a long series of working attempts and demands from the viewer a familiarization with the signature style of the artist. Even though Hegel meant that everything was tested and measured, and that the progress of painting occurred in mere variations, the truth is that the history of the painting has really undergone revolutions. With every new turn the demands on the spectators are increased so much that, in the end, the artwork itself appears to lose its identity in light of the intervention of the reproductive arts and the enormously increasing demands on the spectators. In reality, as I have shown, the inner logic of this development is already laid out in Hegel’s point of departure. With this we have neared the stage of the discussion, which dominates the scene today. Experimentation has exploded all limits. The expectation which the layperson has of a painting is extremely strained. We stand at the end of a long challenge, which has finally led to a resolute suspicion of images and a suspicion of art in general through the cubist fragmentation of form, through the expressionist distortion of form, through the surrealist way of making things cryptic, through the growing depletion of images into the objectless.8 The work of art is no longer supposed to provide the consumer with unbounded satisfaction. The artist would like to provoke and irritate, and many would like to understand their work as only a kind of suggestion, which invites others to become active in reconfiguring the work and continuing it. Thus, for example, in serial music the order of the performance is left to the interpreter. In the same way, the viewers of a painting must often let themselves be convinced and bewildered by the vacillating ways in which the same painting can be read. [215] One thinks of Monet’s cathedrals or Picasso’s forty variations on ‘Las Meninas’ by Velázquez. The stimulating

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vitality of the new rhythms, the intensification of what is striking, of what is caricatural, of what is sign-like wants to abandon completely the quiescent sameness of the work. Nevertheless, it seems to me still hasty to dispute the legitimacy of the concept of work on those grounds. This still remains true: while the piece of work which is produced through craft or the factory exhaust itself and is consumed in its use, however much the artwork is inserted into the constraints and purposes of life, it stands out. It acquires permanence. ‘Once, it stood among human beings’ (Rilke). First, we have the artists themselves, who among the innumerable working attempts at the service of their craft, designate this or that as belonging to their work. This is what one calls their oeuvre [‘work’]. There are also those who receive the work. I remember many of Günther Ramin’s organ improvisations in the style of a motet at the St. Thomas Church in Leipzig. Not always, but now and then one would simply not wish to step out, such was the hold of the improvisation at the organ. Fleeting, singular and unrepeatable, it gained permanence in judgement as this one which the hearer specifically distinguishes. This means indeed ‘to judge’: to select (or reject), to place in the light of what is valid. This is truly no lifeless identity of the work, against which one would have to summon difference. Here we are constantly entering into a new form of validity, in an enduring and simultaneously changing form of validity. It may be the case that the days of panel painting are drawing to a close, that the great murals of a Tàpies or a Miró, or the sculptures and brush strokes of a Henry Moore or Serra, which surge into free space, acquire a unique imagistic majesty in their surfaces and spaces. It may be that these correspond more deeply with the haste and hurry of our life-world than is possible within the scope of the gallery. Everything that has permanence as an artwork has a hold on us, lets us linger in the midst of a raging storm. Let us conduct an experiment, insofar as we follow the old phenomenological need and, starting from the extremes, aim at the common mean. What makes something art, in former times like it does today and tomorrow? I consider (with Hegel) such extremes to be architecture and poetry. The former stands unmoved through all times, in the midst of weathering and decay. The latter, by contrast, the art of the word, the poetic art, which is handed to us, survives and overcomes all space and time. We ask how in these two extreme forms of art the work has its status and gains its life between the creators and the spectators. To pose the question in this way means from the very outset to pull the rug from underneath the false alternatives of production and reception, of the aesthetics of production and the aesthetics of reception. It is not only that, in both sides, what is respectively the other side is always included. On the side of the artist we have the anticipation of the effect [216] which the work will have, whether as fulfilling an expectation, trumping an expectation or producing a contrast to an expectation. On the other side, the work of art is always encountered in such a way that the spectator always ascribes something like an intention or an idea to it or to the artist, who is its creator. This is done in such a way that the work itself may on occasion lag behind its idea. However, both of these intrusions from either side remain, for their part, anticipations, and the true reality appears different. As something accomplished and successful, the work is neither the mere realization of a planned effect nor, seen from the other side, could the idea which the spectator recognizes in it claim to capture

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the whole work. It is like a genuine dialogue, in which the unforeseeable makes its appearance and orients the course of the conversation. Thus, we speak in architecture of the building plan of the master builder and of the architectural design, which the admirer recognizes in the building. Or we speak of that which poets meant in their poems and of that which speaks to us in the poem. Even the poem says more than what any person hears from it. Understanding does not aim at recognizing what one meant. It concerns more, something that neither the poet knows nor anyone else can say, and yet, it is not arbitrary or subjective. We have to ask how this is so. There is the building owner and the architect. What we have here is not an inspiration, a dream building, as every architect certainly dreams or has in the drawer. What we have is rather a given place, a determinate purpose and a pre-given environment, urban or rural. This is most certainly where the art of architecture comes to fruition: to fit within the spatial conditions and to establish a new spatial order. Buildings are never utopias. In architecture, more than in other realms of art, what is of concern is the identification of the leading function to be bestowed in each case upon the creation on the basis of the need, the purpose determined and the terms of the contract. We then say that the artist is less free in this situation, and this may be true. First of all, the modern self-perception of the architect may not have remained untouched by the general transformation brought about by the ascent of art towards autonomy. First and foremost, it is the predominance of the free creation of images and their spread by means of the reproductive technologies of our century which have in turn had an impact on the architect and the experience of architecture on the part of the spectator. Those who see buildings like images (or no longer see, but only snap a picture) forget that buildings stand in space and create space; that one goes around them and enters into them, and that they do not primarily stand there for touristic sightseeing, but have their place in the way life is lived – as church, city hall, bank, public bath, stadium and so on. We suddenly become aware of how something else almost imperceptibly plays alongside, compelling us to linger. [217] It is something that we understand like an answer and we recognize ourselves in it. The fact that the gaze has been weaned away from what is given, which speaks to the constructivist power of abstraction typical of modern technology, has in fact destroyed a lot, cities and streets, spaces and places. Above all, it makes the spectators blind, as if a work of architecture always has to be an isolated artwork, having no other purpose than to give expression to its time; as if it is not rather always built into a life-world which was prepared by a long past. It is not even enough to direct our gaze to what is given to us, from which standpoint the work of architecture may appear as the correct solution. The work of architecture stands even farther in the flood of life which roars around it. Here, we always find human beings, who not only admire it but also incorporate it into their lives. Something that lay on the fringe is absorbed into the city, unforeseeable, and again where the city or the country successfully integrates the building, a new accent is put upon it, by which the old becomes something new. This is what I once saw in Bordeaux, how the medieval city received a new face through reconstruction in the eighteenth century, with the new emphasis on narrow and straight streets stretching from the port into

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the city. Then we have the well-known building design of Paris, whose growth had outstripped even the most fantastic plans of a Napoleon. A few years ago, I was in my hometown of Breslau. As I stepped out of the undestroyed railway station, my gaze immediately fell upon a gigantic church, which I had never seen in my whole life. In fact, in the meantime all sorts of awful buildings belonging to the late nineteenth century had fallen into ruin, and this church was there to be seen anew. This is how a work of architecture gains new forces to open space, which no one foresaw. The architects of today have recourse to unimagined new means and are confronted with tasks which emerge entirely from their own time. Even these architects with their art stand at the service of this continuity between yesterday and tomorrow, which receives their creation and passes it along. By contrast, poetry appears to be independent of all such spatial and temporal conditions, especially from the time it became literature and belonged to the epoch of a reading culture, whose end we are perhaps approaching. This is how it looks like at first. Perhaps, beneath this appearance there hides a deeper dependence. One only needs to ask: are the free spaces and free times, which modern professional life grants people, still an invitation to reading and indeed to reading poems? Here, we may certainly have doubts. Who knows whether needs may not appear again and produce a new equilibrium given that the comprehensive management of human resources leans with such one-sidedness today in the direction of the technological form of civilization typical of our existence. Nobody is able to predict whether, perhaps over and above the interest in narrative literature, [218] an openness to poetry, indeed a new need for poetry will not be awakened subsequently as a countereffect. Be it as it may, the inner independence of literature from external pre-given factors and conditions of existence has by all accounts a significant downside. It is the level of activity, of real effort and self-activity, which it imposes like simply no other art form. Nowhere else is the joint effort of the recipient so palpably demanded as in the linguistic art. Reading is, in this regard, the authentic and representative form, in which we can grasp the participation of the recipient in the art. In fact, it is true of all art that it first finds its fulfilment in recognition, and this becomes explicit with a particular distinction with regard to the art of poetry. I would like to distinguish three kinds of recognition which present themselves to us in their interconnection as prototypical of all art. There is, first, the demand for reading ability in general. This means not only the capacity to spell (und the corresponding ability to write) but also the capacity to actualize the text to be deciphered as a meaningful unity of speech. This is the first condition, if one intends to approach the work of art in its essential quality. Everyone knows this, for instance, from the impossibility of translating lyric poems from a foreign language into one’s own language or to grasp them completely in translation. Here, we have such a deeply interwoven semantic and tonal event realized in the original poetic text that the enactment [Vollzug] of the work signifies a first fulfilment of recognition. We all hear our mother tongue and the texts of our own language in such fullness, in such richness and with such a radiating power, that, as poetic word, as poetic speech by contrast to all other uses of language, they appear as the recognition of our own self. Yet, those who have lived for a longer stretch of time in a world of a foreign language know how on

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their return the first simplest sounds of their own mother tongue touch them as a real recognition. How much more is it for the poetic word. A poetic text requires not only the enactment of what is meaningful in speech. There is always something different awoken, in which we recognize ourselves. There are free spaces of intuition, which are opened up by poetic language and which the enacting reader fills out [ausfüllt]. This filling out happens through the readers and in their specific ways. Yet, the identity of poetry is not affected as a result. To me, if I call to mind right now the famous poem by Goethe ‘To the Moon’, the waft of mist and the undulations of light, which the ‘misty brilliance’ evokes, certainly shimmer before the eyes completely differently than to anybody else or even to me at another time. The word of the poem is [219] one, however differently it is filled out. For this, the great Polish phenomenologist Roman Ingarden suggested the important concept of ‘schema’, which, so to speak, sketches out, demands and allows its free filling out, in which every reader recognizes himself or herself.9 Here comes, as I said, a third form of recognition, which I would like to call not a ‘fulfilling’ [Erfüllen] as with meanings nor a ‘filling out’ [Ausfüllen] as with intuitive schemas, but a ‘filling in’ [Auffüllen]. This seems to me to be one of the essential insights in relation to the essence of all artistic experience in general. ‘Filling in’ here means that the reader (or hearer) reaches out beyond what is graspable in the linguistic structure itself and comes to appearance in it. The reader goes beyond the text, so to speak, in the direction of what it wants to convey. We are all capable of this filling in when a linguistic structure of the poetic kind has seized us. We then let our own subjective and private world of experience completely merge into it. We see and hear past the weaker or shallower points of a composition. We fill it in and only in this compelling filling in does the work of art gain its essential reality. Only then does every opposition between what is meant and reality, any opposition between what the artist would like to say and what the recipient takes from it disappear. They have become one. This is the reason why they have lost every trace of privacy, so that even the occasional biographical aspect of a poetic work is transformed into something universal. This is the reason why works of art grant all who enter into their spell a real encounter with themselves. When a linguistic work of art is there for us in such a way, many of what were pre-existing forms may have entered into the arrangement of the structure. In this regard, the study of intertextuality, as the French post-structuralists practice it today, has certainly hit upon something correct. Yet, something is only a poetic structure when everything pertaining to the pre-existing form has entered into the new, singular form, which lets the poem be there for us as though it had never been said before and as though it were specifically said to us for the first time. Here lies the prototypical meaning of the concept of filling in. Even in relation to all other kinds of art, only this experience signifies the full realization of the artwork, so that we no longer remain in the distance of an aesthetic judgement but merge into the work completely. This is what Hegel had in mind when he placed art as ‘intuition’ [Anschauung] alongside prayer and philosophical thoughts. In times when information technology and the technologies of reproduction pour out a constant flood of stimuli over human beings, realizing the artwork in this way has certainly become a difficult task. Today’s [220] artists, whatever their art, have to battle a flood which dampens every sensibility. This is precisely why all artists of

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today have to offer estrangement so that the persuasive power of their configuration achieves an effect and reverses the estrangement into a new homeliness. The pluralism of experimenting has thus become unavoidable in our epoch. Estrangement to the point of incomprehensibility is the rule under which the creative power of art in an age such as our own can be fulfilled the quickest. The ideal unity of convergence between the familiar contents of the figurative and poetic arts and their configured form can no longer be expected in our epoch like in the times bound by tradition. Now, it is necessary to create art within the terribly fragmented existence in which today’s world constantly moves. If forms of life change at such a pace as is the case in our present, then the artistic responses to this present must also distance themselves with a particularly estranging intensity. Yet, perhaps the distinction between today’s art and earlier art is not as great as it usually appears, if a present reflects upon its present or its immediate past. An end of art, an end of the never resting will to create, which belongs to human dreams and yearnings, will never come to be, so long as humans shape their own lives at all. Any supposed end of art will be the beginning of new art.

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The Place of Poetry in the System of Hegelian Aesthetics and the Question of the Pastness of Art (1986)1 [221] Whoever reads the Hotho edition of Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics cannot escape the strong impression of a text which has been rendered in a fully readable form. This is particularly so if we compare these lectures to other lectures from the huge edition of Hegel’s works prepared by the Friends of the Immortalised.2 We now have come to recognize through recent investigations that this text is accordingly less authentic than what we had automatically assumed up until now. A versatile writer and stylist such as Hotho strove to render Hegel’s theories – so decisive for him – palatable to the tastes of his own generation. In so doing, he obviously introduced many of his own views, which did not cohere with Hegel’s own.3 At the very least, this lack of authenticity might also apply to the properly conceptual elements in the construction of Hegel’s lectures. There is, however, one serious intervention by Hotho, of which we already became aware since Lasson attempted (and failed) to offer a new edition of the lecture on aesthetics. I have in mind the conversion of the section on natural beauty into an independent second chapter prior to and paralleling the section on artistic beauty. This is misleading. Hegel had in fact conceived of his aesthetics entirely from the standpoint of art and famously subsumed natural beauty under art as a reflection of artistic beauty. This heavy intervention by Hotho, which covers up something essential, weighs all the more heavily as the conceptual schematic, with which Hegel worked in his aesthetics – besides the unease which it generates – is of a heightened interest for the philosopher. This [222] is confirmed by the enthusiasm and persistence with which Hegel constantly recapitulates the fundamental ideas of his schematic in all the individual chapters of his lecture. Hegel repeated this structural schematic of his lecture so often and so precisely that we may consider this schematic to be authentic. This is why its implications deserve our particular attention. What stands out in the guiding conceptual structure, in the division of the epochs of art into symbolic, classical and romantic art, is that this conceptual construction finds no true confirmation in poetry but obviously in the sensuous and figurative [anschaulich] arts, that is, in architecture, sculpture, painting and music. This has its good reasons. The sensuous and figurative arts are subordinated much more to the exteriority of taste. The transformation in taste is patent and thus particularly suited for articulating the history of art. As Hegel saw, taste is in fact not what is essential to

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art, but rather constitutes the sensible skin, so to speak, which we need against the challenge and influx of everything that encounters us. We also need it against the challenge of our own constructions, our works and artworks. This ‘skin’ of taste can be damaged to a much greater extent by what is sensuous and figurative than by anything crass and crude in a linguistic and literary form. This is a well-known fact since Lessing’s ‘Laocoon’. It accords with the fact that, when discussing the general theme of art in systematic contexts, Hegel by ‘art’ never has in mind poetry in particular, but either architecture or the plastic arts. As he clearly notes, poetry is even to a notable extent the ‘universal art’. Nevertheless, poetry assumes an exceptional position in the schematic of the Aesthetics lecture. In the hierarchy of increasing desensualization [Entsinnlichung] and growing spiritualization [Vergeistigung] poetry represents the final stage. It has, as Hegel says, its existence only in consciousness itself. There are forms of inner representation [Vorstellen] and intuition [Anschauen] which make the artwork an artwork or manifest it as an artwork. Poetry is, in this regard, the extreme counterpoint to architecture, which is scarcely spirit, but only symbolically or suggestively so, and which, in accordance to its nature, only belongs to the neighbourhood of the spirit. In Hotho’s edition of the Aesthetics, Hegel does not seem to have retained in his language the terminological formulation which we know from the concluding chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit. According to this formulation, the religion of art stands within the standpoint of intuition [Anschauung], revealed religion under the standpoint of representation [Vorstellung] and philosophy under the standpoint of the concept. Yet, in substance, he clearly sticks to this conceptual formulation throughout his entire work. In the lecture on Aesthetics [223] he speaks very freely of intuiting, representing, feeling and the like, without tying himself down to his own conceptual schematizing. The unique position which Hegel grants to poetry now becomes particularly clear when the concepts of form, content and matter, which he uses for his schematic construction, are also applied to poetry, where they are particularly inappropriate (see III, pp.  226f.). Obviously, in the case of poetry, we can speak of giving form to matter only in a very improper sense. Already in music, the talk of tone matter is unsatisfactory. In the case of poetry, the whole relationship to matter changes completely, as Hegel explicitly states. This is because ‘matter’ is not at all something which appears sensuously, but rather is that which is brought to appearance in the inner imagination (III, p. 231). It is with these concepts that Hegel justifies poetry’s claim to be the universal art. Poetry, he says, is not constrained in its conditions of realization by any sensuous matter. In his lectures, it seems that Hegel made the approach to the division of the arts and the privileged position of poetry plausible for his hearers not only in this manner but through multiple variations. To give only one example: at one point, he proceeds from space and time as the general forms of intuition, to which painting and music are still bound. The sensuous element of space belongs to painting; the sensuous element of time belongs to music. Both manifest themselves in poetry as the ‘point of the spirit, as the thinking subject, which connects in itself the infinite space of representation with the time of the tone’ (Hotho 1823, Ms. 421). In this, Hegel not only follows Kant, but a well-known topic of Aristotelian philosophy. In his famous introductory statement

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to the Metaphysics, Aristotle grants priority to seeing over all the other senses, because seeing grasps the most distinctions. However, from another point of view, as Aristotle sees it, hearing is to be granted an even higher priority, for hearing is capable of hearing language, the logos [‘reason’, ‘speech’], due to which it has access not only to the most distinctions, but rather in this way to all distinctions. Hegel takes this up and explicitly employs the concept of totality in a similar way for distinguishing poetry: poetry distinguishes itself from all other art forms through this concept of totality. This is how the place of poetry acquires its significance, within the structure of the Aesthetics, as something that points forward. Poetry already initiates the transition to the religious modes of representation characteristic of revealed religion and to the prose of scientific thought, that is to say, of philosophy. The latter two are a comprehension of the absolute in a form more lacking in sensuousness [Sinnlichkeitloseres] (III, p. 233). This less than pretty comparative of the expression ‘lacking in sensuousness’ indirectly underlines that not only poetry, but also the prose of thought has a real sensuous basis in their phonetic and symbolic form [224]. This whole manner of consideration even follows the conceptual tradition of Aristotelian metaphysics. The comprehensive definition of art, which Hotho offers in his edition of the Aesthetics lecture, as the ‘sensuous appearance of the idea’ (I, p. 144) should thus not be weakened in the least, even if Hegel ascribes an increasing spirituality and a decreasing sensuousness to poetry in comparison to the other arts. It is important to realize that this fundamentally Platonic (Phaedrus 250d) formula manifestly cannot be verified in Hegel’s Berlin lectures. In fact, Hotho employs the beautiful turn of phrase in a traditionalistic context, namely, in the discussion of the relationship between truth and beauty. This fundamental Platonic theme is really not intended to be applied to artistic beauty and the forms of art, but rather encompasses natural beauty as well. In addition, this Platonic theme is applicable to poetry only in an imprecise sense, for it is clear that the ‘sensuous appearance of the idea’ is only realized in the form of a representation and thus in the imagination. Yet, our real theme is precisely the marginal and transitory position which poetry is accorded as the most spiritual of all arts. It is, thus, worth dwelling on those formulas of the ‘ideal of beauty’ which have been better verified in Hegel’s writings. When Hegel describes the ideal as the being [Dasein] of the idea or as the existence [Existenz] of the idea, he basically follows the Kantian way of speaking. According to Kant, the ideal is ‘the idea in individuo [“in a single being”]’. These ideals are obviously such that ‘one would not want to grant them objective reality (existence) immediately’ (Critique of Pure Reason, B 597). This certainly is also true for the ‘ideal of beauty’, which in the Critique of Judgement (§ 17) is called an ideal of the imagination. Furthermore, in Hegel’s way of speaking, one should never understand ‘existence’ [Existenz] in the sense of the Kantian ‘objective reality’, but precisely as the existence [Dasein] of the idea in individuo. When Kant finds the ideal of beauty only in human form, namely in the expression of the moral, this is a classicist narrowing, from which Hegel has truly wrested the entire breadth of the spirit and the spirituality of beauty. In this context, there is already in Kant an indication of a turn from taste to the spirituality of art, when it is said that art is capable of making moral ideas ‘visible in corporeal expression (as the effect of what is inner [das Innere]), so to speak’. What becomes visible in this way,

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whether figurative or ‘represented’, is in any case an idea. There can be no doubt that for Hegel in the case of poetry the idea appears in the representation, that is to say, it is represented as something sensuous and figurative. It is in individuo as something which is represented – such as the ideal of the wise, which Kant offers as an example in the Critique of Pure Reason. Now, upon the ground of the fundamental assumption that [225] art is a mode of the absolute spirit, Hegel obviously builds a hierarchy of spirituality. This hierarchy allows him to say of poetry that it goes so far in the negative treatment of the sensuous [Sinnlich] elements that it rather reduces what is opposed to the heavy spatial matter, the tone, to a meaningless sign instead of shaping it into an suggestive symbol like what the art of architecture does with its material. Yet, in doing this, poetry dissolves the fusion of spiritual inwardness and external existence to a degree to which it no longer begins to correspond to the original concepts of art.

Hegel has not completely escaped the danger which obviously lies here when he ventures to make the stunning statement that for poetry ‘it makes no difference whether a poetic work is read or heard’ (III, p. 227). This can be accepted if one thinks of ‘reading’ as something like an inner hearing. However, Hegel goes still further, ending up with the thesis that the translation of a poetic work can render an artwork in another language without any essential loss of what is properly poetic. We must certainly assume that Hegel really thought this and not perhaps Hotho. It would go with the new enthusiasm of the romantic era for world literature. In addition, it is certainly true of narrative forms of poetry and drama that they are translatable, but not for lyric poetry – and Hegel had certainly perceived these distinctions. Nevertheless, it remains a stunning statement. In the case of the translation of lyric poetry, the sensuous appearance in language is evidently so deeply transformed that the Hegelian statement is actually only understandable – although certainly not justified – if we consider the vividness awakened in the imagination by language and not simply the immediacy of that which resonates in the sounds of speech. Even then, it still remains the case that it is what resonates in the sounds of speech that most of all elevates the vividness of what is poetized to its incontrovertible self-evidence and presence. Obviously, one must understand the questionable Hegelian exaggeration on the basis of its intention, which is to make perfectly clear the distinction between poetry and music, which he treated previously. It is certainly correct that the musical tone is fundamentally different from the building blocks of poetic texts, that is, the word. A  tone simply acquires its concrete determinacy only through its relationship to other tones. By contrast, the word is always already the word of a language and has therefore a determinacy on its own within this language. Even if quite vague and quite capable of variation, this determinacy is still confined and related to certain meanings. Hence it is for good reasons that there is actual performance in music. With this, music first acquires its ontological status and not just in being inwardly possessed by the imagination. The ‘notation’ is not even comparable to the way poetic language is fixed in writing. [226] It remains an exaggeration, in this case ventured by Adorno,

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to see human beings still simply listening to music instead of themselves reading the musical scores as the underdeveloped state of musical connoisseurship and to invoke the fact that, in the case of poetry, we have learnt a long time ago to hear in our inner ear something which is read. Clearly, it is the same exaggeration and from a similar intention that underlies Hegel’s assertion that lyric poetry experiences no essential loss in translation. Hegel’s own position on music indirectly confirms that he did not find the poetic loss which must be accepted by the translation of poetry to be very detracting. Obviously, words are what are essential for him as the authentic bearers of sense. In contrast to absolute music, this appears in an inverted sense, so to speak. He emphasizes his distance from absolute music because it lacks the word: ‘I must see it as unfortunate that music is constituted in such an independent way’ (Marbach Library 1826, Ms. 80). It is clear that he is of the opinion that where the spiritual support of the word is missing, human beings give ‘their representations . . . ’ too much ‘ . . . free range [Spielraum]’. Just as the sense bearing word is missing in music, in the case of the translation of poetry the sense bearing word is, for him, almost everything. This becomes immediately clear if one pays attention to the relationship of poetry to speculative thought, as Hegel depicts it in the Aesthetics. There he says, for instance, that speculative thought stands in close kinship to poetic fantasy [Phantasie] and articulates the difference in the following way: thought dissipates the form of reality in favour of the form of the pure concept. In this way, the appearing world comes into confrontation with a new realm, which is indeed the truth of the real, but a truth which is not again revealed in the real itself as the formative power and the authentic soul of the same reality. Thought is thus only a reconciliation of truth and reality in thought. Poetic creation and invention, by contrast, are a reconciliation in the form of the real appearance itself, if this order is represented spiritually. (III, p. 243)

Statements of this kind must have particularly inspired the young Hegelians’ critique of the reconciliation in thought. For this critique, the inconsequentiality of the reconciliation in thought became a stumbling block. In addition, Kierkegaard’s critique of the aesthetic stage renders the Hegelian argument suspect. This is typical Hegel. The all-sidedness of reflexion allows him to distinguish even poetry by contrast with the prose of thought, which latter still assumes for him a higher rank as the truth of the concept. We see the same thing when Hegel explicitly confronts the poetic world of inner contemplation and feeling, in which lyric poetry comes alive, with philosophical thought and in a stunning way even here demotes philosophical thought. Philosophical thought, [227] as he says there, is affected by abstraction such that it can only develop in the element of thought as mere universality. As a consequence, concrete human beings can now also find themselves forced to express the content and the results of their philosophical consciousness in concrete ways as permeated by sentiment [Gemüt] and intuition,

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­ egel has in mind here probably the philosophical poems of Schiller. However, it H remains a stunning statement, when he imposes a limitation upon speculative thought and says: ‘only in the element of thought’. This ‘only’ stands in stark contrast to his systematic fundamental conception but shows conversely how much he was prepared to recognize the reflected forms of poetry in their timelessness. Even his positive assessment of the West-East Divan4 belongs here. The examination of the systematic incorporation of poetry into the organizational whole of the Aesthetics lecture thus results in the fact that the all-sided reflection, of which Hegel proves himself to be the master even here, leaves open the question which guided us, for from the fact that poetry is systematically placed at the margins of the Aesthetics we can hardly hope to find an immediate answer to the much-discussed question of the meaning of Hegel’s view of the pastness of art. As we know, the chapter on poetry stands at the very end of the Aesthetics lecture and is so presented in Hotho’s interpretation without being explicitly announced as a transition. This is an editorial shortcoming, which can perhaps make the authenticity of this conclusion probable? At any rate, the lecture does not conclude with the transition to religion, in a way which would accord with the Hegelian system. What this probably reveals is this: Hegel explicitly introduced the separation of aesthetics from the philosophy of religion – one could even say the religious elevation of fine arts to ‘art’ at the time when he resumed his lecture on Aesthetics in Berlin, whose first appearance we can date to his time in Heidelberg. At this point, we may recall that the relationship between art and religion in Hegel is from the very beginning rather peculiarly convoluted. In the Phenomenology we encounter art exclusively as the religion of art. The reciprocal connection, which is seen by Hegel between art and religion, makes the systematic question of a transition really difficult. From the fact that he grants a distinctive status to the Greek ‘religion of art’ in his philosophy of history it does in no way follow that this is a narrow classicist judgement of art. One only has to think of the Hegelian appraisal of the Dutch. In contrast to this, it makes sense to discuss explicitly the transition from art and thus mainly from poetry to philosophy – and this means: to speculative thought. This happens [228], it appears, in many places in Hotho’s edition of the Aesthetics lecture. Thus, we must shed new light on the pastness on art by taking this transition as our point of departure. I have repeatedly advocated the thesis that the theory of the pastness of art really means the liberation of art as art,5 for which I had initially linguistic evidence on my side. The language tells us that it is first in Hegel’s time that the bonds between crafts of all kinds and ‘art’ had been loosened to such an extent that the qualification ‘fine’ [schöne], thus the phrase ‘fine art’, became superfluous. If one wishes to illuminate the thesis of the pastness of art from this standpoint, one must fundamentally reflect upon the fact that Hegel’s statements about the transition from one art form to another must also mean something about the sense of the end of art and about the pastness of art, for even these statements aim towards such a ‘transition’. Then we learn that these pronouncements are not pronouncements about the course of events but about

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the order followed in philosophical reflection. These pronouncements are about the truth which philosophical cognition is able to discover in the realities which appear. Thus, the question of the pastness of art stands in line with, for example, the position of architecture at the beginning or the position of poetry at the end in the system of arts – and ultimately with the familiar problem of the end of history. This is a highly instructive analogy. No one can doubt that the end of history could only mean that no new higher principle can supersede the ideal of ‘freedom of all’. It does not mean that history has come to an end but rather that history can no longer go on as a progress in the sense of the consciousness of freedom. Indeed, perhaps history should simply not be seen as progress, but rather as a never consummated effort to bring into actuality what would correspond to the self-consciousness of freedom. It can thus be said that history has ever since played itself out entirely as the ‘external’ happening, with all its vicissitudes, setbacks and illusory advances, in the struggle over the freedom of all. There seems to me to be something similar about the end of art as Hegel asserts it in his Aesthetics. It says something in favour of philosophical reflection but nothing about the future as that which happens. It can only mean – and Hegel indeed also states it – that art no longer fulfils the highest need of the spirit. It is only the sensuous appearance of the divine and not the divine. It is not the divine which has arisen through revelation in the Christian church as the true God and the true salvation. It is not the divine, which, as [229] Hegel deems, at the end of a long effort at comprehending, has simultaneously reached the form of the concept in speculative thought. The pastness of art, if understood in this way, means, for this reason, certainly not the end of art, but only implies that art henceforth exercises its function within a higher claim to truth. This subordination in fact determined the early history of Western art immediately after the advent of Christianity. Art acquired its legitimacy in the painstaking struggles against the Jewish proscription of images and the Christian revelation, that is, the Church’s claim to salvation. In Hegel’s Aesthetics it has the general name of ‘romantic’ art, which means that it aims for a higher form of truth. Here we may recall what romantic art fundamentally was in Hegel’s eyes. The romantic world, as he says, has truly carried out only one absolute work: the spread of Christianity. This novelty that Christianity has arrived in the world and brought about the end of classical art, means for romantic art – that is, for the most manifold forms of artistic creation – that its truth is romantic in the sense that it is no more the absolute truth, no more the concordance between appearance and being. For this reason, painting and music, to a particular degree – and, obviously, above all poetry – are forms of spiritualization [Vergeistigung] and desensualization [Entsinnlichung], even if their own form of presentation again is and remains that of the ‘sensuous appearance of the idea’. What Hegel calls romantic art thus encompasses the whole history of art since the advent of Christianity and this history of art is simply characterized by the fact that, in it, no absolute work of art appears, that is to say, no work in which the divine itself is sensuously there as the forms of the gods were in classical art. Herein lies, at the same time, the fact that the history of art henceforth will unfold into a manifold of finite forms, in which the spirit of a people expresses itself at each time artistically on the basis of its own specific experience of the world and in light of Christian revelation and thought.

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The history of art, which unfolds here, strives towards an end in some sense, which can be characterized by the present in which Hegel writes. This end, which Hegel also calls ‘the dissolution of the romantic art form’, is entirely the liberation of artistic energy, the complete detachment from pre-existing substantial contents in relation to which the artist previously had no free choice. However, to traverse the whole field of worldly experience in artistic creation, which one could also call with Hegel the romantic self-transcendence of art, means, in Hegel’s words: just as much [230] a retreat of human beings into themselves, a descent into their own bosom, by way of which art peels itself away from all strict confinement to a definite set of contents and of interpretations, making the humanus [‘human’] its new holy being, namely, the heights and depths of the human spirit [Gemüt] as such and what is universally human in terms of joys and sorrows, strivings, actions and destinies.

In the context of this enthusiastic depiction, it is explicitly said that art is no longer confined to presenting only that in which it is absolutely at home at one of its definite stages. Rather, it can present everything in which the human being has the capacity to be at home (II, p. 235). This is how Hegel can say: ‘to be bound to a specific content and a kind of representation which is only appropriate for this matter, is for today’s artist a thing of the past. Art has thereby become a free instrument, which artists can consistently handle according to their subjective skills and in relation to any content, of whatever kind’. In the same context this means: ‘today there is no matter that, in and for itself, would stand over and above this relativity’. Here, the emphasis lies on ‘in and for itself ’. Clearly, this should mean that it is not even possible to revive again in free spontaneity the past forms of artistic formation. Hegel spoke clearly enough against this delusion of renewal in his well-known criticism of becoming Catholic on artistic grounds and of inhabiting a religious ‘worldview’ which is no longer really common and comprehensive. This may echo the talk of the pastness of art but this would be obfuscating. It is certainly true that even the Christian art of the Middle Ages, in Hegel’s view, is something ‘past’ and is not capable of being renewed out of romantic nostalgia. In fact, the talk of the pastness of art is not about the terminal stage of romantic art. For this reason, it is wrong to simply push the sense of this talk in the direction of an end of art in general. Rather, there is no doubt for Hegel that art is something ‘past’ and yet we can hope that, in its whole universal reality, it will again and again create something new. Now, despite all of his speculative distance from brute facts and within the expectations and hopes of his time, Hegel as a contemporary certainly could not refrain from drawing more specific conclusions from his thought. The standpoint of the absolute spirit is quite difficult to take for the humanly conditioned [Bedingtheit]. This is why he was deeply dismayed by the events of the July Revolution of 1830. We cannot imagine how he would have reacted to the events of the twentieth century and its ‘advances’ towards the ‘freedom of all’. Similarly, we should also treat his incidental judgements about the present and the future of art only in a historical perspective. It

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remains significant that the chapter mentioned above, [231] ‘The End of the Romantic Art form’ (II, pp. 228 ff.), which expresses his present time the most, does not at all occupy a privileged place. Hegel holds that the objective humour which he conceded to the poetic creation of his time and which refers back to his sharp criticism of the subjective humour of Jean Paul, was realized in Rückert’s Arabian and Persian depictions and in Goethe’s West-East Divan. What he praises in them certainly resonates well with what he described in the newly unshackled arbitrariness of the artistic wit freed of all bonds to tradition. Yet, it remains astounding how the time-bound nature of Hegel’s judgement of art misses the mark about its future – the future to which we today look back upon as our past – far less than, let us say, his historical and philosophical dream of the final goal of history in the freedom of all. If one really wishes to expand to a fully universal concept the talk of objective humour, whose significance was so starkly emphasized by Henrich,6 one finds a stunning degree of agreement with regard to our present and its expectations of the future. Hegel’s views are confirmed not only by the historicism of style, not only by the multiplicity of schools and trends, not only by the particularity of the communities which are always formed around any creating artist. What is still more important is this: that which we call historical consciousness unites the artist and the art enthusiasts in a constant experience, even of the art of times gone by and of foreign cultural worlds. Fundamentally, all of this is already anticipated in Hegel’s characterization of his ‘day’. If letting the substantial emerge out of the accidental is still humour, then it is certainly the abiding determination of all art in the times of unconditioned freedom of invention and daring experiment. By contrast, in Hegel’s presentation, the art of ‘today’ is again only a form of transition in which poetry holds the clearly seen key position. We know that Hegel admired Goethe’s reflected form of poetry in the WestEast Divan, which only much later was to ascend to global literary success. In addition, if he had experienced the rediscovery of the baroque and allegory in our century and all the other forms in which modern art and anti-art are intertwined in an intellectual web, he would have perhaps made the mistake of seeing a historical transition also in the transition from poetry to philosophy. However, the end of art does not let itself be dictated in this way.

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Conceptual Painting? On Arnold Gehlen’s Time-Pictures (1962)1 [305] Whosoever has visited an art gallery in which the development of painting in our century is well documented, such as the Salon des Beaux Arts in Paris, will share with Gehlen a first impression, the shock and the pensiveness, which befall the one entering the rooms where the works of Picasso and Juan Gris can be seen. What happened there in those works? How did we arrive at such a ‘cubist fragmentation of form?’ What is the provenance of the suggestive power which comes from these paintings, despite all alienation, and, like a revolution, represents the onset of a new epoch, when a new era seems to begin? What is this event, which cannot be forgotten? Gehlen speaks very beautifully of the ghostly silence which has come over paintings since post-impressionism. ‘The unbroken meaning of a painting, its objective sense, makes it capable of speaking. By contrast, an ornament devoid of sense is completely silent. Something of this silence seeps into the painting [. . .]. Abstract paintings are completely speechless and mute, they can, like those of Mondrian, radiate a rather brooding silence’.2 We find ourselves in the hands of a skilful guide when reading Gehlen’s book. Gehlen not only attempts to provide a historico-sociological explanation, but also engages throughout with the perspectives from art theory, revealing a familiarity with modern painting which demands respect. The passion with which he confronts the innumerable literature of commentaries and their superficial flights into ideas, associations and analogies is only exceeded by the passion with which he follows the gullible and naïve view which continued to locate the beginning and end of all aesthetic thought in the romantic aesthetics of genius. Accordingly, he reacts with hostility to the ‘expressionistic confusion’, in which he sees an emotional regression. It cannot be said that these passions are without motivation and, as such, must compromise the clarity of the findings. Neither does it serve us to be told [306] that Einstein or Niels Bohr was striving towards the ‘explanation’ of modern paintings – and, let us note, by commentators who understand modern physics just as little as we ourselves, that is to say, nothing. Nor will we be persuaded that the late bourgeois cult of genius of the nineteenth century offers an appropriate interpretation of the artistic productions in the industrial society of our century. And we obviously will not be for two reasons. First, the development of aesthetics based on the concept of genius had in fact always been a one-sided view of the reality of artistic ability. Second, the forms of artistic production itself in the age of jet planes, mass society and serial production

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could have changed from what they were in the age of the stagecoach and the itinerant journeymen. The fundamental idea to which Gehlen’s analysis leads is that of the increasing rationality of the painting. According to Gehlen, the choice of this point of view has, first of all, a methodological reason. The applicability of sociological representations, he says, increases with the degree of the inner rationality of a theme (p.  14). Now, the history of painting exhibits a development in this direction. The connotations, which fill religious art, already become superfluous in realist art to the extent that realist art aims at the mere recognition of what is presented as in Dutch still life, for instance. The new painting undoes even this moment of meaning and restricts itself entirely to the ‘rationality of the eye’. What this means in concreto is first illustrated in Konrad Fiedler’s theory of art, who opposes the complete sensuous appropriation of the thing to the function of the concept dominating practical life. Gehlen then gives an excellent analysis of the early development of painting, which he describes as the conflict between the object of the painting and the surface of the painting. He shows convincingly what the logic of this development consists of: the surface of the painting finally wins the upper hand in this conflict with the object suffering from deformation, if not just complete dissolution. On the whole, I find this analysis aesthetically well grounded. Certainly, the distinction between idealistic [ideell] and realist art is not entirely as compelling as is its opposition to the art which is free of all connotations. For, whether it is a matter of muthos [‘story’] or so-called reality, all mimēsis [‘imitation’] has the sense of recognition, even that of muthos and religious tradition, as Aristotle already clearly saw.3 We will get back to this again under the keyword ‘reflection’. Nonetheless, the severity of the rift, which occurs with the cubist experiment [307], is only slightly mitigated by the logic of the development of painting described by Gehlen. It is another idea, which is decisive here for Gehlen, whose aesthetic justification he exposes with verve but, I believe, exaggerates to the point of implausibility. It is his plea for the peinture conceptuelle [‘conceptual painting’], which is only supposed to be the result of modern painting. Gehlen, accordingly, follows Kahnweiler’s book on Juan Gris.4 The painting is no longer supposed to imitate the visible world but ‘to create a structure of signs from the inside out, so to speak’ (p. 78). In the process, he specifically advances the thesis that it is not convincing to derive cubism, as it is usually done, from Cézanne’s statement that everything in nature is modelled in accordance to the sphere, the cube and the cylinder. In fact, we must concede that it remains something revolutionary when Picasso gives up rendering in paintings that which is seen only from a single standpoint and embraces a script-like distortion of the ‘essential properties’ of things. It certainly seems to me a hardly convincing explanation to say that, in order to avoid the deformation, it is better to give up any imitation of nature. The script of this new faceted style remains a script for painting and thus with an intent to shock our immediate expectation from a painting. This is where Gehlen’s genuine interpretation comes in. He sees in the philosophy of neo-Kantianism an explanation of the cubist programme. Neo-Kantianism is the philosophy of the production of the object through thought, which – different from Kant – counts space and time as a priori categorial moments among the concepts

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of the understanding (the categories). Apart from the fact that this philosophical theory is only used by Kahnweiler to interpret cubism, the actual puzzle itself remains unsolved. There is in fact nothing to show that Picasso and Braque themselves shared this interpretation. The fact that according to neo-Kantianism, the concept of the thing is only a posited reference point (an ‘unending task’) does not explain in the slightest ‘many of the famous paradoxical innovations of cubism, for example, the technique of rendering in the same painting multiple aspects of the same thing simultaneously: one does not even presuppose the mere optical standpoint, but the thing itself, to whose essence it belongs to unfold from different sides’ (p. 88). The faceted style is thus to be seen as the practice of Husserl’s theory of ‘adumbration’ when it comes to the object of perception! What an absurd idea to think that cubism has brought the synthesis of apperception into the painting and that neo-Kantianism, which is anything but revolutionary, would engender the greatest revolution in European painting since Giotto just before it quietly faded away. Nothing could be more implausible.5 [308] How does Gehlen arrive at such a fantastical conjecture? Obviously, on account of the thesis of the peinture conceptuelle. According to this thesis, the revolutionary new approach of cubism must ‘be construed around a fundamental philosophical idea’, which was in turn first used synthetically by Juan Gris (Mathématique picturale [‘pictorial mathematics’]). Gehlen indeed says: ‘it is clear as day that we have here very high levels of thoughtful reflection transposed into art’. This statement is certainly too ambiguous to be clear by itself. What is ‘to transpose’ supposed to mean here? Incidentally, already the reference to Mallarmé’s influence seems to me to indicate indirectly that the thesis of the neo-Kantian origin of cubism cannot be supported in this manner. Or is Mallarmé’s alchemy of words also supposed to have a neo-Kantian origin? Now, an infelicitous application cannot yet simply decide upon the thesis in question, particularly when the puzzle really demands its solution. We will have to examine Gehlen’s other argument. His chief witnesses are Paul Klee and Kandinsky as we today get to see ‘paintings which are found most empirical, remaining totally unclaimed by theory(!) (p. 96). Somewhat patronizingly, Gehlen recognizes that such art could be appropriated ‘purely artistically’, even without any familiarity with theory, but this, he believes, comes down to a question of being content with little (p. 97). However, there is a misunderstanding here. That it is possible – and if possible also legitimate as a task – to investigate the connections between this art and philosophical theories is certainly not the contentious point. What is contentious is whether such connections exist in the sense claimed, namely in the sense that the principles are what come first and by a kind of varying application of these principles, the subjective fantasy of the artist would subsequently overwhelm these principles. It could indeed also be the case [309] that these ‘principles’ themselves, even when presented in an authentic commentary, were not what came first, but the secondary formulation of a new optical and painterly ‘vision’. Nothing of the cult of genius and of emotionalism would need to follow from this. Painterly ‘visions’ can spring from highly prosaic experiences of working with colours, brush and canvas. No one disputes that these visions are composed in the head. What about Paul Klee? We have his early diaries. Yet, Gehlen interprets his work by using the Bauhaus lectures of 1921/22 and later works almost exclusively. Should

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it not be a reasonable assumption that these lectures express the theoretical need for reflection of a painter who has found his style (and that they are not the reflections through which he first became Paul Klee)? The fact that his reflections agree with many of the things which Gestalt psychology has investigated does not decide anything about it. Even Gehlen does not go so far here as to make Gestalt psychology the prime mover of his views. To make this claim would be chronologically impossible. What is still more important is that Paul Klee the painter manifestly knows much more than Gestalt psychology. Besides, Gehlen himself emphasizes that Paul Klee ‘avoided any rigorous geometrizing’ (p. 107). It also seems to me that his interpretation of ‘Tendril’ [‘Ranke’] with the means of Gestalt psychology is hardly a success. The concept of the transposition of a form stands and falls with the strict identity of a form. By contrast, Klee’s painting stands and falls with the fact that such an identity does not exist. It must also be asked what Gestalt psychology could teach a creator of Paul Klee’s standing. Perhaps the abridging expression [‘abkürzende Aussage’]? ‘The idea of “abridging” signifies a wholly authentic invention of Gestalt psychology’ (sic). Gehlen can, however, in all honesty only mean that Gestalt theory has formulated something which not just the painter but we all already ‘know’ when we see something. It seems to me implausible in the highest degree that he has the right description when he writes that Paul Klee ‘found, but at the same time modified’ the Gestalt laws of perception. Is it not rather the case that Klee eventually abstracted much from the countless attempts and variations in his artistic work? In any case, I would prefer – or would this be too undemanding? – to speak here with Gehlen of Klee’s ‘experimental technique’ (p. 105). But, then, I would understand that the goal of all his experiments was the composition of paintings and not the knowledge of Gestalt laws. Even for a structure as hyperrational as the modern technique of musical composition, something similar is true. In musical composition too, as in the case of the painter, what matter are the qualities of the whole. It is with those that the musician works, for example in instrumentation, which is not ‘calculated’, however hyper-rational the principle of construction may be (as in twelve-tone music). One should not confuse [310] the rationality of the material out of which the composition is made with the rationality of the composition itself. For the thesis of the peinture conceptuelle, it is now particularly awkward that Gehlen considers his additional witnesses, Kandinsky and Mondrian, as themselves being only interpretable psychologically because their ‘conceptual art’ seems to him so ‘private’. Kandinsky’s theoretical works may go in the direction of a ‘harmonic theory of painting’ but, according to Gehlen’s own assertion, he took ‘only a few steps’ along this path because ‘his artistic practice’ contains ‘a component which is autistic to an extremely high degree’. With regard to the thesis of conceptual art, this seems to me a clear petitio principii. Furthermore, the aesthetic and hermeneutic success of the effort, in Kandinsky’s case, of making the juxtaposition of his production and his commentary on his own work methodically fruitful (p. 116) is, in Gehlen’s eyes, highly disappointing: ‘someone invents a language, for himself alone, which appears to him so logical and clear, that he begins to communicate in it: the others do not understand a word [. . .]’. How is it with the testimony presented by Mondrian? He derived his ascetic art of surfaces and lines itself from cubism through theoretical reflection and elevated

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it to a cosmic metaphysics. Yet, Gehlen himself seems to be very far from following Mondrian into such a derivation. ‘With the direct disclosure of the rhythm and the reduction of natural forms and colours, the subject loses its importance in visual art’. This clear expression of Mondrian is surprisingly turned on its head: ‘he shows how henceforth from alien heights and depths, sources and abysses, subjectivity streams into art’. This obviously means that even in Mondrian we find a ‘completely private inspiration’. Are all of these testimonies for the peinture conceptuelle? and not rather for the self-contradiction, which lies in it? The key to Gehlen’s exceptionally cryptic argumentation seems to me to be his concept of ‘reflective art’. He understands by it what is specifically new in modern painting: ‘to arrive at the modern situation of chronic reflectiveness simply through painting’ (p. 62). This happens either when the painting is ‘flattened’ by constraining its objectivity or by thwarting the recognition of the object itself, for example, in the Surrealists. Both would be paths to ‘reflective art’. Gehlen presents a whole series of effects in modern painting, which he interprets as according with the chronic condition seen in modern art of adopting a reflective stance. He means that for us immediate and uninterrupted expression has become unbearable. Even our love for the naïve art of the past does not speak against this, for it is only by way of contrast that this naïve art has become ‘reflectively significant’. Against this, I would like to recall that the aesthetic attitude [311] has always been ‘reflective’ from the beginning. Kant speaks rightly of ‘reflective taste’ in contradistinction to immediate sensible preferences. This ‘aesthetic’ reflectiveness does not seem to me to be connected at all to what I have myself called the ‘standpoint of art’ when I characterized the turn to the nineteenth century.6 The Attic theatregoers, who at once celebrated a religious festival and functioned as artistic judges, satisfied their reflective pleasure fully and in the most diverse degrees when watching the ‘play of muthos’ on the stage. I am unable to see any fundamental difference between the Attic dramatist and a poet so permeated by reflection as Ezra Pound, who composed out of thousand poetic forms and formulae. Between the two, only the presuppositions required for understanding and enjoying the work have become more complicated. The pre-existing form of the raw material is of a more artful kind so that the composition always has something of a montage. The aesthetic pleasure of reflection which one finds therein does not seem to me to have principally changed. Even the great epoch of European representational painting, which emerges with the Renaissance, presents a similar phenomenon of spiritual pleasure. Whatever the differences in the status of the paintings and whatever their connection to the need for splendour and ornamentation (in the church and in the court), they remained of universal religious significance. It thus seems questionable to me whether the reflectiveness of modern artistic pleasure is, as such, of a higher degree. I would rather say that the element within which reflection moves has become different, poorer in meaning and hence more formal. I also do not believe that the ‘naïveté’ of old images in normal cases is the object of reflective pleasure taken in naïveté. Will not the particular intertwining of the tensions of form and content, which structures these paintings, become the exclusive object of pleasure? Gehlen very rightly distinguishes the modern effects of the art of trompe-l’oeil, just as the baroque effects of a Tieopolo, from all crude intentions to

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deceive, defending them as purely aesthetic illusion. These modern effects represent, just as those of the collage, a particular technical form of this general aesthetic effect of disrupting the expectations of viewers. Such a disruption of the expectation of the viewers most certainly belongs to all aesthetic effects which are stimulative. It was already the case in ancient drama. It is not only today that ‘one selects the means and effects purposefully in opposition to what is prevalent’ (p. 157). In the aesthetic realm, the transition into the antithesis is least of all a Hegelian invention. As it appears, Polish and Russian aestheticians, whom I unfortunately came to know only through Wellek and Warren’s account, were already aware of the aesthetic law of effect [Wirkungsgesetz] decades ago. [312] This law is present here only in a particular instance of application, specific to a technical civilization.7 I am also doubtful as to whether the process of thought undertaken under the keyword ‘relief ’ represents in the right dimensions what is specific to modern art. In another place, Gehlen showed very correctly the kind of ‘relief ’ the existence of a supporting tradition presents.8 This is obviously described from the standpoint of a lack of such a tradition. Thus, it also appears to me that the thesis of relief through the deconstruction [Abbau] of meaning, which characterizes modern art, is always thought only in its opposition to the century long romanticism, which sought relief from the prose of life through the poetic transfiguration into ‘the ideal realm’. So long as the unbroken tradition of the culture of antiquity and Christianity was determinant, no one demanded even of art a higher meaning or indeed a new mythology. What was demanded was the ingenious presentation of the age-old familiar and valid contents, which one inhabited. This in no way provided a particular relief from the pressure of reality. I therefore leave it open as to whether the category of relief for that matter possesses the anthropological universality which Gehlen claims for it. Certainly, he provided much evidence for it. Yet, can the character of excess, which belongs to what is alive, be satisfactorily grasped through the mechanical equivalence between pressure and relief? Especially when tradition is understood primarily in its function as relief, it remains the peculiarity of modern art that, within the poverty of tradition of our romantic-unromantic world, it must relieve us not only from the prose of reality but, in addition, also from the ideologically stressful nature of its romantic transfiguration. What also speaks in favour of this, it seems to me, is that the rediscovery of the Baroque in the last decades goes together with the deconstruction of the sentimental and psychologizing art of the nineteenth century coming from ‘the modern’. I would thus like to put a slightly different emphasis on the matter, as I gladly acknowledge, under the influence of the insights conveyed by Gehlen in terms of the aesthetics and the sociology of art. The guiding idea of the ‘rationality of painting’ is in my view distorted if rationality is here supposed to mean the constructivist composition which starts with principles in the sense of the application of a preestablished theory. The comparison drawn by Gehlen to Descartes’ return to the idées simples [‘simple ideas’] – which, incidentally, is itself a mere theoretical formulation of the new method wielded by Galileo – leads, in my opinion, to a false assessment of the relationship between theory and its application in the realm of painting. Constructivist composition is certainly a fundamental act of [313] modern technology. Pre-calculation, pre-fabrication and montage have another side as the corresponding processes in

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manual work. It is in the things produced that the modes of production can be ‘seen’, even for example in the style of architecture. How could painting not reflect something of this? In the same way, how could self-interpretation also not suggest something of this? At any rate, the main thesis of modern painting needing commentaries seems extremely doubtful to me. That is, does this thesis really testify to the priority of theory over artistic production? Must one not be distrustful of such a thesis when such a theory – as in the case of Kandinsky and Mondrian – brings about not the comprehensibility but the incomprehensibility of their paintings? The critique of the romantic concept of genius seems to me to fall into the opposite extreme. Are we supposed to take it seriously when, even in the case of Franz Marc, Gehlen believes in an influence of Jakob von Uexküll’s theory of the environment? And this, on the grounds that ‘otherwise, one does not arrive at the idea of painting animals as they are, as they themselves see the world and feel their being’ (p. 144)? As if he had himself not shown very convincingly the kind of inner-aesthetic development which took place when, for example, contemporary painting (Picasso among others) had already abandoned centring the space of the painting through the point of view of the observer? Gehlen seems to me many a time to confuse the ‘logic of the process’ with the logic of the deductive theory. Could he have otherwise said of Macke (in opposition to Marc) that ‘in him, however, no logic of process can be detected, in him it is about experiments’? Is this really an opposition? It is precisely here that I would like to modify the emphasis and assert the primacy of the experiment and the logic resulting from it. Gehlen himself cites, evidently with approval, the words of Max Ernst: as the final superstition, as the sad residue of the creation myth, there remains for the Western cultural circle the fairy tale of the artist’s creativity. It belongs to the first revolutionary acts of Surrealism to have attacked this myth with the right means and in the sharpest form insofar as it insisted with full force upon the purely passive role of the ‘author’ in the mechanism of poetic inspiration [. . .] (p. 155)

This statement seems to me to be valid in principle, well beyond Surrealism. ‘Expression of personality’ is a way of speaking which is a completely naïve anachronism. It could not have been said before 1750 and could not be employed meaningfully anymore after 1920. Thus, I completely endorse what Gehlen says about the experimental element in the spirit of our century. What he suggests about the Italian concetto [‘concept’] and the pre-linguistic sphere is excellent. Yet, I again do not understand him when he cites a self-portrait by Bernard Schultze (p. 191) and thinks that the ‘calculated utilisation of chance events’, of which the painter [314] speaks, increases the ‘scientific nature of the composition’ of the painting. If chance accidents give rise to new chance events until it ‘clicks’, then the accent still rests on the fact that the individual chance event ‘creates new chance events in a completely unpredictable way (thus, not calculated)’. I would also venture to doubt that such a statement shows ‘how the old emotional wellsprings are drying up’. As if inspiration did not always appear somewhat like this and only the thinking about it sounded so completely different?

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It is along these lines that I would like to reformulate what Gehlen’s investigation yields for the sociology of art. In a disillusioned industrial world, a disillusioned way of thinking came close to the insight into the real modes of artistic production. This does not exclude certain interdependencies but would mean less a constructivist control of artistic production by theory than perhaps attesting to the new correspondence between painting and the expectation from painting. At any rate, it seems to me that it is significant for the existence of individuals in modern industrial society that they stay connected and know themselves to be connected. They experience the compelling logic of these connections as a chain reaction of chance events. Should that not be reflected in the art of our age? This would imply that the specificity of these modern ‘time-pictures’ wholly emerges only when one – incidentally by following Gehlen’s beautiful findings – frees them from the ideal of the scientific nature of the composition into which they have been forced and when one measures modern painting – whether or not it is peinture conceptuelle – against the old, ageless standard according to which painting is not in need of a commentary.

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On the Reading of Buildings and Paintings (1979)1 [331] Taking as my point of departure the rather plain and trivial observation that any statement or utterance is essentially only understood if it can be understood as the answer to a possible question, I have analysed the structure of understanding in terms of question and answer. This structure is already to be found in a rudimentary form among certain followers of the Hegelian way of thinking, particularly in Collingwood. I have continued from there and unveiled the dialectic involved in the relationship of question and answer.2 This dialectic shatters the illusion that understanding is about a method which one employs. There is a peculiar interplay in the challenge posed by what is other, by what is not understood. The one seeking to understand what is not understood responds by interrogating it and trying to understand it as a response. This interplay happens not only between the I and the you and that which we are saying to one another, but also between the ‘work’ and me, to whom it says something and who would always like to know what it says. I have placed the retrieval of the question at the forefront in this structure of understanding. Does this general structure of the question and the dialectic of the question and answer suffice as a starting point for reflecting on the experience of works of art? It seems quite unclear how the dialogical structure of the question and answer can be suitable at all for dealing with the work of art. What are indeed the questions raised in a work of art? And further: what answers are elicited from us in our understanding and in such a way that we would finally understand the work of art itself as the answer to such questions? I would like to present some concrete examples and then draw my theoretical conclusions from them. I have been in the cathedral of St. Gallen many times. I was struck there by the peculiar spatial impact of this architectural work, which results from a nave with a considerably strengthened crossing and the chancel being joined together in a uniquely intriguing and grandiose form of unity. The nave and the crossing: this is obviously the great architectural question, which Western church architecture [332] tried to answer over the centuries. In the course of the history of our Western architecture, any solution to the question of how to integrate the idea of a central structure and the idea of the nave is, it seems to me, what the art historians have in their way called ‘architectural ideas’. Without a doubt, it is a question which, in the instant we become aware of it and, so to speak, pose it, makes the structure before which we stand speak. It gives us an answer. The answer of the St. Gallen church is now a very belated answer, and, within the history of architecture, even a particularly

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tardy one, but its greatness still convinces any visitor. It gathers the tension between the nave and the central structural element once more into a unity, almost like a final recapitulation. Yet, it does it in such a way that space formally shifts for those who walk through it, as if it could be read twice. When we enter the space of the church, we experience this tension like an answer. The experience we have seems to me a good illustration of what interpretation is. What art historians bring with them from out of their knowledge of the history of architecture and style ultimately only leads to an interpretation of something we all sense and even understand in a bodily way when we walk through these arches. Or let us take another example. I remember the famous painting by Giorgione, which hangs in the Academy in Venice. Unfortunately, we can only see the original behind glass because the colours are very much compromised. This makes it quite interesting: no human being knows what is really represented in the painting. We naturally recognize the individual details. There stands a young man, there we have a mother with a child, and behind them there is a storm over a city, whose battlements and rooftops are visible but appear to be without life. The painting is called ‘The Tempest’, but what it really means, what is represented in it, has been an open object of discussion right up to this day. Is it a scene belonging to a genre or is it an allegorical composition? In any case, I would like to present the various possibilities of retrieving the question in relation to this painting and its puzzling nature. In the course of our theoretical demonstration, it would be helpful if we could all collectively think of this painting, which also represents, through its colouring, a great turning point in the history of Renaissance painting. The questions which have been posed up until now clearly point in two different directions. What Giorgione’s painting really represents is for us obscure. This naturally implies: if someone were to convince us that so and so is represented there, then we would have understood something which we had not understood so far. It would be a hermeneutic gain. However, I would like to say bluntly that it would be a very modest [333] hermeneutic gain. Does the task of understanding this painting, a masterwork in the art of painting, really consist in interpreting it iconographically? Is it not rather the atmosphere, which lets the mysterious landscape speak, that which is ‘understood’ by us all when we are, as it were, electrified by the sight of this painting? Is it not what constitutes for the art historian the significance of this painting within the course of the Western history of the painting? If it is the case, what is the question which we have to retrieve so that we could say: now, I have understood it better? How do these two questions go together – the question which we call the iconographic question in aesthetics (literally: the description of the icon, of what is represented, of what is reproduced) and the other question: what does the painting ‘say’ to us, even if we do not know what the iconographic content of the painting is, as in this case? It is certainly the case that the painting by Giorgone leaves a deep impression on anyone who has ever seen it. Even in reproduction, one senses something mysterious, something complex which does not let one go. Many observers, for example, point to the city empty of people in the background, others speak of the lack of relationship between the nicely rendered youth and the mother

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with the child, who looks towards us. About the youth we know that Giorgone had originally intended a young woman and this came to light in the meantime with the help of modern technology. What does the slanted stump of the pillar mean? Here we do not need to ask what it means. We immediately understand what it means. We recognize it immediately as the sensible image of what has been halved, of the finite, of the mutilated. What does this well-known symbol say here? Or the contrast between the Arcadian foreground and the storm looming in the distance and apparently not threatening? I am making us aware of these questions about the image in order to lay bare the theoretical question: what is it that we are trying to understand here? Would the solution to the iconographic puzzle answer all these questions? What other questions would we like to see answered if our concern is to understand this work of art? The metaphor ‘it begins to speak’ comes to mind. It is the easiest definition of what hermeneutics is in the realm of art and history. It is the art of letting something speak again. It is crystal clear that for the art of letting something speak we presuppose that it does not speak or does not express itself sufficiently without our effort. The most tangible example illustrating the effort of letting something speak again is when we read something written or printed, which has the structure of a text. Yet, we call something a ‘literary’ work, a poetic work only when it demands still much more than the ability to read. Now, the elementary demand [334] the work makes on us, of being able to read, is not so trivial as it appears. Simply being able to read is not yet ‘really’ being able to read, and this is generally true. It is also true of the work of the plastic arts that one must learn to see it and that it is not in the naïve gaze at the visible whole which stands before us that the work is readily understood, that is to say: experienced as an answer to a question. We will have to ‘read’ it; we will have indeed to spell it until we are able to read it. The same is true for architecture: we must ‘read’ it. This means that we must not only look at it like a photographic reproduction. We must approach it, go around it, go into it and in a stepwise manner, build it for ourselves, so to speak. We must take advantage of these analogies between a work of literature and the creations of the plastic arts.3 Such analogies incarnate the great wisdom of a universal not yet formulated. This can be aptly illustrated on a classical example of the great philosophical world literature. It is well known that Plato’s great dialogue on the ideal state was intended as an analogy for coming to the realization that justice is the highest virtue of the soul. Plato shows us the ideal state as a task of construction in order to make the ‘constitution’ of the soul visible to us. Soul and state should be rubbed against each other as two firestones so that the spark of understanding may burst forth. In this way, the literary work of art and the work of plastic art should be rubbed against each other a little so that we can set out the task which occupies us in its true breadth. What is it that must be understood? What question is it, on the basis of which a ‘work’ can be understood as an answer? We are in an age in which there are so many remarkable artistic productions in the field of informal and objectless art or however we may designate it. In such an age, there should be no dispute that, when looking at the work, it is a moment of understanding when we recognize something in such a way that we know it as that which it ‘represents’.4 For instance, the individual details

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of Giorgione’s painting were all known to us and self-evident even when we could not answer the question: what is happening here, what is represented here? – and all the more the real question: what addresses us here? The question is: how will we overcome this primacy of what is recognizable in the painting? For it is clear: something is far from being a depiction simply because it reproduces something. Reproduction in a commercial catalogue is certainly no painting. In the painting we have a definite manner of what is being represented by way of which what is represented does not appear as a mere roster item from [335] a collection of what can be encountered in reality. Rather what is represented appears suddenly as something singular in its kind. We are all familiar with the hushed complaints we have when a master varies the motif of a painting too often: one too many paintings of those sunflowers, one too many paintings of those peasant shoes make it difficult for us. I do not want to say that this would always be a legitimate critique. Yet, it will not be quite easy for the observer to realize truly what is unique in each of the paintings by van Gogh which shows a pair of peasant shoes or sunflowers. What is clear is that the painting is only understood when the depiction is no longer subsumed under the context of understanding associated with peasant shoes or sunflowers (or indeed under the context of understanding ‘Ah! Sunflowers again!’ or ‘Peasant shoes again!’). Instead, the painting is understood when the painting, in fulfilling its specific function of presenting, also lets the work speak at the same time and not only that which is represented. This is the problem: how do they go together? The fact that we recognize something as something implies that we indeed must recognize that what is objectively recognizable exercises a certain guiding function for penetrating a work. When, for example, the woodcuts of Dürer are shown on a projector in an auditorium, the magnification of the projection format already causes new difficulties for deciphering the work. Only when one has recognized what is presented does the play of black and white, of lines and surfaces attain its full cohesion. Even cubist portraits like those by a Picasso are intended to be deciphered in such a way. I think it cannot be denied that it is very often only in recognizing what is represented that a definite unifying function of the visual vocabulary used in the painting emerges (like the unifying meaning of discourse). There exists a particular connection between the iconographic component – at least, in its weakest potency, the recognition of the cognizable elements of the image – and the unity of the form of the work. It is a reciprocal relationship, which is like a peculiar art of reading. For how is it when we are reading? Let us return to the linguistic text again. In this case, reading is not such that we first spell out the words. As we know, the child who is learning to read cannot yet read. This can be seen clearly while reading something out.5 Most adults can also not do it. This has its good reasons: we can only read out what we also understand. If in silent reading we suddenly cannot go along with the text, we indeed stumble too. If while reading out without understanding, we continue to read on, a person other than us can absolutely not understand it either. This is a sure proof of the fact that in reading out, even in a reading done really silently, [336] everything that is absorbed in such an articulated manner ultimately coalesces into the concrete

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unity of understanding. Does the iconographic content of a painting only belong to the letters? How do we learn to read? How do we learn to understand? In reading we stumble, the self-evidence of reading further escapes us, we must go back because manifestly a horizon of anticipation has not been fulfilled. This is like a shock. We go back. We read one more time, we rectify, we change the emphasis and all of those things that we all know bring something written or printed again to speech. It is well known that a literary work is distinguished by the fact that, through the manner in which it is linguistically formed, it itself prescribes and communicates to the ear how we have to read it, how we have to accentuate it. The so-called reading aids are secondary. Punctuation in the lyrical poem6 is really for weaklings. George was completely right when he preferred getting rid of it as much as possible. If one is not in a position to reconstruct how a verse is configured in its sound and meaning by applying on one’s own the right modulations, rhythms, phrasings, one does not understand it. From musical practice, we also know the role phrasing plays, which is not present in the composition and yet is in the music. Obviously in reading we are dealing with a process of constructing a temporal structure. The problem which has occupied me for decades is what reading actually is.7 Is it a kind of inner reproduction just as a theatre performance is a reproduction set up for the senses? No doubt, one will immediately say: no, obviously the theatre performance is a transposition into a new medium of reality. There is nothing of the sort in reading. In reading everything is just phantasy, inner products of the imagination which we produce through our reading. Yet, this is far from clear. Reading is no inner theatre performance. What is astounding is still the fact that the untiring productions of our imagination constantly churn inside like in a torrential stream so that I do not securely grasp first this and then the other image in its imagistic unity. The phenomenologist Roman Ingarden has nicely shown in the case of the novel the kind of evocative power which lies in the schematizing function of a description. This is such that even a minute description in a poetic work will be filled out differently by each reader and yet, what is described is the same thing. As trivial as it may sound, this has quite far-reaching theoretical consequences. It shows, namely, that what is evoked by words possesses a kind of virtuality. It has no reality, no [337] actualized determinacy, but rather it lets resonate in its virtuality a sort of space where possibilities of actualization play out. In this manner, ‘reading’ appears to me to be in fact a prototype for the demand faced by anyone considering works of art and indeed even works of the plastic arts. We have to read the work with this constant anticipation and going back, with this growing articulation, with these richer and richer sedimentations so that, at the end of such a reading performance, the structure in all its articulated richness coalesces again into the full unity of an utterance. Now, here is my thesis: interpretation is nothing other than reading. This is true in the sense that we can designate it, I think, very nicely with the German word ‘auslegen’ [‘laying out’]. ‘Interpretation’ is often translated or rendered as ‘Auslegung’ and it works. ‘Auslegen’ is a word which in its own speculative dimension already implies

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that we add nothing to reading. On the one side, it means that we are not importing anything into it. Recall Mephistopheles’ advice: ‘if you are not laying something out, you are reading something in [Legt ihr’s nicht aus, so legt was unter]. On the other side, it means that laying something out [Auslegen] essentially only draws out [herauslegt] what is already in there, in order to put it together [zusammenlegen] again. Naturally, this happens in a process which can be learned within certain limits as methodical knowledge and in methodical ways. Yet, it is itself not that simple. Rather, it represents a whole process of inner education until one begins to find the ‘correct’ points of view for observing a painting or a text. These points of view will be those which are really fruitful for understanding what is given in its context. Even when we practice our profession and proceed methodically as philologists, historians or art critics, the real task is to apply the method in a meaningful way and this cannot itself be communicated through method. Now, I draw the conclusion. What I have tried to show through the analogy of reading a text and of penetrating an artistic structure of another kind is that it is not so that a contemplator or observer apprehends an object in a kind of neutral way. Of this kind are the methodological aspects with which the human sciences work and whose use one has to learn. What is essential is still manifestly something different, namely, that we partially benefit from the configured sense we encounter. As a whole, this configured sense is obviously something which cannot be established and determined in its objective givenness. Rather, we are ‘taken in’ by it, as we say, in the meaning it points out, in the significance it radiates and which it distinguishes as a structure. We are drawn into a dialogue by the work, as it were. Thus, the structure of the dialogue is in no way far-fetched if we want to describe correctly the apparent confrontation between an artwork or a literary work [338], on the one hand, and its interpreter, on the other. This confrontation is in truth an interaction of participation. Just as in every dialogue, the other is always a cooperating listener in such a way that the horizon of what the other expects and from which he or she listens to me intercepts and modifies, so to speak, my own meaning-intention. In the analysis of the structure of dialogue we see how a common language emerges insofar as the speakers are transformed and find something common. This truly appears to me to be the case also for our engagement with ‘works’. The technical expression we are used to employing for this purpose is called communication. Communication does not mean: to seize, to grasp conceptually, to take over or to put at one’s disposal. It rather means participation in the common world, in which we understand ourselves. Plainly, what we call a work cannot be dissociated from this stream of common participation, through which the work addresses its time or its posterity. We all belong together to this world of mutual understanding and communication, in which many people and many things have something to say to us. Thus, the things which have something to say to us not only in the moment but also again and again belong indeed first and foremost to this world.

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Poetizing and Thinking as Reflected through Hölderlin’s Remembrance (1987) 1

[42] The theme ‘Poetizing and Thinking’ is familiar to everyone thanks to the fateful proximity between Hölderlin and Hegel, between the unfortunate great poet and the imperial thinker of the same epoch. Even the choice of the poem Remembrance for the discussion of a theme so fundamental cannot exactly be a surprise. In 1943, Heidegger finally offered a comprehensive interpretation of the poem.2 He was manifestly filled with the inner certainty that the fundamental stance of the late Hölderlin closely accorded with his own intellectual destiny, which had compelled him into his philosophical work, and possessed a formidable relevance. Now, all of Heidegger’s contributions on Hölderlin pursue the same end. He would like to wrench Hölderlin completely out of the neighbourhood of German Idealism, with which he was contemporary, and reveal him in his singularity. Stefan George saw in Hölderlin’s late hymns the seer of the future proper to our people and stated this already before the First World War, when he had become familiar with the deciphering of Hölderlin’s late works accomplished by Hellingrath. In a comparable way, Heidegger claimed Hölderlin as the singular symbolic precursor of his own intellectual concerns, which consisted in learning how to ask the question of being anew. Hölderlin’s poetic works were supposed to help him in his efforts to ‘overcome’ metaphysics. In his engagement with Hölderlin’s texts, Heidegger brought many elements to a new life. He followed substantial connections when he decisively placed the poem Remembrance in the series of the great late [43] hymns and interpreted it on the basis of this connection. With this classification he decided against Hellingrath’s sequencing. Hellingrath – not without substantiating it – had placed Remembrance in the series of ‘lyric’ poems.3 By contrast, Heidegger’s approach was to understand Hölderlin’s intellectual work as a unified vision encompassing a philosophy of history and a poetics of history. There is thus much to be learned about the internal consistency of Hölderlin’s work, which led to the so-called turn to the fatherland and the turn towards the homeland. In the poem Remembrance there is, however, only one explicit allusion to that which Hölderlin often placed at the centre of his hymnal creations. Only in the last verse of his Remembrance does he allude to the poet’s vocation. Heidegger takes his lead from this final phrase – ‘What remains however, the poets found’ – insofar as he wants to find the poets implied everywhere in the poem, as much in the mariners, to whom the northeasterly wind promises a prosperous journey as well as in the friends who have vanished and for whom the poet yearns. Heidegger somehow presupposes

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what will become explicit only at the end of the poem. In any case, the concluding verse is drawn out of the whole like a true conclusion. In reading this poem, I cannot, however, follow Heidegger entirely. The poem does not quite have the theme which we know from the hymns. Here there is absolutely no talk of the homeland or the return to what is one’s own, however often wandering, returning home and homeland are otherwise the focus in Hölderlin. In the poem Remembrance it is obviously about someone who has returned home from Bordeaux, overcome by the remembrance of the far south and now feeling lonely. This evidence was indeed what led Hellingrath to place Remembrance under the ‘lyrical poems in the narrow sense’. In this regard, I am totally in agreement with the fundamental thesis of Dieter Henrich’s contribution, which is already expressed in the title of his book: Der Gang des Andenkens [The Course of Remembrance].4 Admittedly, Henrich took a peculiar path for investigating this course. With utmost care and effort, he uncovered all kinds of interesting matters for cultural history. On the basis of his investigation, he reconstructed the Bordeaux of Hölderlin’s day as it really was and, from this, he sought to clarify as far as possible what is stated in the poem and its course of remembrance by using the localities of Bordeaux. This creates methodological difficulties for me. The question is whether even [44] such an apt reconstruction of the Bordeaux of that time can be helpful for understanding the poem. It is possible to ‘explain’ in this way the poetic transformation of factual realities in one instance or another. But whoever reads a poem does not want to see the poetic imagination and its freedom bound in the chains of a precise description of localities. What kind of readers wants an explanation of how they must imagine the pathways on the banks of the Garonne? They know it better. One can, if one wants, perhaps as an art historian, as Oskar Schürer did long ago,5 check the painting Bohemian Landscape by Caspar David Friedrich for its locations and places in order to show how the painter managed even to displace mountains. We are hardly surprised to hear this. Painters indeed compose reality just in the way they engage with it when they construct a still life. Even then, the painting is entirely a new composition and not a true copy of the construction. When it is even a matter of a ‘remembrance’, in which the ever transfiguring work of remembering fantasy lurks and when it is now even a matter of a poetic configuration, then in this case the real locality of Bordeaux is, to speak in an inversion of Plato: ‘thrice removed from the truth’. I would thus really hesitate to speak only of a veduta, even though it is itself a type of art, but one with the particular claim to be an almost portrait-like reproduction of the ‘view’ [Blick]. We will also not be really able to admire the portrait of an artist if we draw a comparison with the subject of the portrait for its similarity. In the case of poetry, this is even more beside the point. For, what comes to be presented in the poem finds in every reader a unique filling out [Ausfüllung].6 Here we can simply no longer talk of similarity without missing the art. I cannot see why one should be interested at all in the way Bordeaux looked at the time in order to understand a poem and the transfiguring power of a remembrance. Henrich may well reply that the violence of Heidegger’s interpretation, which misled him into understanding the mariners as the poets, covers up the true course of the poem. One must still see, Henrich would say, that the landscape of the beginning and the landscape of the concluding strophe are different. Clearly, none of us who heed

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their poetic ear can dispute this. What Henrich has provided through his minute inspection of the region is an almost self-evident confirmation that the concluding strophe means the landscape of the farewell of the merchant vessel thrust into the sea. [45] Again, I do not have the slightest interest in knowing what precise place is supposed to be meant where the Dordogne rages down on the ‘windy peaks’. The point in question here is not a point in the landscape but the point of farewell, whatever it may have been, and this is the point of remembrance emphasized here. Even if I go along the course of the poem between the two different points of the Garonne and thus take the talk of the mariners and then that of the poets literally, then I can certainly not understand the mariners as the poets, as Heidegger (and even Binder) did. Still, I would like to leave it open as to whether the new informative details about the localities, which Henrich had laid out with stupendous scholarship, can really resolve the fundamental question which Henrich poses to Heidegger. As in many other studies, Henrich wants to understand Hölderlin from the standpoint of his connections to German Idealism, to Fichte and to Hegel. To me, it seems that the poem Remembrance is not suitable to make a contribution to this controversial question. Cyrus Hamlin, as the organizer of the 1987 Colloquium at Yale, had himself produced a major work on the poem Remembrance.7 It represents in my eyes another methodological extreme in the interpretation of this text. I certainly agree with him against Henrich that the reference to reality, which Henrich tested, does not deliver anything for the interpretation of this poem. Hamlin, for his part, takes a completely different methodological route in that he seeks out ‘poetic inter-textual’ references. These at times become difficult for me to follow. Certainly, I do not dispute that there are such references in Hölderlin as in all poems, in which one can become interested as a researcher of literature. They may even occasionally contribute to enlightening us a few steps further about the hidden dimensions of the poetic substance of such verses, as everyone senses it – if they wish to know it. This does not, however, seem to me to foster the kind of understanding of the given poem which readers seek and reach more or less consciously, when they understand. There are certainly undertones and echoes, which perhaps resonate somewhere in the poem. Thus, the drink which the narrator here requests, may perhaps remind us of other poems by Hölderlin, for example, Bread and Wine and its multifaceted echoes of the Lord’s supper and the holiness of earth and light. Yet, the cup in Remembrance has nothing of this kind. It is in my view simply untenable to transpose the third strophe with the request for the drink into the scenery of the Spring festival, which is evoked in the second strophe, something on which Henrich and Hamlin appear almost united. [46] In fact, the insertion of the third strophe rather brings the remembering [Erinnerung] to a stop. It is a conscious interruption which is introduced in the third strophe. What Hamlin seeks does not seem to me to have any support in the text. This drink is not passed on. It is also not supposed to animate conversations but, on the contrary, to make it easier for him who is suffering from his solitude and to lull him into sleep. Another example which I have to take as a mistaken interpretation is when Hamlin in the last strophe – ‘The stream flows out’ – wants to understand this exit into the sea as an allusion to death. There are certainly good reasons to pay heed to the symbolic content of the ‘exit’ in Hölderlin. However, this has again nothing to do with

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the present poem. The danger itself, the risk, which the departing sailors take in their stride and which naturally fills those remaining behind with thoughts of death as they are concerned about their return, is not the decisive point in this farewell scene from Remembrance. The strophe does not mean so much the endangering of the sailors as the endangering of memory, of how the sea takes and gives memory and how memory reigns over all separation and over both sides of it. These two examples may suffice for the type of fundamental questions which are under discussion here. In the understanding of poetry, it is important to avow the multifacetedness of the poetic word. However, intertextuality must be offered by the text and not by an all too learned reader. On this point, my objection strikes at the extreme forms of modern deconstructivism today. I do not dispute that there are deep dimensions and even that they can be laid bare in the manner of a possible psychoanalysis of literature. However, I dispute that this is the way in which readers understand the poems they love. Here, a still much more far-reaching question is in play. Is it really so that the deep psychological dimension leads to the unravelling of all communication and forces us into the extreme ramifications of Nietzsche’s theory of the will to power? If one were consistent, a true anti-hermeneutics would then be established. In reality, however, even on the side of those who defend these theoretical interests, understanding between human beings is still sought. This is true for anyone who speaks to another and for any proponent of a theory. Allow me to defend the right of the readers, who read a poem and make it their own. In such an instance, understanding is structured exactly like in everyday conversation between human beings. When something is said to one’s face or in a poem, one tries, as the other, to effectuate [vollziehen] the unity of the sense of what is said. One is the partner who goes along and responds or one is the reader of a poem, who goes along with the poem and, in the end, sings along with it. It remains the first task of an interpretation to promote this going along. [47] The fragments of sense, which a deconstructivist questioning behind every sense-intention may seek out, may merit all sorts of interest. However, they are not capable of replacing the understanding of a poem as a unity of sense. Whoever wants to understand what is said, wants to understand the whole of what has been said to them. It should be possible to reach an agreement upon this. Thus, in the present instance, by going along with the poem Remembrance, I set myself the task of defending the right of the reader. It concerns the unity of ‘what is said’ [Aussage]. Otherwise, despite all assurances given by its name, deconstruction remains destructive. It may be useful to demonstrate this with an example of how far the intertextual trend of interpretation reaches and how it finds its limit in the unity of what is said. On this point, we may call to mind the particular instances in which poets, such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, have succeeded in a compelling manner to integrate citations into the wonderful melody [Melos] of their poems and in this melody all that is fragmentary becomes whole. Certainly, the poet is not an interpreter. However, the interpreter should still remain close to the readers and allow the readers to integrate interpretation into their reading. It has been reported to me that at Yale at one time the fig tree in the verse ‘In the courtyard grows a fig tree’ was treated like a citation. The experts of Baroque poetry have certainly found a lot

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there and would perhaps extend their ‘Anatomy’, for example, to the silver poplars. If one thematizes the fig tree in this poem certainly much will be found. It will not be Rilke, though, for reasons of chronology: ‘fig tree, Oh! How long it has already been meaningful to me . . . ’.8 What everyone must certainly think of, though, is the dramatic scene in the Gospel of John (John 1:47–48), in which Jesus receives Nathanael with the words: ‘see there, a true Israelite, in whom there is nothing false . . . as you were under the fig tree, I saw you’. With this response all doubt in Nathanael comes to an end. No one will doubt that Hölderlin, the alumnus of the Tübinger Stift,9 could have had this scene with the fig tree in mind. Yet, does this belong to what is said in the poem? Who really follows the course of remembrance in the poem will immediately have to understand what this ‘yet’ means. The image of the landscape evoked by the poem, with the banks of the Garonne, the elm forest and the mill could also be somewhere north of the Alps. The fig tree, however, stands for the south. In Swabia one was certainly familiar with figs, but only the dried ones. ‘A fig tree’, which ‘grows’ there is like an emblem of the south. In the poem this emblem guides the course of remembrance further to the brown women, the silken ground and to the time of March . . . This is my point. This is how something is said. In the lament with which the one who feels lonely thinks of the world of Hyperion, of this world, which is also southern, even if only dreamt, he is also reminded of the southern [48] port city by this sea which knows something about fate, with all its daring men. On the course of this remembrance stands the fig tree and nowhere else. In the case of the poem Remembrance, the proof of the understanding is first reached not only when one understands the concluding sentence of the poem (‘What remains however, the poets found’) in itself but when one is also able to gain its sense from the poem by going along with the course of remembrance. If one now seeks access to the unity of ‘what is said’ poetically, the third strophe indeed really obtrudes, but rather as interrupting the evocation of the beautiful memories of Bordeaux. Hence, the request for a drink. Here, there is no basis for saying that the memories of the festival taking place in March are evoked as the participation in a festive meal. There is no evidence for this in the second strophe. The third strophe rather marks the connection with the second through the ‘but’ (‘But may someone pass me’). This obviously means the one who abandons himself to his memories. Heidegger is right in this case to cite the parallel with the poem The Traveller10: ‘therefore pass me now from the Rheine’s/Warm mountains the cup which is filled and overflowing with wine’. The topos [‘topic’] of such an interrupting address is otherwise not really strange. The structure of the poem is indeed easy to see through. In the course of Remembrance the turn takes place in the third strophe, which calls up the second half of the poem and its conclusion. At the end, it is in fact a different landscape which is remembered. What remembrance aims at is the landscape of the farewell. What is the meaning of the transition from the calling of the poetic friends from the world of Hyperion to the talk of the men who leave Bordeaux and sail in the wide sea? We have to understand this transition. It is preparatory for the conclusion of the poem. In my eyes, it is the true touchstone for understanding ‘what is said’ poetically. It is the transition from the remembered friends to the remembered men. If, with

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Heidegger, one sees in both from the outset only made-up names for the poet friends of the narrator, the transition falls flat. One can still then understand the sense of the concluding lines by themselves but one suppresses the essential course of remembrance. It is quite obvious. The memory of the world of Hyperion merges into the memory of an experience which happened to the poet in Bordeaux. He had experienced there the beating pulse of a great commercial city, where all live with the risk of the sailors and where thinking about them until their expected return is kept alive and is perceptible. This is the landscape of remembrance. In Heidegger’s treatment of the matter, something essential is seen to the extent that the friends in the world of Hyperion and the sailors of Bordeaux [49] stand here in an essential relationship to the situation and the fate of the poet. This must also be found in the most difficult sentence: ‘many harbour dread of going to the source’. This can be understood for the friends of Hyperion, who vanished away after the failure of their war for the liberation of Greece. It can also be understood as the fate of the sailors, who seek to bring home the riches of the sea with plucky adventurousness. This must be understood of both. Going far away and going through detours is not only the fate of dreamt heroes or plucky merchant travellers. It is the fate of human beings. This lives in the ‘remembrance’ of the poem. Both have travelled far away. Memories of the departed heroes of the world of Hyperion, for whom the lonely one yearns, have been connected to a new experience and thus deepened. The port city of Bordeaux with its merchant travellers, who bring home the riches, is celebrated like a copy of what is heroic in life itself. The merchant travellers appear here as comparable to the poetized world of Hyperion. Now, the course of remembrance proceeds in such a manner that, in the depiction of these plucky men, remembrance once again becomes the theme. It is the remembering of the farewell, the separation and the commemoration which plays between those travelling away and those remaining behind. The sentence which begins with ‘Many harbour dread . . . ’ does not quite sound as if something is said of someone specific. It is human fate not to go directly to the source. In the ‘dread’, which hinders human beings in this regard, the narrator rediscovers the task proper to the poet. He has returned to the homeland and, left behind all by himself, he suffers alone, without friends. In his interpretation on this point, Heidegger got it right. Dread is in the face of the Holy and dread is also in the mission of the poet, who should not hurry and must endure standing alone. These are the aspects which grant the poet’s vocation its distinction and apportion him his fate like a sacrificial victim. One can simply paraphrase the sentence: ‘Many harbour dread’ in this way: many? Who then does not? There are certainly extraordinary human beings, whether dreamt about in heroic poems or heroes of action, admired for their daring and their resignation. However, do we not all have our fate and lifelong detour? Because it is offered by the text, we may remind ourselves of the intertextual support, of the numerous places in Hölderlin’s work, in which the source is what is full of secrets, from which everything springs and where we all find our fate. Is this not so even for the poets themselves? Poets are those who also know dread. Yet, they are those who in times of need still try in ever new attempts to call up in their work the unnameable and the unsayable. They are poets because they do this for all human beings.

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[50] The first allusion to the difference and distinction of the poet is already communicated here in this ‘Many habour dread’, which is confirmed by the concluding verse of Remembrance. As I by now see, this finds support in the fragment handed down to us under the title ‘Palingenesis’11: ‘but a God also dwells in human beings so that they see what is past and what is future, and as, from down the stream up into the mountain, he strolls through times to the source’, and he is familiar with ‘the silent book of its deeds’. ‘Paligenesis’ is return – in remembrance. One should take the title of the poem Remembrance seriously. Remembrance is neither remembering [Erinnerung] nor memory [Gedächtnis], although both come into play wherever we talk of remembrance. But so little is memory the epitome of retaining everything and so little is memory that which one reminisces about that there lies in remembrance something of an entirely different kind, namely, that one preserves a remembrance. It can be a good or bad remembrance. In any case, it is neither something forgotten nor something that occurs to us. It is that which remains, certainly not as a constant present, but always something that is our own most possession, of which one thinks and which becomes present to us again in a richer manifold. Something is thus emphasized when Hölderlin names a poem in this way. When he devotes a poem to remembrance it is clear in this case that it concerns a memory of travel and yet this is a remembrance. This means that this memory is of an extraordinary significance. Why so? This cannot be said in one sentence. It is the course of the poem itself which calls upon something of which one thinks with joy and melancholy. It is certainly the northern wind of the homeland, which is familiar and kindles these memories. It is called here ‘the most beloved among the winds’. Why it is so is said to us from the beginning to the end of the whole course of the memory and the poem. The wind reminds us of the mariners of Bordeaux and their journey outward because it is a good wind for journey. It is curious that interpreters, above all Heidegger, suppress this reference to reality even though it is about the mariners from the first to the last strophe and not about the poet, who almost like a surprise is the last word, albeit one that illuminates everything. What is so important about the mariners and indeed so important that they push the heroes of the dreamt world of Hyperion into the background? For the Swabian poet, who as student, schoolmaster and house tutor only possessed a limited experience of life, it must certainly have been an immense and novel experience to see the sea and feel its great breath. He did not need to dream it as in his poetry. It must have meant something for him as he encountered the plucky men, who go again and again [51] on the dangerous and daring journey and take everything in their stride instead of surrendering to the magic of life in the south. This must indeed have been a tremendous encounter with reality for someone prone to commemoration, whose poetic dreams so much loved to wander in the southern landscape of Greece. This is how the poet or the one who commemorates is overwhelmed by the memory of both, the heroes of the world of Hyperion and this reality experienced in Bordeaux. It is indeed a Pindaresque interruption, which is emphasized through the request for a drink of forgetfulness and which represents the middle of the poem. In this regard, one may very well also think of the fact that in this dream of memories, which the poem

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evokes, we find nothing of that which is otherwise often the theme in Hölderlin’s late poetry: the stinging sun of the south and the scorching summer heat, which awakens the desire for the coolness of the forests. ‘The living one was almost burnt . . . ’ Nothing of this is in the festivals, which arise in his memories, and nothing of this is palpable even in the memory of the plucky sailors, who under deprivation fight through the ‘winged war’ on the ‘bare mast’. What surfaces in remembrance is nothing other than southern festivals. It is string music and native dance. At the beginning of the poem, the northeast wind of the homeland is named, which is tasked with greeting Bordeaux, so to speak. There, at the mouth of the Garonne, this wind is a travel wind, about which the sailors are happy. The narrator poet feels this too and, with it, his own being away. This is how the recollection of all that is past imposes itself on him. He feels the soullessness of the conversations which he has had since his return home. He calls them mortal thoughts. How could it be otherwise when he remembers the conversations with his friends about the fateful expectations and hopes of liberating Greece, which in the poem Hyperion were evoked between Hyperion and Bellarmin. But where are the friends? Suddenly and without any transition, there is talk of the mariners, who go to India from the Gironde, bringing back beauties from the riches of the world with unending effort and risk. Here, the memories of the plucky sailors, whom he had encountered in flesh and blood in Bordeaux, merge with what the poet has been recollecting out of his poetic dreams. There are two elevated forms of human life, the war hero and the seafaring merchant, who become the object of a meditation before the dreaming eyes of remembrance. The last verse tells us what kind of meditation this is. It sounds like a conclusion: ‘what remains however, the poets found’. One version of the first verse of the last strophe originally read: ‘but now the friends have gone to India’. The second version says: ‘ . . . the men . . . have gone’. [52] This points to the true train of the thought of remembrance: from the poetically evoked friends to the lived reality of the admired men. Then, there follows the turn to the ownmost mission of the poet, which forms the conclusion. This is the point of the whole: these memories of the world of Hyperion and of the world of reality in Bordeaux are linked to each other. It is always about overcoming what is distant and holding firm onto what is close. Let us see the concluding strophe from that standpoint. It depicts the place where the Garonne opens into the sea. It is from here that it gets the name ‘Gironde’. It is the point up to which the relatives and friends of the departing mariners accompany them in their departure. These are the windy peaks, from where the Dordogne pours down and flows together with the Garonne, taking its exit into the sea. Whatever its precise location, it was the place of farewell, where those who remain behind gaze at the disappearing ships with the keen eyes of love and those going out on their journey looking back in the same way towards those who remain behind. What is evoked here is a power of the human being. It is the power to overcome distance, to preserve remembrance and to hold firm to what is close. This is why the poem is called Remembrance. One finally finds it natural that this power of the human being culminates in the poem – where else otherwise? – in what remains. The famous ‘however’ in the conclusion: ‘what remains, however, the poets found’, thus, does not

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mean that poets have a higher initiation into the true than the others. It rather means that they are able to elevate the power, alive in everyone, to hold firm onto that which is absent, in the give and take of memory, which preserves the ‘there’, turning this power into something which remains. This is the mission of the poet. They are truly not those to whom ‘words come like flowers’. They are the lead singers in times of need, even when they sing the return of the gods. ‘Remembrance’ is the never-to-be-completed overcoming of distance and yet, at the same time, the guarantee which lies in the constant risk of farewell and remembrance and the keenly riveted eyes of love. The poem has in its course evoked remembrance, which was for the poetic selfconsciousness the abiding experience of his stay in Bordeaux. Yet, let us ask again: what does this experience mean for the poet? What has he learnt for him to conclude at the end of the whole poem like a learned man: ‘what remains, however, the poets found’? As his heroes of the world of Hyperion ended up cast away, he now learns from those who are completely different, the sailors, that the twists and turns of fate are not only a life of high poetic dreams. The poet who feels himself lonely recognizes in this his own fate and vocation. We can thus explain the surprisingly gnomic phrase of the conclusion, on which depends the understanding of the whole poem. The one who is drowning in remembrance [53] composes himself. He had asked: where is the abiding? Where is the blessed enjoyment of the festivals? Is there soulful conversation? He comes to experience the separation and the departure into the uncertain distance, which follow the lure of the sea and preserve remembrance. The poetizing ‘I’ experiences itself in this. ‘Many harbour dread of going to the source!’ Here we have something like a model of separation and faithfulness, departure into the distance and return home, which are connected in remembrance. They risk everything and remain, at the same time, steadfast, even if no return and reunion should be granted to the lovers – the remembrance remains. This is the great breath of the sea, whose message the poet perceives. ‘The sea takes but also gives remembrance’. In the remembrance of Bordeaux, the poet experiences what remembrance is and that poetizing is remembrance. If, thus, this poem, unlike ‘The Only One’ [Der Einzige]12 and many others of Hölderlin’s hymns, does not complain about the failing of words because the right word is never found, the poet in the end steps completely onto the side of the heroes and the adventurers, who go into the distance and bring back beautiful things: ‘the spirit is indeed at home . . . not at the source’. We are thus led back by the understanding of the poem to the decisive verse: ‘many harbour dread of going to the source’. On this, Heidegger, it seems to me, has given the accurate interpretation and correctly detected the gnomic sense of this ‘many’. Many, and even the heroes who are dreamt or the venturing sailors or the poets’, belong to those who are here meant by ‘many’. It is a distinctive feature to endure this dread of going through risky twists and turns. It is the particularly distinctive feature of poets that they found what remains. They are poets because dread hinders them. This is what seems to lie beyond his own power to name. The unnameable, which exceeds the poetic art as well as the concepts of thinking, is precisely that which is to be constantly ventured and held onto. It is not without right that Heidegger spoke of ‘remembrance’

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later and indeed in the critique of ‘calculative’ thinking, which wants to take control of everything and appropriate it. Let us ask anew how the concluding lines are connected with what has gone before. It is customary to speak of a triad of gnomic sentences, which is supposed to constitute the conclusion. This does not seem to me to be entirely appropriate. In the two previous sentences, ‘But the sea takes and gives memory’ and ‘And love too keeps the eyes keenly riveted’, we indeed have before us two gnomically sounding sentences; but they are precise descriptions of the experience to which the poem gives expression. They describe the to and fro of commemoration and memory, and in both those travelling out and remaining behind. From the recollection of the easy, soulful southern life, which was depicted at the beginning, comes to the poet this other recollection, the one of the heroic men, who take all [54] danger in their stride and the no less heroic women, who try to preserve both the easy southern life and the heroic men together in ‘commemoration’. Here the poet encounters in reality what he had also encountered in his poetic dreams as the poet of the world of Hyperion. What follow these men of the world of Hyperion, who finally went into the far distance, like the sailors, are the yearning and the commemoration, and what follows those who remain behind is love, which looks on and contemplates those who disappear into the horizon and holds firmly onto the present which is missed. This is why love rivets the eye as it awaits an uncertain return. The journey and the separation are uncertain and dangerous not only in the superficial sense: ‘but the sea takes and gives memory’. What drives the plucky seafarers away from the homeland and the festive joy of love towards India is the same ‘dread’ which again and again befalls and leads astray every human being as well as the poet in their steady attempts to ‘go to the source’ and grasp the divine. The experts of Hölderlin’s poetry know the complaint about the shortcomings of the poem and, equally, the steadfast resoluteness with which the poet proves himself in needy times. Thus, the concluding sentence must bring together both of these aspects as the final strophe does on the whole. The versions of the last strophe, which came to be known in the meantime, in fact result in nothing essentially new for the poetic approach of the poet and, what is more important, for the sense of the poem. The distance, which imposes itself in these drafts (farthest/far), in any case does not mean the distance between the port of Bordeaux and the ‘windy peak’. This is not the distance which, in the remembrance by the poet, forces itself into words. It is rather the distance which opens up in the breadth of the ocean. We know that it was Hölderlin’s poetical approach always to jump far ahead in his guiding words and to be ahead of himself. He is thus compelled to withdraw. What he wants is to produce in its full concretion this scene of separation, farewell and memory in the form of a living poetic intuition. This transition from thinking of life enjoyed in a dreamlike manner to remembering the great experience which Bordeaux meant for him allows the one who commemorates to encounter himself again and constitutes the meaning of the poem. The ‘But now’, with which the last strophe is introduced, brings together the friends and the men to whom the poet pays homage – in their farewell and in commemoration, in taking as in giving. The great breath of the ocean, which is like the breath of the soul, gathers in itself the commemoration of what is lacking, of what is missing and the

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holding fast to it. It is like the alternation between ebb and flow. The pounding of the waves of the soul accomplishes both, ‘brave forgetting’ and the holding fast of love. The lonely poet, who misses the good conversations which once satisfied him, evokes the power of commemoration. This power receives its vivid presence in the fifth strophe insofar as it takes the place of the farewell where those travelling out disappear into the distance. [55] One only understands the poem in its melos and one also understands the course of the remembrance in the poem only if one holds before one’s eyes the deep commonality between separation and commemoration which exists in farewell. Missing and holding fast to what is missed, this is the realm of memory. It happened to the poet when he had returned from Bordeaux. He suffers from being without his friends and missing them. This is how remembering gains power over him. Now, he draws the conclusion for his own activity, the activity of the poet. Farewell and commemoration hold sway over the life of human beings like the in and out of the breath of the sea. In this, he recognizes his own fate as his mission to hold fast to what remains in words. Thus, the poem acquires something of the founding of a truth and something of that very sacredness, which have always distinguished the poet and the seer. The poem hardly tells us what it is that remains. It is remembrance itself which grants its eschatological pathos to the new turn of Hölderlin’s final poetic years, the great hymns. ‘But of the divine, though, we still perceive much’.13 This is how Heidegger, for his part, could recognize in this poem his own fate, his remembrance and his theology of expectation. In the constancy of the awaiting and the persistence in his own question, his mission was to hold fast to the question concerning being and the overcoming of metaphysics, a question which crushed Nietzsche.

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Goethe and Mozart – the Problem of Opera (1991)1 [112] On a particular occasion, I once listened to a performance of the Magic Flute in Dresden shortly after the Second World War. Dresden at the time lay completely in ashes and rubble. I was professor at the University of Leipzig and after the war was elected Rector of the university. I, thus, had to travel often to Dresden. Once I travelled with the mayor and together we heard the Magic Flute. The performance took place in a gymnasium. Everything else was destroyed. What was not destroyed, however, was the excellent musical culture of the Dresden Opera, which is associated with the names of such famous conductors as Fritz Busch and Karl Böhm. It had withstood the regime as well as the bombs and the tragedy of Dresden. It was a rare experience for me, like a prelude to the rebuilding of a devastated world and a hope for the culture of humanity. I realized there that there was also a sequel to the Magic Flute by Goethe, with which I had to occupy myself immediately. I had no particular interest in the libretto of Mozart’s opera. When I was twelve, a very impressive German teacher once told us: ‘well, the Magic Flute is nothing but sung nonsense’. In hearing this performance, it seemed different to me, like a message full of sense. It was vocally and instrumentally a masterful performance, which simply did not attempt to compete with the great machines and the art of lighting of the Baroque Age. There was in fact only the podium of the gymnasium, the orchestra at its foot and the female and male singers on the podium. Nevertheless, for me, this performance surpassed all the performances of the Magic Flute I had seen previously. Mozart’s music, our own imagination and a shattered sensibility were stronger than the technological culture of our epoch with its means of illusion. Thus, I found myself faced with the question of how music manages to communicate a sense on its own and to produce images without the help of stage props so that nothing was missed. I had before my eyes the most beautiful images of fairy tales, the most beautiful trial by fire and yet I did nothing other than listen to the music and the voices. What is opera? First, it was an attempt to salvage and transfer Greek tragedy [113] into the modern Christian and humanistic world and breathe new life into it. This is how Monteverdi opened up a new realm with his monodic style of musical art. From Italian opera there developed what we call opera culture in its many branches. In the wake of the lectures we have heard here in the previous weeks, it became very clear how this culture of opera unfolded from the constant need for celebration of the Baroque age and the courts, continuing into the nineteenth century under the conditions of the competition among the bourgeois.

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In this history, Mozart occupies an exceptional position as culmination and at the same time as transition. I would like to remember my late friend Thrasyboulos Georgiades, who used the expression ‘musical theatre’. According to Georgiades, Mozart was the first to produce the specifically musical theatre and reached his own culmination within it. Certainly, he prepared the later development of opera as well as the musical drama. However, his form of musical theatre has remained something unsurpassable. It was something we, young people in the age of the youth movement, indeed we, who otherwise despised opera, always excluded from our negative judgement. Mozart was not just opera. He was more. His theatre was no longer the mere play of musical pieces of the Italian opera theatre, this succession of recitatives, arias and choruses. It was no longer entirely arranged around the art of listening as it was obviously the case in the great opera houses of the eighteenth century. (At that time, the curtain of the loge was first opened when the famous singer sang his aria and then was closed again.) Certainly, when we open the libretto of the Magic Flute we find that it is also divided into musical pieces. Indeed, after the success of the Magic Flute in the Vienna Vorstadttheater, Mozart reports that several encores of individual musical pieces were demanded! Yet, no one will want to claim that this public, which rejoiced at various musical pieces, understood the meaning of the plot as we understand the plot of a play since then. I would like to reflect upon the meaning of the plot of the Magic Flute and take recourse to Goethe’s eyes for this purpose. He wrote and published a sequel to the Magic Flute, even though it only remained a fragment. What happens in both Schikaneder’s opera plot2 and then in Goethe’s script is certainly not drama. Nevertheless, there is an essential difference between the libretto of Schikaneder, the experienced poet of the theatre, and Goethe’s sequel. This is manifested in their success. Goethe did not complete his effort. He did not succeed in finding a composer for the script he had prepared. No one dared to engage in a competition with Mozart. Or did [114] they perhaps feel something of the linguistic excess contained in Goethe’s poetic words which elude music? Goethe may have wanted to write a libretto but could he subordinate the poet in him to this task? What is a libretto in comparison to a pure poetic text? The former is just a script for music and receives its sense through music, and the latter is a text which fulfils its task on its own as poetry. Here I would like to insert a remark about semantics. The word ‘poetry’ [Dichtung] in fact means ‘dictation’ [Diktat]. It is derived from dicere [‘to say’], from dictare [‘to say by repeating’, ‘to dictate’], and this means that, through it, something is laid down in an inviolable manner, in which nothing is to be altered, neither syllable nor tone. This is why lyric poems cannot be translated into foreign languages, as we all know. We can only have adaptations which are more or less fine. However, when the translators are true poets then the adaptations are original works of their own by the poet who did the adaptation. If it has to lay a claim to poetry the linguistic tone of a poetic creation must come from the linguistic tone of the mother tongue. When Hölderlin undertook to translate Sophocles, poetry was created, but it was a work of Hölderlin and hardly a work of Sophocles. The language we all speak gains in the act of speaking something like a living presence. This living presence, however, receives its existence only as poetic language.

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Otherwise, while speaking we are always beyond the linguistic tone with what we want to communicate to others and what they communicate to us. How does language itself come to gain a ‘lived body’ in poetic language and acquire its own weight? This is a theme that concerns philosophers first and foremost because it has to do with hermeneutics. In the poetic word the meaningfulness of words and the tonal music of language are so tightly joined together that whosoever wishes to have the poem must have the unity of the two. We must hear the music of language and at the same time also re-effectuate the meanings and the discursive sense of the whole. A libretto, by contrast, is not intended to be perceived in the same way as language. We re-effectuate its sense only in hearing the music which is sung and played. The librettos are indeed texts which await a musical scoring, that is to say, await the fulfilment of their task which comes from beyond themselves. Certainly, the texts of Greek tragedy also awaited their performance on the stage and this too took place with the medium of music. However, in opera the distribution of the weights between the art of words and the art of music is still something completely different from Greek tragedy. In his posthumous work on naming and sounding, Georgiades undertook an analysis of both aspects, the naming power of word and the sounding of language. In particular, he investigated how [115] both work together in the art of music.3 These are difficult questions and they always require further investigations, especially in the case of Schikaneder, Mozart and Goethe, where such different problems are intertwined. What has obviously become so typical of modern music is its peculiar laws of reprise, the ever-new variations of resumption or inversion, by virtue of which classical compositional technique incorporates everything individual into a great unitary structure. This is naturally true for opera as well and indeed the powers of reprise have always been at play in songs. These laws of reprise are also significant for the form of the text which is meant as the basis for the music. In Shakespeare a character, a fate and a plot, which compels us to involve ourselves in it with a shiver, is conjured up in words. In its time, it did not really need the scenery work on the stage, any more than what I encountered in the Magic Flute at the gymnasium in Dresden. In the opera, and totally in the case of the Magic Flute, the plot determines the form only through vague connections. Psychology is futile, if one is looking everywhere for the clear and illuminating motivations which bring the actors to sing their arias and melodies, their duet responses or to join in the ensemble. Just the level of understanding of the text in any normal performance must have been incomparably lower than, for example, in the Shakespearean theatre or otherwise in dramatic theatre. The opera and its libretto are based upon entirely different principles of composition than character drama. Psychological motivation and the form of participation in the action it leads to are simply not the only unifying principle of theatre. Even ancient tragedy with its play of masks, which is averse to psychology, warns us against expecting everything from mentally participating in the motivations for the action instead of yielding to the new interpretation of the myth known to all. Even ancient comedy works with typical motifs, such as kinship, mistaken identity, role-reversal and with character types, which live on in opera buffa. In this regard, there is definitely a certain analogy between ancient theatre and opera with its sequence of musical pieces. We must remind ourselves of the great

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tradition of rhetoric and its capacity to attain preconceived goals and to awaken emotions through the art of speaking. This also becomes the task of opera: not so much to make a preconfigured plot in the libretto believable as to use it [116] in order to lead the affects and passions as such, which move us, human beings, towards a compelling presence and effect. In dramatic theatre other laws are in place. So much so that even Calderon’s plays, for example, are determined by the formal principles of rhetoric. Yet, in Shakespeare the drama has to develop from the characters who play the persons appearing in the plot. Here it is not so much about the emotions which erupt in the events of the plot as it is about the being of these people, their character, which will become their fate. A character is a habitus which expresses itself in all emotions, a hexis [‘disposition’], a self-sustaining identity, which manifests itself in the changing pathēmata, in the passions. The actor in Shakespeare’s drama is a creator of persons, who can certainly no longer don a rigid mask. By contrast, what makes up the formal laws of the opera are the pathēmata, the passions, which are assigned to a role and shaped through the music. This is why the aria in the opera has a privileged place and is not – like most of the monologue in drama – a kind of interplay. It became the mastery of Mozart to lend the conventional forms of opera so much inner musical coherence that the different musical pieces harmonize into a unified spiritual event through Mozart’s art of the ensemble. We miss what Mozart does if we look for character developments where the joy of acting on the stage is sovereign. We will see how, for instance, the role of Sarastro misled psychologists. In the Magic Flute we are dealing with a play based on a fairy tale. The plot with its peculiar abundance of contrasts, which was praised by Goethe precisely because of these contrasts, is a magical farce belonging to popular genre. Yet, it is elevated to highly spiritual spheres – right up to the initiation of a noble couple into the temple of wisdom – although in being contrastingly accompanied by the popular element. I would like to show later how Goethe in his own fragmentary work further developed this libretto authored by Schikaneder in collaboration with Mozart. We must, first, look at the text of the classical opera by Mozart. The Mozart researcher Otto Jahn, a significant classical philologist around the middle of the nineteenth century, claimed to be able to prove on extrinsic grounds, which we do not want to repeat once more here, that the libretto of the Magic Flute shows a break in the sense that a complete change in the programme occurs between the first and the second act. This clever and naturally very well worked out proof found recognition everywhere at the time. This proof corresponded to a tendency of the philology of that time to see everywhere in texts layers of writing, late editing and montages, as one can indeed often discover them in the screenplays for the theatre but also in the writings of late antiquity. He thus took for granted that even Shickaneder’s libretto was put together by these means. Today we [117] have moved away from that supposition, which was dominant at the time. I myself cast doubt on this supposition in my own essay in 1947 on the Magic Flute.4 As we know, the plot begins with the young son of a count, Tamino, getting lost during a hunt, pursued by a snake and rescued by three ladies, who kill the snake. It turns out that the one who protected him is the Queen of the Night. Although I have never encountered it in any of the interpretations of the performance so far, it seems to

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me that what appears as the saviour in mythical form is the irruption of the night itself and that the three ladies with their silver arrows are the first glimmers of the stars, who notify the beleaguered of the saving cover of the night. I could imagine that this could also be implemented in the setting: by darkening the stage to let the first stars appear and finally the whole starry heavens. (The staging by Johannes Schaaf in Salzburg came impressively close to this when he makes the Queen of the Night appear in an almost glistening moonlight.) The plot is in fact a succession of implausibilities. In the first act, the Queen of the Night appears as a woman embittered by a foreign countervailing power. Her adversary Sarastro has kidnapped her daughter Pamina. However, the evil kidnapper appears later as Pamina’s noble fatherly protector. He is the guide of the initiates into the temple of wisdom. This change in the assessment of Sarastro within the plot provoked the most peculiar constructions from the side of the interpreters. Sarastro is rendered as the rejected suitor of Pamina, who finally mellows in resignation and introduces the young couple into his secret circle of initiates. Pamina, from another perspective, is interpreted as a young woman fighting for her freedom but who is hindered precisely by this evil Sarastro, and his ‘protection’, from attaining the real liberation proper to womankind from the pressures of the masculine world and ultimately she backs down. How are we supposed to resolve the contradictions of the libretto? It is after all a play based on a fairy tale. The logic of the fairy tale is transformation. We have here some easily understandable transformations which seem to overlap with each other. In the middle of the plot it becomes clear that the Queen of the Night had some sort of inheritance dispute with the dying king of the solar world. She wanted to rule over the whole world whereas the king through his last will had handed over his daughter and the dominion over the solar world, the ‘solar circle’, to Sarastro and his friends. Thus, it was not a kidnapping after all, but the execution of a will. [118] It is more doubtful whether there lurks still another motive behind Sarastro’s ‘kidnapping’, namely that he was hoping to win Pamina’s love. When he failed in it, he seems to give up voluntarily. There is a passage in the libretto, which allows for such an interpretation (‘To love I will not force you’). The librettist and the composer were certainly not interested in depicting the processes of maturation in individual persons. What constitute the actual thread of the plot are rather the levels of love itself. It is the story of human passions. Thus, at the beginning stand motherly love and the elemental love of the daughter for her mother. Then, we have the depiction of the transformation and reversal of Pamina as well as of Tamino. Both have their eyes opened, so to speak, and it is the budding love between the two which is introduced with the famous portrait aria at the beginning and is eventually completed with the trial and the acceptance into the circle of the initiated. Levels of love, awakening of love, transformation of the world through the knowledge of how to be loved. Obviously, it is by the means proper to a fairy tale that this logic presents itself. Finally, we understand the trial of silence as the preparation for the tasks of a man in society and we admire Pamina’s unerring loyalty as proof of the morally binding force of love, which leads to the founding of the family. We will see that Goethe developed precisely this point further. Just as all fairy tales speak a hidden language of wisdom in the plenitude of their implausibilities, so is it the case with the Magic Flute. If we follow the plot which

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unfolds not really in an artful manner but in a manner appropriate to theatre, we can see how signs are placed for the love story between the two individuals or, better, for the story of love. We can see how the young maiden initially is still entirely given to an elemental longing for the mother. She is obviously not yet really enlightened by the transformative sparks of love. But when this happens, everything suddenly appears in a new light. Sarastro, the representative of the spiritual order in opposition to the elemental bond to the mother, now appears in his protective and guiding role, and in a superior stature. He will lead the lovers through all their trials and elevate them into the circle of the initiated. What the trials of the young couple mean is that elementary inclination must be elevated to a moral bond. This is how we can understand Pamina’s scene with the dagger and the final overcoming of what is merely elemental in the preparation for death. Pamina is tested as to whether she has resolved that it is preferable not to live than to be separated from the one she loves. This should not just happen in fairy tales. The same is true of the trials of Tamino, in which manly resoluteness must prove itself as the power of maintaining the state. [119] Goethe developed a new phase in this progressive path of love as presented in the Magic Flute. In his sequel too, the Queen of the Night appears as one of the founding powers in the spiritual experiential realm of humanity: on the one hand, the obscure with its secret, its danger and its richness and, on the other hand, the radiance of thought and spirit incarnated in Sarastro. Goethe wanted to let these two powers manifest themselves again in their conflict at the moment the family begins its existence. The Queen of the Night wants to kidnap the child issued from marriage. Although the child remains in his parent’s care, he is enclosed in a box which cannot be opened. The box must be constantly moved so that the child remains alive. ‘So long as you move, the child lives’. Now truly, every new living being who suddenly becomes the focal point of the worry and care of the parents is a secret closed in itself. The infant closed in on itself like a plant is an entirely new, different concern as what stirs to and fro in the swings of love between the two lovers. ‘So long as you move, the child lives’. Goethe depicts how, at the end of a long battle between darkness and light, the elemental power, which holds sway over human nature, ascends towards a new freedom in the wonder of language and the exchange of words. The child overcomes all distance with the first exchange of words with the parents and rises up to a new distant realm. In the end, there arises out of the obscurity of natural being the opening of spirit, similar to how in Goethe’s Faust II Euphorion flies towards heaven. Now, a new struggle emerges. Once again, the beloved child is separated in the steps of love from the loving parents. This is how, in rough outline, Goethe develops the plot further. Once again, the essence of the trials becomes clear in Goethe’s invention when Sarastro himself is put to a new trial. To live is to be tested. This is what Goethe understood as the essential point of Schikaneder’s libretto. He read it and developed it further as a poet. This further development certainly shows anew the difference between poet and librettist, between the art of words and the art of sounds and the difference between the muses. In order to make this clear, I set side by side for comparison two passages from Mozart’s Magic Flute and Goethe’s sequel. In Schikaneder’s libretto one finds what

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Goethe had adopted in this own way. They are the knights, who are assembled as guards for the imprisoned Pamina and whom Goethe in his sequel makes guard the box with the child of Pamina and Tamino. By focusing on this adoption of a motif, I would once again like to illustrate concretely the difference between the text of a libretto and a poetic text. We know the verses of the two knights: ‘those who walk on this road full of grievances / will become pure through fire, water, air and earth. / If they can overcome the terror of death, [120] they will leap from the earth toward heaven. / Enlightened, they will then be in a position to devote themselves fully to the mysteries of Isis’. Doubtless, these are completely fine verses but for which it is hardly a concern to convince purely poetically. Schikaneder’s verses are only supposed to hint at the fact that now the unfriendly world is warded off and love triumphs over the opposite world of night and darkness. In Goethe, the whole thing is played a generation later and the knights converse in the following way: ‘is it day? / Perhaps it is / Does the night come? / Here it is. / Time passes. / How so? / Does the hour sound? / For us, never’. So runs the two-way conversation of these knights. In this, these demonic figures realize that they, who have been excluded from human life, cannot expect and hope for anything from time. The knights continue: ‘In vain do you exert / yourself so much up there. / Human beings running, escaping / Before them the fleeting goal. / They pull and tear in vain / At the curtain hanging heavily over the secret of life / Over days and nights’. These verses are replete with resonance and meaning. For the guards below, it is a secret: the alternating of day and night, the secret of life in its volatile inconstancy and its continuity through being awake and sleeping, and perhaps – as the deepest secret – between life and death. Goethe hints at all of this and all of this has become resonance in these verses. He thus raises to a new awareness that which lies in the mythical struggle of the Magic Flute between the Queen of the Night and the solar realm. ‘They pull and tear in vain at the curtain . . . of life . . . ’ The way this vergebens [‘in vain’] stands in the verse and returns in its rhyming word [des Lebens] does not say anything, but really shows something. The pulling and tearing in their futility – in the eyes of the timeless guards – is concretely there. This is poetry: not only something is meant, but also that which is meant is there in its enactment – it shows itself. Goethe could not simply poetize in such a way that something is only meant. That is why music has no place here where it could fuse with the word tones. For that, we would need to have violent reformulations, as those which Schubert provides for Goethe’s poems and seldom are they instances of an inner fusion of poetic language with musical language. That music can do what poetry alone cannot does not exclude the fact that even music is denied expression where poetry unveils its own power. My return today to Mozart’s Magic Flute and Goethe’s sequel in this year dedicated to Mozart may complete my older work of 1947–49. I have come to learn from newer discussions on this work, not least by being present once again at a masterful production of the Magic Flute on the occasion of this year’s Salzburg festival. What draws [121] us always back to this opera? Certainly, what directly contributed to its worldwide success through the centuries is the fact that this opera was in congruence with the way people thought of humanity in a century which proclaimed itself as the

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century of the commoners. In this sense, it could mean something that without any psychological motivation the great love duet of the Magic Flute is not put in the mouth of the lovers, but in the mouth of those who are unequal, Pamina and Papageno: one is a soul awakening to love and the other a carnal man of nature. The soaring flight of the main plot is brought back to nature. Yet, this grand song can be heard at both levels: ‘man and woman and woman and man / strive towards the divine’.

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The Lynceus Tower Song in Goethe’s Faust (1982)1 [122] The generation to which I myself belong – and which came of age when the imperial rule of Wilhelm II was collapsing – was not marked by the figure of Goethe. The well-tempered cultural pride typical of the propertied classes, to whom Goethe gave prominence in the second imperial rule, gave way to a consciousness of crisis. This consciousness strove towards a new boundlessness and recognized itself much more in the pressing urgency of the late Hölderlin, who only then had really begun to find his voice, than in the serenity of the Olympian Goethe. This can be clarified by a couple of significant anecdotes. It is said of Heidegger, who at the time was exercising a mesmerizing effect by the revolutionary pathos of his intellectual energy, that he read out a poem by Hölderlin in a lecture one day and said at the end: ‘this indeed is a poem! Something different from the rhyming chimes of the old Goethe’ (although later he spoke differently of Goethe). It may have been at the same time, around 1930, when we all felt alive in Hölderlin, George and Trakl, that Bultmann, the Marburg theologian, said to me one day: ‘only when you are older will you discover Goethe one day’. And so it was. The Third Reich helped in this discovery. In contrast to the bellowing of the Nazi movement, the lightness and naturalness of Goethe’s language acquired a new and quiet power. Moreover, the Goethe Society itself had not quite been brought into line. Thus, Bultmann turned out to be increasingly right even for me.

Return In reality, it was a return, a rediscovery. I had just turned eighteen and was hardly out of my adolescence. The year was 1918. I was already familiar with Goethe, even with his Faust, through my schooling, which was basically done in the style of the late Classicism typical of our school culture. One day – it was in Breslau – I heard the great actor of the Max Reinhardt company, Alexander Moissi, recite a poem which was well-known to me. [123] I was as if enchanted. It was the Lynceus tower song from the second part of Goethe’s Faust, which introduces the dramatic concluding scenes with the tragedy of Philemon and Baucis: Born to see, appointed to watch Sworn to this tower, the world pleases me.

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I gaze into the distance, I look at what is near At the moon and the stars, at the forest and the deer. In all of them I see ever-lasting beauty And as it pleases me, I am also pleased with myself. You, fortunate eyes, whatever you have seen, Be it as it may, it was still so beautiful!2

I am somewhat at a loss as to how one should read these verses nowadays. Pathos does not have a place anymore in the age of technological supercooling and verses are no longer around anyway. Yet, even at that time the style of theatre was dominated by the contemporary naturalism and a general psychologizing of everything, which had disfigured the art of verse and its rendition to a point of unrecognizability. Then came Moissi who ‘sang’ this tower song in such a way that the sweetness of the melody completely captivated you. Now, it must indeed really be a song, and nobody who reads this entry to the dramatic scenes in Act 5 of Faust II can be mistaken about it. What gives this song itself a peculiar resonance – the tone of an irretrievable loss, of a peace irrevocably disturbed  – is how the watchman Lynceus suddenly becomes aware of the conflagration which will destroy the idyllic happiness of both Philemon and Baucis in their old age and how he depicts this terrible event in haunting verses. Yet, these verses remain at the same time an overpowering and true glorification of the joy of beholding and the beauty of the world. These are verses that never completely fade away. How can verses be so mesmerizing? Be so much and disclose so much, speak so much and withhold so much? Sing so much? ‘Singing is existing’. But how is this song there? Only through the word. It is already a misunderstanding to read these verses as a text, to which are added a melody or different possible tonalities. These verses are already musical tone; they are themselves song, and this was exactly what my inexperienced ear grasped in Alexander Moissi’s rendition. There was no choice of possible tonalities or accentuations. It was as if language were singing from out of itself and according to its own melody. Now, we speak of the melody of language even there where language does not sing, where it is not songlike. Thus, we can ask what particular aspects distinguish the language of song, which does not present a lyric text but is itself already a song. What in fact distinguishes lyric grammar in contrast to logical grammar is not only a web made of tone and sense as such; it is not metre and rhyme and inner articulation. [124]. All of this is present everywhere, where there are verse and poetry. But how does all this become song? And precisely a song which is already a song, even when no composer tried to make it so? There are indeed enough poems by Goethe which have the form of a song and which, besides, have become lyrics for a song: ‘Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel’, for example, or ‘A Boy saw a Wild Rose’. The musical scoring of Goethe’s songs and poems is in any case a remarkable chapter, if one considers that Schubert’s musical scores, which

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the whole world admires as immortal masterpieces, were placed by Goethe himself beneath those of Zelter and Reichard. Georgiades, the music historian from Munich still in our memory, is certainly right when he says in his book on Schubert3 that it is precisely in his song compositions that Schubert displays a peculiar way of subsuming the music to the poetic language and that this is what distinguishes his musical scoring and differentiates it from those of Beethoven, for example. Nevertheless, the transposition of language into music with its rhythm, its laws of interval, its essentially intrinsic possibility of polyphony, is always something different from the chiming of the song-poem in its own melody.

Song out of language The Lynceus Tower Song is also a song made out of language and not out of notes – a songlike movement of language which is in no way singing. In the play – the tragedy of Faust – we indeed have a singing which is acted out, the acting out of the singer with the song. When Moissi ‘sang’ these verses, he was obviously not on stage, but on the podium. Thus, only the song was resonating. Yet, even today we still read the poem as the text, just as the actor Moissi still spoke the text even when he was almost singing it. This means, though, that he heeded the words of the text as we all do when we hear words. We too listen to them in the way they are melodious in themselves. Those who really sing simply do not speak but lead what is given to them, possibly even set into musical notation, to a melody. What do we do when speaking a song, that is to say, when we read and utter it to ourselves or read it out to others? What are we listening [horchen] to? Whom do we heed [gehorchen]? Certainly, to the metre, certainly also to the rhyme. Both are, so to speak, the metronomes of this music of words. However, how do the words themselves with their interpenetration of meaning and sound follow these measures? Or language itself with its interpenetration of meaningful utterance and tonal melody? What is that art, that unlearnable theory of the harmony, which makes someone a poet? Now, even here – and not only in real music – do we have intervals, although they are obviously not [125] calculable. These are intervals and such that they are of a precision which can be felt: from seeing to watching, from the naturalness of what is inborn to the appointed profession, from the rigour of duty, which binds the watchman to the lonely place on the tower, to joy in the whole of the world. These are tonal steps, the steps of thought, the dance steps of being, which form a singular tune. Furthermore, the principle of composition is also one of polarity between far and near, between the stars and the immediate view around, between the quiet wall of shadows of the forest which is always near and the rare sight of the peacefully grazing wild animals emerging out of it. It is a whole of being which even in the leading voice of the sounds of the words brings together the distant and the near as if in a single cantilena. This happens in the way ‘distance’ [Ferne] and ‘stars’ [Sterne] fade away into an indefinite vastness and ‘near’ [Nah] and ‘deer’ [Reh] make the almost terrifying now of such a fleeting sight become sound. And then what follows is the exercise of

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thought, like a great concluding part of a hymn which ends like an aphorism: ‘Be it as it may, it was still so beautiful!’. The ‘ever-lasting beauty’ hints immediately at the protestant language of the choral. Like Gerhart Hauptmann’s Hannele, one can overhear ‘the battlements of the eternal city’. The whole thereby takes a turn to the generality of a reflection, which fills out the two final strophes. It is thus fitting that in the calm symmetry of this metre arises a slight disquiet, which time and again gets the better of the reader. What the meaning emphasizes does no longer follow completely what the metre prescribes, for however we may turn it, the thought is still that insofar as things please me, I am pleased with myself. This is a typical Goethean thought. It is the thought of an almost heathen selfaffirmation and self-reconciliation, but it certainly goes against the metre: ‘as it pleases me, so I’m pleased with myself ’. Neither the ‘And as it pleases me’ nor the ‘I’m pleased’ carry the tone, but the ‘me’ in ‘As it pleases me’ and the ‘I’ in ‘so I’m pleased with myself ’. It is certainly not a hard imposition of meaning on metre. The metre somehow maintains itself in the background. However, the intellectual transformation, which one calls reflection, is unmistakably mirrored in the shifting of the semantic tone to the words ‘me’ and ‘I’. Does the concluding strophe bring everything back into the suspense proper to the text of the song? It almost looks like it if we take note of the wonderful ascent of the cantilena: ‘you, fortunate eyes, what you have ever seen, be it as it may’. Here, what the metre prescribes is in complete harmony with the movement of the meaning and sound like this to the ear. However, in the end, the back and forth of thought can be heard anew, for what it means there is not only that in the end, in looking back at everything that was, it was beautiful. Rather, the word ‘still’ follows this ‘was’, this word ‘was’, which certainly owes its stark tone to the metre as well as to its syntactic function: it was still so beautiful! A word which hints at all that is the opposite of the beautiful before the [126] singer, after this ‘still’ and with this ‘still’, professes his own affirmation as in an oath. It is certainly a lighter counteraccent, which can only disturb the joyful persistence of the ‘was’ ever so gently. Equanimity is reached in the end; the ‘Yes’ appears unconditional and triumphant. Unconditional? Triumphant? The dramatic-tragic destruction of this ‘yes’ and of this peace irrupts with gruesome clarity and, at the end of the whole tragedy of Faust, leaves only the one who is blinded with his illusions. When he hears the clanging of the spades that dig his grave, which he understands as dike work meant to acquire new land, he dreams of seeing ‘a free people on free ground’. In the end, self-redemption does not seem to fare well. Entire choruses must be mobilized to receive and guide the blessed penitent.

In the end Do we know it now? In the end, do we have pious resignation or, conversely, the triumph of an unshakeable belief in the redemptive power of the spirit, in self-redemption? Or should one in fact understand that even a blind striving, unreal to the point of blindness, always deserves redemption, especially when it can boast of the selflessness

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of a social activity? Do we know this? No, we do not. The riddle Goethe offered himself and us with his Faust is not so easy to solve. In the end, even the verses of the Lynceus Tower Song do not leave us entirely without an answer either. Perhaps, this ‘yes’ to all and this ‘still’ are not the whole truth and yet, without them anything else would not be capable of its own truth. What is given here is really no advice, which indeed nobody would know how to follow. For whom is it not true that they are appointed to their position and must accept themselves and everything, the whole, which is there and happens there, like this watchman? If his song of praise echoes onto existence it certainly does not mean that he had never before been witness to what is bad, to ‘gruesome horror’. By contrast, it remains to be noted that even after he became witness to the catastrophe, this lament thrusts itself into the song. Even here, what always happens is expressed. The watchman sings it (as it literally means): What was once a joy to see Gone it is with the ages.4

[127] This ‘song of lament’, as Faust calls it, is as true as that which the watchman’s song of praise glorifies. And so we learn: in a song, what is melodious is what is. Here, nothing can be recalled. And, thus, the primeval sound of life May drone through the soul! If the poet feels fear in his heart, He will redeem himself.5

In 1947 Karl Jaspers gave a very critical talk on Goethe, saturated with moral radicality. In this, he was following the vehement critique by the Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard, which grew out of a self-tormenting examination of conscience. Kierkegaard attacked Hegel and, in general, the idealism of Goethe’s time from a Christian standpoint, which in our century has constituted an epoch in the form of the philosophy of existence [Existenzphilosophie]. Jaspers, one of the representatives of this philosophy of existence, also saw in Goethe’s ‘self-redemption’ a lack of existential decisiveness. The great humanist Ernst Robert Curtius confronted Jaspers publicly with acrimonious words, warning him that the attitude of being a moral judge easily turns into self-righteousness. Who was right? For me, this conflict reflected something of the puzzle which poetry is: to be true over and above all objections and yet to be nothing that one can invoke in one’s defence.

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What Makes Goethe’s Language Natural? A Congress Contribution (1985)1 [128] For all of us there is an access to Goethe which we have not chosen but which already pre-determines all our engagements with him. We only have to become aware of this access. It is based on the fact that, in the course of the decades and now almost centuries since his death, Goethe’s figure and work have acquired a character which has set some standards. We must realize that today, in 1982, we could very well celebrate a centenary. For it was the year 1882 which first inaugurated the enduring and definitive influence of Goethe. The political development of Germany, like the political development of other European states, led ‘from world bourgeoisie to the national state’, to use Friedrich Meineke’s expression. While Schiller advocated for the national state, Goethe, the world citizen, was at first simply not in favour of it. For the last fifteen years of his life, Goethe was indeed a European celebrity even though he was anything but a German national hero. As we know, his relationship to his beloved Germans was quite strained. It is also significant that the West-East Divan,2 one of the masterpieces of German lyric poetry, had not yet sold out its first edition in the year 1882. Only after the founding of the German empire (in the sense of a lesser German3) was successful and consolidated did the cultural figure of Goethe really enter the general consciousness. The whole emergent nation was taking hold of the Weimar legacy. The large edition of Goethe’s works, the so-called ‘Sophie edition’, which was begun at the time, significantly promoted the increasing dissemination of Goethe’s fame in the cultural life of Germany and in world culture. Nevertheless, Goethe’s work and Goethe’s personality were not entirely without controversy even in our century. It is thus not without interest that it is only since 1932 that Frankfurt University has been called ‘Goethe University’. It is also in 1932 that the Goethe Prize was established, whose first recipient was the poet Stefan George.4 The political constellation was [129] clear. At the time, the poet Stefan George incarnated the sensibility of the aristocratic conservatives, who viewed the Weimar Republic, its dubious nature and political weakness with scepticism and disapproval and who, with their sympathy for the national heritage, were later to be crushed in a terrible manner by the revolution of nihilism. Stauffenberg belonged to the circle around George and sealed with his life the violent illusion of the men who dreamed at the time of a revolution from the right.5 It goes without saying that after 1933 Goethe’s legacy was carried on only by bourgeois intellectuals now condemned to impotence. When in 1949 here in Frankfurt, where I was employed as a professor, we tried to take the first steps

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towards resuming international relations, we used the Goethe jubilee of that year for this purpose and chose ‘Goethe and Science’ as the theme. The theme ‘science’ allowed for a format which transcended linguistic constraints and made it easier to reconnect with international culture. We thus emphasized the morphological tendency which possessed its significance in the natural sciences themselves and showcased Goethe as one of its great pioneers. The history of Goethe’s influence is always a kind of documentation of the respective present of those who are influenced. It was thus not accidental, it seems to me, that the first lecture of this year’s congress in 1982 is devoted to the theme ‘Goethe and the Enlightenment’, in the broad sense in which Mr. Vierhaus depicted it for us yesterday. This again identified this theme as a fundamental current in our own social consciousness of today. This can perhaps be summarized in the recognition that the epoch of the ‘German movement’ (Dilthey), during which the specific shape of German intellectual history received its imprint from Goethe, German Idealism and Romanticism, was, as Ernst Troeltsch once said, ultimately only an ‘episode’ in the great event of the modern enlightenment. I suggest for today that we deal with the topic of ‘What makes Goethe’s Language Natural’. I do this certainly not as a philologist – I have never been a philologist in this field – but as a reflective reader of Goethe. With this topic I believe I can in this way bring to light another fundamental and, I think, also influential trend in our present social consciousness. The global nature of the Enlightenment, in which we stand today gives rise to new repercussions. What motivates us today is no longer the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, which was directed against the oppression of the Church and the Courts. The [130] Enlightenment was successful on that front. Today, there is a new wave of the Enlightenment, whose technical effects drive the transformation of our planet into a social industry and make the limits of this undertaking alarmingly visible. What can Goethe signify in this context? If we ask the booksellers of today, they are completely overwhelmed by the demand for Goethe’s works despite the fact that a wealth of editions has come into the market to serve this need. Now, as we know, the market can certainly be manipulated. We, the authors, do not harbour too many illusions about this. Nonetheless, in order to do business, one needs to anticipate the basic tendencies of social life. Thus, it seems to me to mean something that Goethe today is once again sought after and, manifestly, essentially by a younger generation. Why? Like all social events of such a kind, it is certainly a complex process. However, one of the reasons for this is, I believe, that a lot of this quasi-German, which is run-ofthe-mill today in so many fields of science and journalism, is no longer tolerable. The natural equanimity of Goethe’s manner of speaking has gained a new impact from such a contrast. In any case, it was for me the reason to pose the question today, to which I do not want to give any answer but which I would like to articulate along certain directions: what is the basis of the fact that we find Goethe’s language so markedly natural? To approach this question, we must first remind ourselves of the great transformation that took place in the course of the last decades in the appraisal of the particular values of the artificial [das Künstliche] and the artful [das Kunstvolle]. Let us first consider a process which took place a long time ago: the discovery of the

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Baroque. ‘Baroque’ was once upon a time an insult! This is how I learned it in school and even in the study of literature it was said of Silesian Baroque poetry that it was unbearably bombastic. Today, the English, as well as the Silesian baroque poetry, is of high repute, besides other forms of Baroque art and even in Goethe studies Baroque has become the leading topic of research. We can derive the same from the antiques market: modest civil servants can at best furnish their homes in Biedermeier furniture but not in Baroque furniture, which is simply no longer affordable! These were and are the transformations in taste and stylistic sensibility. Such transformations play out even today in social attitudes and demarcate new changes, not only poetic, but also anti-poetic. How quickly has, for example, the enormous influence of Hölderlin faded away! He certainly remains a leading poetic figure. One can even call him the great classicist of the twentieth century, for it is only through the twentieth century, through the Hellingrath edition, only through the deciphering of his late hymns that Hölderlin [131] passed from a marginal figure between Classicism and Romanticism into one of the great stars of our literature.6 Nonetheless, there is no doubt that today the emphasis placed on Hölderlin – or perhaps the one placed on him by Heidegger or George or Rilke – would no longer be accepted so easily. More likely we will be seeing a return of the soft tones of Hofmannsthal. More likely the subtle inflections of Musil’s prose, even compared to the artful mannerism of Thomas Mann, will correspond to the taste of our time, as it manifests itself today. What is taking place now is something deeper. A kind of turning away from a specific form of artificiality [Künstlichkeit] appears to be looming, an instinctive resistance – it does not have to be the Green movement, but the Greens are a symptom. The Greens indicate a deeper feeling for the stalemate and morass, from which we will have to find out what our task is for our life and our survival. This is why I would like to present a few thoughts and formulate a few questions on what makes Goethe’s language natural. Naturalness and artificiality: allow me to begin with a question that concerns language. Already the word ‘naturalness’ gives food for thought. Who is still perceptive enough to hear that ‘nature’ is a Latin word? So natural has the word become for us. Now, the word ‘naturalness’ sounds relatively late but it appears in the constellation around Rousseau, through whom ‘nature’ becomes for the first time an evaluative term and a motto as a rejoinder [Gegenwort] to the rationalism of an Enlightenment which had become barren. Thus, it was not without Rousseau’s influence that even the German development in Goethe’s epoch went on its new and novel way, in opposition to the Baroque. This again reminds us of something which is in general consciousness. I mean the turning away from the French garden style and the turn to the English garden. What is reflected in this turn is the discovery of nature in the art of garden landscaping. With this, we have come close to the decisive figure which had released the incomparably natural character of Goethe’s language, in its positive as well as negative aspects. I mean Herder and the discovery of the folksong. There is something illuminating in the fact that this suddenly became a new great figure of value, namely, the ways in which people sing, the ‘voice of peoples in songs’; and in the fact that the art of this naturalness, for instance, in the Scottish ballads or in everything else that Herder had collected, became for Goethe a kind of model and an encounter that would

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loosen his tongue. Yet, it is certainly not all, for Herder himself, this discoverer of the ‘voices of the peoples in songs’, was essentially no poet gifted for song or ballad at all. At bottom, he was no poet at all, but rather the greatest orator of German classics – even in comparison to Schiller, whose poetic [132] power owes much to his oratorical skills. In Herder, we have once more and in a rather elementary way rhetoric poured out before us in all of its force and breadth, in the pathos of the pulpit and with the breath of a soulfulness streaming without end. This is precisely the point from which we can outline the naturalness of Goethe’s language. In his language, the rhetorical element seems to be stifled to the point of being undiscernible. We only have to read a few pages from Schiller alongside a rereading of Goethe to become immediately aware of the peculiarity of Goethe’s way of poetizing. Schiller formulated this difference with masterful conceptuality – and certainly not without a sideways glance at himself – as the difference between naïve and sentimental poetry. With this, Schiller did not obviously intend to classify Goethe simply under naïve poetry. With regard to Goethe, Schiller had rather in mind the possibility of a synthesis between the naïve and the sentimental, which was denied to him. This is in a first approximation an indication of the naturalness of Goethe’s language. Its distinguishing feature is to present in their purity the singable and the sayable. Goethe had indeed on occasion dared to say: the dimension of what is written is always already a lessening of truthfulness. Even in his later years – and certainly greatly tempered by what he saw in Schiller – he similarly spoke of the ‘forced talents’, which want to force through reflection what in fact must stream forth by itself out of an intensified form of poetic imagination and impassionate discourse. Here the question forces itself upon us as to how Goethe stands with respect to Augustan poetry, for example, with Horace. There is no doubt that Goethe recognized Horace as a master and admired him. It is quite clear, at least in his youth, that he knew how to value the anacreontic style. Yesterday, we heard a song which attests to the same thing from his later period. Despite this, it seems to me that in all of Goethe’s reflections, a thoroughgoing appreciation of Horace is really lacking and, I believe, this is important to understand. Whoever reads Horace must – how should I call it? – practice a kind of the utmost literary art of the puzzle. The ordering of the words in Horace’s verse is of such a conscious and elegant artificiality that, despite all the immediacy of the force of Horace’s language and all the magic of the linguistic melody, there is always an ordering of the artistic contrapposto in which what ‘speaks’ in a poem by Horace is configured into a poem. To me, it seems that the ballad-like aspect, the song-like aspect, which distinguishes Goethe’s poem, is very far from this ideal of Horace’s poetry. This should not give one an advantage over the other but it makes another ideal of art visible: the artful. It is, for example, what in the age of naturalism let a Stefan George see in Horace a great model. What George exhibited in the composition of his poetic verses was a similar goldsmith’s handicraft. [133] In order to understand the naturalness of Goethe’s language it is helpful to take stock of the conceptual background which resonates in the word ‘nature’. The contours of a concept become apparent against its opposite concepts, for to conceptualize is to differentiate. Thus, for me, naturalness and nature impose themselves in two conceptual oppositions, which give the concept of nature in Goethe its contours: ‘Nature and

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Art’ and ‘Nature and’ – can one say this in German at all? – ‘history’ or ‘society’ or even ‘spirit’? I prefer to place all my cards on the table and speak Greek: this means phusis [‘nature’] and technē [‘craft’, ‘technique’] (for nature and art); phusis and ethos [‘character’] (for nature and society). Both components can lead us somewhat deeper into grasping the art of naturalness, which distinguishes Goethe’s work and essence, indeed not just his poetry but also his prose. It is not by chance that I mentioned the sayable besides the singable. It is precisely of Goethe, the storyteller, that we should think in this context and of his genial talent, which fascinated his contemporaries from the days of his youth. The difference between nature and art certainly plays the most important role here. Goethe himself occasionally reflected upon the relationship between nature and art, especially after being initiated into a certain conceptual language by Schiller, a language which took its point of departure in Kantian-Fichtean philosophy. But this was mostly in his later years. By contrast, there is a witness for the original form in which Goethe sought to formulate his basic ability for ballad. It stems from earlier times, from Karl Philipp Moritz’s Bildende Nachahmung des Schönen [Figurative Imitation of the Beautiful]. Goethe had indeed included a crucial excerpt from it in his Italian Journey and explicitly confirmed that it in fact also reflected his own thoughts. What is the fundamental idea on the basis of which the relationship between nature and art is presented here? Of what does the Figurative Imitation of the Beautiful speak? Obviously of the eagerly creative drive to configure. This oft-used expression of the time stems from natural history. From this point on, for Philipp Moritz and Goethe, it is supposed to give expression to the manner in which a feeling of the active power producing the work of art constitutes the authentic essence of the beautiful. This is crystal clear in Karl Philipp Moritz. It means that ‘the work already completed, through all the stages of its gradual becoming, in an obscure intimation, emerges at once before the soul and, in this moment of its first production, is there, before its real existence, as it were; . . . the beautiful thus has already reached its highest purpose in its genesis, in its becoming: our subsequent satisfaction with the work is only a consequence of its existence’. The young Goethe was absolutely clear about the fact that the work is no frozen form but the becoming-form of the instant and the creative sketch of itself. He saw this as the appropriate form of his own poetic [134] experience. Obviously, the emerging aesthetics of genius lies behind it and Kant later formulated the relation of nature to art in the Critique of Judgement as the relation between the beauty of nature and the art of genius. This third Critique had particularly convinced Goethe.7 The genius appears there as the ‘favourite child of nature’, to whom it is given to dispense with rules and models and to formulate what is the standard and the model. The Kantian phrase ‘favourite child of nature’ is, to a certain extent, already present in the thought of Karl Philipp Moritz. The creative genius – the expression is found even here in this context – is of the kind that in fact only the creative innovations in language present what is essential to the poetic art: ‘nature is raised to a higher existence’. The readers are, so to speak, placed before the model of the creator. Their capacity for feeling, as Karl Philipp Moritz calls it, must come so close to the capacity for creation (and this is a deep insight), that a poem is only really there when we – as we so beautifully say – know it inside out, or – to cite Goethe – we must ‘dwell in the work of art, look

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at it repeatedly, and, through it, give ourselves a higher existence’. Herein lies the fact that the temporality of the poetic saying becomes something like a simultaneity, a true presence, despite its character of succession, which we know from Lessing and his Laocoon Problems. This is like a dance figure which finds its articulation towards the presence of its figure only in its successive moments. In Goethe’s later reflection, which I have just cited, what is formulated as an objection to be dismissed is that artists should strive towards making their work appear essentially like a work of nature. The work certainly functions like nature, but it is because it is supernatural, not outside nature and points to a higher existence. The relation of art to nature is thus doubtless ambivalent for Goethe: the naturalness of art remains an ultimate evaluative concept, but precisely for the art in the art. We will see how this is reflected in the artfulness of Goethe’s language and in the naturalness of his artistic richness. In order to be able to do this we must first unravel more precisely the second semantic turn in the concepts of nature and the natural. Herein lies, as I believe, the very centre of Goethe’s naturalness. To put it with an expression of Goethe, it concerns the relationship of nature to ‘conviviality’. The language of Goethe is a convivial language. This in turn leads to some further questions. There is a particularly beautiful testimony in Goethe’s late work, upon which we will have to reflect further: why is it precisely the late [135] Goethe who formulated all these things? He once defended ‘the subdued turns of phrase’, as he calls them. What he means by that is this: it belongs to the virtue of conviviality that one does not crudely hurl words at the face of people but rather uses expressions like ‘in a certain way’ (this is his own example). These are expressions which bring a moderation of a convivial kind into the expression of one’s own opinion and temper the righteousness and dogmatism of asserting them. Here too, it seems to me, we have touched upon a centre of Goethe’s poetic manner. This is also how we see him portrayed as a human being. His rare sensitivity to feel what is presently other helped him enchant people. His art was not least based upon the fact that he always reacted to the convivial situation in which he spoke. We even have reports according to which, as a young man, when he was in good spirits, he could in an instant act out a completely new drama, which had never been written and that this had a captivating influence on everyone present. Even his poetic talent thus has its convivial side. Thinking through the lens of conceptual history, there lies behind the convivial components of language and discourse the relationship between phusis and ethos – nature and morals. It is the distinctive feature of human beings that they do not, like natural beings, simply develop into their entelechy or their specific character through definite formative constraints. Human beings must rather develop themselves. To speak with Aristotle, human beings have proairesis [‘choice’], that is to say, they prefer this to that and their entire life they perform a long series of such acts of preference, which are indeed as many acts of rejecting (for no act of preference is without rejecting something, no win is without loss). Precisely through this, though, human beings develop themselves into that which they are. This is what the Greeks called their ethos, that is to say, this second nature which is built up through exercise and habit. This second nature is not imprinted on human beings by the threatening gesture of a never-to-be-fulfilled ‘ought’ [Sollen], but rather by the self-evidence of a habitus. This self-evidence of a habitus constitutes what they

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have in themselves and what their character is. The conceptual opposition, which is the concern here, was first formulated in the Aristotelian ethics as the relationship of phusis to ethos. This opposition seems to me to be the conceptual background for the possibility human beings have, which is their distinctive feature, that on the strength of their naturalness, they know how to raise themselves to a convivial form of life, to the art of conviviality and to the artful configuration of language, indeed right up to poetry. Precisely in doing this, they manage to acquire something like an intensified naturalness. How is this general relationship reflected in Goethe’s language? I would like to pose a few questions, whose answers by the experts would really be something worth learning. The first question is the following: what role does the mother tongue play and, in particular, what role does this vernacular peculiarity of the mother tongue in Goethe play – thus, the Frankfurt dialect? One hears it very forcefully: ‘oh lean down [neige], you who are full of pain [Schmerzensreiche]’ is a famous example. There are expressions by Goethe, not so many about [136] the dialect, but some about the mother tongue. We encounter them in relation to remarks about the significance of learning foreign languages. He says of the mother tongue that for it there is no other element than poetry and passionate discourse. Here another question forces itself, the question concerning the significance of French for Goethe. It is well known that modern centuries had the specific task of fully developing Latin into a highly sophisticated literary language. This is how no German philosophical language of really adequate expressive capacity would exist without Kant. Yet, on account of all the influence Latin exercised on the development of the semantics and syntax of the German literary language, Latin represented for Goethe already more of a general presupposition for the linguistic possibilities of German. By contrast, French at the time, in the eighteenth century, played a particular and dominant role in the cultivated upper class of society. One only has to think of Frederick the Great. This is why Goethe himself acquired an excellent mastery of the French language essentially through his years in Strasbourg, during which he imbibed such decisive influences and formative experiences. This leads to the question whether the strong sociality which may be attributed to the French language had not played a role in the naturalness and conviviality of Goethe’s poetic language and linguistic demeanour. We always feel this social element in French and particularly when we read, for example, the French translations of Greek or Latin, German or even Spanish texts. In these translations, suddenly everything is transformed into the style of a social formality. I wonder whether the conspicuous social timbre of Goethe’s naturalness, which in his later years indicates something formal indeed, does not betray the influence of the French language. What is more important is the question initially posed, the question of dialect. Is the Frankfurt dialect, which Goethe quite liked speaking in everyday life, not of a particular quality and has it not influenced Goethe’s poetic capacity for expression in the direction it took? This naturally encompasses the general question of the relationship between dialect and poetic language, as this question is posed everywhere. It may be that dialects lag far behind in comparison to developed literary language when it comes to flexibility and sophistication. Yet, the question is still about how someone who still possesses his own vernacular may precisely through this retain a

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higher flexibility in his use of the higher language, and this means precisely through the tension between the two ways of speaking which he internalized. Can one imagine Luther without the fact that ‘he was looking into the people’s mouth’8? I have myself constantly felt it as a great impoverishment that I have never really spoken the dialect of my Silesian homeland. This was because [137] in the social life of the time and the corresponding schooling system, the use of the Silesian dialect was utterly frowned upon. In Central and Southern Germany, the situation was certainly different and the repercussions were equally different. My question concerns the specific kind of repercussion which the Frankfurt dialect may have had on Goethe. We can certainly find many Swabian expressions in Schiller or in Hölderlin. However, does it not have to mean something that there are dialects where the substitution of the high language is the easiest? This is certainly the case with Central German, with Saxon but also in certain respects with the Hessian dialect. Should one not surmise that in these dialects the naturalness of the linguistic expression and thus even the flexibility in its expressive structure find a particularly favourable precondition? Even today, how forced do people sound when they avoid the Saxon which is natural to them. At any rate, one particular event also allows us to begin to gain a precise knowledge of the flexibility and the productive riches of Goethe’s language, which seems so natural. I mean the ‘Goethe dictionary’, which was initiated at the time by Wolfgang Schadewaldt. It was actually a brilliant idea, which in our cultivated Alexandrianism appears more like a noble exception. With this dictionary it becomes possible to ascertain how a poet with a particular freedom in relation to his language acquired a suppleness in the use of the German language, which is really one of a kind. The enormous multifacetedness of constructions, reconstructions, easy transformations, new compounds, surprising simplifications of words which he produced and built into poetic contexts, in fact also belong to this ideal of fluidity, this being-in-becoming which we encountered in the fundamental poetological convictions he shared with Moritz. Nothing in this seems like neologisms. Neologisms, new creations of words are in general of the kind that those who invent them find them indispensable but no one is willing to borrow them. The constructions of Goethe do not function like this at all. It is not that one could imitate them but they function in their rather inimitable simplicity like something strewn on the shore by the waves of language itself. On this point, it would interest me to know what the Frankfurt dialect signifies for the flexibility and the naturalness of Goethe’s language. Can it be integrated at a higher level into the high language of literature? I add a further question. It concerns the impure rhymes in Goethe. They play a very important role and it seems to me quite questionable to see it as a kind of lack instead of the purest fulfilment of the rhyming function. Is it not the case that when precise correspondences are tempered, it makes it easier to tie in the rhyme into the linguistic body of a verse? And this, in turn, offers the poetic whole the decisive [138] mediation between the consonance of rhyming words and the assonance of interior vocalization. This effortlessness which permeates Goethe’s cantilena depends very often on the impurity of the rhyme, on the slight tuning down which the other rhyming word manifests. Only in rare cases will people derive this so much from the Frankfurt dialect and formulate it in the way I did it a moment ago in broad strokes with the

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‘lean down’ [neige] and the ‘full of pain’ [Schmerzensreiche].9 Generally, vocalization is always granted a broad range, which permits abundant variation. Thus, impure rhyme too, it seems to me, very often presents an opening into the breadth of singing in which the tonal structure of the verse, so to speak, resonates.10 The convivial attitude of human beings and of the poet Goethe reaches still further into more essential depths. Many researchers, eventually also Emil Staiger, have spoken a lot about the inconsistencies in Goethe’s work. They have rightly pointed out that Goethe essentially did not like to make a complete plan and then put it into action like a timetable, as it were. This is undoubtedly true, but is it really correct? Is it not rather suggested by our own rule-bound thinking that this is the reason why Goethe appears to have made changes so often in the creation of his characters or in the composition of his plot? Is this the right entryway to the phenomenon? To give an example, Staiger adduced the figure of the mediator from Elective Affinities for this thesis. This man appears in the beginning as a master of spiritual intercessions, a true mediator, who emerges as a mediator and conciliator wherever there are spiritual conflicts with his natural knowledge of the soul and his talent for giving advice. Then, his art fails him in the complicated tragedies which take place in Elective Affinities. Does this really mean that Goethe’s conception of this character has changed? I rather believe that human beings indeed under particular circumstances are exposed to real transformations and behave and appear completely different from what one is used to. Is it not perhaps the case here too, in Elective Affinities, that the high human art of mediation, which this mediator has, hits upon its limits when elementary passions are stifled so that it seems so flat and helpless as a result? In reality one must reckon with such matters. Yet, even where an inconsistency appears inexplicable as such, one can, I believe, reckon with what is convivially binding in Goethe’s being. Let us think of the manner in which Goethe integrates reflections into his narrative work. I was told that a few days ago in this place Wolfgang Hildesheimer revealed that Elective Affinities was unbearable to him [139] because Ottilie in the work thinks like Goethe. It is certainly so. This is Goethe, who with peculiar carelessness intertwines his own reflections in the flow of the narrative. Sometimes these reflections fit the characters in a plausible manner but definitely not always. Even where they fit it is always the case that we completely forget while reading that it is not Goethe himself but one of his figures who is reflecting. This corresponds to the occasional, the first glance, the incidental which Goethe generally cultivates as a fundamental attitude. This is how it obviously costs him no thought to include in the set of his Collected Poems pieces from Wilhelm Meister, such as the Songs of Mignon, the Songs of the Harpist and similar poems, which clearly have their specific place in the whole constituted by the novel. It seems to me that something of Goethe’s convivial nature is at play throughout his work. He does not avoid the random and the occasional. He presupposes the goodwill of the reader and freely embraces the interest of the other. This is more important for him than the formal cohesion of the work. It is a component of his attitude of openness, which reaches into the deeper experiences of life. This goes for many of the so-called inconsistencies in Goethe’s work. My concern is not to give an apology for Goethe but to describe that which is noteworthy in Goethe, whether we want it or not, whether we feel close to it or distant from it. How much does he leave open, how much does he leave himself open!

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This provoked his moral critics, for example, in the manner of Kierkegaard or Jaspers. Yet, does this attitude of leaving much open not also grant Goethe’s poems something of their mysterious vitality and depth? Many of Goethe’s deviations from a plan appear to me to originate from this attitude, which allows for a movement back and forth between the most diverse spheres. If we find a novella inserted in the middle of a novel then we take as more or less natural the fact that the plot of the novel and the story found in the novel reflect each other. We take all the many reflections and counter-reflections occurring there as something more or less natural. I go still further. I have always had a soft corner for those who want to understand Goethe’s Faust in the sense that they ask themselves how Goethe himself really thought of his poetic rewriting of the folk tale of Faust and how he thought of Faust’s redemption in the end. I think the question is wrongly posed. The question presupposes that Goethe must have had at some point in some way but definitely a unified and rational interpretation as to whether Faust was to be redeemed or not and with what right. The same goes for what was supposed to happen or not happen to Mephistopheles. I find many of the speculations undertaken for the sake of interpreting Faust very interesting, for example, Henkel’s contribution on the apokatastasis [‘restoration’], the recreation of all things, which also includes the great final redemption of Mephistopheles as the fallen angel.11 [140] I also find other astute interpretations of Faust fruitful. Yet, was Goethe actually aware of what is asked here? Here is rather what I think Goethe does: he only sets the tone for the multiple possibilities of interpretation and understanding. We know that Goethe comported himself accordingly and when he was asked questions about his poems, he very much preferred to appear mysteriously and enigmatically evasive. In fact, there lies still more in this being-open than just the wisdom of a poet who was constantly de-dogmatizing himself, so to speak, through poetry. One of the deepest motifs which resonates again and again in Goethe is his mysterious interweaving of love and death. We are familiar with this from the great scene of the drama Prometheus, written in his youth, in which the daughter of Prometheus observes her female friend in a love scene and comes rushing to her father, completely distraught about what it was which had changed her friend so completely. Prometheus answers with a wonderful speech about how in ecstasy all things rise up and unravel. While we expect that he will say: ‘this is love’, he says: ‘this is death’.12 Here is another example from the poem The Bridegroom, a mysterious poem of the later Goethe, which he had given to his daughter-in-law. It has been included in all the later editions. The poem introduces the bridegroom as the speaker, who ‘at midnight’ – is it in a dream or in a dreamlike expectation of the coming wedding night? – speaks in delightful verses. How does this whole episode end? At midnight! The gleam of the stars leads In lovely dream to the threshold, where she rests. O be it prepared for me too to rest there Whatever may be, life, it is good.

The expectation of the joy of love and the serene prospect of the end of life resonate here in their peculiar intertwining when the human feeling for existence is elevated to

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its highest form. It is the same intertwining of ‘die and become’, which Goethe in his way always opposes to old age and the proximity of death like an eternal revival. Is this also not natural? I interrupt my questions – they are really only questions which merge into one question: is the naturalness of Goethe not rather the fact that [141] he is always convivial and that his poetry always moves back into the social reality, in which it has its communicable presence? It struck me that when Goethe, this great expert in poetic craftsmanship, speaks about other poets and poems, he employs the word ‘competent’ [tüchtig] as his favourite word. This word indicates a civic virtue of the first rank. It is highly valued by Goethe in all the human beings who possess it, not only in handicraftsmen but also in poets. I mean that one senses in this something of the social self-consciousness of the son of a bourgeois living in a free state. If one compares Goethe with his great partners in the classical age of our literature, he exhibits the qualities of a lackey of the aristocracy the least, even though he was most often an employee of an aristocrat, indeed a minister. The civic virtues of competence, carefulness, reliability of ability have themselves always disciplined the poetic inspiration which flows so abundantly in Goethe. The balance sheet of his own life, it seems to me, most closely corresponds to the naturalness of his language. This shows the incidental role, so to speak, which the poetic represented in his own life’s work. On this point, I believe, Staiger was correct about what he noticed in Goethe’s Tasso. The poetic and tragic self-portrait of the suffering sentimental, something Goethe certainly was, is not only represented in the figure of the Tasso, who had the privilege ‘to say how I suffer’, but even Antonio is this self-portrait. Both the great adversary of real life and the poetic dreamer who is shattered by reality best describe the complete ambit of Goethe’s life experience. To the naturalness of Goethe’s language there also belong measure and balance, with which he knew how to reconcile social constraints with vital force.

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­1 5

Language and Understanding (1970)1 [184] In recent years, the problem of understanding has increasingly gained in relevance. This is certainly not unrelated to the geopolitical and sociopolitical aggravation of the situation and the exacerbation of the tensions permeating our present time. Everywhere we see attempts to reach a mutual understanding between zones, between nations, between blocks, between generations failing. They are failing because a common language seems to be lacking and the guiding concepts in use function like incendiary slogans, reinforcing oppositions and exacerbating tensions. It is for resolving these oppositions and tensions that people are coming together. We only need to think of words like ‘democracy’ or ‘freedom’. There is thus really no need for proving the thesis that all mutual understanding is a problem of language and succeeds or fails in the dimension of language [Sprachlichkeit]. All phenomena of mutual understanding, of understanding and misunderstanding, which form the object of the so-called hermeneutics, represent a phenomenon of language. However, the thesis which I would like to discuss in what follows is even a bit more radical. It says that not only the process of mutual understanding among human beings but also the process of understanding itself represents a language-event when these processes are directed at what is extra-linguistic or at listening to the extinguished voice of the written letter. It is a linguistic event of the kind that consists in this inner dialogue of the soul with itself, which is how Plato characterized the essence of thinking. It is daring to claim that all understanding is linguistic. We only need to take a look around us and at our own experiences in order to have immediately a plethora of apparent counterexamples, in which the silent, tacit understanding presents itself as the highest and most intimate form of understanding. Whoever makes the effort to listen to what language says will be confronted immediately with phenomena such as the ‘tacit agreement’ or the ‘silent guess’. The question obviously arises as to whether these are not, in a certain sense, modes belonging to the dimension of language. I hope to make it even clearer as to why it makes sense to say this. But then what about the other phenomena, to which language [185] itself leads us? I am thinking, for instance, of ‘speechless astonishment’ or ‘silent admiration’. What we encounter thus are phenomena about which we can clearly say: it renders us bereft of words. It renders us bereft of words precisely because it is so clear that it stands there before our ever more encompassing gaze, far too enormous for our words to be sufficient to grasp it. Is this not too bold an assertion to state that being left bereft

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of words is still a form exhibited by the dimension of language? Should this not be that absurd dogmatism of philosophers who try over and over again to stand things on their head when they stand completely fine on their feet? However, when we are left bereft of words it means that we would like to say so much that we do not know where to begin. The refusal [Versagen] of language testifies to its capacity to look for an expression for everything. It is precisely why saying that we are left bereft of words is itself a figure of speech, such that, with it, discourse does not come to an end, but rather begins. I would like to show this primarily in the first counterexample from language I mentioned, namely that we speak of a ‘tacit agreement’. What is the hermeneutic significance of this linguistic expression? The problem of understanding which we find discussed in so many ways nowadays, particularly in all those sciences in which there is no exact method of verification available, consists in this that here we only have a mere inner self-evidence of understanding which all of a sudden flashes in our mind. This happens, for example, when I suddenly understand the context of a sentence or a statement made by someone in a specific situation. That is to say, when I am suddenly fully clear and comprehend the right reasons with which the others say what they say, or even the wrong reasons. Such experiences of understanding obviously always presuppose difficulties in understanding, the disruption of agreement. This is how all the effort aimed at understanding begins with the encountering of something that confronts us as strange, challenging, disorienting. The Greeks had a very beautiful word for this situation in which our understanding grinds to a halt. They called this the atopon [‘the extraordinary’ ‘the strange’]. This really means that which does not have a place, which cannot be accommodated within the schematisms of what our understanding anticipates and which, for this reason, takes us aback. The famous Platonic doctrine that philosophizing begins with wonder means this being taken aback, this inability to move forward with pre-schematized expectations coming from our orientation in the world. And this is what calls for thinking. Aristotle, at one point, describes this very nicely by saying that what we anticipate depends on the amount of insight we have in a particular situation. As an example, he gives us the following case: If someone marvels at the square root of two being irrational, at the inability of the relationship of the diagonals to the sides of a square to be expressed rationally, then we realize that this person is no [186] mathematician. A mathematician would marvel at someone holding this relationship for rational.2 This is how relative this being taken aback is and how much it is connected to the knowledge and to a deeper penetration in the subject matter. All this being taken aback, being astonished and not being able to continue in our understanding are manifestly always tied to moving forward, to a more penetrating knowledge. I therefore assert: we must deliberately disentangle the phenomenon of understanding out of the privilege given to the disruption of understanding if we really want to bring into focus its place in the totality of our existence as human beings and also our social existence as human beings. Agreement is presupposed where there is a disruption in agreement. The task of the purposeful will to understand, which is supposed to lead to the rectification of a disrupted understanding, is directed first and foremost at the relatively rare hindrances to mutual understanding and agreement.

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In other words, the example of ‘tacit agreement’ is so little an objection against the linguistic nature [Sprachlichkeit] of understanding that it rather guarantees the breadth and universality of this linguistic nature. This seems to me a fundamental truth which must again be granted a place of honour after we made the concept of method found in modern science absolute for understanding ourselves for several centuries. Modern science is the science arising in the seventeenth century founded on the notion of method and of securing the progress of knowledge methodologically. It has transformed our planet in a unique way in privileging a form of access to the world, which is neither the only one nor the most encompassing one that we possess. It is the access which, through methodical isolation and deliberate examination – in the experiment – has prepared the particular fields thematized through such isolation for a new intervention on the part of our agency. This was the grand accomplishment of the mathematical natural sciences, in particular of Galileo’s mechanics in the seventeenth century. It is well known that this intellectual accomplishment of discovering the laws of free fall, of the inclined plane, was not brought about through simple observation. There was no vacuum. Free fall was an abstraction. We all still remember well our own astonishment over the experiment in the classroom at how, in relative vacuum, the small plate of lead and the feather fall equally rapidly. When Galileo abstracted from the resistance of the medium it was for him an isolation of conditions which do not occur in nature in this manner at all. However, only such an abstraction enables the mathematically exact description of the factors which constitute a result in a natural occurrence, thus enabling the controlled intervention of human beings. The mechanics which Galileo built in this manner is in fact the mother of our technological civilization. What emerges here is a completely determinate methodological mode of cognition which has provoked the tension between our [187] unmethodical cognition of the world, which encompasses the entire breadth of our life experience, and the cognitive accomplishment of science. It was Kant’s great philosophical accomplishment to have found a convincing conceptual resolution to this problematic tension in modernity, for the philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was consumed by the unsolvable task of unifying the great omniscience of the metaphysical tradition with the new science. It was an effort which could not reach any real reconciliation between rational science based on concepts and empirical science. Against this, Kant found the solution. Seizing on the English critique of metaphysics, Kant’s critical restriction of reason and of its conceptual knowledge to what is given in experience indeed meant the destruction of metaphysics as a dogmatic rational science. Yet, ‘the pulverizer of everything’,3 as the contemporaries perceived the gentle professor of Königsberg, was at the same time the great founder of moral philosophy on the basis of the rigorous principle of the autonomy of practical reason. He recognized freedom as a unique factum [‘fact’] of reason, that is to say, he showed that the practical reason of human beings and therefore the moral and social existence of human beings could not be conceived without the postulate of freedom. In so doing he ushered in a new legitimacy for thinking under the concept of freedom, in the face of all the deterministic tendencies emanating from modern natural science. In fact, his moral-philosophical impulse, especially through the mediation of Fichte, stands behind the great pioneers of the ‘historical worldview’: especially, Wilhelm

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von Humboldt, Ranke and Droysen. Certainly even Hegel and all those who have been positively or negatively influenced by him are imbued in the extreme with the concept of freedom and retain, by contrast to the mere methodological approach of the historical sciences, a drive to thrust into the whole of philosophy. However, precisely this connection between the new science and the ideal of method which it supports was also what alienated, so to speak, the phenomenon of understanding. For the researchers in the natural sciences, nature is, at first, what is alien and impenetrable, which they coerce into speaking through calculation and selective force, through torture by means of experimentation. In the same manner, the sciences making use of understanding understood themselves more and more from the perspective of the concept of a method of this kind. For this reason, understanding was envisaged predominantly and primarily as the clearing up of misunderstandings, as the bridging of the estrangement prevailing between the ‘I’ and the ‘thou’. Yet, is the ‘thou’ ever so alien as the object of experimental research in the natural sciences is by definition? We need to recognize that agreement is more original then misunderstanding so that understanding always flows back again into the restored [188] agreement. This, it seems to me, grants the universality of understanding its full legitimacy. Why is the manifestation of understanding of a linguistic nature? Why does the ‘tacit agreement’, which establishes itself time and again as the commonality of our orientation in the world, mean the dimension of language? To question in this way implies the answer. It is language which is constantly building and supporting this commonality of the orientation in the world. Speaking with one another is not primarily arguing with one another. It seems to me typical of the tensions within modernity that it is so fond of the expression ‘arguing with one another’. Talking with one another is also not primarily talking at cross-purposes with one another. A common aspect of what is talked about is constituted in talking with one another. What constitutes the proper reality of human communication is that the dialogue does not set the opinion of one against that of the other or append the opinion of one to that of the other, as if it were an addition. The dialogue transforms both. A successful dialogue is of the kind that we cannot fall back again into the dissensus which sparked the dialogue in the first place. A commonality which is so common that it is no longer my opinion and your opinion but the common manner of interpreting the world first makes moral and social solidarity possible. What is right and is considered right demands, in accordance with its essence, the commonality which is established in the self-understanding of human beings. In fact, common opinion is constantly built in talking with one another and then sinks back into the tacitness of what is agreed upon and self-evident. For this reason, it seems to me justified to claim that all the extraverbal forms of understanding refer back to the understanding which disseminates in speaking and talking to one another. If I start from this insight it does not mean anything more than this: in all understanding, there lies a potential connection to language such that it is always possible – this is the pride of our reason – to initiate an agreement by talking with one another where a dissensus arises. We will not always succeed but our social life rests on the presupposition that by talking to one another in the widest scope we manage

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to do what is closed to us when we are hardened in our own opinions. It is thus a grievous error if one believes that the universality of understanding, which I take as my starting-point and which I try to make plausible, would imply something like a particular harmonizing or conservative fundamental attitude towards our social world. ‘To understand’ the arrangements and orders of our world, to understand ourselves with one another in this world, certainly presupposes just as much critique and fight against what has been rigidified or what has become alien to us as the recognition or the defence of existing orders. This is manifested again in the manner in which we speak with one another and [189] build an agreement. We can observe it from generation to generation. Once world history puts on seven-league boots,4 as it has perhaps happened in the last decade in particular, we no doubt become witnesses, so to speak, to how a new language emerges. Here, by new language, we certainly do not mean a totally new language. Yet, we imply more than a mere change of expression for the same thing. With new issues and new goals, a new language is also born and fleshed out. A new language brings disruption in mutual understanding but, at the same time, also brings the overcoming of disruption in the communicative event. At least, this is the idealistic goal of all communication. Under specific conditions, this goal may prove to be unreachable. In particular, the pathological breakdown in agreement among human beings, characterized by the fact of neurosis, is to be counted among such specific conditions. The question also arises as to whether even in social life as a whole, the communication process may not also serve the dissemination and maintenance of a ‘false’ consciousness. This, at least, is the thesis of the critique of ideology that the antagonism in societal interests renders the communicative event practically impossible in exactly the same way as in the case of mental illness. However, just as in the latter case, therapy consists precisely in reuniting the ill with the community of mutual understanding within society, the sense of the critique of ideology is also to rectify false consciousness and thus to found anew a correct agreement. Exceptional cases of a deeply disrupted agreement may necessitate the appropriate forms of restoration based on the explicit knowledge of the disruption. However, they confirm precisely thereby the constitutive function of mutual understanding as such. Furthermore, it is self-evident that language always leads its exhilarating life in the antagonism between conventionality and revolutionary irruption. We have all experienced our first training in language when we came to school. How everything that was no longer allowed there still appeared right to our healthy linguistic fantasy! What happens, for example, during drawing lessons is no different, which often leads to children unlearning at school their passion for drawing and drawing itself. In reality, even the school is, by and large, an institution of social conformism. Naturally, only one among others. I do not want to be misunderstood as if I were referring to a specific accusation in these remarks. I rather mean: this is society, this is how it operates, always normalizing and conformist. This absolutely does not mean that all social education is only a process of repression and that teaching a language is a mere instrument of such repression, for despite all conformism, language lives on. New configurations in language and [190] new modes of expression arise from the transformations in our life and our experience. What continues to exist is the antagonism which makes language

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something common and yet always permits the emergence of new impulses towards transforming this commonality. Now, one will ask whether this relationship between the natural conformism of society and the forces disrupting it, which are released by a critical insight, has not been qualitatively transformed in a highly industrialized and technological civilization. There have always been unnoticeable transformations in the use and the life of language, the emergence and the dying away of buzzwords and slogans. Critical periods, in particular, could be depicted in their decline by observing the transformation in language, as, for example, Thucydides has shown us in the famous description of the consequences of the plague in beleaguered Athens.5 But in our present circumstances, we are perhaps dealing with something qualitatively new and of a different kind, which did not yet exist in this way. I have in mind purposeful linguistic regulations. This seems to be a state of affairs first devised by technological civilization. What we call linguistic regulation in this way is no longer the unintentional regulations of the schoolmaster or of the organs of public opinion but a consciously manipulated instrument of politics. By means of a centrally connected communication system, politics is able to make states of affairs suggestive insofar as it enacts, so to speak, linguistic regulations in technological ways. A relevant example, which we find again realized just now in a selftransforming linguistic trend, is the characterization of the other half of Germany as DDR [Deutsche Demokratische Republik].6 This mode of expression is generally known to have been proscribed for decades by the administrative regulation of language and nobody can miss the fact that the recommended expression for it ‘Central Germany’ sets a sharp political tone. Let us abstract entirely from all questions of content and pay attention only to the process itself. The technological form of manufacturing opinion today gives to the centrally controlled regulation of language an influence which distorts the natural conformism of society in a particular way. One of the problems of our present is how to keep in harmony, on the one hand, the politics of a centrally administered manufacture of opinion and, on the other, the demands made by reason to use our free insight and critical judgement in order to participate in determining the life of society. One may have in mind the following as the solution to this problem: it is precisely the distinction of the sciences to enable independence from the manufacture of public opinion and from politics and to train people to form their judgements on the basis of free insight. In their most proper domain, this must in fact be the distinction of the sciences. But does this mean that they also come to have a public influence by relying on their own strength? However much the sciences, in line with their own intention, may want to escape all manipulations, [191] the tremendous public esteem for the sciences stands well and truly against it. This public esteem constantly limits the critical freedom which it admires in researchers insofar as it proceeds to appeal to the authority of the sciences even where it is in fact a question of the struggles for political power. Is there really a proper language of science to which we should listen? The expression is obviously ambiguous. On the one hand, science develops its own linguistic means for the sake of specification and mutual understanding in communication in the process of research itself. On the other hand – and this is another meaning – it speaks a

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language which would like to reach public consciousness and overcome the legendary incomprehensibility of the sciences. However, do the communicative systems, which were developed within scientific research, have the character of a proper language at all? When we speak in this sense of the language of science, we obviously mean such communicative systems which do not grow out of everyday language. The best example is mathematics and its role in the natural sciences. What mathematics is for itself is its own private secret. Even physicists do not know it. What mathematics knows, what its object is, what its questions are, is something singular, this is obviously one of the great wonders of human reason that it unfolds in itself, sees itself as reason and abides by itself while doing research. However, as a language in which we speak of the world, mathematics is a symbolic system among other symbolic systems in the totality of our linguistic behaviour. It is not a proper language. Physicists are generally known to be always in the most embarrassing position when they want to make intelligible to others or even only to themselves what it is that they have figured out without using equations. They find themselves constantly in the tension of this task of integration. At this point, even the great physicists become poetic in an often very ingenious manner. What these tiny atoms are all doing, how they capture electrons and carry out other orderly and clever procedures, this is entirely a language of fairy tales, in which physicists attempt to make comprehensible to themselves and then also, to some extent, to all of us, that which they map exactly with their equations. Yet, this is the implication: mathematics with which physicists gain and formulate their knowledge is not a proper language but belongs to the multifaceted linguistic instruments with which scientists articulate what they want to say. In other words, scientific talk is always the mediation of a technical language or of technical expressions – we call it a specialized terminology – by means of the language which has a life of its own, grows and transforms itself. This task of integration and mediation acquires an entirely specific intensification in the work of physicists, for [192] among all the researchers in the natural sciences, they are the most conversant in mathematics. Their case is particularly instructive because they are the extreme case of the use of an extensive mathematical system of symbols. In this poetic imagery we see that mathematics is only a part of the language for physics but in no way an autonomous part. Language is autonomous where, like in the case of the natural languages, it has its actuality as the worldly aspects of different cultures. Now, the question is about the nature of the relationship between the speaking and thinking in the sciences and outside the sciences. Is that which happens in the supple freedom of our everyday speech perhaps only a phase in a convergence towards the language of science? To those who deny this it could be objected that it may seem at present as if natural languages were indispensable but that we would all have to learn a little bit better and finally we would understand the equations of physics without words and perhaps give an account of ourselves and of our actions with equations. Then, we would need no other language any more than the language of science. In fact, modern logical calculus had such an unambiguous artificial language as its goal. But this is controversial. To the contrary, Vico and Herder held poetry to be the primordial language of the human race and held the intellectualization of modern languages to be its impoverished destiny, not the culmination of the idea of language. The question is thus the following: is the view

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at all correct that every language pursues an increasing approximation to a scientific language as its culmination? In order to be able to discuss this question I would like to oppose two phenomena. One is the proposition [Aussage] and the other is the word [Wort]. I will first explicate both concepts. When I say ‘the word’ [‘das Wort’] I do not mean ‘word’ whose plural is Wörter, as the lexical entries found in a dictionary. I also do not mean ‘word’ whose plural is Worte, as a grammatical term which, at any one time, forms the context of a sentence with other words. I mean the word which is a singulare tantum [‘only singular’]. This is the word that one encounters, the word that one lets speak to oneself, the word that ‘falls’ into a determined and unambiguous living context and receives its unity precisely from this commonality of a living context. It is good to remind oneself that even the way the New Testament uses language eventually stands behind this singulare tantum ‘the word’, for whatever this beginning with the ‘word’ means, over which Faust broods when he wants to translate the Gospel of Saint John, this active word which radiates strength is for Goethe not a single magic word, but points (without any allusion to the event of incarnation) beyond the unifying power of human reason, to the ‘thirst for existence’.7 When I oppose ‘the word’ in this sense to the ‘proposition’, the sense of proposition also becomes clear. We talk of propositions in the [193] compounds ‘propositional logic’ and ‘propositional calculus’ in the modern mathematical formalization of logic. This mode of expression which is self-evident for us goes back ultimately to one of the most consequential decisions in our Western culture and this is the construction of logic on the basis of the proposition. Aristotle, the creator of this part of logic, the masterful analyst of the inferential processes of logical thinking, accomplished this by formalizing propositional sentences and their inferential connections. We are familiar with the well-known school examples of a syllogism: All human beings are mortal. Darius is a man, Darius is mortal. What is the kind of abstractive activity being performed here? Obviously this: that only what is stated propositionally counts. All other forms of language and speaking are not made the object of analysis, just the proposition alone. The Greek word is apophansis [‘proposition’], logos apophantikos [‘propositional sentence’], which means discourse, the sentence, whose only sense is the apophainesthai [‘to let appear’], to bring about the self-manifestation of what is said. This is a sentence which is theoretical in the sense that it abstracts from everything not explicitly said. Only that which the sentence itself discloses in its being said constitutes the object of the analysis here and the basis of logical inference. Now I ask: are there such pure propositional sentences and when and where? In any case, the proposition is not the only form of discourse that exists. Aristotle speaks of this in the context of his doctrine of propositions and it is clear what remains to be thought: prayer and request, curse and order, to give examples. We must indeed contemplate one of the most puzzling intermediate phenomena: the question. It obviously belongs to the peculiar essence of a question to lie so close to the proposition like none of these other linguistic phenomena and yet it clearly does not permit any logic in the sense of propositional logic. Perhaps, there is a logic of the question. That the answer to a question necessarily awakens new questions could belong to such a logic. Perhaps, there is also a logic of the request, for example, that the first request is

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never the last request. But should this be called ‘logic’ or should logic only concern the connection of pure propositions? But how do we define what a proposition is? Can we detach the proposition from the context which motivated it? In the methodology of modern science this is certainly not often discussed. It is indeed the essence of scientific methodology that its propositions are, as it were, a kind of treasure house of methodologically secured truths. Like any treasure house, the one of science also contains a stock to be used at will. In fact, this is the essence of modern science: it constantly enriches the stock of knowledge to be used at will. All the problems pertaining to the social and human responsibility of science which we carry in our consciousness so pressingly since Hiroshima have their acuteness in this: it is a [194] consequence of the methodological consistency of modern science that they are not in a position to master the goals towards which its knowledge is directed in the same manner that it masters the objective conditions themselves. The methodological abstraction of modern science has secured its success insofar as it allows practical application, what we call technology. Technology itself, as the application of science, cannot in turn be mastered. I am in no way a fatalist and a prophet of doom when I dispute that science could limit itself. I rather mean that it is not science as such but ultimately all of our human and political capacities which can alone succeed in guaranteeing the reasonable application of our abilities or, at any rate, lead us to a position where we avoid the worst catastrophes. With this, we recognize at the same time that isolating propositional truth and constructing a logic on the basis of the propositional statement is perfectly legitimate in modern science. It is just that we have to pay a heavy price which modern science in accordance to its essence cannot spare us: to the universality of our productive ability, which science furnishes us, there corresponds no limitation of that productive ability through theoretical reason and with the means of science. No doubt, there are ‘pure’ propositional statements here, but this means that in them a knowledge presents itself which can serve all possible goals. I certainly wonder whether this example itself, in which the isolated propositional statements turn out to be the basis of the power of technology to configure the world, does not truly show that propositions are never encountered in complete isolation. Does it not seem true even here that every proposition is always motivated? Is it not a break from the religious representations of the medieval world and a resolve to be satisfied and self-reliant that underlie this abstraction and concentration on the productive ability, in the way it finally led to this great methodological thought of modern science in the seventeenth century? This is the foundation on which a will to know finds its motivation, which is at the same time a productive ability and therefore scorns any limitation or control. By contrast, knowledge in the great advanced cultures of East Asia is distinguished by the fact that the technological application of knowledge was controlled by the binding forces of social reason so that there were possibilities pertaining to individual ability which remained unrealized. What forces, which we lack, made this possible is a question for researchers on religion, historians of culture and ultimately even for the philosophers still to be found who would be really at home in Chinese language and culture. At any rate, the extreme example of modern scientific and technological culture seems to me to show that the isolation of the proposition, [195] its detachment from

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any kind of context which motivates it, is questionable in its own way, as soon as we look at the whole of science. It thus remains correct to say that what we understand by proposition is a motivated proposition. Here we find particularly telling phenomena, for example, the interrogation or the statement given by witnesses. For reasons concerning judicial wisdom or the necessity of finding justice, we find that witnesses, at least in some cases, are asked questions about which they do not know why they are being asked. In certain cases, the testimonial value of the statement made by witnesses relies solely on the fact that it cannot be intended to exonerate or incriminate the accused because the witnesses cannot penetrate the context which is supposed to be elucidated. Now, anybody who has ever been witness or victim in an interrogation will know how dreadful it is to have to answer questions without knowing why one is being questioned in this manner. To the fiction of a ‘pure’ proposition, there evidently corresponds, in witness statements of such a kind, the no less fictitious notion of the pure establishment of the facts. It is precisely this fictitious restriction to the factual which then gives lawyers their chance. The extreme example of the statement before a court thus teaches us that people speak with a motivation, that they do not just make a statement but respond. To answer a question is to realize what the sense of the question is and thus what the background is which motivates it. It is well known that there is nothing as difficult as having to answer so-called ‘dumb questions’, that is to say, questions which are posed in such an oblique way that they do not point in any clear meaningful direction. What comes to light here is that a proposition never contains its full content of sense in itself. In logic, this has been long known as the problem of occasional expressions. The so-called occasional expressions, which appear in every language, are distinguished by the fact that they obviously do not contain their sense completely in themselves like other expressions. For example, when I say ‘here’, what ‘here’ means is not comprehensible to all by the fact that it was said or stands written but one must know where it was or where it is. ‘Here’ requires for its own meaning that it be completed by the occasion, die occasio [‘occasion’], in which it is said. Expressions of this kind captured the particular interest of logical-phenomenological analysis because it can be shown in these meanings that they include the situation and the occasion in their own content of meaning. The special problem of so-called occasional expressions thus seems to need expansion in many respects. Hans Lipps did this in his Untersuchungen zur hermeneutischen Logik [Investigations in Hermeneutic Logic].8 Similarly, in modern English analytic philosophy, for example, among the so-called ‘Austinians’, the followers of Austin, [196] there is an important question which Austin expressed as ‘How to do things with words’9 (how can one do something with words?10). These are examples of forms of speech which transcend into action by themselves, differentiating themselves particularly sharply from the pure concept of proposition. Let us now place the ‘word’, but not as the smallest unit which exists in speaking, in opposition to this concept of the isolated proposition with its blurred boundaries. The word which we utter or which is uttered to us is not this grammatical element of a linguistic analysis. About this grammatical element, we can show in the concrete phenomena of learning to speak how secondary it is compared, for instance, to the linguistic melody of a sentence. The word which can be really considered a smallest

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unity of sense is not the word at which the analysis of discourse arrives as the ultimate component. But this word is also not the name and speaking is not naming. It is not naming precisely for the reason that in the name and in naming as, for instance, the report of Genesis shows us, there exists the false implication of name giving. It just does not belong to our basic relationship to language that we would ever find ourselves in the caprice and freedom of name giving: There is no first word. To talk of a first word is in itself contradictory. There is always already a system of words underlying the sense of any word. I can also not say, for example: ‘I introduce a word’. Indeed, there are always people who say this but they vastly overestimate themselves. They are not the ones who introduce the word. At best they suggest an expression or coin a technical expression which they define. But whether this becomes a word is not up to them. A word introduces itself. Only when it passes into communicative use does it become a word. This happens not through the act of introduction by someone who suggested it, but manifestly when and because the word ‘introduced itself ’. Even the expression ‘linguistic usage’ always suggests something which misses the essence of our linguistic experience of the world. It always seems as if one had the words in one’s own pocket and pulled them out as and when one needed them, as if language use was at the discretion of the one who uses language. Language is precisely not dependent on the user. Truly speaking, linguistic usage also means language refusing to be misused. Language itself is what prescribes what linguistic usage is. There is no mythologizing of language in this. It rather means a claim made by language which can never be reduced to an individual subjective opinion. We are the ones who speak, none of us individually and yet all of us – this is the mode in which ‘language’ exists. Furthermore, the word cannot be [197] completely detached from signs or other expressive phenomena through the ‘ideal unity’ of the word meaning. It was indeed one of the most important logical and phenomenological accomplishments at the beginning of our century that phenomenology, particularly Husserl in his Logical investigations, carved out the difference between all signs and the meaning of words. Husserl correctly showed that the meaning of a word has nothing to do with the psychologically real representational images which present themselves when a word is used. The idealization which a word has through having a meaning, which is always one, differentiates it from all other senses of ‘meaning’, for example, the meaning of a sign. While the insight that the meaning of words is not simply of a psychological nature was very fundamental, it is equally unsatisfactory to speak of the ideal unity of the meaning of the word. Language manifestly rests on the fact that words, despite their determined meaning, have no univocity but possess a fluctuating range of meaning. It is precisely this fluctuating which constitutes the peculiar audacity of speaking. It is only in the performance of speech, in keeping on talking, in the formation of a linguistic context that the meaning-bearing moments of speech become fixed by adjusting to each other, as it were. We recognize this especially when understanding texts in a foreign language. In this case everyone knows quite well how the fluctuation of the word meanings stabilizes itself slowly when we go through and reproduce the unity of the sense which a sentence structure has. Naturally even this is still a completely imperfect description. We only need to think of the process of translation in order to see how imperfect

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this description is. Indeed, the whole misery of translating lies in the fact that the unity of the view intended, which a sentence possesses, cannot be found by simply correlating the parts of the sentence to the corresponding parts of the sentence in the other language. This is how these dreadful configurations come about which are generally imposed upon us in translated books: letters without spirit. What is lacking there and which alone constitutes language is that a word gives another word. Each word is, as it were, summoned by the other word and in turn itself holds the continued progress of discourse open. When a translated sentence has not been so fundamentally transformed by a master in the art of translation that we no longer notice how another living sentence lay behind it, it is like a map in comparison to the landscape itself. The meaning of a word is precisely present not only in the system and in the context alone but this standing-in-a-context at the same time means that this meaning does not completely separate itself from the plurivocity inherent in the word, even when the context makes the particular sense in question unambiguous. The sense of a word, which is accorded to the word in the discourse in which it is encountered, is obviously not the only thing which is present there. There are other [198] things present at the same time, and the presence of all that is present at the same time constitutes the evocative force found in living speech. We can therefore say that every speaking points into the open horizon of a continued speaking. There is constantly more and more to say in the direction in which speaking began. Here we find the justification for the truth of the thesis that speaking proceeds in the element of the ‘dialogue’. When we grasp the phenomenon of language not from the standpoint of the isolatable proposition but from the totality of our comportment in the world, which is, at the same time, a life in dialogue, then we can better comprehend why the phenomenon of language is so puzzling, attractive and forbidding at the same time. Among the actions we perform as rational creatures, speaking is the one most profoundly oblivious to itself. Everybody knows the experience of how one stumbles while speaking and how words escape us at the moment we are consciously attending to them. A cute little story about what I experienced with my little daughter can illustrate this. She had to write ‘strawberries’ [‘Erdbeeren’] and asked how to spell it. As she was being told, she remarked: ‘It is funny! When I hear it this way I simply do not understand the word any more. Only when I have forgotten it again am I right back in the word’. This being right back in the word in such a way that one is not turned towards it as an object is obviously the fundamental mode of all linguistic behaviour. Language has a sheltering and self-concealing force such that what happens in it is protected against the intervention of one’s own reflection and remains sheltered in the unconscious, so to speak. When one has recognized the disclosing-sheltering essence of language then one will be impelled to move beyond the dimensions of propositional logic and advance into broader horizons. Within the living unity of language, the language of science is always only one integrated moment. In particular, there are words of the kind we encounter in philosophical, religious and poetic speaking. In all these domains the word is something other than the self-oblivious passage through the world. We are at home in the word. It is like a kind of guarantor for that of which it speaks. This stands especially clear to everyone in the poetic use of language.

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The Theory of History and Language (1987)1 [324] It is not without reason that Reinhart Koselleck uses Heidegger’s Being and Time to show how the questions posed by the historian make it necessary that the fundamental structures of the Heideggerian analysis of existence [Daseinsanalyse] be expanded and modified. This corresponds in a certain sense to my own philological and aesthetic motivations which led me to try in my own way to develop further Heidegger’s beginnings as well as the impetus I received from him. However, it is not easy for me to say a few sensible words on the thought process of a historian. I feel that I must call to mind a famous saying by Hegel. He said of the newspaper that it was for the thinker the realist’s morning prayer. Something of a realist’s morning prayer is also how the lecture by Reinhart Koselleck, given in my honour, sounded to me today. I feel truly honoured. Not only because it is one of my friends and students, who, in such a consistent and assured manner, gave an account of what he does and to where it has led him. What is more significant for me is that he has presented us this account in this form and on this occasion. I take this in fact to be a validation of my own efforts. Whoever finds hermeneutics important, must know above all that one has to listen and that one can only give someone who is able to listen something to understand. We were invited to a conversation today, and I wish we could pursue this conversation more often. My own hermeneutic project, in its fundamental philosophical intention, is not very different from the expression of the conviction that only a dialogue brings us closer to what matters. It is only when we are exposed to the possible opposing view that we have opportunities to go beyond the narrowness of our own biases. Now, I certainly cannot hope to succeed in finding a counter-response in the moment and in such a situation, a response which is in no way adversarial, but which, like any word, is a response, that is to say, it responds to something from which one has grasped that it questions and it turns to one demanding a response. At the moment, I cannot hope to find such a rejoinder [Gegenwort] which would really amount to a response. Yet, any attempt at a response, [325] even if it is not the rejoinder, introduces something in the space opened by the horizon of the question: a definiteness of sense which creates a commonality. Therefore, in continuing the unending dialogue which we call ‘thinking’, from discourse and counter-discourse, from a retrospective look and a prospective look, from looking back and looking forward, I would like to bring to the discussion something of the commonality which presents itself to us in such a moment. When I agreed to say a word of gratitude at the end of this celebration in my honour, I was filled with the

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sense that we live in this world in a peculiar time. We live in an imperilled world and with an imperilled consciousness of the future, as it must be felt by all people today and certainly most strongly by young people. As it happens, from those who represented and still represent the discipline of philosophy in academic instruction, we expect something other than just a retrospective backward glance full of gratitude at the path pursued by their own experience and thought, on which they were accompanied and enriched by those who are older, of the same age and ever younger. At bottom, we all know that perhaps the greatest possibility that life always brings to us is that of theory, of theoretical distance and the free view which is to be gained from there. We know that this view always remains bound to conditions, as Reinhart Koselleck so powerfully developed then. I mean the powerful realities within which human life in common plays out. If we turn our attention to these, then the ‘joy in meaning’, this allencompassing ‘philology’, can seem like an escape into a dreamworld. We only need to think of the fact that the intellectual world, which human beings seek to navigate according to their own-most self-determination, is also accompanied by so terrible a fact as that the human species invented war. It is something which, in the case of living organisms of a higher degree of organization, does not occur in nature among members of the same species. Already this very first point in the speech of Koselleck mired me in thoughts which I have myself often entertained on this topic. I am fully aware of the fact that the gaze of the one who understands is checking for any trace of meaning and is always on the lookout for meaning. This meaning always opens itself for human beings in the irrationality of what happens and of history, something like horizons of expectation, of hope, of adventure, of not despairing. Perhaps, we must say that this is the greatest human strength: in the face of the challenges which reality metes out to us through nonsense, insanity and destructive meaninglessness, to withstand and to remain indefatigably in search for what is understandable and for meaning. I can hardly hope to express myself clearly and succinctly about the basis of this truth. When I seek to formulate the peculiarity of human beings with Aristotelian means – and he is ultimately the master of those who have this knowledge – it means the following: [326] to reflect on what it means for human beings to have language. It is certainly true that, in comparison to the factors which actually determine human situatedness and behaviour, language, in a certain sense, is almost more like what brings all these factors together. Yet, Aristotle is right when he distinguishes human beings from animals by the fact that human beings have language. This means that they not only use signs to exchange information about pre-existing instinctual purposes or threatening dangers, for example, as birds do with warning calls or mating calls, or as all the other forms of exchange in which animals interact with each other by giving signals. By contrast, human beings are so far removed from the complex of their natural faculties and capacities that in this freedom there is incorporated at once the responsibility for themselves and their own, for themselves and for all of us. This is what is innate to our own exceptional position within the totality of living nature: like other natural beings, we follow constraints, impulses, dispositions, as if driven by them. And yet, there is a range of possibilities which remains open to us. It is a range of a different kind which is open for us. It is the space of open possibilities, of what is plausible not only in the space of what is left open with which our thoughts play, but

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the space in which we have to make the decisions in which the constant struggle for domination and submission takes place. It is the space of human history. This is how we have the famous definition of the human being in the text by Aristotle on politics, which came to be known in Latin as animal rationale [‘rational animal’]. What the Greek text in fact teaches us is that it is not so much about reason as about language. It is not just about exchanging signals, like mating calls and warning calls. The distinctive feature of language is rather to represent states of affairs to oneself and to others. Even the word ‘state of affairs’ [Sachverhalt] has something very peculiar about it. There is something selfless about granting the affairs [Sache] its own behaviour [Verhalten] and about bowing to this behaviour of nature in our behaviour. This is something which we rightly call reason and which acts itself out in our rational action. It presents itself in the marvel of taking a distance, which we are capable of doing in language: to let something remain open. Hermeneutics – if I may mention it in the modest limits within which I must feel jointly responsible – is the elaboration of this ability which is in equal measure wonderful and dangerous. It is more than just one of the purposeful natural endowments of a living being that it can let something remain open, weigh it in its import and time and again consider its possibilities anew. After having uttered this statement, Aristotle continues: for, precisely through this ability of the logos [‘reason’, ‘speech’], human beings have a sense for what is beneficial and harmful for them. This means that human beings have a sense for something which is perhaps not alluring at the moment [327] but holds a promise for something later. Human beings thus have the peculiar freedom to project themselves forward towards distant goals and to seek the appropriate means to reach these goals. This capacity to project oneself into the future in advance is a remarkable capacity but also a dangerous one given the sagacity and rigid determinateness of natural constraints. Human beings have the sense of time. To this now belongs (as Aristotle’s internal consistency gives us to understand) the sense for what is right and wrong. We can always experience something of this implication when we consider the dubious freedom of being able to understand and of wanting to understand. We are always confronted with realities – and mostly with the reality of the other human being. ‘Right’ [‘Recht’] is fundamentally the great order created by human beings, which sets limits for us, but also allows us to overcome disagreement. If we do not understand each other, misunderstand each other or even misbehave, it is this order that allows us to put everything back in order again and integrate it all into something which is common to all. All this is not of our ‘making’. All this happens with us. Thus, it may very well be, as the clear and sober gaze of the historian has placed it thoughtfully before our eyes, that we are never the masters of history. We only know stories. In order to make stories possible, we are always already engaged in the inflexibly sharp and fundamental oppositions evinced by historians: the oppositions between friend and enemy, secrecy and openness and all the other fundamental categories whose polarity belongs to any ‘history’. Thus, both having language and having history go together and constitute the distinctive feature of human beings. Hence, it is completely legitimate for a historian to read Being and Time for what it has to say in terms of anthropological content and to expand the categories of historicity in such an anthropological manner, as Koselleck has done here. But then, they remain categories, fundamental concepts of a world of objects and of the knowledge of such

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a world. They are fundamentally different, it seems to me, from the Heideggerean concepts, which seek to elaborate the historicity of Dasein [‘existence’] and not the basic structures of history and its knowledge. It is certainly the case that the analytic of Dasein presented by Heidegger can, for its part, be understood by the historian from a historical distance, as a historical phenomenon or at least as a contemporary historical phenomenon. History is a ‘universal’. Koselleck’s ‘theory of history’ offers a theory of categories for this universe, which articulates a gigantic field of human knowledge. This theory of categories does not intend to provide a legitimation for the interest in this objective world of history and histories. Yet, in all historical knowledge there is ‘understanding’. Droysens’s ‘theory of history’ decisively expresses this and is to this extent a ‘hermeneutics’. This does not mean that Droysen is only thinking of language and linguistic testimonies when he defines the task of the historian [328] as an ‘investigative understanding’. This is how Schleiermacher, as a theologian and exegete, had seen the task of hermeneutics and Dilthey had explicitly designated the ‘expressions of life received in written form’ as its object. In this sense of hermeneutics, the theory of history certainly also, for its part, encompasses all our linguistic activity, insofar as it knows how to determine temporal connections to our environment in linguistically formulated statements, for example, in the changes in the use of language and, above all, in the changes in the conceptuality of a time period. Philosophical hermeneutics, however, does not follow the tradition of hermeneutics, but goes straight to its foundation in the life-world. When hermeneutics pursues, as with Heidegger, a ‘hermeneutics of facticity’, of the self-interpretation of Dasein and for this reason places the dimension of language at the centre of the investigation, hermeneutics has not simply cast the task of understanding, which the historical researchers – and certainly along with many others – are pursuing as theirs, in a broader framework and generality. The dimension of language does not only encompass all kinds of texts, including jurisprudence and religion, for example, thus also the text of a theory of history to the extent that it is formulated linguistically. The dimension of language which hermeneutics considers central is not only that of texts. It also means the fundamental condition of existence of all human action and creation, in the way Aristotle has made this dimension of language powerfully significant when distinguishing the zoon logon echon [‘the animal which has speech’] from all other living beings. The historical categories, friend and enemy, parents and children, succession of generations, earlier or later, the tensions between above and below, as well as the tensions between the internal and the external or the secretive and the public, are also to be found to some extent in animal societies. Behavioural research can, in this regard, also teach us much about human beings, because animal societies are so similar and also so different. Now, it is this beingdifferent of what is the same that matters. The struggle between above and below, domination and submission shows other specific structures in the case of human beings. What manifests itself in this form in the human dimension of language and renders these forms human is not an additional endowment which can also be missing. Rather, it means a fundamentally different relationship to time and to the future – and to death. This is how war appears as a specifically human invention, as well as suicide, and the forms of distinguishing between what is public and what is secret. Above all,

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however, there are stories, of whatever kind, which have been narrated, which can be narrated. What marks all our histories and allows them to become stories, is the fact that we narrate them, these innumerable stories, and narrate them over and over again. There is certainly a difference between, on the one hand, the stories we narrate as storytellers and which are true without being real, and, on the other, the stories transmitted by historiographical representation and reconstructed through critical research, from which ‘history’ is always put together and rewritten anew. The text of history is never completely finished and also [329] never fixed in writing. The fact that we speak of ‘fixing in writing’ in today’s mode of speaking sounds like an impotent protest of the spirit of language against the constantly changing flow of narration. I can see why, in the age of modern science, history sees itself as more philosophical – which in Aristotle means nothing other than containing more knowledge, than being more scientific – than poetry. Historiography surrenders completely to puzzling over contingency and is consumed by this task. The facticity of the fact, which historians establish, could never compete, in terms of the weight it has, with the facticity which, each of us, who establishes it or comes to know it, knows as his or her own facticity and which we all together know as ours. Clearly, historians do not just tell stories. These stories must be told as things happened. Yet, we have to ask: in what way are we concerned with all these stories of theirs? Why all the effort at preserving and investigating? It is certainly not to work one’s way up to the mastery of human destinies, in the way research in the natural sciences enables a mastery of natural processes or is on the way to using these natural processes for human purposes. It is also not to learn something from history, so as to become smarter. Jacob Burckhardt was right: it is not to become smarter that history and historical knowledge can help us, but to become wise forever. Why do stories grab us? To this, there is only the ‘hermeneutic’ answer: because we recognize ourselves in the other – in what is other in human beings, in what is other in events. This also applies to the pairs of categories which Koselleck has convincingly brought out. Recognition presupposes distance. However, recognition, at the same time, eliminates distance. Recognition, which can also be achieved and described with all these historical categories, is not, however, exhausted in the satisfactory classification of events of other times and foreign worlds. It is the recognition of ourselves, and it thus continually permeates the movement of questioning, which motivates us as human beings. It is the old Socratic question about the good. This should remind us of the Aristotelian feature which is distinctive of language. Not because everything is language. Language does not speak of itself, but of that which is or presumably is. Because language points to the openness, the entirety and the expansiveness of time and the future, out of free choice and open questioning, the broad horizon of the ‘there’ [‘Da’] distinguishes itself from the world of human beings. This is why we listen to those who tell stories. Even if we do not simply listen to stories, but inquire into their historical truth, it remains an interest in the recognition of what is humanly possible and what really happened. The ancient world already saw something correctly when it did not see historiography, even in the face of its master at critique, Thucydides, along the lines of the mathemata [‘things learned’] of the ‘mathematicians’, but along the lines of the poetry of the poets, despite [330] the fact that poetry does not match history in

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its power of recognition. Even with our stories, as with any of our decisions in practical life, we contribute to the building of the commonality of what makes sense to us, what appears to us as the good, the better, the right. With these great and beautiful words, I almost feel myself the heir to a scarcely surviving heritage. Yet, in the face of everincreasing tensions and the increasing disorder, mistreatment and failure to act, I believe that all of us, in full awareness, should direct our understanding gaze towards what is common to all of us, which we recognize better in the other than in ourselves, and that we should not give up constantly reshaping the hard realities of history into our human possibilities.

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Of Teachers and Learners (1986)1 [331] On an occasion when I have to give thanks for a friendly and moving celebration of my work, it is natural for me to talk about the significance others have for the development of an individual. In the end, the humanity of our existence depends on how far we can learn to see the limitations which we have in our being compared to the being of others. This conviction is also behind the passionate concern, which has animated me for a long time, to pass on what I myself have gathered in knowledge and insight. We learn from those who learn from us. Now, I believe that I do not have any special calling to take any explicit position on the political events of the time, as Karl Jaspers did, whose name this prize bears and for whom I have the highest regard. I am rather convinced that thinking and being trained by others in the task of thinking, exercising freely our faculty of judgement and awakening it in others, pertain as such to an eminent political activity. In this sense, I believe that even my own capacity to judge always finds its limits in the judgement of others and their capacity to judge while also being enriched by it. This is the soul of hermeneutics. That is why in today’s lecture by my friend Wilhelm Anz, a well-known word has stuck with me, which I had never heard in such a way. He only mentioned it in passing. The word is: listening audience [Hörerschaft]. This does not mean here a gathering of students – although in my view such a gathering certainly also belongs to the learning of how to think – but it concerns us all. We all are a listening audience. We must learn to listen, in one way or another, and constantly strive to work against getting entangled in our ego, against getting caught in our willfullness and the compulsion to value our own intellectual inclinations. I would like to show plainly with examples of my own life that which I indicate in such a general manner. As I have also done in my autobiography, it is natural for me today to think of the figures who, in the course of my own life, represented such a function of being the other to whom one learns to listen. In this regard, what I would like to do is not to bring up private experiences of this kind, of friends and life’s fellow travellers, but only – as it [332] behoves a scientific event – speak of those teachers from whom I was able to learn this fundamental task of human beings to become a listener and thanks to whom I too have perhaps something to say to some of my listeners and students. I see my political alibi in this that, in the great process in which public opinion is formed and disseminated, a word which is said ex cathedra [‘from the chair’, ‘with full authority’] or delivered publicly is to be preserved. As a sign of thankfulness, I would like to name two personalities who are my own contemporaries and two others who, beyond all times, are the teachers of us all. The

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contemporaries are Heidegger and Jaspers. I join the name of Jaspers to Heidegger, who was for me decisively influential, not only because of this distinction, which is now bestowed upon me as the successor of the one whose name this prize bears. I am rather thinking of an earlier and, to that extent, more formative experience from early years. Wilhelm Anz managed to evoke before us the significance which we, the younger generation in the 1920s, saw in the intellectual energy, radicality, decisiveness and concentration, which manifested themselves in a natural genius of thinking, as Martin Heidegger was. It was overwhelming. This is why I became a classical philologist. I had the feeling that I would be overpowered by the superiority of this thinking if I did not find my own proper ground on which I could stand perhaps more firmly than this powerful thinker could himself. Now, in the Marburg of the 1920s there were still many others who knew how to nurture our intellectual development: Rudolf Bultmann and Ernst Robert Curtius, Nicolai Hartmann and Paul Friendländer, as well as Richard Hamann and all the others, whom I have depicted in my autobiography.2 Yet, the energy with which Heidegger showered us with his power of concentration, so to speak, was something like a baptism to a new dawn, to a new vitality of thinking. As you can imagine – this is indeed how young people are – this filled us all at the time with an unlimited and undeserved self-consciousness. We felt as if inspired by this master. I can roughly imagine how difficult it must have been for Heidegger’s colleagues in Marburg, in all the possible sciences, when imitators of the radical energy of Martin Heidegger’s thought and questions unsettled their seminars and class sessions by their so-called radical questioning. Heidegger was for all of us a great challenge. When I think back at this, I recall the precarious situation in which we lived at the time, having to pursue our career as [333] scholars, after the inflation, after the prosperity of the middle class had been destroyed, dependent on a system of scholarships which had not yet secured its firm financial and administrative basis and was called remarkably the ‘Emergency Organization of German Science’ [Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft]. Ultimately, it was the power of the impulse emanating from Heidegger which empowered us to gather our own strength, to practice resignation and to concentrate on our own task. It was a stimulus of the highest power. What was helpful for us was that the mutual friendship, the discussion and the rivalry in living together with others established a community of austerity and adventure. This can be easily understood. Then came the years in which Heidegger returned from Marburg to Freiburg and left us, young lecturers of philosophy, alone or, to put it better, he set us free, for it makes a big difference if one can pass on in one’s own way what has been learned, without the proximity of the master being constantly felt. It was a marvelous possibility which was offered to us, young lecturers. There were Karl Löwith and Gehrard Krüger, to whom I would like to dedicate a word of thankful memory today. And there I was myself. We were suddenly called upon to inherit a great mission. At this moment, after a ten-year-long silence, the first publications of Karl Jaspers appeared, the small volume published by Göschen, Die geistige Situation der Zeit,3 and above all the three volumes which bear the title Philosophy and which, in their whole bearing, deviated completely from the normal academic style of a professor of

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philosophy. This work of one thousand pages does not include any comprehensive table of contents and not even a single note, not to mention a computer prepared index. It was like a surprise. Here was yet another individual who had withdrawn from the academic routine and precisely for this reason knew how to present anew the worth of the academic profession. It was especially the humane tone of an unforced serenity which touched me and gave me the task to connect this humanity with Heidegger’s mighty pathos for breakthrough. In the prodigious reader which Jaspers was, the whole cultural wealth of our tradition was kept alive in its human riches. Yet, he was separated by a whole world from that into which we had been educated. When I was able to define hermeneutics in a new manner and say that hermeneutics means not believing in any translation, then I had to take issue with a large part of the sources of Jaspers’ wisdom. The fact that hermeneutics has to lay out [auslegen] the living word, so to speak, and awaken to life anew the word congealed in writing represents the real [334] task here. No translation is really alive. It is only in the living language that the power to awaken accrues, which is granted to us in the wonder of language, namely, to experience the real intention of the one speaking beyond what is said. This is what we were educated to do and I have stuck to it right up to this day: to awaken language to life. Even in the extended activities of travel and lecturing in foreign countries to which I have turned my attention after becoming emeritus professor, I have tried each time to speak in the language of the foreign country. By contrast, the way in which Jaspers always knew how to gather from translations all the fundamental knowledge in its truly universal scope, as it emerged in its spiritual form, meant a totally different talent or genius. He gathered it in the way a physignomist knows how to gather something from the facial expression of someone who speaks in a foreign language. To combine this gift, which Jaspers himself called ‘communication’, with the radicality and scientific rigour which were inculcated in us in our own way of working, allowed us once again to recognize our limitations and presented the reason for which the intellectual capacity of Karl Jaspers gained for me its own significance, alongside the great thinker Martin Heidegger. As a matter of fact, I had the fortune of finding, alongside these two men, two more great teachers. One was Plato and the other Hegel. They are certainly two very different figures from our history, who cannot be easily and willingly brought together. To make them jointly relevant to our intellectual history cannot succeed without some inner contribution of one’s own. Let us begin with Hegel. Anyone can immediately sense how fundamentally different Hegel’s magisterial encyclopedic thinking capacities are from Plato, who represents this unique case of a mind which is both philosophical and conceptual as it is poetic and creative. It has also been a mystery to me how Hegel could become an international model of teaching in his time, this Swabian professor of the Brandenburg marsh sands. Those who know what Swabian is and how Hegel himself spoke Swabian must ask themselves how the intellectual evocative power of thinking could pierce through the alienating effect of this dialect and become perceptible and influential – a mysterious intermingling of tonal sonority and lexical meaning. Hegel appeared to us as the great synopsis of the word which emerged from Greece, was permeated by Latinization and Christianization and is now awakened to a new thinking in modern languages, above all in our own mother tongue. I became aware

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of the mystery of the dimension of language thanks to Hegel and his full might. This exercised its effect precisely alongside the revolutionary and powerful radicalism of Heidegger’s engagement with language. This may sound strange to lay people. They may not even know how much they speak with Hegel when they say, for example, ‘in and of itself [335] the situation is such and such’. This holds true, above all, of Luther’s heritage and German mysticism as well as the spirit of German poetry, which Hegel introduced into his philosophical reshaping of the tradition. I do not consider it an objection – which has been levelled against me time and time again from many quarters, even by Heidegger himself – that I have never freed myself in my works from the linguistic world of German idealism. What I experienced vividly should also remain alive in my own attempts at thinking. Let us now turn to Plato, the teacher of all those who cannot by themselves do philosophy as a task. We can wonder how Plato can be the teacher of all of us if we try to envisage the intellectual history of our culture in its totality, focusing especially on the sciences, which at that time with the Greeks, were daring to take their first steps, to give rise in modernity to unforeseen and far-reaching advances of a completely different sort. Against the great historical background of the ancient and Christian heritage and its transposition into the thinking of the present, it is a true wonder that this thinker and poet speaks to us so directly, like the great artworks of all times can speak to us. What lent him the ageless immortality of the great creative artistry? We find ourselves following a dialogue of Socrates with someone young or old, following how he scuppers their innermost claims to self-understanding, how he unmasks them before their own selves and how, from the commonality which he had established between himself and the other, he conjures up great visions in which the order of the universe, the order of society and the order of the soul fit together within a magnificent unified order. In the tension-filled, fragmented and damaged situation of our world, how could we not be constantly called upon to take over the great task of understanding this vision and establishing an agreement with this unique and one of a kind teacher? This is the background of my whole active life. I am grateful that this university still opens its doors to me even in my old age and that I am still able to speak to the many young people in the same way as I, in turn, once sat before the great teachers who surpassed me and could listen to them.

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Heidegger and Language (1990)1 [14] If we want to engage in a discussion about the significance of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy, we cannot do otherwise than start from the fundamental experience which mediated his appearance on the academic scene of philosophy in Germany. This fundamental experience was not limited only to the German-speaking sphere but over time was communicated to the whole world. It is a new experience of the language of philosophy. It may be comparable to what people were able to experience in their time in Meister Eckhart’s sermons in German and certainly also in the language of Martin Luther, whose translation of the Bible furnished the German language with a new immediacy. We are confronted with a fact which is, in a certain sense, outrageous. Now the whole world echoes of a man, in responses of one kind or another, in one language or another, a man, who had by himself provocatively declared the inappropriateness of French, English, Italian and Spanish for philosophy. What kind of experience is this that has taken over philosophizing in this way? What is it that allows us to have this rather unique experience in relation to Heidegger, which can in fact be compared to the impact Wittgenstein had on Anglo-American philosophy? I recall how for the first time in 1920 a student told me about a lecture in Freiburg by the young Heidegger on the basis of excerpted notes. It surely seemed powerful to me, and yet something hardly different from a kind of Chinese. Only later, when I met Heidegger himself in his own voice and the singular power of intuition, which his language radiated, did I begin to have some inkling of the proximity of language to the subject matter of philosophy. It is hardly possible even just to intimate all the further horizons of the problem that were opened up to me in this inkling. We immediately recall the age-old struggle over the education of the youth, fought in Greece between rhetoric and philosophy. Surely, we also recall how the Platonic Socrates brought about a great turn in Attic philosophy [15] when he granted logos [‘reason’, ‘discourse’] the central meaning of providing access to the truth. This became fully clear in Aristotle when in his logic he refined logos entirely in the direction of a capacity to be a conceptual statement, apophansis [‘proposition’]. This was the expression Aristotle introduced, which was much repeated later on, in order to delineate and distinguish theoretical demonstration from all the other possibilities of speech. What Aristotle founded in this manner upon the logic of judgement, the logic of inference and the logic of concept has since then determined what goes by the name of philosophy in Europe. The late Heidegger simply traced

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his own language back to this beginning, which is still decisive in all our intellectual endeavours as the language of metaphysics. Heidegger’s own beginnings clearly show him to be on the search for a break from this conceptual tradition. Martin Heidegger grew up in the Swabian Alemannic border region, and this instilled in him an unmistakable linguistic gift, which stayed with him, as it did with Schiller, Hölderlin, Schelling and Hegel. The biographical experiences, which the genial young theologian garnered during his formation, eventually found their expression in the transition Heidegger made, when he was a lecturer [Privatdozent], from the faculty of theology to the faculty of philosophy. Thanks to the recent publication of the early lectures in Freiburg and the works of Wilhelm Anz, Karl Lehmann, Hugo Ott, Otto Pöggeler, among others, it has meanwhile become clearer how Heidegger’s intellectual endeavours must have clashed for a long time with the dogmatic framework of the Catholic theology of the time, in which he had been educated. From this we can assess what it meant when he was transported into the climate of Marburg in 1923, where Protestant theology had been nurtured for years. It would go well beyond my competence if I were intending a real treatment of the intellectual tensions overlying the theological education of the young student and his maturation into a lecturer in the Freiburg years, before he went to Marburg. There are still important research projects to be undertaken on this topic. As always, in this case too, the things we turn away from may fall into obscurity and conversely, the things to which we turn may be cast into too bright a light. Truth be told, even revolutionary upheavals have their long pre-history. It was certainly the case here. There is one thing, though, which is clear in Heidegger’s encounter with the theology of Marburg: the conceptual exposition of the doctrinal contents and the doctrinal tradition of Christianity, as it had been elaborated in the Holy Scripture and in the tradition of the Church, was the predominant form in which the young Catholic theologian Heidegger had been schooled. In opposition to this, he had for a long time immersed himself in Saint Paul and Saint John. In the Protestant milieu of Marburg, [16] exegesis more than ever took the first place. The emphasis lay entirely on new readings of Biblical texts. This may have been grounded in the progress of historical knowledge and biblical criticism, but this emphasis on exegesis was deepened at the time through suggestive and intensive discussions with Rudolf Bultmann. This theologian, as erudite as he was penetrating, took up the provocation offered by Karl Barth’s and Gogarten’s dialectical theology positively and thereby tried to bring the totality of his historicocritical, exegetical abilities into harmony. Heidegger was no doubt drawn into this effort, especially since his own ways of thinking always led him to clarify and secure his own thoughts by appealing to the history of philosophical ideas. This was true more than ever in view of the present and past of the Christian message: if one is to find one’s way in the age of enlightenment and science, then one needs the art of philosophical thinking. In this way, Marburg represented for the young Heidegger a continuation in his spiritual journey, thanks precisely to the proximity to Protestant exegesis. In Marburg at the time, we obviously also had Rudolf Otto, the great theologian who was called ‘Holy Otto’, not because he was a saint, but because he had written a book known to all titled Das Heilige [The Holy]. It was a kind of phenomenological approach to the secret of the divine, which was designated by the expression ‘the wholly other’.

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Students in theology at Marburg went from Rudolf Otto to Rudolf Bultmann and were told by Bultmann that the whole of dogmatic and systematic theology, even the protestant one, was no match for the immediacy of the language of the New Testament. Bultmann managed to make this comprehensible in his own way also in his discussions with Karl Barth, Friedrich Gogarten and dialectical theology. With Heidegger’s arrival in Marburg a new epoch began, even for philosophical thinking. Thanks to publications in Heidegger’s Complete Works, we are now in a position to follow step by step the path taken by the young Heidegger since the early 1920s in Freiburg. It would be an exceptional task to show how Heidegger’s language and the terminology he used were enriched at the time through the new conceptual ventures he undertook in his own conceptual construction and how his language improved in constant engagement with the contemporary neo-Kantianism. This is how the growing presence of the concept of ‘life’ left an unmistakable trace already in Heidegger’s early years in Freiburg. When he came to Marburg, he found himself completely exposed to the full impact of modern enlightenment, which reinforced him in his own scientific pathos, while also challenging it. Naturally, all this meant that in the case of Heidegger, his provenance and [17] lineage, his connection to the message of Christianity, which he never totally abandoned, breathed life into his thinking. Let us ask ourselves how this became manifest in the unusual and unusually powerful language of the young Heidegger. We detect here above all the influence of Kierkegaard. It was in particular a Kierkegaardian concern which Heidegger had already adopted at the time from his reading of Kierkegaard. The pathos proper to Kierkegaard indeed comes down to this: the key is not to understand ‘from a distance’, as the Danish Church, in Kierkegaard’s eyes, was doing at the time and failing at its own task. The Church took the history of Jesus Christ’s act of redemption 2000 years ago as a story to be narrated, whereas what mattered was to render this message potent in its contemporaneity with us. This became the motto of any genuine exegesis of the New Testament in the Marburg theology at the time. It was fully consonant with Heidegger’s efforts to become contemporaneous with the history of philosophy through a dialogue with it. Was this not the task with which the young Heidegger had found himself confronted in his intellectual endeavours for quite a long time? What was he to do about it? The Heideggerean response is ‘deconstruction’ [Destruktion]. On this point, I always have to clear up a widespread misunderstanding suggested by European languages and responsible in part for a false reception of Heidegger across the world. For the German linguistic sensibility at the time, ‘deconstruction’ [Destruktion] did not mean ‘destruction’ [Zerstörung] at all. It meant a precise dismantling [Abbau], a dismantling of the overlying layers until one returned to the original experiences of thinking. These experiences are eventually encountered, then as well as today, nowhere else than in the language as it is really spoken. In other words, what is at stake is the task of appropriating anew or dismantling the conceptual language of the entire Western history of ideas, which, from the Greeks via the Latin of antiquity and the Christian Middle Ages and via the perpetuation of this conceptual framework, led to the formation of modern thinking and its national languages. The task was thus to treat the traditional terminology deconstructively in order to trace it back to original experiences.

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To accomplish this goal Heidegger initially preferred the use of the expression ‘formal indication’, obviously in connection with the way Kierkegaard understood himself as a Christian, which consisted in being a religious writer without authority. It is thus not only about avoiding traditional conceptual language as much as possible, a language whose fixed conceptual apparatus was mediated by tradition. Rather, it was about speaking in the way one does when one wants to reveal something. This is precisely what was involved in a formal indication, which only points in the direction in which one has to look. As soon as we grasp this, we recognize in it the pathos of phenomenology. Husserl had already practiced this on simple phenomena with a true mastery of the subtlest art of description. [18] In phenomenological language, what this amounted to was called the ‘fulfilment of the intention through intuition’. One spoke of intuition as the ‘giving’ intuition. Formal indication thus points back to experiences of thinking in the life-world. These experiences have been sedimented in language and also originally lay at the basis of the conceptuality of our tradition developed by Greek thinking. Greek antiquity, the Latin Middle Ages and modernity go back to these experiences in their conceptual formation. It is thus not so much about going back [Rückgang] to the philosophy of Aristotle as it is going through [Durchgang] Aristotle. Heidegger had managed to convince Husserl that the first phenomenologist before Husserl was Aristotle. Since his years as a student of theology, Heidegger had naturally been familiar with Aristotle for a long time, but the Aristotle he had appropriated, which was certainly of a very high level at the time, had been shaped by Aquinas. Now, he read with a new inner tension which was demanded of him by his doubts about theology and his religious distress. But he also read another Aristotle then. He read the Rhetoric and this revealed to him the existential significance of the theory of affects. In the second book of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, we have an exposition of how speech reaches the other by stirring the affects. Subsequent to the trail blazed by Plato’s Phaedrus, Aristotle had developed this exposition into a whole anthropology. However, something came up short in Aristotle’s treatment and became important for Heidegger, who knew what anxiety was, the anxiety of life, the anxiety of death, the anxiety of conscience. After this first access to Aristotle, there was a second access through ethics. It is important that we notice that Heidegger did not directly go to the metaphysics, which in his view was shaped too strongly by Aquinas. I have myself frequently elaborated the significance of Aristotelian ethics in my works, and above all the concept of phronēsis [‘practical wisdom’]. It is this moral reasonableness and thoughtfulness, this wakefulness [Wachsamkeit] and watchfulness, which is manifestly the proper distinction of human beings, making it possible for them to ‘lead’ their life. From these two points of departure, which stand close to living speech and the exercise of thought in practical life, Heidegger then turned to the Metaphysics. For a few weeks now we have had in our possession this precious document, which Heidegger had sent to my teacher Paul Natorp in Marburg at the end of 1922 as a kind of programmatic writing. It was preceded by an introduction under the title ‘Indication of the Hermeneutic Situation’. It represented an introduction to his studies of Aristotle. This document, which was in my possession – Natorp had offered it to me – was then lost in the course of the war. In the meantime, it (or in another copy) has reappeared

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with all of [19] Heidegger’s handwritten additions, which I knew, and garbled only on a few pages. Then, the whole typescript was suddenly discovered in another copy – a new discovery we owe to Ulrich Lessing. Besides the introduction, this copy also includes a sketch (thus, a programme) of his studies on Aristotle intended for publication in Das phänomenologische Jahrbuch [‘The Phenomenological Yearbook’]. In the meantime, this find appeared in full in the Dilthey-Jahrbuch [‘Dilthey Yearbook’] in 1989, for which I wrote a short introduction. What I find so significant about this matter is how Heidegger found access to the phenomenologist in Aristotle. It is an Aristotle who speaks directly from his own experiences of thinking and whose language, thus, should not be peddled around like a set of letters and conceptual labels, but is intended to be followed as a formal indication. Heidegger was completely clear at that time that, under the sway of the presuppositions of an epoch moulded by Christianity, we could not substantially renew or even take over the Greek experience of being. The introduction to his studies on Aristotle, which Heidegger drafted at the time, was even for him not quite yet the firm ground from which his ownmost questions could be definitely answered. What mattered to him then was only to free the Greek experience in its original sense and to make it visible through its otherness as a kind of provocation, as it were. This provocation was directed as much against the Christian consciousness of our own past as against modernity and the historical consciousness, that is to say, against a reflexively conscious interpretation of our past in the differentiated conceptual forms of our own having-been [Gewesensein]. What Heidegger undertook was this: to establish Aristotle as a kind of counterpart to his own questions and precisely with the aim of coming to grips with his own questions. I will use an example to illustrate it. We learned something which, in and of itself, was nothing absolutely new, but what was new was precisely the fact that it had to be learned and that which could be learned from it. The example is the Greek expression for ‘being’. The Greek word is ousia, as found in Plato as well as in Aristotle. If one wishes to understand this Greek conceptual word, then one must above all heed its use in language, how it is already there outside all the conceptual efforts of thinking. This is what Heidegger did. Through this, we gain our first clue towards understanding the multiplicity of the meanings and of the use of language, which Aristotle differentiates in the concept of ousia, as well as in the famous catalogue of concepts (in book Delta of his Metaphysics). The conventional lexical meaning of ousia is ‘property’, ‘assets’, etc., thus that which is in one’s possession. [20] When we are speaking of farmers, it is the estate, the ‘landed property’ [Anwesen], what farmers cultivate and tend as their own, from which they live and where they dwell. Those who have followed Heidegger’s path of thinking, even distantly, will immediately notice how the German language comes into play in this example. German offers something which was also present in some way for the Greek ear and its corresponding expressions: ousia means what grants presence [Anwesen]. Being is the coming into presence [Anwesenheit]. We know the verbal power of the German word Wesen [‘essence’] since Meister Eckhart – and since Martin Heidegger. Even Hegel in the second volume of his Logic, the ‘Logic of Reflection’ or the ‘Logic of Essence’, introduced the word Wesen as a concept for ‘being’ and thereby conceptualized the

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turn of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy and its overcoming of the pre-Socratic mythology of ‘a being in totality’. In this example, we see what this means. Ousia is no longer ‘substance’. This was the Latin translation of hupokeimenon [‘what serves as a basis’] as the formal expression for what lies at the foundation. This expression could designate the sense of being. ‘Being’ is ‘what lies before us’ [das Vorliegende]. Yet, besides this formal expression, Aristotle also conceived of being as energeia [‘being at work’, ‘actuality’] and this comes closer to the concept of essence [Wesen] than the Latin concept of essentia, which is dominant among the scholastics (and which we know as ‘essence’ in the sense of an undiluted herbal extract). Later, this became one of the most remarkable experiences, which the old students of Heidegger had in his company, a group from the Freiburg years to which belonged Oskar Becker and Walter Bröcker among others, besides myself. When, on the occasion of the Freiburg University jubilee, Heidegger gave a seminar in the old style for his older students, he wrote on the board the first sentence of the second book of Hegel’s Logic: ‘the truth of being is the essence [Wesen] . . . ’. Heidegger insisted with meticulous care that this sentence had to be fully understood from the metaphysics conceived in modernity. ‘Being’ here means ‘lying before us’ in the sense of being represented [Vorgestelltheit]. Truth, in this view, is self-ascertainment [Selbstvergewisserung], thus certitudo [‘certainty’]. We should see nothing other than the certainty of what is represented in the statement about essence [Wesen]. This is how fixated Heidegger was on the task of supressing completely the connotations of the verbal sense of ‘essence’ [Wesen], which were certainly not hidden from him and which Hegel had also very well perceived in the German language. It was the late Heidegger who tried above all else to secure his ways of thinking against losing its way again in the most customary sense of metaphysics, in which he saw an ‘oblivion of being’. Against this oblivion, in order to be able to see the history of metaphysics in such a way, he often stressed the verbal sense of ‘being’ and ‘essence’ in his beginnings, even in Hegel and then later in Aristotle, Meister Eckhart and Leibniz. When I arrived in Freiburg in 1923, I had the distinction [21] of being invited by Heidegger to read Aristotle with him once a week. At times, his children were running around naked while he was showing me how Aristotle must be read. He began: ‘to on legetai [“being is said”], being is . . . ’. As I had learned it in Marburg, it was clear that the translation was: ‘being is understood or conceived or thought’. For Heidegger it meant: ‘being is spoken’, that is to say, ‘one speaks about being in this manner’. This thus takes seriously the legesthai [‘to be said’], the legein [‘to say’], ta legomena [‘what has been said’] and thereby all that which followed from Plato and his Socrates as a flight into the logoi. It means language and what language says. In one stroke, the logic of the tradition, which was still at the basis of German idealism, was transformed into the vivacity [Lebendigkeit] of a reality in the life-world. Logic is encountered as language. I recall my consternation as well that of a very close friend in Marburg at the time, Nicolai Hartmann, when Heidegger also gave him such a private lesson. In this way, Aristotle became, all of a sudden, a contemporary. What had occurred here? A merely functional concept, such as ‘being’, was called to life in the way it was encountered precisely in the life-world of the speakers and the way they articulated

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themselves in language. Already in his very early years, when reflecting on the concept of life, which was fashionable then, Heidegger pondered the inner motility [Bewegtheit] of life and saw at the same time that life always tends towards rigidity. This is also true of language and words. Carriers of meaning are reduced to functional signs and sentences to empty dogmas. This orientation towards the living use of language, which Aristotle especially cultivated, then opened a new access to the question of ‘What does being mean?’, which, in the conceptual language of metaphysics, seemed to have lost its meaning as something unquestionably obvious. In the case mentioned above, we vividly saw that we understand better what the essence of being is when we think of ‘what grants presence’ [Anwesen] and Heidegger’s students had learnt how to recognize a genuine question in the ‘question about being’. This naturally presents us with a general task: learning how to think life in all its many dimensions of linguistic self-interpretation and experience. To this belongs the experience of transcendence, the experience of poetry, of art, of the cult, of the rite, of the law – all this needs to be thought anew. This was Heidegger’s preoccupation. He always began anew along this path. We may ask ourselves: what does our thinking in a culture shaped by science have to learn from these experiences? What I mean is that we need to find a new balance so that our thinking does not simply exhaust itself in the mastery (and exploitation) of nature, that is to say, in making everything readily available, including ourselves. Later on, Heidegger called this ‘calculating thinking’. [22] From the ‘deconstruction’ [Destruktion] of the conceptual language of metaphysics we can figure out how we came to the predominance of this thinking. We certainly would need first to grasp the significance of the Latinization that took place. The adoption of Greek thinking – of the Greek intellectual world – by the Latin language is a process which stretched out over the whole of late antiquity, while in the Rome of Plotinus, in the imperial court in the second-third century, people were still speaking Greek. All the more do we wonder: what does Latinization mean in this context? Dilthey was the one who introduced the expression ‘the Roman voluntary attitude’. An ingenious expression of ingenious precision. What does ‘will’ actually mean in Latin? Well, we all know it: voluntas [‘the will’] and velle [‘to want’]. But what does it mean in Greek? Nobody knows. Here one speaks of boulesthai [‘to want’]. Yet, anybody who knows even a bit of Greek knows that it actually means ‘to deliberate with oneself ’. Boulē is the deliberative assembly. The Greek word thus means ‘taking counsel’, and not the blind impulse of the will or even the will to power. Or it means ethelein [‘to want’, ‘to wish’]. It is not quite easy to say what this word actually means. Yet, we can hear in it – and the linguistic use confirms it – that it does not so much mean giving counsel in view of open possibilities as the closure of such possibilities, a being decided, or even better: being resolute [Entschlossensein]. ‘Resolution’ [Entschluss] is a modern variant of decision [Beschluss]. In Plato’s Gorgias (522e) we read: ei de boulei, ethelō [‘if you want I would like to . . . ’]: ‘If you have deliberated and decided, I am ready and resolute’.2 Both Greek expressions still encompass the whole phenomenon, whereas in the Latin velle and voluntas, as well as in the German Willen [‘the will’], the meaning of ‘choice’ and ‘counsel’, which lies originally in boulē, recedes in favour of what is ‘decided’, ‘wanted’, ‘wished’: sit pro ratione voluntas [‘let my will be the reason for it’].3 In Kant’s Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals the will is a form of (practical) reason.

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It is only after Kant, mainly since Schelling and Schopenhauer, that the notion of ‘blind will’ appeared. In an early letter Heidegger once used the expression the ‘devilry of the will’. Anybody who is familiar with the later Heidegger knows the remarkable place the concept of ‘serenity’ [Gelassenheit] has received in his thought. It is not any kind of letting go [Lassen] but a ‘holding back’ [Ansichhalten] so that one lets be and sets free [lässt und freilässt] by contrast to the resolute hunting down motivated by goals decided by the will, which are constantly concealing from us everything else that could be open to us. We have to realize that the scholarly language of modern science goes back to Latin and thus to the Roman voluntary attitude. This is true, more than ever, of the national languages, which themselves developed from Latin in their different forms. For German there was also something peculiar on account of German mysticism, Meister Eckhart and Martin Luther. Yet, for the German of the philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the task [23] was still to break away from Latin. It was the tremendous achievement of Kant and many of his predecessors in the German enlightenment, such as Thomasius and Christian Wolff, to have transformed the language of the scholastic metaphysics of the eighteenth century from Latin into an elegant, supple and finely crafted German. By contrast, the vernacular language of Luther and the German preachers found its enormous and all-nurturing influence only later in the linguistic genius of Hamann and Herder. In the time of Goethe and in the aftermath of Kant, all of this converged into the tremendous conceptual force of a Hegel. He was indeed able to integrate the thought of the pre-Socratics into the German language insofar as he indicated the first steps of the concept with ‘being’, ‘nothing’ and ‘becoming’, steps which the logic of being took, leading to the logic of essence and of concept. Let us now ask what is gained from the deconstruction [Destruktion], dismantling [Abbau] and from the laying-bare [Freilegung] of the provenance of our conceptuality. I answer: the return to what is originally Greek makes us aware of what is our ‘own’. This is what the example of the Aristotelian concept of energeia can teach us, for instance. We know the word. ‘Energy’ belongs to the German language in its own right. Yet, the Greek word itself has a totally different meaning. Energeia means ‘being at work’ [am Werke sein], ‘being in exercise’ [im Vollzug sein]. We, Germans, hear in the word ‘energy’ the explosive charge of an accumulated force. Since the Renaissance and the beginning of modernity, our present concept of ‘energy’ comes from the Greek Aristotelian concept of energeia, which liberated the dynamism contained in it. In fact, even the Greeks could already hear something of this in energeia, for ‘being’ is not only substantial being, that which lies unchangingly before us and underlies all transitory properties. Energeia is rather the mode of being of that which is not produced by us (ergon [‘work’, ‘task’]), but is ‘from nature’, such as the ‘simple’ bodies, the elements and all living beings. These in particular are not only in movement but possess ‘selfmovement’. All that which is in motion has ‘being’ in the sense of motility [Bewegtheit] and for this Aristotle introduced the technical expression of energeia. This was already one of the most important insights of the young Heidegger. By way of the concept of energeia he opened up a new sense of Aristotelian physics. Naturally, this was not physics in the Galilean sense, whose triumphant march covered the entire modern

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scientific world. The Aristotelian question concerned the being of beings in their motility. By contrast, Galileo’s foundational development of modern mechanics is based upon taking the basic concept of motion as something measurable. This does not mean a ‘being in motion’, but the process of motion as such, which, for example, in free fall, takes place in such a way that in a vacuum, feathers and lead-plates fall at the same speed, so to speak. [24] This powerful step of abstraction, which was only confirmed later through experiments, opened up the dimension in which modern science charted its course of transforming the world from the ground up and ushering us thereby into the age of technology. In ousia and energeia as well as in ‘coming into presence’ [Anwesenheit] and ‘motility’ [Bewegtheit], something of the linguistic experience associated with the Greeks resonates. Even in the expressions ‘what grants presence’ [Anwesen] and ‘coming into presence’ [Anwesenheit], there is ‘unfolding’ [Wesen] and thus our ear can hear something of ‘motility’ [Bewegtheit]. This clearly shows itself in the sense of ‘decay’ [Verwesen], which is a deterioration in the unformedness of that which is not living. ‘Being present’ [Anwesen] and ‘decaying’ [Verwesen] are in this sense very close to each other and allow the original Greek experience of ‘being’ in turn to speak to us. By contrast, the passage through Latin with concepts such as substantia [‘substance’], subjectum [‘subject’], essentia [‘essence’] and actus [‘act’] made way for a totally different understanding of being in the tradition of metaphysics. With concepts such as ‘subjectivity’ and ‘objectivity’, this understanding of being introduced us into the age of modern science. It was thus not ridiculous chauvinism when Heidegger occasionally spoke of Greek and German as the languages of philosophy. It is rather those very people who feel hurt by such a dictum by Heidegger who suffer from such a chauvinism. This dictum states what is the case, namely, that philosophy and science have put their stamp on the West since the Greek beginning up to our own awareness of these beginnings. The German contribution distinguishes itself only insofar as for us the Greek beginning received new life through Kant and Hegel. In truth, thinking is always bound to the language which is actually spoken. Language offers us our experiences of thinking. This is true for all spoken languages. This is also seen, for example, in Heidegger’s particular interest in Japanese and Chinese, because, as spoken languages, they too have found their own possibilities for conceptual articulation and perhaps allow us to get a sense of the experiences of thinking which lie ahead of us. German philosophy has been determined in such a way by its Greek inception and the subsequent transposition of this inception, first, into Latin and, then, into the scientific languages of our scientific culture, that our thinking as a whole is now faced with the task of deconstruction. This task does not consist in a laughable purism, which, say, wants to substitute German words and vocabulary for other words everywhere. It rather consists in enlivening the problematic of the conceptual language which has been handed down to us through the powers of intuition inherent in spoken language. We can recognize this perhaps most clearly in the central position that the concept of ‘consciousness’ has gained in German philosophy, which is a concept fundamentally denied to Greek as well as Latin. One will now say: but we did not need Heidegger to show us what is problematic and obscuring in the concept of [25] ‘consciousness’.

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Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud and others did not live in vain. We all know that consciousness presents us a most superficial aspect, beneath which much is hidden. As Nietzsche says: ‘hanging in dreams on the back of a tiger’.4 However, it was Heidegger’s distinction to have managed to deconstruct this concealment at work in the conceptual field most characteristic of philosophy. The deconstruction of the concept of ‘consciousness’ is, in truth, the recovery of the question of being. This constitutes the revolutionary element in Heidegger’s enterprise. He did not question back behind consciousness in the sense in which depth psychology [Tiefenpsychologie] and the critique of ideology did it in their own way. What is revolutionary in Heidegger is that he asked the radical question of what we are to understand by ‘being’ at all and that this cannot be done if we only go back to the alleged authenticity of consciousness and self-consciousness. Heidegger thus made a breakthrough by taking over the Platonic and Aristotelian question of ‘being’. In doing so, he also truly transformed the whole of modern philosophy into a far more radical enterprise, which, even since German idealism and above all since neo-Kantianism, had based itself, not without reason, upon the Cartesian concept of the cogito. We now stand in the middle of the discussion with the Greek beginning of the West. This lay in the background of Being and Time. This lay in the background of ‘What is metaphysics?’ and this question was radicalized into the question concerning the overcoming of metaphysics or even about the end of philosophy in the West. The language of philosophy and its conceptuality belong everywhere to the living context in which a specific language is spoken. This is how the language of philosophy partakes in the role played by language in general as our access to the world. What is the essence of the language which grants us this access? It will be clear to anybody that this question is extraordinarily difficult. Language is hidden to us as language because it always means something. The Greeks did not even have a word for language, just as they did not have one for consciousness or for will. For language, the Greeks either used the word logos, which meant the matters and states of affairs as they are expressed, or they used an expression for the tongue, glotta, through which the linguistic sounds are produced. To this day, language itself is for us something mysterious, unless we only use it for calculation and mastery, in which case it is best when improved through artificial symbols. Truly speaking, language exists where there is dialogue, thus in the being with one another. What is really mysterious is the manner in which language is at work in dialogue. Why can a wrong word at the wrong moment be so disastrous, indeed even deadly? And, conversely, why can the right word at the right moment disclose commonalities and resolve tensions? This is worth pondering. To be with one another is the situation of our life and [26] to come to an understanding in being with one another is the task assigned to us all. The phenomenon of language has certainly drawn the attention of Greek thought and, especially in Stoic philosophy, it set the essential foundation for the whole subsequent tradition of the philosophy of language. However, the rise of the modern natural sciences, based on mathematics with its technical symbols, launched a countermovement, which gave a new impulse to the phenomenon of language. The language of metaphysics, as it stemmed from Aristotle, dominated the tradition and also determined in a fundamental way the engagement with modern science. This

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above all took place in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and its aftermath. Even the linguistic genius of Herder could not impose itself upon philosophy, especially since his infelicitous critique of Kant’s theory of space and time, which based itself on language and its living use, could not prevail against Kant’s superiority. Even thinkers such as Fichte and Hegel, who were so powerful in their language, have left no real place for the role of language as the genuine and fruitful ‘depth of experience’. Schelling’s genial dilettantism may have narrowed the domination of logos and logic, and associated philosophy with art and poetry. However, it was only Wilhelm von Humboldt’s romantic sensibility that, in the proximity to German idealism, had grasped language in the full extent of the manifold forms of its manifestation and inspired thereby the linguistic sciences. From this point on, there later developed a linguistic relativism in the renewal of Humboldt’s insights, which, I believe, missed the essence of language. Precisely because of the manifold of its appearances, language itself remains deeply concealed. Even such ingenious approaches as those of Chomsky do not do justice to the manifoldness of the world of languages. Heidegger too raised the mystery of language to the privileged object of his meditations only gradually, even though his thinking had been operating in the element of language for a long time. We were indeed talking about Heidegger’s linguistic power. It is certainly not always pleasant to be forced to misuse language by the dictatorial intellectual will of a Heidegger. This should be entirely uncontroversial. Yet, when we see how the living visions of thinking are mired in rigid linguistic rules and language usage, as well as in the stereotypes which shape opinions, we must demand of ourselves a violent effort to move away from these ossifications. For this, we need the hermeneutic effort to bring to the fore what we wanted to say when we speak with one another and what we wanted to show the other in order that we ourselves learn something when we are speaking with one another. In Being and Time Heidegger already appreciated the significance of language for the analysis of Dasein. Yet, when he treats the meaning of language and [27] discourse [Rede], it is all essentially the explication of a monologue. This is so even when Heidegger is aware of it and insists that discourse is addressed to someone. The fact that dialogue is first of all language and radiates its own luminosity remains a marginal point for him. The situation is different in the late Heidegger. He tried to break out of the constricting scientific culture of the West and come back to other ways and settings for being human. In this, he really undertook tremendous efforts to hear the voice of being in the pre-Socratics, who had not yet found themselves caught in the shackles of logic. The first texts we possess, those of Parmenides and Heraclitus, cannot validate his attempts. These texts simply gave us a glimpse into a linguistic pre-history. Heidegger was aware of only being on the way to language – and this means naturally not on the way to language, but in the thinking about language. Or, perhaps, on the way to language as to the word which is sought? This can be shown best in Heidegger’s interpretation of alētheia. Heidegger translates alētheia as ‘unconcealment’ [Unverborgenheit]. Perhaps it would be more correct to say, on the basis of the way the Greeks spoke and with Humboldt and others: ‘unveiledness’ [Unverhohlenheit]. In fact, alētheia appears primarily and for the most

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part in the context of speaking: telling the truth or even deceiving. Odysseus was the admired hero of lies, in whom even the gods themselves took pleasure. Behind the glittering false brilliance of the lie there is a concealing in the dark. This dark ground lies behind all speaking and seeing. The Greek concept of pseudos [‘false’] has not yet given this dark ground its conceptual expression and in this respect ‘disclosure’ [Entbergung] is in fact the more appropriate expression for alētheia. Language ‘wrests’ something out of ‘concealment’ [Verborgenheit] and brings it into unconcealment, into the word and into the risk of thinking. Since Parmenides, being and appearance – not sincerity and lie – have been the great new themes of Western thinking. What is unveiled in such a way, what is disclosed in such a way, which was concealed before, is at the same time also preserved as that which is sheltered [geborgen] to the extent that it returns into the word. This is the ontological dimension of alētheia. This dimension is completely concealed by the concept of consciousness and its dominance in modern thought, even when thinking takes the concept of being as its theme. ‘Being’ becomes an object. Object is resistance [Gegenstand ist Widerstand]. From the very outset, the object is seen from the perspective of the energy with which the will strives to overcome this resistance. What manifests itself in the concept of ‘object’ is a will to dominate. This is why Heidegger avoided both the concept of consciousness and the concept of object. He knew that we have methodically secured our dominance over the entities, which we have objectified, and, in this attitude, we can only come to have marginal experiences of our system of domination. [28] In such ‘knowledge of domination’ we will not only forget the knowledge which can save us but also all the other ways of knowing how to think if we do not change our way of learning. I hardly need to say how easy it was for Heidegger to transition from this point to ‘dwelling’, for ‘dwelling’ is indeed also the word for the fact that we are not face to face with objects in order to dominate them. We dwell [wohnen] in what is familiar [das Gewohnte]. This is also language, something in which we live, dwell and are at home. The word is not like a sign that we put up and then take down once it has served its purpose, as if we had it ready in storage. Word and language are that with which we interact with one another and with the world, where we are at home. Hegel was already aware of this dwelling when he used the beautiful expression ‘to make oneself at home’ [sich-Einhausen] for characterizing the task of human life. In a similar way, Heidegger has shown in the case of dwelling that the word does not circumscribe the field of what is mastered, but the field of what is familiar. What opens itself there is a space proper to oneself, in which one is never alone. Not only because one is so often there with others but because one is, above all, always surrounded by traces of one’s own life and filled with the entirety of one’s memories and hopes. The secret of language is its openness. One manages to find the right word for situations which can never be the object of a calculation and for moments which are unforeseeable. In order to make this clear, I have tried to refer to the concept of verbum [‘the word’] in the Christian tradition, whose salvific power is not completely unknown even in secular circles. To the disclosure there corresponds a sheltering [Bergung]. Something is sheltered in words. This has nothing to do with romantic and poetic inclinations, even if romanticism and poetry have certainly something to do with language. We must note that words can be something more and do not always

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exercise a referential function. This also means that we dwell in words and are at home in a language. Consequently, words always reach beyond the particular conceptual function, which exhausts its sense in expressions. We are closer to language when we think of dialogue. For a dialogue to succeed everything must fit together. This is not the case if the partners of a dialogue are not engaged in the discussion and do not move beyond their answer but are only, for example, interested in finding the means of counter-argumentation by which to restrict what was said or simply finding the logical arguments with which to refute what was said. A fruitful dialogue is a unity in which giving and taking, taking and giving finally lead to something that is a common dwelling place, with which one is familiar and in which one can interact with others. We also say this in German: ‘I got on well with him’. But in what does one really get on with someone? Answer: in everything. This idiom, which gives expression to an experience, shows that [29] a genuine universe opens up in a dialogue. It is not directly what Socrates undertook, when, in response to the naïve cosmological speculation of the oldest thinking, he spoke of the ‘flight into the logoi [“arguments”, “discourses”]’. Yet, it remains an aspect of it, only that it would have to be situated in a broader framework of dialogue and dialectic. It would be unnatural and artificial not to speak of Nietzsche in this context. Our French neighbours have precisely attempted to go beyond Heidegger by returning to the radicality of Nietzsche. He in fact considered truth and lies – in the extra-moral sense – as values of life and finally regarded both as mere masks of the will to power. Doubting truth in so radical a manner certainly belongs to the original experiential possibilities granted to human beings. Without being aware of it we would not manage to see through something like the fictions of consciousness and of self-consciousness and those of the ideology implanted in us. How did Heidegger lead his intellectual struggle with Nietzsche in the 1930s? It is a little bit parochial to want to answer these questions by taking into account the distance which Heidegger in these decisive years took from the biologically racist doctrines of Nazi Germany. More is at stake in the intellectual struggle with Nietzsche. To the task of questioning the underlying basis of the concept of truth from the standpoint of the primary category of the ‘will to power’, Heidegger opposed the concept of ‘remembrance’ [Andenken]. I do not dare to say that Heidegger came out victorious in this struggle. Yet, most certainly he was aware that he was struggling with the radicality of Nietzsche’s nihilism and could not lag behind the radicality of this thinking. If Heidegger had not found in Hölderlin a partner and violently pulled him into his intellectual camp, he would indeed not have been able to sustain this struggle – and we may see in this the limit, but also the greatness of his genius. He saw in Hölderlin’s distress about language his own distress and need in relation to language. He saw in him the poet whose visionary power, without particular theological and historical knowledge, had renewed the heresy of Joachim de Fiore.5 Joachim taught that an intermediary would always be sent from God or the divine in order to re-vivify the dying fire among human beings so that the divine would show itself in the series of these intermediary figures which mark the epochs of time. In Islam there are similar convictions. Hölderlin’s poetry thus became for Heidegger a theological aid for his thinking, and even more than that. He not only shared the distress about language,

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which he recognized in Hölderlin’s poetic work. He saw in his poetic creations a measure for all that was to come. When Hölderlin evoked the distance of the gods ‘in times of need’, this distress about language, which he bemoans, was at the same time its poetic legitimation. Heidegger [30] recognized himself in this and, in his own way, he interpreted it rigourously in its dogmatic consequences as the New Testament has always been interpreted. He tried to conceptualize his own vision of a new thinking and of a homely being of the human, a new way of being together, as a salvation coming from the poetry and the rhetoric of Hölderlin. Let us finally ask ourselves what the task is which is left to all of us. I am always a bit blindsided when someone asks me what it is really that we still have to learn from Heidegger. If we could only learn it! It is not about learning but about an ability. In each case we should try to do in our own thought what he did: to go back to the original experiences of one’s own life and to face the demands of social and political life; and in all this, to use the freedom of intellectual judgement to break through the academism of valuations and opinions composed with finality, even at the risk of being wrong oneself. I do not believe in the universal language of humanity just as little as in one artificially produced weather for all the inhabitants of the earth. What I believe is that human beings can learn from their own experiences. There are original experiences for human beings in all languages. All of those, who are speaking with one another or even with us, know of the reverence for the exalted just as they know of the mindfulness and shared responsibility for what is concealed by the common future.

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Homeland and Language (1992)1 [366] The homeland is not merely a place of residence which one chooses and can change. The homeland can also not be forgotten. To use a famous word by Schelling, it is something immemorial [unvordenkliches]. This is why life in exile must be accompanied by thoughts of the homeland, from which one knows oneself to be shut out, as well as by thoughts of return, even if a return is simply out of question. The homeland remains unforgotten. Now, the homeland is no longer the same in our world of an ever-increasing mobility, as it was in more sedentary times. In those days, the thought of a forbidden return from banishment to the homeland was something that was always suffered as a new exclusion. Now, every exile is hard and so the hope is always alive that the banishment will be lifted and the return to the homeland will be allowed. This is why the dirges which the Roman poet Ovid composed from his place of exile by the Black Sea still resonate in the heart of people today. But what is the homeland for us, this place of primordial familiarity? Where is it and what would it be without language? Language belongs, first and foremost, to the immemorial nature of the homeland. We know this ourselves from the fleeting experience of travelling. When we return home from a country where a foreign language is spoken, the sudden reunion with our own mother tongue is virtually like a shock. Indeed, it is really the totality of what is familiar, the mores, the practices and the customary world which is permeated by our own language. Certainly, people who are at home in their own mother tongue can learn other languages and eventually so well that they are in some sense also at home in them. Yet, the decisive point here is still the following: for those who live in exile, returning to the world of their own language is not left to their own free decision. Those who have settled only as guests in the language of a host country have clearly not lost their homeland. The same is true even when people spend their entire time abroad if they only know they can come back. But in fact, the homeland is above all the home constituted by language. The mother tongue retains for all of us something of an immemorial homeliness, [367] and this is also true for those who are multilingual, precisely when they hear and speak their own mother tongue again in the fleeting encounters with those from their own country. However, those who are fated to live in exile lead a life between wanting to forget and preserving remembrance, between farewell and remembrance, between loss and new beginning, wherever it may be. To live is to dwell [Einkehr] in a language. This is why we all must see to it that we make

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the foreign place and what is foreign habitable, and must look for a dwelling in another language. Herein lies a rupture which is not to be avoided and which must heal if one wants to live on. Healing is not at all what we so often imagine in our mechanized society, namely, something which someone does, like a doctor. It is always a vital task for the sick themselves. Thus, when one cannot get to hear one’s own language anymore, it is a farewell from the language that binds human beings. This is the human background of all exile. In this way, we can measure the weight of the real question: what can a return from exile be? Must it not be a new rupture, a second rupture? Or does it make the first rupture palpable once more like a pain? What is at play in such a rupture is like a crisis in a dialogue. Even when one’s own homeland, which one has not abandoned, has been disfigured into something alien, one can in the end only live under the maxim of hope and promise: et illud transit [‘this too shall pass’]. Even today we in Germany are experiencing what such a rupture is, which makes dialogue difficult, so to speak. This is how the dialogue between those living in the West and those living in the East is not easy. I recall how difficult it was, even just with my own friends who had gone into exile, to resume conversation by making do with the connections of the postal service, when it had been interrupted by the war. Both partners in a dialogue are then faced with the new task of finding a new identity, which is a continuity and yet also cannot be. However great the power of the spirit and the heart may be, human beings cannot bring back time. That towards which we return has become different and the one returning has become equally different. Time has marked and changed both. For everyone who returns, the task is to dwell in a new language. There is a whiff of alienation in everything to which one returns. Everyone sees a repeat, so to speak, of the primordial task of being-in-the-world, which consists in overcoming alienation. Young children bump against the walls of reality and the dialogue begins in the slow awakening of the exchange of glances, in the first touch, in the first babbling of sounds close to language and finally in the first words. In truth, something of this situation pertaining to our learning to speak is repeated in every case of reaching mutual understanding through dialogue. Language is indeed not what we possess as words and administer according to our free choice. It is in giving and taking that language is constituted. [368] Speaking has its sense in its enactment [Vollzug] and can only exist where one person draws near to another in order to secure the commonality of the experience. It is precisely in this context that the task of literature can be sized up. Literature wishes to put into words that for which there may be no pre-established and pre-cut formulas. We are in an age of increasing regulation in which there is a surge of public information pouring in from all directions all day long, like a stupefying wave. This age is such that for writers and poets, dwelling in language, which language itself could express, must appear almost like a return to what is completely other and estranged. It is from this perspective that the sense of literature festivals can also be quite well determined. Such festivals do not claim that poets will be found here, who could not be found otherwise. It is not at all claimed that something like poetic schools are established here, which is perhaps not the worst thing to have happened in the history of a culture with a high literary standard. Yet, it is indeed important to bolster a mutual

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validation as much among the creators as among the readers of literature. For all the possibilities of cultural creation ultimately depend upon this validation. Let us first ask what a writer really is. I would say that writers are supplicants before language. They want language to answer their prayers. They want it to grant them a favour so that they succeed in making it speak in a new way. In this way, what is merely written as such or what is read as such would not be part of the general process of the flow of information but we would listen to language. The distinction of poetic language and that which we call literature in the proper sense lies in the fact that here we listen to language. Poetry in whatever form, be it lyric, narrative or screenplay, is always the claim and the possibility to be like a dictum [Diktat] which is only to be accepted and not submitted to a critical world of experience. The word ‘poetry’ [Dichtung] comes from dictare [‘to dictate’], from dictating, even if there possibly resonate in it still older, pre-humanist layers of meaning in the sense of ‘rendering thick’ [Dichtmachen]. At any rate, what writers produce from out of themselves with the intention that it will eventually be read is not something which people pick up by simply hearing [abhört] what is communicated to them. It is something to which they listen [hinhört] as that which they are made to see through the writer’s own linguistic power of evocation. The ability of writers depends on the degree to which readers become aware of this and their ability to succeed depends on whether this kind of presence of that which is evoked in language finds a response in the readers. It is thus a badge of honour, so to speak, of literary festivals that they bring together many silent readers and that they manage to draw public interest upon themselves by keeping it at arm’s length. We should not be ashamed of this or feel belittled because of it. It is [369] in the end a proof of the amount of cooperation of every kind that goes into the commonality in our social life. What comes easily also quickly disappears again. In conclusion, I would like to illuminate a bit more acutely the connection between return and literature. We must be clear about the fact that entirely new tasks have emerged for writers in the age of the industrial revolution and automatized communication, when the information given to all of us about everything is massively multiplying itself. In a certain sense, writers must constantly return from exile, when they try to withdraw from the world of words constantly needed and utilized, from all pre-processed opinion making, ways of speaking and expectations of information prepared by technology. All the more so will we become conscious of what language is in its true possibilities and how literature is assigned this task of returning to language. This turns all poetry into a return from what is alien. I have articulated this at one time in my congratulatory speech when Hilde Domin was conferred the Droste prize, namely, that even in her case, her poetry is a return to language.2 It is indeed also the task for all of us in our own life to return home from alienation. The poetic word leads the way in this. I would like to distinguish three stages in which language can unify us all. For this purpose I first refer to the word used by Paul Celan of the grid of language [Sprachgitter].3 Language is first of all a grid. This begins with the already described process of socialization in the language education of young children. In our world where we express ourselves in language, a world which has matured but has also been

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polished through socialization, we should recall the geniality of this early age in which one learns how to speak and we should see in it a model. There indeed we see what language is capable of when it is not overly restricted by the constraint of rules but when, in a wholehearted attempt to communicate something to the other, it ventures out towards its own self. This is what we observe with astonishment time and again in a three-year-old child. Here we see that language is not only the grid which hinders but equally the grid which allows for an intimate mutual understanding. The grid is both, even a hindrance, which reminds us of specific conditions without which it would absolutely not be possible to come over to the other. Wittgenstein rightly said that there cannot be a private language. Language is dialogue. A word which does not reach the other is dead. Dialogue is indeed with the other and any word in the concrete moment needs [370] the appropriate and unrepeatable tone so that it overcomes the other grid, the grid of being other and reaches the other. The second function, which is connected with this, I would call the veil of language [Sprachschleier]. It encompasses all those spheres of common courtesy, including the avoidance of harshness and abrasiveness, of impetuosity and irritability, which make living with one another only possible by polishing our manners. No doubt, this veil of language also has its dubious underbelly, for which the famous words of Talleyrand are fitting: language is the very best instrument to conceal one’s thoughts. This is in fact the art of the diplomat. Yet, even this is not only something negative. Obviously, this art of hiding one’s thought eventually succeeds in reaching the basis for an agreement and a peaceful settlement. With this I come to the third level of language, which is of particular concern for me here in the circle of those who are preoccupied with literary creation. This third level I would like to call the flash of language [Sprachblitz]. In all measured, well-examined and lucid words which go back and forth in the exchange between people there can be a flash. This reminds me of experiences which I have often been able to have. Allow me to retell one such experience because it is particularly amusing. In order to learn something about the secret of the dark continent, I once taught in South Africa in a University for Bushmen. Obviously in English. This was the language of instruction there. I had to deal essentially with the professors, who were Afrikaners, and with the assistants already trained by them. They wanted to gain a feeling for the philosophy in Europe while, for their part, tending to their students. I was once asked whether I would like to speak to all the students about the task of philosophy. It was an impressive spectacle. The Bushmen are very tall and particularly handsome people. There was thus a real gallery of ebony statues around me. However, their face did not betray any expression even when I did everything to reach them. I was in despair. What should I be able to tell them about philosophy when I did not detect the slightest impulse of a response? (Later, my colleagues told me that it was unfortunately always so even for them, that they could detect no reaction.) Then, I had an idea during my presentation which saved me. I was explaining to them that Greek philosophy had begun with Parmenides and that his insight was that there was no nothingness, but only being. I then added: ‘Please be clear about this: nothing is no thing’.4 At that moment, something like a wildfire ran through the rows of seats. ‘Did you understand, did you understand? Nothing is no thing!’ It was as if a flash of

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language had struck them. For a moment it became clear that being is no thing. This story naturally serves more to entertain then to teach but it has its instructive side. [371] In relation to such experiences we must ask ourselves what we can do from here in the continent of Europe. This is why we are already asking today as to what it means when our highly cultured and highly trained Japanese colleagues come and, by reading our texts through a sheer impenetrable grid of language, they absorb our Western philosophy with an astonishing proficiency and a sterling acuity. During this occasion, we would like so much to learn what they would have had to say to our thinking and to us from their tradition, Confucianism and Shintoism, as well as the values coming from religious and moral traditions. Today, we stand at the inception of a gigantic human process in which we are all implicated. We will never be able to achieve the eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideal of eternal peace in the world if we do not finally succeed at arriving at a real exchange between foreign cultures and our European ones. What does it mean when they philosophize with us and absorb the world literature together with us? Learning foreign languages is quite certainly a part of this. There is no way around it. Translations only provide a first service aimed at surmising something of the resonance, the sound and the sense of the original. However, the omnipresence of the fine arts in all cultures teaches us what is possible where the language barrier is no obstacle, and not least music, the first cultural language of the whole of humanity, teaches us this. Yet, we are here in the space of the German language dealing with literature. I therefore close by illustrating the return to language in a flash of language. It is a famous statement by Heraclitus, which is particularly familiar to me because Heidegger had engraved it on the door of his cabin. In its German formulation, it says: ‘It is the flash of lightning that steers everything’. We have to take this very literally, not as if fire were meant as the element of nature, like water, air and earth. No, it is the flash of lightning. But is it not paradoxical that the flash of lightning steers? Indeed, this is what one is supposed to understand, that it is a paradox that the flash of lightning must steer. What is then meant here? I opine that it is this that the momentary brightness of the quiver of lightning suddenly shows the world in a blinding clarity. And even when everything sinks back into the depths of the night, a moment of orientation has been still granted to us and we recognize something of the life of the spirit in it. Even when much sinks back again into darkness we have been shown the way of searching and questioning, which lurches back and forth between forgetting and illumination. Thus, I finally come to one last point: that we know all language in a form of approximation. I call this the ‘crystal of language’ [Sprachkristall]. This not only evokes the ‘grid of language’. It reminds us of the crystal whose grid has a firm mathematical structure according to which crystals form. This is how it is, I think, when the flow of speech gains a legitimate form in poetry. [372] Just as the crystal in its formation and in the firmness of its structure begins to spray its fire when light falls on it, so it is also with the linguistic accomplishment of poetry, that it approaches the hardness, firmness and permanence of the crystal and captivates not by a pleasant form but by the iridescence of light. A multifaceted glimmering radiates from the poetic structure like from a crystal. We all participate in this and surmise something of the truth of the word which stands in such a light.

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On the Way to Writing? (1983)1 [258] For a few decades now, the problem of the dimension of writing has been thrust into the foreground of our interests in the area of the pre-history of peoples and their literary tradition. For reasons which cannot be discussed here, writing acquired a methodological precedence over living discourse insofar as the engraving of marks, in giving written signs an advantage over a fleeting speech, represents an aspect of the world with its own ontological status. Texts refer to texts. In the wake of Nietzsche and Heidegger, this point of view was most notably developed by Derrida. At the same time, since we have come to know the Serbo-Croatian epic songs, the growing insight into the perpetuation of oral traditions has conversely amended and refined our view on oral traditions and their vitality. We are thus invited to inquire into the common ground which lies at the basis of both the orality of speech and writing. One will ask oneself: is it not the case that something like a tendency to set into a fixed form is always already included in the usage of words? Words have their meaning. Despite all the reservations that could be raised from older and newer perspectives, there still remains something true in Husserl’s decisive distinction between the functions of expression and meaning. The ideal unity of meaning, which Husserl treated in the first of his Logical Investigations and with which he expanded the field of eidetic reflection beyond the dimension of mathematical objects, indeed includes an artificial isolation of the single word. It is not the word as such that is constituted by a unitary meaning intention, but the choice of the word, and this means speech itself, which articulates itself into words. Only from the context of speech does the manifold of meanings, which can pertain to words, receive its determination. This again cannot be completely reduced to the unity of a sentence provided that speech is embedded in the broad stream of the mutual understanding between persons. This flow of speech does not admit any isolation of its components and furthermore pre-linguistic as well as non-propositional expressions contribute to it. This in fact only makes the real [259] question more acute: how does the unity and sameness of what is meant and communicated take shape in the temporal flow of an event as something that is the same? It is noteworthy that the first steps of reflection in Greek thinking already began with this question. At the end of his second Analytic, Aristotle speaks of a process in which the universal reaches its permanent identity.2 Even though this happens in a text on logic, it is clearly not the logic of argumentation or the logic of inference which can present a satisfying answer to this question. It is rather most clearly the enigmatic character of mnēmē, of memory, within which something

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permanent is established. This means explicitly the following: from the multiplicity of encounters or perceptions, which are retained, arises the unity of one single experience and this experience in turn rises to the abiding unity of the universal, upon which the logos [‘reason’] is constructed. The logos has its foundation in the act of meaning something, in the noein [‘to think’], the immediate awareness of what is meant as such. What has been later derived from this as the theory of conceptual construction or indeed a theory of inductive reasoning in fact refers back to the secret of language and its semantic life. This is how Themistius in his interpretation of the Aristotelian text elicited the learning of language as an illustration: in learning a language the process of coming to an understanding progressively plays itself out in the conventions governing the use of words, which constitute a linguistic community. This linguistic community does not itself consist of a rigid system of rules in the hands of a schoolmaster, but of the pliable mutual agreement among those speaking to each other. This analogy between word and concept dominates Aristotle’s interpretation here and goes hand in hand with the precedence given to the judgement, to the apophantic logos in the so-called ‘hermeneutics’ of Aristotle. The analogy between word and concept must clearly be cast in a broader context. For this purpose and with regard to a living use of language, I would like to speak not of the unity of the sentence but of the unity of the phrase. This general grammatical expression continues to live on in a definitive way in at least two fields: first, in rhetoric, where the word has today acquired a pejorative colour. The phrase is an empty phrase, the pre-existing form of something put into words which is not inhabited by any real act of meaning [Meinen]. Thus, we speak of phrase-ridden speech or even of phrase-mongering when we want to characterize a discourse as being empty. The other use of this word has a decidedly positive ring. In music we speak of the phrasing and recognize thereby that the musical [260] recital includes a rhythm over and beyond the purely musical fixing through notation. This rhythm is ultimately rooted in the rhythm of our own breathing and thus of our liveliness [Lebendigkeit]. The negative and the positive colours which lurk within the concept of the phrase obviously point to a twofold pliability of the aspect of language itself. Even in the purely linguistic event, we are familiar, besides the grammar, with something like a phrasing as well as with the formation of relative unities, which corresponds to the musical phrase. In the case of language, we call them, for example, the formula or the formulation. Here too, relative unities come together through sense and sound, which are, for their part, prescribed for the articulating and modulating rhythm of the public lecture or for the reading which aims to comprehend. This leads us to the decisive point, namely the connection between repetition, which is never quite the same, and the constitution of that which is one and the same. This connection is clear as day in the phenomenon of learning to speak. The child learns the word more or less through many repeated attempts at saying it. The use of formulas and formulations in speech also points in the same direction. They occur almost in the manner of a ritual, that is to say, in a unity of meaning and form. This unity is precisely defined by its repeatability, indeed by the inviolability of its integral sameness in the repetition. This is true primarily of all ceremonial use of discourse in the religious realm as much as in the legal sphere and we encounter it as an integral moment in the widespread use of rhetorical artifice.

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What is so extremely instructive about this phenomenon of the phrase and the formulaic recurrence of linguistic expressions is its vacillation between mere execution and genuine meaningfulness. Manifestly, the identity of such linguistic unities is not necessarily founded on the unity of the meanings which are at play in the formulaic use of discourse. Rather, wherever a formulaic use becomes customary a depletion of meaning sets in. The expressive force of the formula can even win out in the way we know from magic formulas in the style of abracadabra. Without doubt, even the formulas which are the most pregnant in meaning have a share in this function, which is more magical than rational. This is certainly true of the formulas of prayers, blessings, curses and the like: their familiarity and settled recurrence do not diminish their expressive power but are a constitutive part of it. Rhythm itself as such has for a long time drawn the attention of researchers because, on the one hand, it is in a certain sense prescribed and wants to be sustained but, on the other hand, its recurrence is formally integrated into the course of the movement. Something similar is true in all the cases in which the rigidity of what is meant limits the latitude for variations, a latitude which, in itself, belongs to the repetition of discourse. As a consequence, it is the listener who formally insists on the precise execution of the discourse. In the socalled ‘refrain’ we all know perfectly well [261] the unifying force which comes into effect in the repetition of what is familiar. Here, we are very far from anything pertaining to the dimension of writing. Nonetheless, ensuring the identity of the formula or of the phrase is a crucial element in such an event of oral repetition. This event is by itself capable of being fixed and is indeed impelled towards such fixing. There is no question that the identity of such recurring formulas is more original than the identity of written signs (whatever the kind of script). Already in the way the epic uses language, recurring formulas constitute a stylistic element as peculiar as the one with which we are all familiar from the use of writing. Song and epic narration are indeed really like a kind of written recording in memory. This is how Plato describes it in the Philebus (39b): it is mnēmē which ‘inscribes’ the logoi [‘discourses’, ‘arguments’] in our soul. The talk of the engram, which is a well-known metaphor in modern psychology and neurophysiology, expresses this connection in a similar way. If we look back at these initial considerations, we can understand why there is a direct path leading from the repetitive form of the ritual to what we call literature. At the beginning of all recording we have the legal document pertaining to the sacred or the profane, a kind of originary lore, to which one can come back at any time and which clarifies what the legal situation is. Inscriptions on graves must have had a similar documentary character, which we find in all cultures: it serves the continued life of the dead in the memory of the living. The first step towards literature is obviously found in the place where a memory, which continues to live on, is evoked anew in artful ways. The invocation of the muses, with which the Homeric epics begin, is already of such a kind. In particular, the poet’s dedication to the muses at the beginning of Hesiod’s Theogony3 is a kind of literary art form which presents the totality of what follows as a unitary book or work. Obviously, in all this one must be conscious of the fact that such literature, even in its subsequent expansion into the different forms of lyric poetry, tragedy or comedy, was not meant to be read nor were for that matter the first

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forms of prose. They were meant for public recitation. This means that we are dealing here throughout with ‘textbooks’, with things set in writing, which are meant for reproduction and not for personal reading. This state of affairs may take very different forms. Epic poetry has developed a distinct profession of rhapsody. In many forms of lyric poetry, it may have initially been only the poet who recited the verses publicly. By contrast, the choral lyric is already in the literal sense a textbook on the basis of which the public recitation is made. The same goes for all forms of theatre. It may have been only in the case of early prose that the author was the sole speaker, at least in a first ‘publication’, if one can call it that. But even here a repetition through renewed public reading seems likely. [262] There is thus no strict separation between the dimensions of orality and of writing. Transmission [Überlieferung] can be brought about in both ways and, in both cases, we have a new orality in which transmission is first brought to fruition. At any rate, we see in the classical age of Greek philosophy how the art of prose was developed into a genuine literary genre. Speeches were even written down and possibly not for the sake of preservation at all but for the sake of being presented publicly in this form as literature. Or, when they were real speeches, they underwent an artistic refinement and were thereupon also reproduced again and again as ‘literature’. Thus, we see in Plato’s Phaedrus (228b) how the young admirer of Lysias carries with him the copy of a great rhetorical feat by the famous orator and is burning to read it out to Socrates. By invoking the Phaedrus, which has cropped up here, we are falling into a new field of problems. The Platonic dialogue Phaedrus stands powerfully in the way of taking for granted the transition from artful discourse to artful writing. From his dialectical analysis of genuine rhetoric Socrates here draws a conclusion which seems to lead to a radical critique of the dimension of writing altogether. As we see here, if the skilful anticipation of the addressee’s reaction also belongs to true rhetorical art, writing becomes a problem. Plato expresses this through the story of the godlike inventor Theuth, which Socrates narrates (274cf). He tells us of how Theuth had made many wonderful inventions and among them also the invention of writing. As he came to the Egyptian king with these inventions, all his inventions were critically tested. Some were praised and others criticized. Finally, he also presented his invention of writing, proudly believing that not one objection could possibly be made against this marvellous invention which will strengthen the memory of human beings. To his painful astonishment, the king declares, but not without gravity, that it is one thing to make ingenious inventions and an entirely different thing to assess their value for the people and the culture. What the inventor of writing recommends as a strengthening of memory in fact causes a weakening of memory. Obviously, we have here a clever variant which Plato introduces on the familiar Greek topic of the first inventors. The story is also, quite obviously, treated as a Socratic fable, even if as one which expresses something true and appears ruinous for the whole thesis of a natural transition from the dimension of orality to that of writing. The arguments are well known. Discourses which are entrusted to writing are helplessly exposed to all sorts of misunderstanding and misuse. When expressed in a lively exchange, speeches [263] can be defended by the speakers themselves, explained, completed or even

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improved, so that misunderstanding and misuse, if they arise, are quickly overcome. In written form, these discourses prove to be vulnerable to all forms of misuse and any misunderstanding. Over and above this, writing does not in fact help to strengthen our inner possession of knowledge, of our mnēmē and the anamnēsis [‘recollection’] originating from it but helps to make knowledge a mere appearance and an empty claim. The merely external dissemination of discourse does not serve cognition at all. Socrates then applies this to the case at hand. His young friend, he says, should convey to Lysias that he should not waste his time with such things as manufacturing speeches in a written form. Socrates makes a distinction between the one who loves the true logoi [‘discourses’, ‘arguments’], the philosopher and such manufacturing of speeches, which only produces copies and false images of logoi (278f). As is well known, this rejection of the dimension of writing and the positive turn towards the essential oral dimension of philosophy and the living dialectic have a decisive significance for Plato’s entire work. This is confirmed by the famous excursus in the Seventh Letter. Plato refutes the claim made by the young tyrant of Syracuse who, on the basis of an entirely insufficient tutoring by Plato, had dared to record Plato’s essential thoughts in written form. Since then, Plato’s unwritten doctrine has been a question as open as it is central for the understanding of Platonic philosophy. Socrates warns against (276dff) treating what is written with utmost seriousness instead of regarding it with playful detachment. Plato follows him with equal decisiveness in the Seventh Letter. As a matter of fact, in the entirety of his dialogical work, Plato avoids speaking in his own name. All this certainly indicates a radical commitment to dialogue and to the inner dialogue of the soul seeking the truth, which we call ‘thinking’. Only in the recreation of dialogical understanding does Plato share his own thinking with his readers. But does a rejection of the invention of writing and of the use of writing really follow from this? Or is it rather an appeal to the right use of writing, something we could call with an expression of our time a ‘hermeneutic appeal’? Let us examine what Plato says with regard to this positive suspicion (274ff). What strikes us first of all is the brilliant inventor Theuth presenting to the Egyptian king the invention of writing along with a whole series of inventions, whose rank and significance were beyond doubt even for Plato. It is clearly the Egyptian romanticism placed at the service of a critique of his own time which allows Plato to put so much stock in this mythic inventor, just as Greek mythology [264] in the variants made by Aeschylus puts so much stock in the inventor God Prometheus. Admittedly, the invention of writing, different from what we see in Aeschylus, receives a lot of prominence in Plato. In the eyes of its alleged inventor, writing is something peculiar and exceptional. In fact, what is reflected in indeterminate ways in such stories about the invention of writing is the adoption and refinement of the Semitic alphabetic script by the Greeks in preHomeric times. It seems hardly plausible that Plato was serious when he characterized this invention itself as a dubious acquisition. This is why we are not informed about whether the critical reprimand, issued by the wise Egyptian king to the inventor, is supposed to signify the rejection of the invention. It was known to any reader of Plato that writing had been pervasive for a long time. Rather, it is clear that the Egyptian king rejects only the misuse and the deception which lie in setting speeches and thoughts in

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writing. It is as if the king had foreseen the phenomena of corruption typical of the age of the sophists. The artful speeches in written form eventually must also be counted as part of these phenomena. By contrast, Socrates definitely does not condemn the use of writing as such. In fact, writing is recognized as a solace and remedy when faced with the forgetfulness which comes with age and, in a broader sense, as an aid to memory for those who know and know how to think. The expression encountered here, and which stands in a positive relation to forgetfulness, is hupomnēsis [‘act of reminding’] and hupomnēma [‘reminder’], which means ‘to remember’ and ‘that which reminds through its external existence as writing’. It is a function which is subordinated to the genuine inner possession of mnēmē and the anamnēsis, which arises in mnēmē. All this points to the proper domain of the ‘inner’, to the phenomenon of mnēmē: the retaining and holding fast, which form the ‘inner possession’ enjoyed by the human mind and shield it from forgetting. Mnēmosunē, the goddess of memory and the protector against oblivion, in fact occupies a distinguished position as the mother of all muses. In Hesiod, she belongs to the oldest generation of the gods, as daughter of Heaven and Earth, and she had a cult in many places. We encounter her as the divine greatness which specifically presides over memory, memory being that which overcomes even death. In the Orphic mysteries she is the one who is invoked and whose invocation is placed in the grave for the deceased as a passport for the dead. Her stream does not bubble along the white cypresses, the tree of the dead which characterizes forgetting, but promises the thirsting souls through its invigorating sip that they will escape oblivion and remain themselves. What is thematized here are temporality and the capacity to escape temporality, which imprint themselves upon the essence of human beings. In one stroke we find [265] ourselves at the centre of Platonic thinking, in the midst of its discovery of the secret profundity which lies in the common expression philosophia and its derivations. This profundity concerns this: what is meant by philosophia is not so much wisdom and knowledge, and knowledge for the sake of knowledge, but rather the never-tobe-quenched desire for knowledge and the unrelenting search for wisdom. Oudeis tōn theōn philosophei [‘nobody among the gods does philosophy’]. It may be that this new nuance, which Plato introduces in his myth of Eros in the Symposium, has experienced a certain over-resonance in modern times with their never to be completed empirical sciences. It may also be a bit too much in tune with Lessing’s famous words that, given the choice, he would prefer the search for the truth over the possession of the truth. In fact, what is meant here, however, is neither an occasional idea by Plato nor even an anticipation of the modern idea of progress or a pathos for enlightenment. Rather, we are dealing with a fundamental insight into temporality and finitude, which is the lot of human beings and separates them irremediably from the divine, despite all their participation in immortality, which may be granted to them through fame and memory. We recall the passage in the Symposium, in which Diotima instructs an astonished Socrates in the art of love (207cff). She begins with the daemonic power of eros [‘love’], which is an animal urge, and applies it in a specific way to human beings and their distinctive feature, which we call the ‘mind’ [Geist]. With the irresistible violence of instinct, nature compels animals to carry out the preservation of the species and in this way – perhaps even with the sacrifice of their own life – to have

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a share in immortality, which will be granted not to the single individual, but only to the species. In a similar way, human life not only has this kind of share in immortality, but is granted another comparable, yet remarkable, share in immortality. Individual human beings are constantly regenerated during their corporeal existence – this is a knowledge acquired by the natural sciences of the time, which also plays a role in the Phaedo (87f). In a similar way, this regeneration also holds true for all their mental and psychological impulses: they must constantly be revived. This is the law of temporality which has been laid on the human mind: what is proper to it moves between forgetting and sinking into oblivion, on the one hand, and recording, retaining, repeating, retrieving, remembering and restoring, on the other. Nothing is a firm possession in the human mind. Everything requires the indefatigable overcoming of oblivion and the rebuilding of that which abides in time. Obviously, we should not take this doctrine to the extent that it is elicited here, as Plato’s last word on the matter. It is not even Diotima’s last word. Rather, this doctrine is introduced as an explanation in the style of the wisest of all, of those who are perhaps too wise and reduce all cultural achievements of humanity to ambition and the longing for immortal fame. [266] We can still apply this lesson to our problem. This deep insight concerns the presumption of an enduring possession and is associated, as a temptation, with all forms of writing. In this regard, the bold analogy between the reproduction of the species in animal life and the reproduction of knowledge in individual human beings carries a particular significance. Just as in the case of animals, it is literally always a new being which carries on the preservation of the species, so it is clearly also the case with human knowledge that it must continually gain a new relevance if it is to exist at all. This is how Diotima boldly threads the analogy between life and mind. Dead repetition, that is to say, a repetition in which the difference with regard to time and to what is new would be blotted out and which would have an existence like the frozen sameness of writing, would not satisfy the condition for spiritual permanence nor the demand for such permanence. Such a repetition would be an appearance, a copy, a fantasy of knowledge, like those speeches spouted out which are no longer speeches. This is how Plato, through the mouth of the Delphic priestess, defends himself against the tendency towards deterioration, which finds expression in the folly of a dogmatic possession of knowledge. Obviously, it would be a mistake to date back to Plato the consciousness of historicity, which arose in the eighteenth and nineteenth century at the end of the age of metaphysics, and which lies inexorably in the way of modern philosophizing. Plato’s position towards history presents a specific problem. This problem is certainly in extreme opposition to modern thinking insofar as what we call ‘history’ meant for him far less a historical process directed towards a completion than a process of decline, which appears as a decline because it is compared to a sacred, fully accomplished beginning. History is the history of a decline and knowledge is a protection against that decline. This indirectly gives its distinctive feature to what positively corresponds to the tendency which all finite beings have to deteriorate: protection, preservation and restoration.4 Now, we have to ask: is it not too radical to apply these insights to the questionable nature of all that is set in writing? Has Plato not left us with too one-sided a position when he so totally secures himself from the decline inherent in the dogmatism of the

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dimension of writing that he unqualifiedly condemns all textuality? Does this not go too far? Are there not truthful texts, texts which first satisfy the idea of the text and of the claim of ‘literature’ precisely as text, which are truthful texts by the fact that they are completely the same and impossibly unchangeable? Do we not call all poetic texts in this eminent sense ‘texts’? We have to ask whether Plato perhaps champions his own ideas all too one-sidedly, when in his opposition to [267] the sophistic style of misusing the logos for parading oneself, he puts the living transmission, the sowing of the logoi in the soul. This truly has its own deep power to convince and we will basically have to accept that the continued life of philosophical thought cannot consist in the transmission of reports about the doctrines of philosophers, as it became common in the Greek cultural life since Theophrastus or as it spreads itself today in the philosophical Alexandrianism of the age of the positive sciences and historicism. It makes sense to say that philosophy does not have its permanence in texts, but that texts can only be aids to memory, and this means for those who know (eidotōn hupomnēsis [‘a reminding of what is known’], Phaedrus 278a1). Are there not texts which possess their peculiar distinction in the inviolability of the letter, such as religious, legal and even poetic texts? One could even think that in such texts the true meaning of writing is really fulfilled, namely as a codification of what is valid, as a preservation of what is valid against misuse, adaptation, distortion or even denial. At any rate, it must be conceded that such texts have their proper and unique presence in their literal repetition which is faithful to the letter. This is not about a unity of meaning and of the meaning intention alone which can be presented – and, in the case of international legal treaties, must be presented – in the most different formulations, even in different languages. What is at stake is the singularity of the structure put together in language. Not only the letters, but also the unity of sound and meaning must be exactly preserved and abided by. This tonal totality of meaning may be realized in ever so imperfect and multifaceted approximations but it is posited as if it were an unchanging standard against which any reproductive realization is measured. This is the true secret that is specific to art and to which there is nothing analogous either in the domain of the truth proper to the sciences or to that proper to philosophy. This goes hand in hand with the fact that works of art can be fully understood at a very different level of expression without the truth of what the artwork says lapsing into a relativization due to this and without false understanding misplacing its specific critical sense. The growing familiarity with a work of art not only does not exhaust it but allows it – as the same – to become ever richer and speak to us ever more vividly. It seems to me that it is the ritual aspect which fuses here inextricably with the effectuation of a sensible and intellectual meaning. Does this now mean that Diotima is wrong when she recognizes something abiding only in renewal and that the Platonic Socrates is wrong when he sees in the setting in writing only a secondary activity and when he separates off what is written as a kind of game from the true seriousness of saying what is true? [268] It could sound as if Plato had put in the mouth of his Delphic priestess his old prejudice against the art of poetry, which he largely banned from the ideal city as a mere imitation of imitations. But no, he does not do this. Diotima mentions the works of poets, of Homer, Hesiod and others. Likewise, Lycurgus, the creator of the Spartan community, and Solon, the

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creator of Athenian legislation, are honoured. These are the true children that these men have left behind (and not so much their biological children) (Symposium 209d). Through these children, they achieve fame and immortality. We will readily count Heraclitus’ statements and Plato’s dialogues among these achievements of valid logoi – along with all other documentations of philosophizing, which are more ‘works’ than ‘ways’ and which surpass the exertions of the concept, as do all works of art in that they are always challenging us anew. Here, the discussion achieves its unity. We have the critique of the dimension of writing directed especially at the literary pieces of rhetoric by a Lysias, but also in its unmistaken application to Plato’s own work. We have his rejection of the setting of philosophizing thought in writing, on the one hand, and, on the other, Diotima’s inclusion of all the works of wise people, poets and statesmen in the great struggle with temporality and in their push towards immortality. Even such ‘works’ do not remain in place in a dead sameness and let the events of time rush by them. Plato may not have given any explicit indications on this point. Yet, Lycurgus’ ‘children’, the laws of Lacedaemon, are celebrated as the saviour of the whole of Greece. Solon’s laws are celebrated as his Attic legacy. Homer and Hesiod figure as the teachers of the whole of Greece. What we see here, in substance, points to the entire wide realm of the constantly renewed appropriation of this legacy. These ‘children’ themselves have also been released into life and continue to live in mnēmē, whether they have been set in writing or not. Their existence consists not in the adherence to the dead letter, but in the constantly renewed application and appropriation as the same and as ever different and new. We should pay attention to this: Diotima without hesitation entrusts this ‘hermeneutic’ insight to Socrates, who, being himself a constant conversationalist and refuter of all fake knowledge, found an unexamined life, an ouk exetastos bios [‘non examined life’], not worth living. Diotima herself opens the prospect onto the path of love, which goes through all the logoi and leads to the highest insight, the path of the dialecticians, which is supposed to lead them yet beyond themselves. When Diotima proceeds in this way, she is, however, no longer certain that Socrates can follow her (Symposium 210a). The path of love she describes leads through all the logoi in all their forms, which ought to be traversed, and [269] it is supposed to engender logoi everywhere until it reaches the heights of a final insight into the beautiful itself. In this final vision, in this fulfilment of love, which is only contemplating and beingwith (theasthai monon kai suneinai), Diotima recognizes, for her part, the life truly worth living. We have to ask ourselves what this conveys to Socrates and, thus, to us. Plato can hardly distance himself from the life of self-examination (bios anexetastos [‘unexamined life’], Apology 38a5), which Socrates considers his own, and he will certainly not ascribe to himself a life of fulfilled vision. Does he not rather say this to himself – and to us who can hardly all follow him on this path? Yet, we know that, in all the restless to and fro of presence and wakefulness, forgetfulness and sleep, which governs every aspect of our temporal and finite being, the dialogue of the soul with itself continues and constantly renews itself so that there is something durable in the end, mnēmē and anamnēsis. In the dialogue on eros it is the beautiful itself, in the dialogue on the ideal city it is the good itself towards which we are casting our gaze. This highest and unique is not only otherworldly, removed from all temporal decline,

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passing away and transience. It also has its existence in everything that is beautiful, in everything that is good, like the animal species has its existence only in all of its exemplars. What we learn here is that it is also true of the word, of the logos, that it only exists when it renews itself constantly. Indeed, this is even true of the dead letters of that which is written that they reach their existence only when they are revived in the ‘soul’. Mnēmosunē is the mother of all the muses.

­2 1

Voice and Language (1981)1 [258] One aspect which presents itself right away as the background for the topic ‘Voice and Language – Speaking and Language’ is the triad of phenomena that we call ‘speaking’, ‘writing’ and ‘reading’. These three concepts, which as experiences and modes of behaviour, straddle the entire span between voice and language, are not simply a sequence in which the first is first, the second is second and the third is third. They rather appear intertwined in a very peculiar manner with each other, both in the specific manner in which they are realized and in the reflection upon them as to what they actually are. This is why I would like to place in the foreground the essential significance of writing for language. I speak only of one triad and not of hearing. For hearing obviously belongs to everything that is supposed to be language, whether spoken, written or secret. Yet, how writing and reading belong to language is a matter for reflection. It only takes a few words to recall the kind of loss inflicted upon the living exchange of speech when it is written and set in writing. In a famous passage of Plato’s Phaedrus, we are told how the inventor of writing came to the Egyptian king in order to promote among other things his newest invention as something to assist and strengthen memory. Yet, the wise king of Egypt is not at all happy about this and replies: ‘you have not invented a means for strengthening memory, but one for weakening it’. In the age of Xerox, we are all rather clear about the truth of this royal wisdom. How much has been lost due to the domination of writing and its reproduction needs no elaboration at all. Yet, what would make for an interesting topic is the degree to which, for example, the reflection on the deficits in communicative power, which are introduced due to writing, may have led to the situation where these deficits have been made up by the art of writing through literary style. Think, for example, of how in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the art of reading in connection with the pietist movement, and generally in connection with the central role of the interpretation of written texts in Protestant preaching, prepared the ground [259] for a culture of writing and reading. At the time, people had first made a calculation or, better, listed the alternative accomplishments which were expected from the art of writing when it must compete with the immediacy of speech in personal conversation. The negative aspect of the dimension of writing is so clear that I prefer to talk of the positive relation between language and writing. I would like to see more acutely how much the possibility of setting language in writing casts an important, even illuminating light on the essence of language itself. Obviously, both the phonetic form of speech

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and the symbolic form of writing have an ideality in themselves constituting what they are. The word ‘ideality’ is used here purely descriptively – one should not condemn Plato’s truths just because they stem from Plato. It is simply true that language in its essence, exactly like writing, idealizes along the lines of what is essentially constant in the space of what is contingent and variable. Linguistic sounds are linguistic sounds without even remotely possessing the precision of the tonal character which the tones of music claim for themselves within the system of tones. Linguistic sounds have a wide margin for free variation. Their communicative function lies precisely in this that this margin for contingency never extends so far as to obliterate what is common to all and what is constant in all variations. The same is obviously true of writing and the written signs. Think only of the differences in handwriting, which often calls for an interpreter of oracles to decipher a handwriting. Yet, even this margin is constrained by limits. These are the limits of legibility, which stand in immediate correlation to the articulation of speech. This is borne out in our Western civilization already in the oldest reflections on these matters. I am thinking above all of Plato, who in his reflections – just as the atomists – begins with the expression for the letter – and not the one for sound (phonē). The Greek expression is stoicheion [‘letter’]. Plato reflects on the ideality of what is systematic in language, of the linguistic means, of the different sounds, vowels, consonants, voiceless consonants, etc. He presents their systematic connections, which alone make linguistic competence and speaking possible. These reflections can be understood just as much from the standpoint of what is written as from that of the act of writing and reading. The word grammē [‘line’], which stands for writing, is not for nothing in the word ‘grammar’. This word does not primarily mean language but the art of writing. The ideality belonging to both the sounds of language and the signs of writing tells us something about what language is. The space which language articulates and the view offered by language of what is common are such that space and view are not lost when set in writing. It is precisely through this that speaking differentiates itself from other forms of vocal expression [260], such as screaming, groaning, laughing, etc. All these phenomena obviously do not have in themselves the same ideality of what is meant, which language documents through its capacity to be written down, even if these mental forms of expression cannot exist for their part without conventional expressive values, such as the archaic laugh. I must remind the readers that Aristotle in his famous definition of language uses the expression sunthēkē [‘convention’].2 Kata synthēkēn means ‘according to conventions’. By this, Aristotle rejects certain theories which reduce language and word formation to an imitation of nature and emphasizes the conventional character of all forms of linguistic communication. This conventionality is of such a kind that a convention is never negotiated as a convention, never reached as an agreement. It is a convention which, so to speak, realizes itself as the essence of all agreement and through such agreement. Without our being always already in agreement in this sense, no speaking is possible. Yet, we do not start first with an agreement when we learn to speak. The essential intrinsic connection between language and convention only tells us that language is an event of communication in which human beings are in agreement. This is precisely what is obvious as the

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far-reaching dimension in which both language and writing, as well as their relationship move together. The close relationship between the two is reflected in the fact that we know of ‘transmission’ in the form of literature, which means that the litterae, the letters and thus the dimension of writing are granted a central distinction here. This distinction appears in the fact that there is no loss when something is transmitted in literary form whereas all other monuments, compared to written transmission, remain mute as the vestiges of a life lived. These monuments grant us knowledge of many things, reveal much of what is now no more, but they themselves do not tell us anything. By contrast, undeciphered inscriptions are not mute in themselves – only we are still deaf to them. We have here, so to speak, the full existence of things ‘thought’ contained in linguistically formulated messages so that something is communicated to us when we decipher the inscriptions. Obviously, it does not have to be ‘literature’. Where we use the word ‘literature’ in an eminent sense, for example, when we speak of ‘belles lettres’ [schöne literatur], it is evident that we are marking something out within the infinite multiplicity of things written (and printed). We may perhaps say of a good book of the scientific sort or even of a letter: this is really literature! What we want to bring to words by this is that a true art of language reveals itself in it. Just as often we say of texts, which claim to be literature: well! literature this is not. In a linguistic use, the concept of ‘literature’ thus represents [261] a value concept within the possibilities of language. This sense can also be imbued with negative connotations; for example, when in the context of a political action someone says that it is ‘literature’ in a critical and disparaging manner. This in fact means uselessness for praxis. The concept of ‘literature’ can certainly also be used in a much broader sense. We must envisage the whole breadth of this concept in order to organize our thoughts on the matter. Anyway, I would still say that we all agree that the jottings which lie on this page here are not literature despite the fact that they are written. What kind of difference is this? Now, obviously that which is written but which neither is nor claims to be literature has its own communicative limit and function. It grants the dimension of writing the specific reference back to what was originally spoken or meant. So are the notes which we make to ourselves, in fact aids to memory, as we are also used to saying. They are there only to reproduce, to a certain extent, what was meant in the original act of thinking and speaking for the author of the note. This relationship undergoes a reversal at the very moment something becomes literature. When I am reading a book, there is no question anymore of being referred back to the original act of speaking or writing, for example, to the real voice or the individual being of the writer. I stand here in an event of communication of a totally different kind. This will need to be discussed in detail. A second example besides literature is naturally the letter. The letter is for the one addressed, allowing the dialogue partner and what he or she intends to say to me to speak again, that is to say, the exchange through written means in place of a living exchange. We make the same assumption in case of the letter. When a letter is like literature – let us take the case of Rilke’s letters, which are indeed true texts of a literary kind: they are virtually no longer letters. Rilke himself devoted a large part of his working hours – and definitely as working hours – to the writing of such letters. Beyond any doubt, they are

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now ‘texts’ and represent a part of his intellectual creation. It is entirely obvious in this case that this is literature, precisely because it no longer refers back to the situation in which the writer and addressee come to an understanding. We do not need to know who the Countess Nostitz was or any of those other respectable ladies to whom Rilke wrote his profound letters about death as the other side of life. These are no longer genuine letters. Genuine letters are rather of such a kind that they refer to something which they presuppose for the understanding with the addressees and which they intend as an answer, like any word in a dialogue. In the form of a such a substrate, they at least still have something of the orchestration of a living dialogue in themselves. There is no doubt that misunderstandings can also arise in the case of the transition from speaking to writing, which [262] in the face to face of a living encounter would be dealt with in a timely manner, while becoming intractable when written down. Although letters are obviously this possibility of continuing the dialogue and developing its thread, we all still know the misunderstandings which can arise even between friends in an exchange of letters and which would be eliminated in living discussion through immediate selfcorrection. This was also Plato’s well-known argument that what is written cannot come to its own assistance and is thus helplessly exposed to misuse, distortion and misunderstanding. As a letter, what is written always already veers into a certain zone of abstraction or ideality even when, in our more literary world, it still wants to be the continuation of a living dialogue – or at least the resumption of a living dialogue in accordance with the idea of a letter. In contrast, there are other forms of writing, which I call literature in the broader sense, for example, when instead of notes, I speak of ‘codification’, if I may express myself in such a way. I use the expression ‘codification’ intentionally and do not mean by it the linguistic terminology of today, but simply have in mind the natural use of language and its basis. That is to say, what is written always ‘remains written’, as Luther says in his translation of the Bible. It remains written, it has gained a definite status by its being written down and this status obviously means that now what is written speaks by itself and does not first receive its power to speak through the return to an original speech situation. This is the sense of all these painstaking regulations in our world dominated by writing, in which we formulate an agreement which has something like the ‘force of law’. The oldest documents of humanity, as we must admit to our chagrin, are for the most part not exalted works of the intellect, but commercial agreements or tax lists, at best tablets of laws. At any rate, they are matters of a documentary character, in which there is obviously no looking back at an original speech situation, but a forward focus on the implication of what has been established. This is of great hermeneutic significance. I may only remind us that jurists, for example, when taking recourse to what is written – the civil code, the statutes of law and the like – in no way confine themselves to going back to the original intention of the legislator for interpreting the law. Studying, for example, the acts of the legislating commission in the modern parliament is a secondary and more than dubious way of supporting the interpretation of the law. It would be a historian but no jurist who would be content with reconstructing the original intentions of the legislator. It is the ratio legis [‘reason for the law’] which matters for the jurists. It is the function which pertains to what has been set in writing in accordance with its own content and for the legal order and its preservation.

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[263] I thus take note of the fact that we have here juxtaposed to one another, two different forms in which the dimension of writing has a connection to language. One is a substitute for the living dialogue and the other almost like a new creation, a linguistic being of a new, unique kind, which, precisely because it is written, has received a claim to meaning and a claim to formality, something which is not granted to the ephemeral phonetic sound as such. Now, it is clear that the concept of ‘literature’ belongs more closely to this second form, in which what is decisive is not the referring back to an original speech situation, but the pointing ahead, here to an appropriate way of letting the text speak and understanding it. I already touched upon the fact that, from this point of view, we can easily understand why the so-called belles lettres can most properly fulfil the sense of literature. The belles lettres are called ‘beautiful’ because they are not linked to application and thus to the immediate effect of an action. This is the old sense of kalon [‘beautiful’] and of the artes liberales [‘liberal arts’]. Even in ‘knowing’ there can still be a freedom from the useful and what is to be used, and, hence, the kalon. Not being a literature of use fully defines the concept of belles lettres. What I would like to consider in these matters is how this narrower ‘eminent’ concept of literature has the necessary effect of making a kind of demand.3 Writing is in this case not simply writing something down for oneself or for someone else, but becomes a genuine writing, which ‘creates’ something for the reader who is anticipated or to be won over. This is the writer in the proper sense of the term. Such a person must be able to ‘write’ and this means to compensate in artful style for everything contained in the immediate exchange of words in terms of emotional coloration, symbolic gestures, voice modulation, intonation, etc. We must assess writers according to how far they are able to achieve the same power of language in writing which is at work in the immediate exchange of words between people, and perhaps an even greater power, for in the case of poetry the power of language is so intensified that the reader remains continually captivated. It is clear where this points to: an art of language which renders what is written capable of speaking. It is an art of writing. What comes out of this is literature. It is clear what this means. With this, the convergence between language and writing, which is realized in reading, reaches its highest intimacy. ‘Speaking’ appears in the dual form of writing and reading. This is the basis for my third key term.4 It is to be shown that reading is not something like a third term, which is added to them, but that the third is here precisely the point of convergence between writing and language. [264] Writing is really a phenomenon of language only in the fact that it is read. It is worth submitting the ways of reading and the process of reading to a closer analysis as I intend to do. I am aware that I am treating in this way a topic which is, in a certain sense, opposite to the main topic of voix et langage [voice and language]. An opposite topic always has the advantage that it produces delineations and thereby also makes what is delineated visible. We are thus asking: what is reading? I would like to go through a series of phenomena which may clarify for us all how the retrospective connection of writing to language looks like in each of these cases. I make my distinctions in a serial manner. First of all, as a statement of fact: reading is not spelling out. As long as we are spelling out, we cannot read. Reading always already presupposes definite anticipatory processes for grasping the meaning and has, as such, a specific ideality

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in itself. This is how we can read something handwritten despite the fact that we all have our own individual handwriting or how we can generally read over typos without being impeded. The devil of the typo is the best-known witness for the comforting fact that we are generally carried by the context of what we understand and fruitfully read over the factual defects pertaining to the visible existence of signs. This naturally has its limits but within these limits it shows something about the teleology of meaning which guides reading. Now, there are intermediate forms which came to be known in earlier times. There is not only the reader of written literature, but also the listener of unwritten literature. We should think of the phenomenon of oral poetry. It is a very important and recent insight that the epic tradition of peoples can remain alive over very long periods of orality. The well-known investigation of the Albanian epic songs in the Balkans by the American expedition of the early 1930s has produced such astounding findings that, for example, our whole Homeric research today appears in a new light. We now know much more about the perdurance of the traditional epic forms of the oral type. I am saying this to stress a point which seems to me to have been generally overlooked. The new enthusiasm for the fact that traditional forms remained alive for so long in an oral manner has, I believe, blinded us to the fact that already in the linguistic means used in oral poetry5 there lies a specific manner of being on the way to writing. I do not only mean what is obvious in relation to mnemonics, as, for example, metre, padding lines and the like. What also belong to the techniques of mnemonics are the repetitive formulas, recurrences which have the sense of fixing in a definite way the uniqueness of the recurring presentation. The investigations in this field are highly interesting. They have shown that even here there is a great amount of trust in the memory [265] of the epic and a certain room for filling out this memory. This room for filling out is precisely the same, at a higher level of freedom, as what I described at the beginning when I spoke of the room for configuring all conventional signs, both our phonetic sounds as well as our written signs. I would like now to discuss a certain culminating point of phenomena, which perhaps has for our relationship to language and to the linguistic transmission of our culture a significance which has not always been sufficiently considered. I mean the point at which reciting, reading out, reading aloud and silent reading reach their peak. This peak has a reasonable logic and we have to ask what changes in each of these forms. As it will be shown, all these forms of reading are in principle more or less different from the immediate ideal of a speaking which reproduces in the form of a new, actual act of speaking. Reading out is not speaking, even if it happens in phonetic form. The case of recitation is more difficult. Here we can wonder: is recitation a reproduction? We are familiar with genuine reproduction, for example, in the utterances of the actors on the theatre stage. In this case, it is indeed true that genuine actors really ‘speak’ although their text had been written for them in advance, and bad actors do not speak. They always leave us with the impression of merely repeating something out. They start a second too early – a well-known phenomenon in theatre – and we can never get rid of the feeling that they already know the next word when they speak. Speaking, though, means speaking into the open. Real actors reproduce a genuine act of speaking so that we forget that it was written for them in advance. As a matter of fact, genuine

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actors also possess the art of improvising, at least in some forms of theatre. Even in literary theatre, the text leaves open a space for filling it out. Through this contrast with the art of the actors, we can see that even recitation, which brings a text back to its phonetic form, is not yet an act of speaking, but is somehow still ‘reading’. It is not yet the act of speaking of the actors who incarnate their role. When they succeed, then they really speak, that is to say, they break the silence or keep silent, they choose to utter a word or they keep silent. We speak of ‘recitation’ primarily in the case of the epic and the lyric. We are familiar with recitation mostly as the art of the rhapsodes. As the literary forms of the epic seem to me to indicate, the rhapsode is not really the reincarnation of an original singer or original speaker. In Plato’s Ion we have the depiction of a Homeric rhapsode who has shaped his public presentation in so virtuoso a manner that, when some terrifying scene comes up, his own hair stand on end and when it is some sad scene, his own eyes well up in tears, etc. Plato describes this obviously with a critical intent. He sees in this the emergence of a definite dissolution of the [266] epic and the religious tradition of Greece. The rhapsode has become a virtuoso. Genuine rhapsodes were pure intermediaries transmitting mythical and epic events, and did not themselves wish to be known by name. Yet, it must be said that the professional singer is no longer a mere narrator, but already begins to place the narration under certain literary conditions. These are difficult problems: what are the relations, for example, between the art of narrating, which appears as a work of literature, and the art of narrating, which we also encounter outside literature? What bridges lead from the gift of a good narrator to the narrative art of a novelist? If it is true that recitation maintains a certain relation to the dimension of writing – or at least to the memorized text – then this must itself be reflected in the possibilities of literature. I am reminded of dramatized reading [Lesedrama]. Here, we have a drama, which not only is also read, but was written only for being read – or at least failed when the attempt was made to transfer it onto the stage. Think, for example, of Maeterlinck,6 whose staging directions alone, because of their own linguistic density, rule out implementation. In recitation we thus have a connection with reading, whether in oral poetry,7 in the oral transmission of the epic or even in its revival. This is by the way a further problem which has in the meantime entered into the discussion with oral poetry,8 and we should never forget this. What may be more important is not whether a tradition was set in writing or not, but whether it was only heard in recitation or whether there was also immediate use of the text by readers, without the mediation of the reciter or the rhapsode. Speaking by heart seems to me to be a phenomenon in which the whole problem of reciting comes to a head. Earlier, this was something entirely respectable for poems and, I remain convinced, it still is. A poem we really know by heart is recited, whether mentally or vocally. It is not reproduced. It is not supposed to be the reawakening of some original kind of speaking, but it has its exclusive relation to the ideality of the text itself. It has its art of speaking indeed recorded in the dimension of writing, but alive in memory. When we know something by heart, this art of language is manifestly present in its full actuality. For a long time, I have been interested in the question of the extent to which recitation always really belongs to the ability of knowing something by heart. That is the question.

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I do not believe that every poem one knows by heart can really be recited in front of others. There are poems which exist for being recited. I do not only mean those which were originally performed on the stage, such as the choral lyric, for example Pindar’s hymns. What about the poems of Horace? We can rightfully wonder whether Rilke [267] can be recited. (The examples I have concretely experienced leave me in doubt about this.) The question is not about the art of public presentation, but about the artistic form of the linguistic work, thus about poetry itself. It is a silent speaking to oneself alone which corresponds to the linguistic disposition pertaining to this kind of poems. For other poems it is different. George can naturally be recited. He had in fact used the term ‘saying out loud’ [Hersagen] as an expression for reciting and rehearsed it with his young followers and disciples. Yet, can Rilke or Hölderlin or Trakl be recited? In German poetry we must distinguish between what is really transposable into the materiality of a voice and what is only to be heard in the inner ear. The latter obviously belongs to lyric language. Poetry is the manifestation of the phenomenon of language itself and not a mere passage to meaning. It is a continuing harmony of the comprehension of meaning and the sensuous phenomenon of sound through which meaning becomes alive. But this does not mean that there must be a real voice, that it must be really heard. Or better: it is only like a voice to be heard and must not, indeed cannot be a real voice. This voice which is only to be heard and which never speaks is fundamentally a model and a measure. Why are we then in a position to say that someone is good at reading out? Or: this was badly read out? Which authority tells us that? Certainly, not the way the poets themselves read. It is true that poets can be very instructive by the way they read. However, they are not for this reason the models for how their poems should be heard. It is not only that they are often not expert speakers. Rather, it lies in the essence of literature that the work has separated itself so much from its creator that poets at best can be good but never privileged interpreters of themselves. I thus hold the connection between literature and voice for absolutely essential wherever we have literature in the eminent poetic sense. Yet, the form in which the voice is present here does not have to be the materialized voice but is primarily something in our imagination which is exemplary like a canon, which allows us to evaluate any kind of recitative performance. The relation between voice and text becomes even clearer in the case of reading out [Vorlesen]. In this case, one does not strive for the immediacy of speech, which belongs to the stage. Reading out must make audible something which is written as a ‘text’. This presupposes certain restrictions on the immediacy of what is speaking. It is a question of tact and a question of understanding. We only know all too well when, for example, during class we ask students to read out a given sentence and they have not understood it. Then, none of us understands the sentence either. We cannot understand any sentence being read out to us if those reading the sentence out have not understood it. Why is this so? What is the kind of ‘idealisation’ to be found here, which [268] establishes what is common? I would call it ‘hermeneutic’ because it depends on the understanding. It is a kind of announcing which is loaded with meaning, a kind of being-speaking, of being-talking. With understanding – this does not mean with ‘expression’. The situation already turns quite bad when someone

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reads ‘with expression’. Actors who incarnate a role must give expressive power to the whole person they play, but only to the extent that they also give expression to the ‘text’. Should the one who reads out give expression to a text by referring it back to the original speaker or writer and to what extent? Must the expression which, say, the narrative text demands not have something of an impersonal meaningfulness and intuitiveness? An analogy from the plastic arts may clarify this. In contradistinction to Renaissance Art, we notice in the painters of Sienna, for example, that the curve of an angel’s garment can be really expressive whereas the face or the proper gesture as such simply shows no ‘expression’, most notably, not even the eyes. Something of such an anonymity of expression lies in the correct style of reading out a narrative. My decisive point is that at any rate all use of the voice is subordinated to reading and is measured against the ideality, which the inner ear alone hears, in which what is contingent in the specific voice and the specific speaking disappears. At this point, I must still linger a moment longer to make fully clear how reading something out modifies itself when we are dealing with a linguistic art and not with the mere transfer of meaning, the transmission of a definite content, the delivery of a definite message. In the case of the linguistic art, the how of what is being said, the language which manifests itself and rings out must rather be configured at the same time, in contrast to a message, of which we say: yes, yes, now I get it! and are no longer listening. By contrast, when we read a poem, for example, we do not say: I already know this! and stop reading. Those who re-read a poem do not believe that they do not need to read any more. On the contrary, only then do they start reading in the right way and really understand only when they know the poem by heart. The epic genre, by contrast, is characterized all too well by the tension in the way the narration unfolds and by its surprises. Here too, the problems concerning the way time is configured play a decisive role. What sort of tarrying is engendered here when we are dealing with art? Is the course of events as such not held back, so to speak, for a kind of vivid present? This is the art of language. Naturally, language appears very differently as language in the diverse artistic genres. In theatre, this is relatively simple, although it remains a problem why, in a masterful performance of a role, we can always detect the style of the poet behind the way in which the actor speaks. In the reading in which there are distributed roles, there must still remain something of ‘reading’. In reading out dramas – which was once a first-rate social event (I am thinking [269] of Ludwig Tieck) – it is doubtless not so that speakers lose themselves in the person whose words they utter in the moment. There remains a certain overall tone of reading, thanks to the sameness of the voice, which in order to play a character modifies itself only slightly, remaining conscious of the existence of a text being read. Even in a phenomenon such as Tieck, for example, who spoke all the roles of a Shakespearean drama so that it was almost like a living utterance with distributed roles, we would no doubt experience a certain diminishment in comparison to a stage production. This is surely because Tieck’s reading out had a stylistic unity that was one of a kind. In the art of narration, things again look different. Here, we can surely detect the style of a narrator, but in such a way that we are taken by the narration and almost without noticing it we forget ourselves, even if afterwards we may admire the art of language.

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In general, we are dealing here with silent reading. I am not clear about it and do not even know to what extent we know how to do this. Since when did we really read, without reading aloud? In ancient times it was obvious that one reads aloud. We know this from an astonishing remark that Augustine makes about Ambrosius.9 Let us continue: since when does ‘one’ read silently without being an auditor? Since when is this fact of importance to writers that we read silently without making a sound? What I mean is that writers then write for another kind of reproduction of their linguistic art in reading than reading aloud. Yet, there can be no doubt that the transition to the general culture of reading is also anticipated by writers and has modified the stylistic forms of writing. In poetry this is at times unmistakable, for example when we have before us anagram forms in Baroque lyric, which were also meant for the eye. The same may be true for Mallarmé’s play with the layout of the text for his ‘Un Coup de dés’ [‘A Roll of the Dice’]. Visual layouts can serve the (outer or inner) listener of the language of the poem, in the way George’s writing, for example, virtually demands a ‘saying out loud’ [Hersagen] in order to differentiate itself from the art of recitation in theatre. I can only marginally touch on the peculiar topic of the temporal form of reading. We are dealing here with the question of how language takes form in the inner ear of readers and in their mind.10 There are modifications, for example in the case of a song one sings or of the poem one knows by heart and recites for oneself. At another end, we have pure literature for reading, for example the novel. Even when, in the case of many narrations, we can undertake an uninterrupted temporal sequence of reading, the author of the novel is still aware of the discontinuity, which narrative literature must fully take into account. Musil [270] certainly did not expect that people would read his novel The Man without Qualities without pause. Epic literature almost aims at making it so that discontinuity passes over into a new continuity. Epic literature relies on this, which also gives it freedom in the treatment of the temporal sequence while narrating. This, however, also places new demands on the art of writing, for example to increase and intensify tension. In contrast to a scientific book, it is not a recommendation for a novel if readers have to leaf back through the pages. The temporal form of reading still remains in a certain correspondence with the temporal form of the text. However, they are not the same and, at any rate, not like the unity of execution in ‘reading’ a poem or in listening to a piece of music. In all of these differences, though, a common feature persists. This is what Dilthey, for example, called the ‘structure’ of the centring on the middle point and this remains fully at the forefront in modern French structuralist research. Thus, the process of reading varies in manifold ways when the successive temporal dimension is mediated by the cyclical temporal dimension during the performance of the reading. The temporal structure of reading like that of speaking indeed presents a wide field of problems.

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Hearing – Seeing – Reading (1984)1 [271] Since Nietzsche, philology has been called the art of slow reading. In truth, this art of lingering on something, instead of rushing through texts and gleaning the information stored in them, is more and more on the wane. The task I have set for myself today is to reflect a little on the particular structure of reading. Reading is linked to writing, handwritten or printed, and writing goes back to language. Reading is letting speak. Therein lies a hermeneutic moment. Who can read without understanding? So long as one is not led by language itself into what is awakened in it, it is no reading but it would be a stuttering, a stammering, a spelling out. Speaking thus requires understanding, understanding the word said. Even understanding one’s own words. We all know what it means for one not to understand one’s own words. We say it, for example, when the room is too loud. We mean by this something very fundamental, namely, that we do not understand our own words because we cannot see how the other person receives them. This does not mean that we are listening to our own words, but that one must get the other to hear them. It is a matter of words arriving at the one addressed. We have indeed to ask ourselves the question: any time our understanding of ourselves falters, which is certainly one of our fundamental reflective experiences, is it not in fact a failure in getting on with ourselves? If I consider the phenomenon of reading in conjunction with listening and seeing, it is because this theme has two aspects: an anthropological one and a poetological one. The anthropological aspect is ancient. The rivalry of these two most human senses of ours is a well-known phenomenon. We all know that a hawk sees better than us and that a cat hears more than us. But from time immemorial, the interplay of hearing and seeing is a particular distinctive feature of human beings. Hearing does not mean only hearing. It also means hearing words. Herein lies the distinctive feature of hearing. Thus, in the well-known idiom which says that our hearing and sight fail us,2 we see that hearing comes first. Aristotle is certainly correct when he says at the beginning of the Metaphysics that, of all the senses that human beings have, [272] seeing is the most important because it presents the most distinctions, the most differences and for this reason, among all the senses, stands closest to cognition, to discernment.3 He also says something about the priority of hearing. Hearing can receive human speech whose universality surpasses everything. Now, we know how much these two essential human senses compensate for each other. All those who have a bad eyesight train their ears much more than others. But, conversely, we know how far the ear can be replaced by the eye, for example, by

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reading the movements of the lips. The relations between hearing and seeing, seeing and hearing are, however, much more complicated than it first appears. Obviously, when we speak of hearing and seeing in relation to reading, the point is not that we must see in order to be able to decipher what is written, but rather that we must hear what the writing says. To be able to hear means to be able to understand. This is the real theme of my reflections. The connection between reading and hearing is obvious. It is only in the late phases of our European culture that we got around to being able to read without speaking. We know from a passage in Augustine that the Church Father Ambrosius drew astonishment because he could read without having to speak aloud. From my own youth, I remember that my German teacher at the Breslau Gymnasium had first looked at me with suspicion – until he became convinced of my innocence – because I always moved my lips when writing as if I were speaking. Perhaps this was an early indication of hermeneutic talent that, when reading something, I still always liked to hear it. What is at issue is thus the reverse transformation of writing into speech and the hearing associated with it. Here we find ourselves in a certain new field of questioning. It must make a difference as to whether a text is written down for being recited or whether a text is to be read from the page, whether a text is to be read out in public and written for that purpose, or whether, as has eventually become increasingly common in our culture, we only have to reckon with silent reading. It is not that these are clear differences. Yet, the manner in which what is written is put to use must play a role for the art of writing itself. Herein belongs the much-discussed problem of oral poetry4 today. What I had learned as a classical philologist, namely that the epic tradition could only be developed on the basis of the dimension of writing, is to be qualified by the fact that an astonishingly long-living oral tradition, especially in the case of epic legends and the tradition of epic poetry, has come to light. This is what the American expedition in the Albanian mountains has shown. We must obviously assess this knowledge correctly as to its significance. [273] It means, in fact, that mnēmē, memory, the engram in us, must be acknowledged as the first form taken by the dimension of writing which engraved itself in the psyche. We can see in Homeric epics as well as in other epics, which were composed for rhapsodic transmission, the extent to which repetition, set phrases, stylistic means and recurring metaphors relieve the burden on the memory of the rhapsode as well as that of the listener. The stabilization provided by the dimension of writing is already almost anticipated in the oral transmission of poetry. Now, I cannot discuss here how the portion of oral transmission and that of the condensation in writing has influenced the editing of our classical epics. My only concern is to draw attention to the connection between reading and hearing so that we do not neglect the addressee to whom writers and authors turn and who is so decisive for them. We know from rhetoric that the great representatives of the art of speaking familiar to us from Greece consistently prepared written speeches, that is, literature. They read out texts when they made their famous appearances. Already at the time, the relationship between rhetoric and literature was thus very close. We clearly see that this is a relatively late period and our tradition of speech-making solely goes back to it.

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The various ways in which what is readable is transposed into what is audible are obviously of very wide-ranging significance. Think of how different it is, for example, when the professional rhapsode or narrator of a particular genre, such as the epic, sings before an audience or when choral lyric is performed on the stage. Even here, there is fundamentally nothing performed other than language, but language performed in dance-steps is something totally different from the language of the epic. Choral lyric implies several individuals singing and acting together. If we run before our eyes the whole series of phenomena connected together here, we learn something about reading and what a session of reading is. Here I refer back to investigations I did as a young lecturer in 1929, when I spent an entire semester in a seminar in philosophy discussing the question of what reading actually is: is it a kind of performance on an inner stage? Goethe once called it so. The expression is certainly not ill-chosen, for when reading one must carry a stage in oneself, if one wants to take real measure of the articulation of the language in its entire range of tension or wants to convey this articulation. Yet, the comparison obviously is very limited. This becomes somewhat clear when I remind you of a translation such as the Shakespeare translation by Gundolf. I will illustrate my little contribution with it. For the last time I heard Rudolf Sühnel speak, I heard him lecture on his beautiful work on Gundolf. There he showed how the reception of Shakespeare in Germany [274] shifted more and more towards the classical age of a reading culture and thus towards the inner stage of reading. In Gundolf ’s translation, his capacity to translate poetically rose straight to a form which was unfit for the theatre. These are interesting matters. Goethe saw things entirely in this way when he says, for example, that Shakespeare occupies a great place in poetry and that his place in the theatre was more accidental and extraneous. The reception of Shakespeare in German classical literature was in fact completely dominated by the word and oriented towards the poetic effect of language. This obviously means that this reception was essentially based on public reading. Goethe was a tremendous public reader of his own poetry, and we know about Ludwig Tieck that he was an incomparable master at reciting Shakespeare’s dramas. But what kind of reading is such a reading out? Is it a mime? Is the total transformation of the voice the ideal, so that one gets the impression that it is always someone else who is really speaking? Or is it not rather a soft modulation in accordance with the various people who are speaking and this modulation is held together by the tune and the melody of the one voice of the poetical work and its speaker? Obviously, what we have here is an intermediate form between the actual performance on a stage and a performance on the inner stage, which is not a performance at all, but merely an inner listening to language becoming resonant. Now it is clear to everyone that this latter characteristic is the distinctive feature of literature. It is rightly called literature but its object is language and not writing. Language is the authentic reality of what is transmitted in literature. It is this most supreme possibility of retreating from everything material and gaining something like a new semantic and tonal reality out of the very exercise of language within the fixed text. All other arts, and, naturally, even that of theatre, are bound to materially restrictive conditions. Thus, one can say of a theatre piece that it cannot be played, and this means the following: the restrictive conditions, which arise from the transposition

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into yet another mode of appearance than that of speech alone, also infringe upon the sovereignty of this meaning appearing in language. Here, we can grasp the inner connection between reading and hearing in its core. Where we are dealing with literature, the tension between the mute signs of writing and the audibility [Hörbarkeit] of all languages ​​finds its full resolution. One not only reads the meaning, one hears it. To speak of inner performance, as Goethe does, is thus not without justification. This leads me to the second point, the relation of reading to seeing. Naturally, it is not about the triviality that one must be able to see in order to read what is written, but about the fact that, through reading, something visible is awakened, which we call ‘intuition’ [Anschauung]. It is the wonder [275] of the evocative power of language in general and its perfection in the evocative power of poetic word. One can really say that the poetic word demonstrates its autonomy through this very power. One must call philistines those who, for example, would like to seek out in reality the landscape depicted in a poem or a story in order to understand the poem better. The evocative power of language rather leads to an intuition and vividness, which has the almost puzzling presence of self-attestation. This is the second point upon which I would like to make a remark, because it touches upon a much-discussed problem since Emil Staiger treated time as the medium of poetic imagination under the influence of Heidegger’s insights. Today, this matter is almost driven to extremes in post-structuralist poetology. In such a poetology, all presence is supposed to be put on trial. I take this to be a misunderstanding. Derrida sees in such a presence a continuing effect of Greek metaphysics. Now, Heidegger in fact taught us that Greek metaphysics and its understanding of being are directed towards the present. What is presently at hand [das gegenwärtig Vorhandene], what is present [das Gegenwärtige] constitutes the proper character of the Greek understanding of being. This temporal mode of the presence of Being [Seinsgegenwart] is, in fact, contradicted by the temporality of speech and hearing, which includes succession. However, what one must see is that the same is true of the intuition awakened in speech. In the context of his little essay on Shakespeare, Goethe himself makes the distinction between the sense of the eye, of the physical eye and the inner sense, which can only be adequately satisfied by the word. Herein lies our problem: what is the basis of the vividness which we know to appreciate not only in the poet but in anybody who uses language, as the quality of their linguistic expression, and how is this vividness constituted? We are speaking of the ‘vivid’ report. It does not require one to be a poet to narrate something to us in such a way that one has the feeling that one was there. We also and especially praise it in poetic discourse when it stirs our imagination and sets up in us something like an overall effect and an overall intuition from a fullness of changing, appearing and fading visions. What sort of event is this? Obviously, it is not about the inner sense in the manner in which philosophers, such as Kant, speak of it. When Kant calls the form of intuition of time the inner sense, he means by it time as succession. In contradistinction to the simultaneity of things in space, time presents the sequence of one thing after another as the form of intuition. This is clearly correct given the purposes for which Kant made this distinction. However, this has manifestly nothing directly to do with the problem of vividness, which we consider here for good reasons when speaking of genuine reading. [276] What is constitutive

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for all reading is not succession as such, but the presence of the non-simultaneous. Whoever does not comprehend or reproduce texts in the complete execution of their articulation, modulation and structure cannot really read. Reading is not the mere sequencing of word after word after word. This is spelling out or repeating after. By contrast, reading is a quiet way of letting something speak again, and this presupposes the anticipations of the understanding. We know what it is which we understand as a good act of reading something out. This act of reading out must be such that we can understand it well and this can be the case only when those reading have themselves understood it. I fundamentally do not believe that it is possible to read something out such that someone else understands it while the reader does not understand it at all. Indeed, what do we mean here by understanding? Certainly, we are dealing with a wide-ranging continuum between the vaguest hint of meaning and a comprehension capable of justifying itself. It is certainly most conspicuous where one is not just reading or reading out, but where there is a theatrical performance. The different levels of understanding which, for example, led an Attic theatre audience to form a consensual judgement, are not mere augmentations of a partial understanding towards the ideal of a complete understanding. The levels are rather concentrically arranged within one another. Even a stage actor nowadays is always within this space of variations between ‘mechanical imitation’ and intentional interpretation. We know this through counterexamples, for example, in a rote repetition of poems, as we had to do for our parents’ birthday when we were little children. This is a kind of saying that is no saying. For, in this case, the exercise of language has sunk into the extremes of a thoughtless form of mere memorization, which is not embedded into an enactment with understanding. It is not the rendering of something [Nachahmung], but the whole performance is ‘mechanical imitation’ [Ahmung]. Thus, there is an essential difference which evidently exists between the temporal form of vividness in presence and the temporal form of the succession, whose pure expression lies in physical time, measured time. The distinction is manifestly connected most closely with the essence of speech, with the anticipation of meaning, to which all speaking is oriented in its seeking, failing and finding. Real speech is oriented precisely towards the awakening of intuition such that the intuitive presence of what is said is produced through the fact that it is not merely a sequence which unfolds, but that an anticipation of unity takes the lead and acquires a configuration. We talk, for example, about the unity of form, about which Gestalt psychology has informed us. Or we speak with Dilthey of the centring on a middle point, and we know all this the best from listening to music, for what does understanding mean in this case? An interest focused on informational content cannot understand anything in music. Who then [277] understands? The negative extreme clearly stands out when one must look anxiously around oneself at the end of a piece of music to see whether one has to begin applauding. Understanding, thus, includes that one is already ahead, so to speak, of what is still pending or is no longer pending and has it so clearly in the ear that no problem of this kind arises. On what is the formation of this unity based? What is the time in which such understanding of linguistic configurations composed of sense and tone is ahead of itself? It certainly does not have its essence in the measurable succession of now-points.

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At one point, Aristotle treats the essence of a sudden change. He means by this such phenomena as the sudden freezing of an overcooled liquid, the metabolē [‘change’]. He wants to say with this that not all movement takes place in the dimension of time. There is for this physics of appearance also the suddenness of a change. Now, such a suddenness of change lies in all understanding. We know this when we listen to a simple exchange in daily life: we listen until we ‘get’ it. The moment we ‘get’ it, the whole thing is there, so to speak. Impatient people do not like it at all if others go on speaking to the very end. Now, it is certainly not the same in the case of literature. Here, the whole phenomenon of language is meant alongside the whole meaning of what is said. But this whole, which is brought to a vivid presence through language, and especially through poetic language, is not constructed word by word, but is present as this whole, as if in one stroke. Naturally, this kind of presence [Präsenz] does not have the mode of presence [Gegenwärtigkeit] of an instant but entails space-filling simultaneity. In the German romanticism of Novalis, Baader and Schelling, we have the first hints in this direction, which gained universal recognition through Bergson’s Matière et mémoire [Matter and Memory]. This is clearly reflected in the linguistic use of the foreign word ‘presence’ [Präsenz]. We say, for example, of some people that they have presence by the fact that we notice when they enter the room, while we do not notice it in other people. Also, in the case of great actors we say that they have presence, that is to say, they fill the stage, even when they only stand in the background and the other actors exert themselves more, without attaining such presence. Presence, thus, means something which spreads as if in its own present, so that the mysterious and uncanny aspect of the passing of time, of the rolling away of the moments in the flow of time, is as if suspended. The art of speaking is based on this. It is capable of making something lasting in the wavering duration. In fact, we do not really read a literary work of art for what it offers by way of information. Rather, we are always thrown back to the unity of the structure, which is always articulated differently. Science, from ancient rhetoric through [278] philology right up to textual linguistics and phonology, teaches us of the stabilizers which give speech such a heft. The function of rhythm and rhyme, of assonances and phonological symmetries, permeates all speech, from advertising to poetry. What rhymes is not always poetry. Rhyme certainly belongs to the stabilizers of speech, which we encounter in poetry. It is perhaps one of the artistic means of lyric poetry which is most difficult to handle. Modern poetry has probably become so hesitant in the use of rhymes for the simple reason that their misuse has become more and more widespread. Thus, it is always harder to avoid the rattling of the rhyme. We also find the same kind of misuse in other artistic means, for example, in the case of alliterative assonance. In fact, the uniqueness of poetic composition always stands guard against the erosion of language. The erosion of language means that language no longer achieves what it can: to create a new presence, a new familiarity which does not wear out, but constantly gains in depth. This certainly implies that the words are not received, first, in the externality of the sound, then in the capacity to convey meaning and finally in the insertion into a meaningful context and thus gradually built in this way into a whole. Rather, the effective unity of meaning and sound, which is sustained by a whole, as it were, is already present in every word. This

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being-in of the whole in all the individual elements of the structure, however, entails that, in turn, the one who is fully engrossed by the whole is fully immersed in the whole, as the spectator in watching, as the singer in the song. This contains the true meaning of knowing poetry by heart. The ever-renewed advent of the presence of poetic words is that in which we are completely at home. In fact, we speak of knowing something inside out and this is what also prepares the proper overcoming of strangeness, the being at home, the dwelling in something. Goethe once used the term ‘dwelling’ in such a context. Heidegger dealt with it extensively. Thus, the theme of ‘hearing – seeing – reading’, when considered in its proper limits and in the inextricability of the different aspects in which it presents itself, appears in the end in a context which is of widest scope. All our experience is reading. It is a reading out of that to which we are directed and reading oneself in the whole which is so articulated. Thus, reading too, which makes us familiar with poetry, helps existence become liveable.

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Reading Is like Translating (1989)1 [279] A famous quote from Benedetto Croce says: traduttore-traditore [‘translatortraitor’]. Any translation is like a betrayal. How could a man who was such a polyglot as the prominent Italian aesthetician was, not know this! Or how could any hermeneutician not know this who has learned his whole life to heed the tones associated with language, its overtones and undertones! Or anyone looking back on a long life. With age, one becomes increasingly sensitive to those works which are partial or half approximations to the truly living language and which present themselves as translations. It becomes increasingly difficult to tolerate them and, on top of that, increasingly difficult to understand them. Nevertheless, it is a hermeneutic imperative to reflect not so much upon the degree of translatability as upon the degree of untranslatability. We must also give an account of what was lost, when something is translated and perhaps also of what is gained. Even in this seemingly hopeless loss-making business of translation, there is not only a more or less of what is lost. Occasionally, there is also something like a profit, at least a profit of interpretation, a growth in clarity and occasionally also an explicitness, wherever this is a profit. The part of language which we encounter as a text is alienated from the original life of dialogue, in which language has its essential existence. Speaking itself is in fact never so completely precise that the right word is always chosen and found. Already in a dialogue there is a lot of beating around the bush and the same happens with the text where there is a flight into the empty formulas of a trivial rhetoric. In living dialogue all this is covered over and imperceptible. However, when such artless speech is encountered as text and then literally translated, it produces a disaster. On one hand, we have the writer, who instead of using the proper word has lapsed into empty conventions, and, on the other hand, the same threat again appears with the translator, who takes what is conventional and empty for what is really said. Thus, what the text says, which was already imprecise in its original, becomes completely imprecise in translation simply because one wants to be precise and render every word, even the empty words. It is [280] really an education in how to express oneself with clarity and succinctness when a German writer makes use of English or even, like a burnt child dreads the fire, writes for a translator and this means writing for the reader of the coming translation. The writer will avoid complicated verbiage and steer clear of long periods, which we, Germans, love so much and which were instilled in us through the reverence the humanities had for Cicero. The writer will also avoid the soulful obscurities, which we find attractive.

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In the end, the art of writing, even in the theoretical-scientific realm, always aims, like the art of living discourse, at ‘forcing’ the other ‘to understand’ (to speak with Fichte). Nothing of what the medium of living speech offers comes to the aid of the one who writes. Unless it is about a private letter, writers do not even know their readers. They can neither sense when the reader is not following them nor can they come to the assistance of their work when it lacks the power to convince. What the writer can achieve through the power to convince has to be accomplished through the fixed signs of a script. Nothing but signs written down must replace the articulation, the modulation, the rhythm of speech, whether loud or soft, the emphasis and the subtle hints – and what is the strongest means of all convincing speech: the hesitation, the pause, the search and the finding of the word, which results in something like a lucky find, in which the listener participates, almost joyously startled. In this regard, there are so many of us who are simply no real writers, no masters and artists of writing, but solid scientists and researchers, who ventured into the unknown and simply wanted to report from there about how things looked and how they were progressing. This is how much is demanded of translators! We may apply a witty saying to them, what Friedrich Schlegel once said of the comprehending reader, the interpreter: ‘in order to understand people, one must first be cleverer than them, then equally clever, and also equally stupid. It is not enough to understand the proper meaning of a confused work better than the author understood it. One must also be able to understand the confusion right up to its principles, to be able to characterize it and construct it.’2 The last part is what is the most difficult. We run the risk of being even stupider than the author, when with a broader perspective and clearer insight we convincingly bring the meaning of the text we have read to word. We do not notice how easy it is to read into the text something that comes from us. Reading and translation have to overcome a distance. This is the fundamental hermeneutic situation. As I have shown, any distance, and not just the temporal distance, means a lot for the understanding, in terms of loss and of gain. Sometimes it may seem a relief [281] when there is no temporal distance to overcome, but only the transposition of a contemporary text from one language into another. In fact, translators are then exposed to the same danger in which all poets find themselves, who are constantly threatened by a lapse into so-called colloquial language or into the dull imitation of poetic models. This is true for the translator in both cases but also for the readers. For both translators and readers, opportunities are constantly offered, pouring out of human interactions in conversation and idle talk, for the translator’s own desire to compose and for the reader’s desire to understand. These opportunities can inspire but they can also lead astray. The translator must take care of all this. To read translated texts is generally disappointing. It lacks the breath of the speaking person, which inspires the understanding. Language lacks the substance of the original. Nevertheless, translations are sometimes for this very reason a real aid to understanding for those familiar with the original. Translations from Greek or Latin writers into French or of German writers into English are often of astounding and illuminating clarity. This is quite a gain. Or is it? In the cases where we are dealing exclusively with knowledge or nothing other than a grasp of what is meant in a text, such heightened clarity can very well be a gain.

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This would be a gain like photography and magnification of a sculpture we see with difficulty in a murky dome. In the case of many a research book or textbook, what matters is again not so much the art of writing and thus the art of translating, but sheer ‘correctness’. Professionals understand one another (if they want to) very easily and it certainly annoys them if too many (or indeed beautiful) words are used, just as it is annoying in a verbal exchange when one wants to continue explaining that which has already long been understood. An anecdote will make this clear. The young Karl Jaspers, it is said, was one day conversing with a colleague about his first book and got to know from him that it was badly written. Jaspers replied: ‘you could not have told me anything more pleasant’. This is how much Jaspers at the time followed his great role model, Max Weber, and his passion for objectivity. Jaspers, who matured into a thinker of unique stature, certainly had his own highly artful and so individual a style in writing that it was hardly translatable. We can understand that English has increasingly imposed itself in many sciences to the point that researchers write their original work in English right away. In doing so they are certainly safe not only from their own ‘fancy words’, but also from the translator. For a long time now, in many fields, for example, in marine navigation, air navigation and [282] information technology, English has been standardized in a secure place beyond the good and evil of the art of translation. It is no accident that what really matters in these fields is a correct understanding. Misunderstanding could be deadly. However, we also have literature. Here it is not dangerous to be misunderstood by the translator. Yet, it is again not enough to be understood. Like any author, a poet indeed writes for people who speak the same tongue and the fact of having a common mother tongue separates people from another language. In addition, literature is not only belles lettres [schöne Literatur] but rather encompasses the whole field where the printed letter must fully replace living speech. Against the young Jaspers, it is really questionable whether writing ‘badly’ is a real advantage for a historian or philologist or even for a philosopher (where it is debatable). This question first and foremost applies to translations. In reality, ‘style’ is more than a dispensable or rather suspicious decoration. Style is a factor which constitutes readability and thus obviously also represents for the translator an unending task of approximation. This is not a matter of craft and technique alone. We have a readable translation when it is also in some measure ‘reliable’, which is already a lot and indeed almost everything that one can wish as an author or as a translator (or as a reader). However, the situation is totally different when the task is of transposing genuine poetic texts. This will always stand between translating and paraphrasing. Art overcomes all distances, even a temporal distance. Thus, translators of poetic texts, without being aware of it, identify themselves as contemporaries of the poet and this requires from them a new formulation, which still has to reflect that of the original. It is completely different for mere readers, whose humanistic and historical education (or lack thereof) makes them aware of the temporal distance. As readers, we are more or less conscious of this when we are dealing with translations of works from classical Greek and Latin literature or from the history of modern literatures. These are texts which have been the objects of such efforts for centuries, lugging behind them an entire translation literature of at least 200 years. It is in relation to this history that we,

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as readers with a historical sensibility, have experienced how the literature belonging to the time of the translator was reflected in the formulation of those translations. Such an existence of an entire history of translation, which displays a manifold of translations of the same text, is, in a certain sense, a relief for a new translator and yet also a challenge, which can hardly be met. The old translation has its patina. When we are really dealing with ‘literature’, the criterion of readability cannot just suffice. The degree of untranslatability rears its head menacingly, like a gigantic mountain range with many layers, with lyric poetry looming as its final peak [283], glorified through perennial snow. With different literary genres, the requirements and standards for the success of a translation certainly also vary. Let us take for example the translations meant to be reproductions, as it is the case today for plays. This means that, in this case, we have the aid of the stage and all that, which ‘literature’ by itself has to do without. The translation itself should, for its part, not only be readable, but also capable of being spoken out and true to the stage, whether in prose or in verse. Gundolf ’s translation of Shakespeare, which was poetically improved with the assistance of George, must almost be called a new Germanization after the one by Schlegel and Tieck. It is said of this translation that it cannot be performed. Many today may not even find it readable. The colours have ‘faded way’. We again have a peculiar situation with the translation of stories. Here, we can hardly expect any unanimity over the aim a translation pursues. Is the aim faithfulness to the words or to the meaning and the form? This is almost equally true of any ‘high’ prose. What is the goal in this case? Take the great literature in translation, which, for example, brought the English novel to Germany, or the translations of the great Russian novels into other world languages. As we immediately notice, the loss of what is proper to the original, of what is close to a people, the loss of vigour and vibrancy, which is an unavoidable part of a translation, is hardly of any consequence in comparison to the presence of what is narrated. How the words used for narrating are chosen is actually not so important. Something else is involved: the vividness, the thickness of its tension, the depth of its soulfulness, the enchantment of its world. The art of great storytelling is a unique marvel, which itself remains almost undiminished in translation. Those who know Russian assure us that the German translation of Dostoevsky by Rahsin in the Piper edition, with its smoothness and readability, is hardly suited for the halting, rugged, careless style of Dostoevsky. Yet, when we pick up Notzel’s or Eliasberg’s ‘better’ translation instead or the newest one published by Aufbau, we simply do not notice the difference as readers. If we exclude exceptional cases, such as Gogol, the bar for what counts as untranslatable is extraordinarily low. It is thus no accident that the coining of the concept ‘world literature’, which is inseparable from translations, was contemporaneous with the spread of the art of the novel (and dramatic literature intended for reading). It is the spread of the culture of reading, which made literature ‘literature’. Thus, we must almost say today that ‘literature’ demands translation, precisely because it is the object of the culture of reading. In fact, the secret of reading is like a great bridge between languages. At completely different levels, to translate or to read seem to be the same hermeneutic achievement. Already the reading of poetic ‘texts’ in one’s own mother tongue is like a [284] translation, almost like a translation into a foreign language. For, it is a

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transposition from fixed signs to a flowing stream of thoughts and images. The mere reading of original or translated texts is in fact already an interpretation through tone and tempo, modulation and articulation. All of this lies in the ‘inner voice’ and is there for the ‘inner ear’ of the reader. Reading and translation are already ‘interpretation’ [Auslegung]. Both produce a new textual whole from sense and tone. Both demand a transposition that borders on creation. One can venture the paradox: every reader is like a semi-translator. In the end, is it not truly the greater wonder that we can really overcome the gap between letters and living speech, even when we are ‘only’ dealing with the same language? Is it that much more when one overrides the distance between two different languages in reading translations? In any case, reading is what overcomes the one distance as well as the other, that between text and speech. Is the mutual oral understanding between different languages despite distances not rather natural? Reading is like a ‘going-over’ [Über-setzen] from one riverbank to another one, farther away, from what is written into what is spoken. In the same way, the activity of the translator of a ‘text’ is a ‘going over’ [Über-setzen] from coast to coast, from one continent to another, from text to text. Translation [Übersetzen] is both. The phonetic configurations of different tongues are therefore untranslatable. They appear like stars separated from one another by light years. Yet, readers understand their ‘text’. But how is it with the poem, which one must not only read and understand but also hear? In this case, translators with their Greek3 are at a loss. Or still better: what they present remains Greek to us. Certainly, there are exceptional cases. When real poets carry over into their own language the verses of other poets, it may become a real poem. Yet, it is then almost more the poem of the translator than of the original author. Are the translations of Baudelaire by George still really Flowers of Evil? Do they not sound like the preludes to a new youth? Or Rilke’s translations of Valéry? What is left of the brightness and the hardness of Provence in Rilke’s wonderfully soft meditations on The Graveyard by the Sea? We would truly do well if we called something like this not so much adaptations [Nachdichtungen] as poetic rewritings [Umdichtungen]. We could more likely call the rendering of sections from the Divina Comedia by Stefan George an adaptation. On the whole, real poets can only operate as translators if the poetry they choose fits their own poetic work. Only then can they maintain their own tone even when they translate. For real poets, their tone is their second nature. Thus, the consequence is this: when those translators who are not real poets borrow poetic equivalents from their own language and [285] arrange them artfully into a ‘poetic’ language, it always sounds Greek4, which means artificial and alien. However, many poetic resonances and linguistic beauties from the literature of the target language may chime through, the tone is missing, the tonos, the chord which has been tightened and must quiver under the words and tones, if music is to be heard. How could it be anything different? Equivalents must not only be found for the word meanings but equally for the tones. But no, neither words (even the most appropriate) nor tones (even the most appealing) could achieve it. Verses of a poem are sentences. But no, this is not even the case. There are verses and the whole is a poem, a song, a melody – it does not even have to be a melody with its repetition. Yet, it will always be something which resonates, a

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meaningful tone, made of one tone and many, a hidden harmony, which is stronger than an open one, as Heraclitus knew. Therefore, we should all admire the translators of poetry, who do not completely hide from us the distance to the original and yet at same time bridge this distance. They are almost like interpreters. But they are more. Interpreters speak from the in-between. The greatest ambition of interpreters can only be that their interpretation too remains a mere mediating discourse [Zwischenrede], which folds, as if self-evidently, into the re-reading of the original texts, and disappears in the process. By contrast, the trace of the translators’ poetic contribution remains for all of our reading and understanding a firmly established arch or a bridge, which can be crossed from both sides. Translation is a bridge, as it were, between two languages, like between two riverbanks in a single country. There is a constant flow of traffic over such bridges. This constitutes the distinction of the translator. There is no need to wait for any ferryman to take us over to the other side. Many will certainly require help to find their way over and will remain solitary travellers. Perhaps they meet someone now and again, who helps them read and understand. Any reading of a poem is every time a translating. ‘Every poem is a reading of reality, this reading is a translation, which transforms the poem of the poet into the poem of the reader’ (Octavio Paz).

Notes 1. Aristotle, On Interpretation 16b–7a (in The Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, trans. Harold Cooke. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983 [1938], p. 121). 2. On Interpretation, 16a, p. 115. 3 Nicomachean Ethics 1098b, Book I, viii, trans. H. Rackham. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934 [1926], p. 37. 4. ‘Reflections on My Philosophical Journey’, in Lewis Edwin Hahn, The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Chicago: Open Court, 1997, [pp. 2–63], p. 22. See also: ‘If we said that historically effected consciousness is realized in the dimension of language, this was because the dimension of language characterizes our human experience of the world in general’ (Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1986, p. 460; Truth and Method, rev. trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall. New York: Continuum, 1998, p. 456. Translation modified). 5. In this volume, p. 177. 6. As Gadamer explains, ‘language already contains an understanding of the world in those respects in which it remains the same. For the words by which we designate things already have the character of a universality that remains the same. Every word has its meaning [Bedeutung], which is one, by comparison with the manifoldness of what can be designated by means of it’ (‘Platos dialektische Ethik’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 5 Griechische Philosphie I. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1985, p. 52; Plato’s Dialectical Ethics: Phenomenological Interpretations Relating to the Philebus, trans. Robert Wallace. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991, p. 70. Translation modified). 7. In this volume, p. 142. 8. In this volume, p. 180. 9. In this volume, p. 100. 10. In this volume, p. 151. 11. In this volume, p. 151. 12. Wahrheit und Methode, p. 442; Truth and Method, p. 438. 13. Wahrheit und Methode, p. 457; Truth and Method, p. 453. 14. As Gadamer notes critically, ‘in Being and Time Heidegger already appreciated the significance of language for the analysis of existence. Yet, when he treats the meaning of language and discourse [Rede], it is all essentially the explication of a monologue. This is so even when Heidegger is aware of it and insists that discourse is addressed to someone’ (in this volume, p. 173). 15. Wahrheit und Methode, p. 490; Truth and Method, p. 487. 16. Wahrheit und Methode, p. 478; Truth and Method, p. 474. In ‘Text und Interpretation’ Gadamer comments: ‘When I wrote the sentence “being which can be understood is language”, the point was that we can never completely understand that which is. The point was that, insofar as everything which is conveyed in a language always

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points beyond that which reaches its expression. It remains as that which must be understood, that which comes to language’ (in Text und Interpretation. Deutschfranzösische Debatte, ed. Philippe Forget. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, pp. 28–9). 17. Wahrheit und Methode, p. 442; Truth and Method, p. 438. 18. In his assessment of his work, Gadamer writes: ‘In my view, my studies in Greek philosophy are the part of my philosophical works which most stand on its own’ (‘Platos dialektische Ethik – beim Wort genommen’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 7. Tübingen: Mohr, 1991, p. 121). See also: ‘hermeneutics and Greek philosophy have remained the two main foci of my work’ (‘Reflections on My Philosophical Journey’, p. 26). 19. In this volume, p. 162. 20. ‘Reflections on My Philosophical Journey’, p. 12. 21. In this volume, p. 160. On Heidegger’s evaluation of Gadamer’s work in 1925, see Jean Grondin, Hans-Georg Gadamer. Une biographie. Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2011, p. 140. About Heidegger’s intimidating presence, Gadamer writes in one instance: ‘thus, faced with the superior force of Heidegger’s philosophical personality, I began to doubt my philosophical aptitude and decided after my promotion to engage in a sustained study of classical philology in Marburg’ (‘Paul Friedländer’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1995, p. 403). The presence of Heidegger continued to loom over Gadamer’s career even after the war. When he was rector of the University of Leipzig, for example, he wrote: ‘Writing was a torment for me. I had the terrible feeling that Heidegger was standing behind me and looking over my shoulder’ (‘Reflections on My Philosophical Journey’, p. 15). 22. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato, trans. P. Christopher Smith. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980, p. 156. 23. Plato, The Philebus, in The Statesman, Philebus, Ion, trans. Harold Fowler. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001 [1925]. 24. In Robert Dostal’s words, ‘the Philebus is the single work that most decisively represents for Gadamer what Plato is about [. . .]. Plato and his Philebus represent for Gadamer the highest accomplishment of philosophy. Most importantly, the Philebus shows us how philosophy is dialectical and how we can address that most important of questions, the question of the good’ (Robert J. Dostal, ‘Gadamer’s Platonism and the Philebus: The Significance of the Philebus for Gadamer’s Thought’, in Hermeneutic Philosophy and Plato: Gadamer’s Response to the Philebus, ed. Christopher Gill and François Renaud. Sankt Augustin: Academia, 2010, [pp. 23–39], pp. 23–4). 25. Gadamer makes several references to the Philebus in this volume, for example, pp. 4, 16ff, 185. 26. Gadamer reminds us that hēdonē, usually translated as ‘pleasure’, is in fact the ‘drive to live’ (der Drang des Lebens) (‘Platos dialektische Ethik – Beim Wort genommen’, p. 125). 27. ‘Die Idee des Guten zwischen Plato und Aristoteles’, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7, Griechische Philosophie, Plato im Dialog. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1991, [pp. 128–227], p. 143. English translation: The Idea of the Good, trans. P. Christopher Smith. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986, p. 28. 28. ‘Platos dialektische Ethik’, p. 56; Plato’s Dialectical Ethics, pp. 76–7. 29. ‘Platos dialektische Ethik’, p. 153; Plato’s Dialectical Ethics, p. 213. As he explains further: ‘The “good” for an entity is not only a good that is good for something. It is not something that it has but something that it itself is [. . .]. When something is experienced as good, then it is understood in relation to what it is good for and, just by that fact, is understood in its being. Thus, the ultimate basis of this understanding, the good itself, is at the same time the understood possibility of existence [Dasein]

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itself – what it can be. And that is: something that understands itself in a unified way’ (‘Platos dialektische Ethik’, p. 58; Plato’s Dialectical Ethics, pp. 79–80). 30. ‘Reflections on My Philosophical Journey’, p. 34. 31. Dialogue and Dialectic, p. 140. 32. ‘Reply to Donald Davidson’, in Lewis Edwin Hahn, The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Chicago, IL: Open court, 1997, [pp. 433–5] p. 435. 33. Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Die Idee des Guten zwischen Plato und Aristoteles’, p. 192; The Idea of the Good, p. 114. 34. ‘Platos dialektische Ethik’, p. 103; Plato’s Dialectical Ethics, p. 143. Gadamer explains: ‘As we know, logos is a mathematical term that means “proportion”’ (Dialogue and Dialectic, p. 149). 35. ‘Platos dialektische Ethik’, p. 153; Plato’s Dialectical Ethics, pp. 212–13. As Gadamer says, connecting the two logoi, ‘something that is addressed in its proportion is addressed in its being’ (‘Platos dialektische Ethik’, p. 103; Plato’s Dialectical Ethics, p. 143). 36. ‘Platos dialektische Ethik’, p. 103; Plato’s Dialectical Ethics, p. 143. 37. ‘Platos dialektische Ethik’, p. 100; Plato’s Dialectical Ethics, p. 138. Translation modified. Gadamer expresses this recuperation of an external efficient cause through an internal logos as telos as a recuperation of a creation within knowledge: ‘the creation of the world by the demiurge (or, to say the same thing, the knowing of the world by men) is every bit as much a kind of determination of the indeterminate, an ordering of the unordered. Certainly it is just as true in physics as it is in ethics that ordering is made possible by reason or, better said, that reason perceives the possible order and is therefore able to undertake bringing it about’ (Dialogue and Dialectic, p. 192). 38. Dialogue and Dialectic, p. 198. 39. Phaedo, in Euthyphro. Apology. Crito. Phaedo, trans. Chris Emlyn-Jones and William Preddy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Loeb Classical Library, 2017 [1917], pp. 455–7. 40. Dialogue and Dialectic, p. 198. 41. Gadamer makes this connection explicitly in Truth and Method when he writes: ‘As we know, the fact that the human experience of the world takes place in the dimension of language [Sprachlichkeit] was already the guiding thread followed by Greek metaphysics for thinking being since Plato’s “flight into the logoi”’ (Wahrheit und Methode, p. 460; Truth and Method, p. 456. Translation modified). See also in this volume, pp. 43, 168, 175, 185. 42. ‘Platos dialektische Ethik’, pp. 53–4; Plato’s Dialectical Ethics, pp. 72–3. Translation modified. 43. Wahrheit und Methode, p. 442; Truth and Method, p. 438. 44. Wahrheit und Methode, p. 479; Truth and Method, p. 475. 45. Wahrheit und Methode, p. 480; Truth and Method, p. 476. 46. Wahrheit und Methode, p. 490; Truth and Method, p. 487. 47. Wahrheit und Methode, p. 478; Truth and Method, p. 474. 48. In this volume, p. 177. 49. In this volume, p. 177. In his ‘Reflections on My Philosophical Journey’, Gadamer explains further: ‘One learns to interact with the world through one’s mother language, and conversely, the first development of one’s own capacity to speak begins to be articulated within one’s orientation in the surrounding world’ (p. 42). 50. In this volume, p. 177. 51. In this volume, p. 164.

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52. In this volume, p. 161. 53. In this volume, p. 66. 54. After Husserl, Gadamer sees this model of scientific knowledge originating from Galileo’s mathematization of nature, which assumed that the essence of science was constituted by ‘that which can be explained and constructed according to rational laws. Thereby natural language lost its self-evident precedence’ (‘Text und Interpretation’, p. 31). 55. See in this volume, p. 146. 56. See in this volume, p. 42. 57. See in this volume, p. 104. 58. In this volume, p. 183. 59. In this volume, p. 184. 60. In this volume, p. 134. 61. In this volume, p. 132. 62. In this volume, p. 186. 63. In this volume, p. 204. 64. In this volume, p. 196. 65. In this volume, p. 196. 66. In this volume, p. 185. 67. In this volume, p. 186. 68. In this volume, p. 198. 69. In this volume, p. 198. 70. In this volume, p. 185. 71. See Wahrheit und Methode, p. 107f; Truth and Method, p. 101f. 72. In this volume, p. 204. 73. In this volume, p. 197. 74. ‘We cannot understand any sentence being read out to us if those reading the sentence out have not understood it’ (in this volume, p. 200). 75. In this volume, p. 207. 76. In this volume, pp. 97, 148. 77. In this volume, pp. 197–8. 78. In this volume, p. 205. 79. In this volume, p. 198. 80. In this volume, p. 198. 81. In this volume, p. 203. As Gadamer explains, Aristotle ‘knew no boundaries to hearing at all, because language is among the things one hears, and, as the logos, language encompasses simply everything’ (‘Reflections on My Philosophical Journey’, p. 25). 82. In this volume, p. 200. 83. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, p. 81. 84. Needless to say, it is quite difficult to reconcile what we find in Truth and Method with the interesting picture Beiser draws of Gadamer as the last of the aesthetic rationalists. See Frederick C. Beiser, Diotima’s Children: German Aesthetic Rationalism from Leibniz to Lessing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 27–30. I am thankful to David Vessey for pointing me to Beiser’s interpretation. 85. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 114. 86. Much has been said about how the concept of play overcomes the subjectivism which had infected aesthetics, about how it shows that the work is constituted in the very

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relationship to the spectator and about the manner in which it does not willy-nilly erase subjectivity but restructures it in a unique way. See Richard Detsch, ‘A Nonsubjectivist Concept of Play – Gadamer and Heidegger versus Rilke and Nietzsche’, Philosophy Today 29, no. 2 (Summer 1985): pp. 156–72; Jean Grondin, ‘Play, Festival and Ritual in Gadamer’, in Language and Linguisticality in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001, pp. 43–50; Flemming Lebech, ‘The Concept of the Subject in the Hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies 14, no. 2 (2006): pp. 221–36. 87. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 115. 88. We know of James Naismith as the inventor the basketball. 89. Self-presentation is understood verbally as a performance, an activity, even a repetitive one. Gadamer in his later writing replaces the same self-presentation with the Heideggerian and more obviously verbal noun: enactment (Vollzug). But the verbal sense is clearly present even in Truth and Method despite Gadamer’s employment of what Grondin calls the Neo-platonic terminology of presentation (Darstellung). See Grondin, Play, Festival and Ritual, p. 45. 90. In this volume, pp. 60–4. 91. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 379. 92. In this volume, pp. 95–100. Gadamer cites this essay in a footnote in the second chapter of Truth and Method. 93. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Die Aktualität des Schönen: Kunst als Spiel, Symbol und Fest (1974)’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993, p. 117; English translation: ‘The Relevance of the Beautiful: Art as Play, Symbol and Festival’, in The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, trans. Nicholas Walker, ed. Robert Bernasconi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 26. 94. In this volume, pp. 127–37. 95. In this volume, pp. 121–5. 96. In this volume, pp. 77–85. 97. In this volume, pp. 113–20. 98. In this volume, pp. 87–94. 99. In this volume, pp. 211–6. 100. In this volume, p. 213. 101. In this volume, pp. 101–11. 102. H. G. Gadamer, ‘Die Gegenwärtigkeit Hölderlins’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993, pp. 39–41. ­103. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Replik zu Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik (1971)’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993, p. 274; English translation: ‘Reply to my Critics’, in The Hermeneutic Tradition from Ast to Ricoeur, trans. George H. Leiner, ed. Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1990, p. 292.

Chapter 1 1. ‘Die sokratische Frage und Aristoteles’ was first published in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 7. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1991, n. 14, pp. 373–80. It was also published under the title ‘Die Gegenwart der sokratischen Frage in Aristoteles’ [‘The Actuality of the Socratic Question in Aristotle’] in Zur Rekonstruktion der praktischen

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Philosophie: Gedenkshrift für Karl-Heinz Ilting [On the Reconstruction of Practical Philosophy: Commemorative Volume for Karl-Heinz Ilting], ed. Karl-Otto Apel in collaboration with Riccardo Pozzo. Stuttgart/Bad Cannstatt: Wilhelm Frommann Verlag, 1990, pp. 17–25. 2. Translators’ note: This expression is used by Cicero in Academics II, xxxviii: ‘For when your Stoic wise man aforesaid has told you those facts one syllable at a time, in will come Aristotle, pouring forth a golden stream of eloquence, to declare that he is doting’ (Academics, in On the Nature of the Gods. Academics, trans. H. Rackam. The Loeb Classical Library. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956 [1933], p. 621). 3. Translators’ note: There are two Greek words related to our word ‘ethics’: ethos, which means ‘habit’ or ‘custom’, and ēthos, which means ‘character’. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle tells us that ‘moral virtue or ethical virtue [ēthikē] is the product of habit [ethos], and has indeed derived its name, with a slight variation of form, from that word’ (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, 1103a15, trans. H. Rackham. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934 [1926], p. 71). As the translator writes in a footnote, ‘it is probable that ethos, “habit”, and ēthos, “character” (whence “ethical”, moral) are kindred words’, p. 70. When Gadamer transliterates the word as ethos in German it is not always clear if he means ‘habit’, ‘custom’ or ‘character’. Unless Gadamer uses the Greek word ēthos or transliterates the word explicitly to mean ‘character’, we transliterate it as ethos. 4. Lambros Couloubaritsis has recently confirmed what I see, namely that the expression proairesis ultimately aims at the same inseparability of ēthos and phronēsis (‘Le problème de la proairesis chez Aristote’, in Annales de l’Institut de Philosophie (Bruxelles), 1972: pp. 7–50). 5. Karl-Heinz Ilting (1925–84) held the chair of philosophy from 1966 until his death in 1984 at Saarland University in Saarbrücken. He was editor of the Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie from 1979 until his death in 1984 and was instrumental in recognizing the importance of Hegel’s lecture manuscripts and edited quite a few of them, especially Hegel’s Heidelberg lectures on the Philosophy of Right. 6. Translators’ note: Plato offers a view of virtue which is not an object of a theoretical knowledge – it cannot be taught, as argued in the Meno – but is in itself a form of practical knowledge as ‘knowing how’ to act or to behave in certain circumstances. As Gadamer showed, Aristotle’s ‘ethics’ as a practical philosophy is a continuation of Plato’s teaching and not a break from it. 7. On this, see ‘Denken als Erlösung. Plotin zwischen Plato und Augustin’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 7, n. 17, Tübingen: J. C. B. J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1991, pp. 407–17. [Translators’ note: English translation: ‘Thinking as Redemption: Plotinus between Plato and Augustine’, in Hermeneutics, Religion, Ethics, trans. Joel Weinsheimer. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999, pp. 76–90].

Chapter 2 ­1. ‘Der aristotelische “Protreptikos” und die entwicklungsgeschichtliche Betrachtung der aristotelischen Ethik’ was first published in Hermes 63 (1928): pp. 138–64. It is now in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 5. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1985, n. 2, pp. 164–86. 2. Translators’ note: Werner Jaeger, Aristoteles. Grundlegung einer Geschichte seiner Entwicklung. Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1923. English

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translation: Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of His Development, 2nd edn., trans. Richard Robinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962 [1948]. 3. On the totality of Jaeger’s work, see my ‘Note’ in the philosophical journal Logos, vol. XVII (1928) 1. Now in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 5, pp. 286–94. 4. Translators’ note: Werner Jaeger, Studien zur Entshehungsgechichte der Metaphysik des Aristoteles. Berlin: Weidmann, 1912. 5. Translators’ note: Protreptikos means ‘persuasive’, ‘exhortatory’. It was a genre of works dedicated to an exhortation to philosophize. Iamblichus’ own Exhortation to Philosophy is a series of excerpts from different philosophers, including excerpts from Aristotle in its Chapters 5 to 12, which are believed to be part of a lost dialogue of the same genre by Aristotle, a Protrepticus or exhortation to philosophy. 6. I cannot explicate this in more detail here. Furthermore, it is not required to refer specifically to Jaeger’s work on this point. For, what provides the strongest additional support when reading the Nicomachean Ethics – the twofold treatment of hēdonē [pleasure] in H and K is simply not included by Jaeger in grounding his reconstruction of a development in Aristotle (Jaeger, p. 270. See also p. 247). In fact, it is as much a problem pertaining to the objective content of the Nicomachean Ethics as it is a problem pertaining to the literary history of the genesis of this work, not a problem of historical development. 7. Translators’ note: Gadamer’s emphasis. 8. It is thus extremely difficult to decide the question of whether Aristotle’s Protrepticus was a dialogue or not. The fact that we find no clear traces of anything dialogical in the Aristotelian excerpts, which are so abundant in the Platonic excerpts, is not enough to make a decision, for certainly the Aristotelian dialogues appeared far less dialogical than the Platonic ones. Conversely, the fact that [168] we discern everywhere in the Aristotelian excerpts the tone of a refutation of the opponents of philosophy does not prove their dialogical character, for we cannot find out if these opponents were introduced meaningfully or if it was only their views which were referenced by Aristotle. Even the loose composition of p. 43, 25ff (25: eti [‘furthermore’], 27: eti, 44, 4: toinun [‘thus’] etc.), which led Hartlich to conclude in favour of the dialogical nature of the presentation, is not conclusive for the same reason. At most, there are still some indications that speak for a general literary nature of the work, on the basis of which Jaeger, it seems to me correctly, decides in favour of a continuous form of discourse. 9. A precise comparison of the excerpts with the Platonic originals brings to light only a single small misunderstanding: Ch. 5, p. 26, 1 Pist. = Euthydemus 281 b 7, which Iamblichus misunderstood. He implements the misunderstood thoughts 26, 5–7 in an insertion of his own making, and not a successful one at that. This is, however, the only exception! [Translators’ note: The abbreviation ‘Pist.’ refers to Hermenegildus Pistelli who edited the manuscript: Iamblichi, Protrepticus, ad finem codicis Florentini, ed. H. Pistelli. Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1888. Reprint: Stuttgart/Leipzig, 1996]. 10. Translators’ note: The work in question is Proclus’ commentary on the first book of Euclid’s Elements. The second number Gadamer gives is the pagination in Friedlein’s edition: Procli Diadochi in primum Euclidis Elementorum librum commentarii ex recognitione Godofredi Friedlein. Hildesheim/New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1992. ­11. Even the loose concatenation of the Platonic excerpts is not without organizational perspective. At the beginning, we have the specifically protreptic dialogues: Euthydemus (characteristically augmented at the beginning for the sake of a diairetic formulation!); thereafter, a non-Platonic diairesis, the protreptic use of which depends on the concepts

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archōn [‘magistrate’] and oikeion [‘private’]; then, the Clitophon; then the Alcibiades I under the perspective of the gnōsis tēs psuchēs [‘the knowledge of the soul’] (29, 8); then The Laws, under the perspective of the timē tēs psyches [‘the honour of the soul’] (30, 3); after that, no longer just psychē, but kuriōtaton eidos tēs psychēs [‘the most important part of the soul’], that is to say the kosmos [‘right order’], which connects, however badly, the Timaeus with the Republic. The second series of Platonic excerpts (Ch. XIII–XIX) is similarly loose, but not haphazard. Obviously, here and there, precisely in the Aristotelian excerpts, Iamblichus’ method is detrimental to the inner coherence of the thoughts. Especially in the part p. 37, 26–40, 11, we can find clear insertions but they are only superficially connected, for example, 40, 1. In such cases, we clearly have to assume large-scale omissions of counter-objections, from which what has been passed down has been preserved as a positive refutation. 12. Translators’ note: ‘Rose’ refers to the edition of Aristotelian fragments by Valentin Rose: Aristotelis qui ferebantur librorum fragmenta collegit Valentinus Rose. Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1886. It was published earlier as Aristoteles pseudepigraphus. 13. Diels obviously had this in mind when he considered this passage – admittedly, without sufficient reason – to be simply borrowed from the Aristotelian Protrepticus. 14. The fact that Aristotle (in Nicomachean Ethics Z 7, 1141 a 27) grants phronēsis even to animals does not speak against this. For, this only happens in the sense of a transference, thus improperly. But essentially the analogy, which makes this transference possible (a transference which incidentally can also be suggested by the common use of language), is precisely not an ontological commonality, but a similarity of behaviour. The behaviour of certain animals appears as if it displays reflection. The understanding of animal existence, which always proceeds from human beings by way of negation, allows us in this way to recognize here a certain phronēsis. 15. With regard to the fact that there are communities organized in a state [staatlicher Gemeinschaften], the Aristotelian Politics teaches us precisely the necessity to develop a variety of eidē [‘forms (of government)’], which fits the multiplicity of empirical circumstances. By contrast, in the Protrepticus the question is not about the eidē, but about ‘the’ theion [‘the divine’] (55, 27). 16. On p. 94, in reference to 56, 1f, Jaeger speaks of ‘to anchor’. Here, however, we have to abandon the ‘improvement’ ormei [‘anchors’] and re-insert orma [‘moves forward’]. What is meant is not ‘to drop anchor’, but the journey into the open sea, for which it makes sense to depend upon unchangeable points of orientation (the stars). 17. These correspondences, as horos in De Partibus Animalia, I, 1 and, above all, the essential use of auta [‘themselves’] (See Adolf Torstrik, ‘Die Authentica der Berliner Ausgabe des Aristoteles’, Philologus. Zeitschrift für antike Literatur und ihre Rezeption 1857, 12, p. 525) are an indication of the common background of the linguistic thinking of the Greeks, whose external appearance can only be characterized as the perpetuation of Platonic expressions in Aristotle (Diels’s use of Nicomachean Ethics A 7 theatēs talēthous [‘contemplator of the true’] is distorting as this is said of a mathematician). 18. Clearly, I cannot follow Jaeger on this point when he finds these thoughts ‘crudely cut to size’ for the needs of the Proemium. The ‘triumphant force’ of the line of thought present in the Proemium relies as much on the terseness as on the consistency of the development. The fact that mathematics appears there is in no way ‘strangely unmediated’ and does not at all demand an explanation from the exposition of the Protrepticus. Rather, the thought is compellingly developed here that the sophos [‘wise’],

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as someone who knows, is independent of the concern for the utility of the eurethen [‘found’, ‘discovered’], and mathematics is the greatest example of this! (Jaeger, p. 72). 19. Jaeger incorrectly sees in this section an example of the academic threefold division of the philosophical disciplines, which is otherwise only to be encountered in the Topics A14. For, as attested by the examples in 39, 4 as well as in the Rose fragment 52, p. 59, 4, the allē alētheia [‘the other truth’] is a simple generalization of the concept of phusis, not an independent term. [Translators’ note: In his text, Gadamer mistakenly refers to page 861, which we have corrected as p. 86, note 1. In this note, Jaeger sees the division into three terms: 1. About what is just and advantageous; 2. About nature; and 3. About all other truths]. 20. The structure of this chapter (A 6) raises suspicion. First, we have the informative gar [‘for’, ‘indeed’]: b32: ek [‘out of ’] gar . . .; 39: philosophon [‘philosophical’] gar . . .; a8: apaideusia [‘lack of education’] gar; 16: esti [‘it is’] gar . . . ), which is added to the Aristotelian explication of the facts. Next, the Analytics is drawn into the discussion, which seems out of place in relation to the practical exercise of the method. (Where in what follows is the separate treatment of aitia and to deiknumenon [‘what has been shown’] actually pursued?). Jaeger on p. 146 also fails to recognize that the formal structures of the arguments are mostly just not what the editor of the excerpts [Iamblichus] takes from the original, but that they are suspicious as the fruits of a scholastic exegesis. On this point, Reinhardt (Kosmos und Sympathie [Cosmos or Sympathy], Munich: C. H. Beck, 1926, p. 82ff) seems to me to be right against Jaeger. 21. On this matter, the Freiburg dissertation of Ernst Knapp: Das Verhältnis der eudemischen zur nikomachischen Ethik (1912) [The Relationship of the Eudemian Ethics to the Nicomachean Ethics] occupies first place. Yet, even this work does not take it upon itself to clarify the internal problems of the Eudemian Ethics and takes the proof of the work’s authenticity for granted when it argues that individual themes of the Eudemian Ethics have objective precedence over those corresponding elements in the Nicomachean Ethics. 22. Translators’ note: See, for example: Aristoteles, Nikomachische Ethik, übersetzt und kommentiert von Franz Dirlmeier [Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, translated with a commentary by Franz Dirlmeier]. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1967 [1966]; Aristoteles, Eudemische Ethik, übersetzt und kommentiert von Franz Dirlmeier [Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, translated with a commentary by Franz Dirlmeier]. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1979 [1963]; Aristoteles, Magna moralia, übersetzt und kommentiert von Franz Dirlmeier [Aristotle, Magna Moralia, translated with a commentary by Franz Dirlmeier]. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1979 [1964]. 23. Translators’ note: Anthony Kenny, The Aristotelian Ethics: A Study of the Relationship between the Eudemian and Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Chapter 3 1. ‘Heidegger und die Griechen’ was a lecture delivered at the eleventh symposium of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Bonn on 24–28 April 1989 on the theme ‘Philosophische Aktualkität Heideggers’ [‘The Philosophical Relevance of Heidegger’]. It was first published in Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung/Mitteilungen, Issue 55, August 1990, pp. 29–38. It is now in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1995, n. 3, pp. 31–45.

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2. Now under the title ‘Auf dem Rückgang zum Anfang’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3, n. 27, pp. 394–416. [Translators’ note: English translation: ‘On the Way Back to the Beginning (1986)’, in The Selected Writings of Hans-Georg Gadamer, vol. 1 Hermeneutics between History and Philosophy, ed. and trans. Pol Vandevelde and Arun Iyer. London: Bloomsbury, 2016, pp. 247–69]. 3. Translators’ note: English translation: Ontology – The Hermeneutics of Facticity, trans. John van Buren. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008. 4. Published with an introduction by me under the title ‘Heideggers “theologische” “Jugendschrift”’ [‘Heidegger’s early “theological” writing’], Dilthey Jahrbuch 6 (1989), pp. 228ff, especially pp. 235ff. 5. Professor Held delivered the keynote address in the symposium on the theme ‘Die gegenwärtige Lage der Philosophie – Heideggers Phänomenologie der Grundstimmung’ [‘The Present Situation of Philosophy – Heidegger’s Phenomenology of the Fundamental Mood’]. See in this connection his essay ‘Grundbestimmung und Zeitkritik bei Heidegger’ [‘Fundamental Determination and Temporal Critique in Heidegger’], in Zur philosophischen Aktualität Heideggers [On the Philosophical Relevance of Heidegger], vol. 1 Philosophie und Politik, ed. Dietrich Papenfuss and Otto Pöggeler. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1991, pp. 31–56. 6. Translators’ note: This is the volume 65 of the Gesamtausgabe: Beiträge zur Philosophie (vom Ereignis), ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1989. It was first translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly in 1999 under the title Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. A second translation appeared in 2012 by Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu under the title Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. 7. Published in Holzwege (Frankfurt 1950). It is now in volume 5 of the Complete Works [Gesamtausgabe] (Frankfurt, 1977). [Translators’ note: English translation: ‘The Age of the World-Picture’, in Marin Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 57–85.] 8. Translators’ note: B. L. van der Waereden, Science Awakening, trans. from Dutch Arnold Dresden. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961. 9. Kah Kyung Cho, Bewusstsein und Natursein: Phänomenologischer West-Ost Diwan [The Being of Consciousness and the Being of Nature: Phenomenological West-East Divan]. Freiburg/Munich: Karl Alber, 1987. 10. Translators’ note: Gadamer seems to be using the expression Weltorientierung (‘orientation in the world’) as an alternative to Weltsituation (‘situation in the world’) as used in the essay ‘Reason and Practical Philosophy’ (in this volume, pp. 47–52). ‘Orientation in the world’ has a stronger emphasis on the activity of finding one’s place in the world. Gadamer seems to borrow this notion from both Dilthey, who influenced him, and Karl Jaspers, whom he considers one of his contemporary teachers along with Heidegger (see in this volume p. 160) and who uses it as a fundamental concept, especially in his three-volume work titled Philosophy, the first of which is titled Philosophical World Orientation (Philosophische Weltorientierung). Jaspers links this notion of ‘orientation in the world’ to the concrete act of orienting oneself in space. Now, in our scientifically minded understanding, he believes, we have lost our bearings in the world. In a short essay on Jaspers after his death, (‘Karl Jaspers’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1995, p. 396) Gadamer connects the two terms Jaspers uses, ‘situation’ (as in Jaspers’ essay ‘The Spiritual Situation of the Age’ of 1931) and ‘orientation in the world’ by noting

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that ‘the essence of “situation” all too clearly calls for a knowledge which does not have the objectivity of an anonymous scientificity but for one which is marked by horizon and perspective, engagement and enlightening insight into one’s own existence’. 11. Translators’ note: Hymns to the Night, trans. Dick Higgins. New Paltz, NY: McPherson, 1984.

Chapter 4 1. ‘Die Idee der praktischen Philosophie’ is an expanded version of a lecture given at the World Congress on Aristotle, which took place in Thessaloniki, 7–14 August 1978. It was first published in Praktika Pankosmiou Synedriou ‘Aristotleles’, ed. by the Greek Ministry of Culture and Sciences. Athens, 1983, vol. 4, pp. 386–92. It is now in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1995, n. 19, pp. 238–46. 2. On the parallel roles played by the Timaeus and the Philebus in Plato’s late work, see ‘Die Idee des Guten zwischen Plato und Aristoteles’, now in Gesammelte Werke vol. 7, n. 6, pp. 128–227. [Translators’ note: English translation: The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy, trans. P. Christopher Smith. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986.] 3. Translators’ note: Gadamer sometimes uses the Greek alphabet and sometimes transliterates the Greek words. We transliterate all of them. 4. In any case, here too a positive relationship to praxis is thereby presupposed, if the agathon of the polis not only implies that it is more important to grasp (labein) the good but also that it must be preserved (sōzein). This can certainly not be reduced to a mere theoretical ‘grasping’ and ‘keeping in mind’, if it is characterized as the more divine. 5. Nicomachean Ethics Zēta 8, 1141b23 f. 6. Dio dei tois ethesin ēchtai kalōs ton peri kalōn kai dikaiōn kai holōs tōn politikōn akousomenon hikanōs [‘This is why in order to be competent students of what is right and just, and in short of the topics of politics in general, we need to have been well trained in our habits’, in Nicomachean Ethics, Book 1, 1095b4, trans. H. Rackham. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934 [1926], p. 13. Translation modified]. 7. Nicomachean Ethics Alpha 2, 1095b6; Alpha 7, 1098b2. 8. Nicomachean Ethics Alpha 1, 1094a23. 9. Translators’ note: In English in the text. 10. Translators’ note: Gadamer seems to be referring to the following passage in Kant’s Grounding: ‘Thus is ordinary human reason forced to go outside its sphere and take a step into the field of practical philosophy, not by any need for speculation (which never befalls such reason so long as it is content to be mere sound reason) but on practical grounds themselves. There it tries to obtain information and clear instruction regarding the source of its own principle and the correct determination of this principle in its opposition to maxims based on need and inclination, so that reason may escape from the perplexity of opposite claims and may avoid the risk of losing all genuine moral principles through the ambiguity into which it easily falls’ (Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James W. Ellington. Indianapolis/ Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993, p. 17).

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11. It should not escape the attentive reader of the Book Zēta of the Nicomachean Ethics that there are only two dianoetic virtues, the aretē [‘excellence’, ‘virtue’] of the theoretical and of the practical logos respectively. 12. Nicomachean Ethics Alpha 9, 1098b24, which corresponds to what we find in the Eudemian Ethics. 13. See, for example, diaphoran kai planēn [‘difference and variation’], 1094b15; amphisbētousi [‘they disagree’]. [Translators’ note: Gadamer writes amphisbētousin], 1095a20f; polloi logoi pros auta katabeblēntai [‘Many arguments have been presented against them’], 1096a9; and the explicit reference to the legomena 1098b6. Eudemian Ethics Alpha 2, 1214b6 explicitly states that all who are capable of living according to their own choices follow a skopos tou kalōs zēn [‘A goal of living well’] if they do not live their lives without sense and understanding (aphrosunē [‘madness’]). What becomes absolutely clear overall in this context is that ‘philosophizing’ happens in all people even if they live like boskemata [‘cattle’]. The epitaph of Sardanapalus is, for instance, itself an expression that claims ‘knowledge’. [Translators’ note: Sardanapalus was a legendary king of Assyria. In his translation of the Nicomachean Ethics, H. Rackham notes that two versions of his epitaph have been recorded, which he quotes, one saying in part ‘eat, drink, play, since all else is not worth that snap of a finger’ and the other ending with ‘I have what I ate; and the delightful deeds of wantonness and love which I did and suffered; whereas all my wealth is vanished’ (Nicomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934 [1026], pp. 14–15)]. Particularly illuminating is 1095a23ff: The polloi [‘the many’, ‘ordinary people’] understand eudaimonia differently, alloi d’ allo [‘each differently’], every person differently according to the circumstances – when they are ill, happiness will be health, when poor, it will be wealth. However, because they are aware of their own ignorance, they follow those who teach mega ti kai huper autous [‘Something which is grand and is beyond them’], the sophoi [‘the sages’]. 14. See Eudemian Ethics Alpha 6, 1216b40ff. [Translators: note: the text reads: ‘For in respect of each subject inability to distinguish arguments germane [okeious logous] to the subject from those foreign to it [allotrious] is lack of education [apaideusia]’ (Eudemian Ethics, in The Athenian Constitution, The Eudemian Ethics, On Virtues and Vices, trans. H. Rackham. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971 [1925], p. 221). 15. Translators’ note: Gadamer seems to be referring to the discussion from 1180b29 – 1181b11 of the Nicomachean Ethics, which culminates in the following: ‘Very possibly therefore collections of laws and constitutions may be serviceable to students capable of studying them critically, and judging what measures are valuable or the reverse, and what kind of institutions are suited to what national characteristics. But those who peruse such compilations without possessing a trained faculty cannot be capable of judging them correctly, unless they do so by instinct, though they may very likely sharpen their political intelligence’ (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1181b5, trans. H. Rackham. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934 [1026], pp. 641–3). 16. Translators’ note: Gadamer is referring to the passage that immediately follows the one mentioned in the previous note (1181b12–15): ‘As then the question of legislation has been left uninvestigated by previous thinkers, it will perhaps be well if we consider it for ourselves, together with the whole question of the constitution of the State, in order to complete as far as possible our philosophy of human affairs’ (Nicomachean Ethics, 1181b10, p. 643).

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17. Translators’ note: Viktor Kraft (1880–1975) was a member of the Vienna Circle. He had a Student circle called the ‘Kraft Circle’, of which Paul Feyerabend, who was to write his dissertation under the supervision of Kraft, became the leader. Ludwig Wittgenstein and Elizabeth Anscombe visited the circle. Kraft had an influence on Hans Albert and Karl Popper. In ‘Historicity and Truth (1991)’ Gadamer comes back to this critique by the Vienna Circle. He writes: ‘One is used to hearing, for example, from the Vienna Circle, that the human sciences are at most ten percent science and when it comes to the concept of scientificity, as developed in the Vienna Circle, this is probably putting it too mildly. In any case, it is upon the other ninety percent that we rely for our life in common and for human solidarity. This ninety percent opens for us possibilities of dialogue about truth, which is the logos that is common to us all, even if only ten percent satisfies the norms of scientificity’ (Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hermeneutics between History and Philosophy, The Selected Writings of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Volume I, edited and translated by Pol Vandevelde and Arun Iyer. London: Bloomsbury, 2016, pp. 22–3). 18. Kurt Von Fritz, ‘Die Rolle des Noūs’. Reprinted in Um die Begriffswelt der Vorsokratiker, ed. Hans-Georg Gadamer. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftlich Buchgesellschaft, 1968, pp. 246–363. 19. Generation of Animals Bēta 3, 736b28: theion einai monon [‘It alone is divine’]. [Translators’ note: trans. A. L. Peck. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990 [1942], p. 171]. On the Soul Gamma 5, 430a2a: touto monon athanaton kai aidion [‘This alone is immortal and eternal’]. [Translators’ note: in On the Soul, Parva Naturalia, On Breath, trans. W. S. Hett. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957, p. 171.] 20. Translators’ note: As Gadamer says in ‘Heidegger and the Greeks’, ‘motility is not movement. Its opposite is not rest. Motility is the being of what is moved’ (p. 36). 21. Translators’ note: Gadamer seems to be referring to the following passage: ‘Stranger: Well then, do you say that knowing or being known is an active or passive condition, or both? Or that one is passive and the other active? Or that neither has any share at all in either of the two? Theatetus: Clearly they would say that neither has any share in either; for otherwise they would be contradicting themselves. Stranger: I understand; this at least is true, that if to know is active, to be known must in turn be passive. Now being, since it is, according to this theory, known by the intelligence, in so far as it is known, is moved, since it is acted upon, which we say cannot be the case with that which is in a state of rest’ (Theatetus and Sophist, trans. H. N. Fowler. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002 [1921], p. 383).

Chapter 5 1. ‘Vernunft und praktische Philosophie’ was a contribution to an international conference of the German Society for Phenomenological Research in Trier in April 1985. It was first published in Vernunft und Kontingenz. Rationalität und Ethos in der Phänomenologie [Reason and Contingency: Rationality and Ethos in Phenomenology], ed. Ernst Wolfgang Orth. Freiburg/Munich: Karl Alber, 1986, pp. 174–85. It is now in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1995, n. 21, pp. 259–66.

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2. Translators’ note: In the Politics Aristotle notes that ‘the human being is by nature a political animal’ (anthrōpos phusei politikon zōon, 1253 a4. The Politics, trans. H. Rackham. The Loeb Classical Library. London: William Heineman; New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1932, p. 9. Translation modified). He adds further on: ‘And why the human being is a political animal in a greater degree than any bee or any gregarious animal is clear. For nature, as we declare, does nothing without purpose; and the human being alone of the animals possesses speech [logon] [. . .]. Speech [logos] is designed to indicate the advantageous and the harmful, and therefore also the right and the wrong; for it is the special property of the human being in distinction from the other animals that the human being alone has perception of good and bad and right and wrong and the other moral qualities, and it is partnership in these things that makes a household and a city-state’ (p. 11). 3. See in the regard, Die Idee des Guten zwischen Plato und Aristoteles, now in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 7, n. 6, pp. 128–227. [Translators’ note: English translation: The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy, trans. P. Christopher Smith. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986.] 4. This is also true for the book by Alasdair MacIntyre. See my criticism in Philosophische Rundschau 32 (1985), pp. 1–7, now also in Gesammelte Werke, ‘Ethos und Ethik (MacIntyre u.a.)’, vol. 3. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1987, n. 25, pp. 350–6. ­5. On this, see, among others, the contributions ‘Praktisches Wissen’ [‘Practical Knowledge’], in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 5. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1985, n. 5, pp. 230–48 and ‘Über die Möglichkeit einer philosophischen Ethik’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1987, n. 11, pp. 175–88. [Translators’ note: English translation: ‘On the Possibility of a Philosophical Ethics’, trans. Michael Kelly, in Kant and Political Philosophy: The Contemporary Legacy, ed. Ronald Beiner and William James Booth. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, pp. 361–73.] 6. Translators’ note: In the passage Gadamer cites, Aristotle does not quite say that theory is the highest praxis. Rather, he says that the active life is the best life but that theory, because it is also aimed at the good, is a form of praxis. Here is the full passage: ‘But if these things are well said, and if happiness [eudaimonia] is to be defined as well-doing [eupragian], the active [praktikos] life is the best life both for the whole state collectively and for each man individually. But the active life is not necessarily active in relation to other men, as some people think, nor are only those processes of thought active that are pursued for the sake of the objects that result from action, but far more those speculations [theōrias] and thoughts [dianoēseis] that have their end in themselves and are pursued for their own sake; for the end is to do well [eupraxia], and therefore is a certain form of action [praxis]’ (The Politics, trans. H. Racham. The Loeb Classical Library. London: William Heinemann; New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1932, p. 551).

Chapter 6 1. ‘Zu Poetik und Hermeneutik. Lyrik als Paradigma der Moderne – Die nicht mehr schönen Künste’ were two reviews of two volumes in the series Poetik und hermeneutik – Arbeitsergebnisse einer Forschungsgruppe [Poetics and Hermeneutics: Findings

Notes

2.

3. ­4.

5. 6. 7.

8.

9. 10.

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of a Research Group], published by the editions Wilhelm Fink. The first review of vol. 2, Immanente Ästhetik – Ästhetische Reflexion. Lyrik als Paradigma der Moderne [Immanent Aesthetics: Aesthetic Reflection. Lyric as the Paradigm of the Modern Age] (ed. Wolfgang Iser, Munich, 1966) was published in Philosophische Rundschau 15 (1968): pp. 291–99. The second review of vol. 3, Die nicht mehr schönen Künste. Grenzphänomene des Ästhetischen [The Arts No Longer Beautiful. Limit Phenomena of the Aesthetic] (ed. Hans Robert Jauss, Munich, 1968) was published in Philosophische Rundschau 18 (1971): pp. 58–62. These two reviews are now in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993, n. 6, pp. 58–69. Translators’ note: ‘Die Moderne’ in German designates a period in the history of art that extends from the nineteenth century into the mid-twentieth century, including such works as by the impressionists, the cubists and van Gogh. These works were essentially characterized by the fact that they break away from the form and content of previous classical painting. When it comes to art, ‘modern’ as in ‘modern art’ always refers to the same period in English as the German ‘moderne’. However, in English we also use the term ‘modernity’ as a historical period starting roughly with Descartes and characterized by the prominent role granted to reason and enlightenment. We translate die Moderne by ‘the modern’ when referring to the artistic period, leaving ‘modernity’ to name the historical period of the enlightenment, Neuzeit in German. Let us note that in the latter sense, Gadamer uses both modern and neutzeitlich. Translators’ note: English translation: ‘Tree’, in Guillaume Apollinaire, Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War (1913–1916), trans. Anne Hyde Greet. Berkeley, CA/ London: University of California Press, 2004. Translators’ note: Gadamer refers several times to the simile Valéry uses to distinguish between everyday words and poetic words. The latter are like gold coins, which have an intrinsic value because of the precious metal used to make them – whereas the former are token coins having only a face value. See, for example, ‘Philosophie und Poesie’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993, n. 20, p. 233. Translator’s note: Gadamer is referring to the artwork by the Hungarian born French artist, Victor Vasarely (1906–97), titled Alphabet VR (1960). Translators’ note: The Göttinger Hainbund [‘the Göttingen League of the Grove’] was a group of poets in Göttingen in the 1770s who admired Klopstock and wanted to return to nature in their reaction to the enlightenment. Translators’ note: This is an expression of Hegel about which Gadamer writes in ‘Heidegger and Language’: ‘Hegel was already aware of this dwelling when he used the beautiful expression “to make oneself at home” [sich-Einhausen] for characterizing the task of human life’ (in this volume, p. 174). See ‘Dichten und Deuten’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993, n. 3, pp. 18–24. [Translators’ note: English translation: ‘Composition and Interpretation’, in Literature and Philosophy in Dialogue: Essays in German Literary Theory, ed. Dennis Schmidt, trans. Robert Paslick. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994, pp. 66–73]. Translators’ note: Both Friedrich Rückert, a poet and translator, and Johann Friedrich Overbeck, a painter, were contemporaries of Hegel. On Hegel’s mention of Rückert, see in this volume, p. 85. On this, see the two contributions on Hegel which address the thesis of the pastness of art in its context. [Translators’ note: The first essay is titled ‘The End of Art? From

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12. 13. 14. 15.

Notes Hegel’s Doctrine of the Pastness of Art to the Anti-art of Today’ (in this volume, pp. 65–76). The second essay is titled ‘The Place of Poetry in the System of Hegelian Aesthetics and the Question about the Pastness of Art’ (in this volume, pp. 77–85).] Translators’ note: This is Gadamer’s review of the third volume of Poetik und Hermeneutik [Poetics and Hermeneutics]. See note 1 p. 260. The full title of the volume is Die nicht mehr schönen Künste: Grenzphänomene der Äesthetischen [The Arts no Longer Beautiful: Limit-Phenomena of the Aesthetic] edited by Hans Robert Jauß. The title plays with the expression schöne Künste (‘fine arts’) and understands it literally as ‘the beautiful arts’, in order to speak of die nicht mehr schönen Künste, which literally means ‘the arts no longer beautiful’. Translators’ note: In English in the text. Translators’ note: In English in the text. Translators’ note: In English in the text. Translators’ note: In English in the text.

Chapter 7 1. ‘Ende der Kunst? Von Hegels Lehre vom Vergangenheitscharakter der Kunst bis zur Anti-Kunst von heute’ was a lecture given at the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in May 1984. It was first published in Ende der Kunst – Zukunft der Kunst [‘The End of Art – The Future of Art’], ed. Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts. Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1985, pp. 16–33. It is now in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993, n. 18, pp. 206–20. 2. On this, see ‘Mythologie und Offenbarungsreligion’ [‘Mythology and Revealed Religion’], in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1999, n. 15, pp. 175–9. 3. Translators’ note: Leo von Klenze (1784–1864) was an architect in Munich who became responsible for the architectural plan of Bavaria. He oversaw the architectural renewal of Munich. 4. Wahrheit und Methode, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1. Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1990 [1986], pp. 122ff. [Translators’ note: English translation: Truth and Method, 2nd rev. edn., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum, 1998, p. 117.] ­5. Translators’ note: The Nazarenes, also called the ‘Brotherhood of Saint Luke’, were an early nineteenth century group of artists, first in Vienna and then in Rome, who rejected modern forms of art and wanted to return to medieval and Renaissance art forms at the service of religious goals. 6. Anselm Feuerbach (1829–80), nephew of the thinker Ludwig Feuerbach, was a German painter, who was influenced by Greco-Roman and Italian Renaissance art and adopted a classicist style in his work, spending a major part of his life in Italy. 7. Hans von Marées (1837–87) was a German painter, belonging to the Idealist school in Germany. He stood in opposition to French modernist realism and the nationalist art in his country by going back to classical themes, seeking inspiration in Italy, where he spent many years of his life. 8. On this, see ‘Vom Verstummen des Bildes’, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8, n. 28, pp. 315–22. [Translators’ note: English translation: ‘Speechless Image’, in Hans-Georg

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Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, ed. Robert Bernasconi, trans. Nicholas Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 83–91.] 9. Roman Ingarden, Das literarische Kunstwerk, 4th edn. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1972. [Translators’ note: English translation: The Literary Work of Art, trans. George G. Grabowicz. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973.]

Chapter 8 1. ‘Die Stellung der Poesie im System der Hegelschen Ästhetik und die Frage des Vergangenheitscharakters der Kunst’ was first published in Welt und Wirkung von Hegels Ästhetik [The World and the Influence of Hegel’s Aesthetics], ed. Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert and Otto Pöggeler. Bonn: Bouvier, 1986, pp. 213–23. It is now in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993, n. 19, pp. 221–31. 2. Translators’ note: After Hegel’s death, a group of students and friends endeavoured to publish Hegel’s collected works and called themselves an ‘association of the friends of the immortalized one’, the one immortalized or rendered ‘eternal’ (verewigt) being Hegel. The title was Werke. Vollständige Ausgabe durch einen Verein von Freunden des Verewigten. Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1845. 3. I am grateful to Dr. Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert, who is in charge of these matters at the Hegel Archives, for stimulating information on the transcriptions of the lectures Hegel actually held on aesthetics. See especially the following among her publications: the ‘Introduction’ and edition of Hothos’ transcription of 1823 Die Philosophie der Kunst. Nach dem Vortrage des Herrn Professor Hegel. Im Sommer 1823. Berlin. Transcribed by H. Hotho. Hamburg, 1986. [Translators’ note: English translation: ‘Introduction: The Shape and Influence of Hegel’s Aesthetics’, in Lectures on the Philosophy of Art. The Hotho Transcript of the 1823 Berlin Lectures, ed. and trans. Robert Brown. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2014, pp. 7–168]; Die Funktion der Kunst in der Geschichte. Untersuchungen zu Hegels Asthetik [The Function of Art in History. Investigations on Hegel’s Aesthetics] (Hegel Studien, Supplement 25). Bonn: Bouvier, 1984. 4. Translators’ note: Johann Wolfgang Goethe, West-East Divan. The Poems, with ‘Notes and Essays’: Goethe’s Intercultural Dialogues’, trans. Martin Bidney. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010. 5. On this, see ‘The End of Art?’ in this volume pp. 65–76. 6. Dieter Henrich, ‘Kunst and Kunstphilosophie der Gegenwart. Überlegungen mit Rücksicht auf Hegel’ [‘Art and the Philosophy of Art of the Present. Reflections with regard to Hegel’], in Immanente Ästhetik – Ästhetische Reflexion. Lyrik als Paradigma der Moderne [Immanent Aesthetics – Aesthetic Reflection. Lyric Poetry as the Paradigm of Modernity], ed. Wolfgang Iser. Munich: Fink, 1966, pp. 11–32. See also in this volume ‘On Poetics and Hermeneutics’, pp. 55–64.

Chapter 9 1. ‘Begriffene Malerei? – Zu A. Gehlen: Zeit-Bilder’ was first published under the title ‘Wissenschaftliche Malerei’ [‘Scientific Painting’], dedicated to the 60th birthday

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4. 5.

6. 7.

Notes of Walter Bröcker, in Philosophische Rundschau 10 (1962): pp. 21–30. It is now in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993, n. 27, pp. 305–14. Arnold Gehlen, Zeit-Bilder [Time-Pictures]. Frankfurt: Athenäum Verlag, 1960, p. 66; see also p. 187. On this, see Wahrheit und Methode (Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1990 [1986], p. 119ff). [Translators’ note: Truth and Method, 2nd rev. edn., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum, 1998, p. 113ff] and the programmatic essays ‘Kunst und Nachahmung’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1999, n. 4, pp. 25–36. [Translators’ note: English translation: ‘Art and Imitation’, in Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, ed. Robert Bernasconi, trans. Nicholas Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 92–14] and ‘Dichtung und Mimesis’, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8, n. 8, pp. 80–5. [Translators’ note: English translation: ‘Poetry and Mimesis’, in The Relevance of the Beautiful, pp. 116–22]. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Juan Gris. Sa vie, son oeuvre, ses écrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1946. [Translators’ note: English translation: Juan Gris: His life and Work, trans. Douglas Cooper. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1969]. In the meantime, Gehlen has specifically dealt with Kahnweiler’s theory of art in the Festschrift for Kahnweiler (Pour Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, ed. Werner Spies. Stuttgart: Gerd Hatje, 1965) and brought to light its Kantian underpinnings [308] by placing Kahnweiler alongside Konrad Fiedler. This may well be by and large correct although the Kantianism which undertook to interpret the art of Marées and his circle had to be a very different neo-Kantianism than the one with which Kahnweiler – favouring Husserl – interprets cubism. In addition, in his writing, Kahnweiler never goes so far as Gehlen on this matter, as to claim an influence of the philosophy of neo-Kantianism on the programme of cubist painting. When we examine the clear explanations which Juan Gris made on the possibilities of painting, we will admire how these explanations develop their idea of ‘architecture’ without borrowing anything from the philosophy of the time. This has little to do with the Kantian synthesis of apperception. The originality accorded to ‘synthetic’ cubism (Kahnweiler) is, in my view, absolutely not based exclusively on the constructivism of its technique, but as much on how this construction is limited and modified through the legibility of what is presented as an object. What Kahnweiler understands by peinture conceptuelle does not mean, as in Gehlen, the scientificity of painting or its closeness to science, but rather the pure spirituality of the elements out of which the artistic composition is formed when anything related to imitation has been abandoned. Art lies not in the elements, but in their synthesis. This is true for Juan Gris, who once said explicitly: I did not arrive at any aesthetics, and only experience can give me something such as an aesthetics. Wahrheit and Methode, p. 87 ff. [Translators’ note: Truth and Method, p. 81 ff.]. René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theorie der Literatur. Frankfurt: Fischer Athenäum, 1963, pp. 274ff. [Translators’ note: English original: Theory of Literature. New York: Harcourt, 1956]. See also Russischer Formalismus, trans. N. Lohner (Munich, 1964). [Translators’ note: This second reference was not included in Gadamer’s review published in Philsophische Rundschau. It is most likely the book by Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History – Doctrine (The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1955), to which René Wellek wrote a preface. The book was translated

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into German by Marlene Lohner and published by Carl Hanser in Munich in 1964. Let us note that René Wellek also wrote an essay titled ‘Russian Formalism’, published in Arcadia – Internationale Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft / International Journal for Literary Studies 6, no. 1–3: pp. 175–86. DOI: https://doi. org/10.1515/arca.1971.6.1-3.175]. 8. Arnold Gehlen, Der Mensch. Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1940 [Translators’ note: English translation: Man, His Nature and Place in the World, trans. Clare McMillan and Karl Pillemer. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988]. See also the supplementary collection of essays Anthropologische Forschung [Anthropological Research]. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1961.

Chapter 10 1. ‘Über das Lesen von Bauten und Bildern’ was partly published under the title ‘Hermeneutik und bildende Kunst’ [‘Hermeneutics and the Visual Arts’] in Neue Zürcher Zeitung 200, 218 (Fernausgabe), 21 September 1979, Supplement ‘Literatur und Kunst’ [‘Literature and Art’], pp. 29–30. The complete version appeared in Querschnitt – Kulturelle Erscheinungen unserer Zeit [Cross-section – Cultural Phenomena of Our Time], ed. Hanno Helbling and Martin Meyer. (Zürich), Neue Zürcher Zeitung (1982): pp. 65–73. It then appeared under the title ‘Über das Lesen von Bauten und Bildern’ [‘On the Reading of Buildings and Paintings’], in Modernität und Tradition. Festschrift für Max Imdahl zum 60. Geburtstag [Modernity and Tradition: Festschrift for Max Imdahl for His 60th Birthday], ed. Gottfried Boehm, Karl-Heinz Stierle and Gundolf Winter. Munich: Fink, 1985, pp. 97–13. It is now in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993, n. 30, pp. 331–8. 2. See Wahrheit and Methode, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1, p. 375ff. [Translators’ note: English translation: Truth and Method, 2nd rev. edn., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum, 1998, pp. 369f.]. 3. On this, see, in particular, the essay ‘Wort und Bild – so wahr, so seiend’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8. Tübingen, J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993, n. 35, pp. 373–99. [Translators’ Note: English translation: ‘The Artwork in Word and Image: So True, So Full of Being’, in The Gadamer Reader: A Bouquet of His Later Writings, ed. Richard E. Palmer. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007, pp. 192–224]. 4. See Wahrheit und Methode, pp. 118ff. [Translators’ note: Truth and Method, pp. 112ff.]. 5. On this, see my essay ‘Voice and Language’, in this volume pp. 193–202. 6. For an instructive example, see ‘Poesie und Interpunktion’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9, n. 24, pp. 282–8. [Translators’ note: ‘Poetry and Punctuation’, in Literature and Philosophy in Dialogue: Essays in German Literary Theory, ed. Dennis Schmidt, trans. Robert Paslick. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994, pp. 131–7]. 7. On this, see my essay ‘Hearing – Seeing – Reading’, in this volume pp. 203–9.

Chapter 11 1.

‘Dichten und Denken im Spiegel von Hölderlins “Andenken” is based on parts of a lecture given at the occasion of the second colloquium of the Martin Heidegger

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Society in Messkirch on 26 September 1987. It was first published under the title ‘Von der Wahrheit des Wortes’ [‘On the Truth of the Word’], in Denken und Dichten bei Martin Heidegger [Thinking and Poetizing in Martin Heidegger] (annual publication of the Martin Heidegger Society 1988), private print, Messkirch, 1988, pp. 7–22. The framework was a contribution meant for the 1987 Hölderlin Colloquium in Yale. This contribution has not yet been published. It is now in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993, n. 4, pp. 42–55. 2. It was published along with my interpretation of Hölderlin’s hymn ‘Der Einzige’ [‘The Only One’] (now in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993, n. 1, pp. 1–19) in Hölderlin. Gedenkschrift zu seinem 100. Todestag [Hölderlin: Commemorative Volume on the 100th Anniversary of His Death], ed. Paul Kluckhohn. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1943, pp. 267–324 (now in Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe, vol. 4. [Translators’ note: ‘Andenken’, in Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung (1936–1968), ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1981], pp. 79–151. English translation: ‘Remembrance’, in Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, trans. Keith Hoeller. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000, pp. 101–73.] In the meantime, in addition to this essay by Heidegger, there is the far-reaching lecture course of 1941/42, which interpreted this poem and is available as vol. 52 of the Gesamtausgabe. [Translators’ note: Hölderlins Hymne ‘Andenken’, ed. Curd Ochwadt. Frankfurt am Main: Kostermann, 1982. English translation: Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘Remembrance’, trans. William McNeill and Julia Ireland. Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2018]. Volumes 4, 39 and 53 contain more of his works on Hölderlin. 3. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe [Collected Works. HistoricoCritical Edition], ed. Norbert von Hellingrath in collaboration with Friedrich Seebass, vol. 4. Munich and Leipzig: Insel, 1916, p. 303. On this, see Friedrich Beissner in the Grosser Stuttgarter Hölderlin Ausgabe, vol. 2/2, p. 802. [Translators’ note: the volume is titled Text. 2. Hälfte: Lesearten und Erläuterungen, in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Friedrich Beissner. Stuttgart: J. G. Cottasche Buchhandlung Nachfolger, 1946]. 4. Dieter Henrich, Der Gang des Andenkens. Beobachtungen und Gedanken zu Hölderlins Gedicht [The Course of Remembrance: Observations and Thoughts on Hölderlin’s Poem]. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1986. 5. Oskar Schürer, ‘Zu Caspar David Friedrichs Gemälde “Böhmische Landschaft”’ [‘On Caspar David Friedrich’s Painting “Bohemian Landscape”’], in Wissenschaft im Volkstumkampf: Festschrift für Erich Gierach zu seinem 60. Geburtstage [Science in the Conflict about Folklore. Festschrift for Erich Gierach on the Occasion of His 60th Birthday], ed. Kurt Oberdorffer, Bruno Schier and Wilhelm Wostry. Reichenberg: Sudetendeutscher Verlag F. Kraus, 1941, pp. 433–46. 6. Translators’ note: In his essay ‘The End of Art? From Hegel’s Doctrine of the Pastness of Art to the Anti-art of Today’, Gadamer distinguishes in relation to understanding a work of art between Erfüllung (fulfilment), Ausfüllung (filling out) and Auffüllung (filling in). He writes: ‘Here comes, as I said, a third form of recognition, which I would like to call not a “fulfilling” [Erfüllen] as with meanings nor a “filling out” [Ausfüllen] as with intuitive schemas, but a “filling in” [Auffüllen]’ (in this volume, p. 75). He borrows this view from Roman Ingarden who speaks of indeterminacies in a work that need to be filled out by readers, making connections between sketchy descriptions to make sense of what is described. In Gadamer’s words, ‘There are free

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9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

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spaces of intuition, which are opened up by poetic language and which the enacting reader fills out [ausfüllt]. This filling out happens through the readers and in their specific ways. Yet the identity of poetry is not affected as a result’ (in this volume, p. 75). Cyrus Hamlin, ‘Die Poetik des Gedachtnisses. Aus einem Gespräch über Hölderlins Andenken’ [‘The Poetics of Memory: From a Conversation about Hölderlin’s “Remembrance”]’, in Hölderlin-Jahrbuch, vol. 24 (1984/85), pp. 119–38. Translators’ note: It is taken from the sixth of the Duino Elegies. Rilke’s text is somewhat different. It does not say ‘o wie lange’ [Oh! How long] but ‘seit wie lange’ [since how long] and it does not include ‘bedeutsam’ [meaningful] but ‘bedeutend’ [important, significant]. Translators’ note: The Tübinger Stift is a theological seminar belonging to the evangelical Church in Württemberg and associated with the university of Tübingen. Among its famous alumni, besides, Hölderlin, are Hegel, Mörike, Schelling and Kepler. Translators’ note: English translation: ‘The Traveller’, in Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger, ed. Jeremy Adler. London: Penguin Books, 1998. Hölderlin, Stuttgart Edition, vol. II/1, p. 317 (n. 12). Translators’ note: English translation: ‘The Only One’, in Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger, ed. Jeremy Adler. London: Penguin Books, 1998. Stuttgart Edition, vol. II/1, p. 136 (‘Versöhnender’ [‘The Reconcilers’], Third Version, verse 19f) and Stuttgart Edition, vol. III, p. 535 ‘Friedensfeier’ [‘Celebration of Peace’], verse 64f.

Chapter 12 1. ‘Goethe und Mozart – das Problem der Oper’ was a lecture given in the Alte Aula [‘Old Lecture Hall’] at the University of Heidelberg on 10 July 1991. It was first published in Mozarts Opernfiguren. Grosse Herren, rasende Weiber – gefährliche Liebschaften [The Figures in Mozart’s Operas: Great Men, Terrific Women, Dangerous Love Affairs], ed. Dieter Borchmeyer. Bern/Stuttgart/Vienna: Paul Haupt, 1992, pp. 233–45. It is now in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993, n. 8, pp. 112–21. 2. Translators’ note: English translation: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, The Magic Flute, an Opera in Two Acts after the Libretto of Schikaneder and Giesecke, trans. W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman. New York: Random House, 1956. 3. Thrasyboulos Georgiades, Nennen und Erklingen: die Zeit als Logos [Naming and Sounding: Time as Logos], ed. Irmgard Bengen, with a preface by Hans-Georg Gadamer. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1985. 4. See my essay ‘Vom geistigen Lauf des Menschem’, part 2, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993, n. 7, pp. 80ff. [Translators’ note: English translation: ‘On the Course of Human Spiritual Development: Studies of Goethe’s Unfinished Writings’, in Literature and Philosophy in Dialogue: Essays in German Literary Theory, ed. Dennis Schmidt, trans. Robert Paslick. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994, pp. 31–66].

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Chapter 13 1. ‘Das Turmlied in Goethes “Faust”’ was first published under the title ‘Zwischen Ferne und Nähe – Goethe lesen’ [‘Between Distance and Proximity – Reading Goethe’], in Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 203, 64 (Fernausgabe), 19 March 1982, pp. 35–6. It is now in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993, n. 9, pp. 122–7. 2. Translators’ note: For an alternate translation, see Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust I and II, edited and trans. Stuart Atkins. Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014, p. 285. 3. Thrasyboulos G. Gorgiades, Schubert: Musik und Lyrik [Schubert: Music and Lyrics], 2nd edn. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1979. 4. For an alternate translation, see Goethe, Faust I and II, 286. 5. Translators’ note: This is taken from the poem ‘Audacity’ (Dreistigkeit) in the WestEast Divan.

Chapter 14 1. ‘Die Natürlichkeit von Goethes Sprache – ein Kongress beitrag’ was a lecture given at the invitational symposium which took place in the Lecture hall of the JohannWolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main on 25–26 March 1982. It was first published in Allerhand Goethe – seine wissenschaftliche Sendung. Aus Anlass des 150. Todestages und des 50. Namenstages der Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe Universität in Frankfurt am Main [All Kinds of Goethe – His Scientific Mission. On the Occasion of the 150th Anniversary of His Death and the 50th Anniversary of the Naming of the University of Frankfurt as the Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main], ed. Dieter Kimpel and Jörg Pompetski. Frankfurt/Bern/New York: Peter Lang, 1985, pp. 45–57. It is now in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9, n. 10. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993, n. 10, pp. 128–41. 2. Translators’ note: Johann Wolfgang Goethe, West-East Divan: The Poems, with “Notes and Essays”: Goethe’s Intercultural Dialogues, trans. Martin Bidney. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2010. 3. Translators’ note: In the nineteenth-century discussion about the unification of Germany, kleindeutsch, which literally means ‘small German’, referred to the position that Germany as a state should exclude Austria, as opposed to the other view, called grossdeutsch, which literally means ‘great German’, defending the view of a ‘greater’ Germany encompassing all German-speaking people, thus including Austria. 4. On the background of the award of the Goethe Prize to Stefan George, see [129] Erwin Walter Palm, ‘Spuren in Frankfurt’ [‘Traces in Frankfurt’], in Die Wirkung Stefan Georges auf die Wissenschaft. Ein Symposium. Heidelberg 1985 [The Influence of Stefan George on Science. A Symposium. Heidelberg 1985], ed. Hans-Joachim Zimmermann. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1985, pp. 73–6. 5. Translators’ note: Claus von Stauffenberg, who was part of the George circle, participated in the failed attempt to kill Hitler and claimed to be motivated by George. He was executed in 1944. 6. On this, see ‘Die Gegenwärtigkeit Hölderlins’ [‘Hölderlin’s Contemporaneity’], in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9, n. 3, pp. 39–41.

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7. On this, see ‘Goethe und die Philosophie’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993, n. 5, pp. 61 ff. [Translators’ note: English translation: ‘Goethe and Philosophy’, in Literature and Philosophy in Dialogue: Essays in German Literary Theory, ed. Dennis Schmidt, trans. Robert Paslick. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994, p. 8ff.]. 8. Translators’ note: dem Volke auf Maul schauen. Luther uses the word ‘schauen’, not ‘sehen’, as Gadamer quotes him. 9. Translators’ note: The complete verse is: ‘Oh lean down, you who are full of pain’ 10. On the melody [Melos] of Goethe’s verses, see also my essay ‘The Lynceus Tower Song in Goethe’s Faust’, in this volume, pp. 121–5. 11. Arthur Henkel, ‘Das Ärgernis Faust’ [‘The Vexation that is Faust’], in Versuche zu Goethe: Festschrift für Erich Heller zum 65. Geburtstag [Essays on Goethe: Festschrift for Erich Heller for His 65th Birthday], ed. Volker Dürr and Géza von Molnar. Heidelberg: L. Stiehm, 1976, pp. 282–304. Now revised in Arthur Henkel, Goethe-Erfahrungen. Studien und Vorträge [Experiences with Goethe: Studies and Lectures] (Kleine Schriften I). Stuttgart: Springer, 1982, pp. 163–79; 203–6. 12. See my essay ‘Vom geistigen Lauf des Menschen’, Part 1, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9, n. 7, p. 87. [Translators’ note: English translation: ‘On the Course of Human Spiritual Development: Studies of Goethe’s Unfinished Writings’, in Literature and Philosophy in Dialogue: Essays in German Literary Theory, ed. Dennis Schmidt, trans. Robert Paslick. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994, [pp. 31–66], p. 39ff.

Chapter 15 ‘Sprache und Verstehen’ was first published in Zeitwende. Die neue Furche 41 (1970): pp. 364–77. It was reprinted in Kleine Schriften IV, pp. 94–108. It is now in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993, n. 14, pp. 184–98. 2. Translators’ note: This is taken from Metaphysics, Bk I, part 2, 983a15: ‘All begin, as we have said, by wondering that things should be as they are, for example, with regard to marionettes, or the solstices, of the incommensurability of the diagonal of a square; because it seems wonderful to everyone who has not yet perceived the cause that a thing should not be measured by the smallest unit. But we must end with the contrary and [. . .] the better view, as men do even in these cases when they understand them; for a geometrician would wonder at nothing so much as if the diagonal were to become measurable’ (trans. Hugh Tredennick. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980 [1933], pp. 16–17). As the translator explains in a footnote, by ‘incommensurability’ Aristotle means ‘the fact that the diagonal of a square cannot be rationally expressed in terms of the side’ (p. 16). In his Prior Analytics I, xxiii, 41, 27, Aristotle mentions this as a hypothetical proof: ‘one proves that the diagonal of a square is incommensurable with the sides by showing that if it is assumed to be commensurable, odd become equal to even numbers. Thus, he argues to the conclusion that odd becomes equal to even, and proves ex hypothesi that the diagonal is incommensurable, since the contradictory proposition produces a false result’ (in The Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, trans. Hugh Tredennick. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983 [1938], p. 321). 1.

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3. Translators’ note: Arthur Schopenhauer applies to Kant an expression used in another context by Moses Mendelssohn: der Alleszmermalmer: ‘the all-crushing one’ (Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. Richard Aquila. New York: Routledge, 2008, vol. 1, p. 485). 4. Translators’ note: The expression ‘seven-league boots’ means ‘to make tremendous strides’. The expression was made popular in European folklore and especially by Charles Perrault in his fairy tale ‘Hop-o’-My-Thumb’ (‘Le petit Poucet’) under the name ‘bottes de sept lieues’, which are magical boots allowing the person who wears them to take a step of seven leagues at a time (one league representing between 2.4 to 4.6 statute miles and one lieue in French representing about 4 km). Goethe also uses this expression to describe how Mephistopheles suddenly appears to Faust in Act 4 of Part Two: ‘A seven-league boot plumps itself down, immediately followed by another; after Mephistopheles has stepped down from them, they stride quickly away’ (Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Faust I and II, ed. and trans. Stuart Atkins. Cambridge, MA: Suhrkamp/Insel, 1984, p. 254). 5. Translators’ note: Thucydides’ detailed description of the plague of Athens is found in Bk. 2, Chs. 47–54 of the History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. C. H. Smith. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956 [1919], pp. 341–57. References to the plague are found right up to Ch. 64 (p. 371) while the first reference to the plague is found in Ch. 31 (p. 315). 6. Translators’ note: In English, GDR: German Democratic Republic. 7. Translators’ note: Here is the passage in Goethe’s Faust in which Faust tries different variations on this ‘beginning with the word’: ‘It is written, “in the beginning was the Word”. How soon I’m stopped! Who’ll help me to go on? I cannot concede that words have such high worth And must, if properly inspired, Translate the term some other way. It is written: “In the beginning was the Mind”. Reflect with care upon this first line, And do not let your pen be hasty! Can it be mind that makes all operate? I’d better write: “In the beginning was the Power!” Yet, even as I write this down, Something warns me not to keep it. My spirit prompts me, now I see a solution And boldly write: “In the beginning was the Act”’ (Johann Wolgang von Goethe, Faust I and II, ed. and trans. Stuart Atkins. Cambridge, MA: Suhrkamp/Insel, 1984, p. 33). ­8. Tübingen, 1938. Now, in Werke, vol. 2, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1976. 9. Translators’ note: In English in the text. 10. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962.

Chapter 16 1. ‘Historik und Sprache’ was a response to the keynote address by Reinhart Koselleck on ‘Historik und Hermeneutik’ [‘The Theory of History and Hermeneutics’] in the

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Alten Aula [‘Old Lecture Hall’] of the University of Heidelberg on 16 February 1985. It was first published with Koselleck’s lecture in Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften [‘Proceedings of the Heidelberg Academy of Science’], Class of Philosophy and History, Year 1987, Report 1. Heidelberg: Carl Winter University Press, 1987, pp. 29–36. It is now in Gesammelte Werke, vol.10. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1995, n. 27, pp. 324–30. [Translators’ note: The term Historik names the methodology of the historical sciences. In German there are several closely related words designating history and all these terms can be used differently as concepts. Geschichte, besides meaning ‘story’, usually means ‘history’ in the sense of the happening and unfolding of facts and events in time. Historie is usually understood as the knowledge of these facts and events in the form of a historiography. Geschichtswissenshaft is the claim of this historiography to be scientific. Philosophers can play with these words and complexify these concepts, as Hegel and Heidegger have done, injecting a philosophy of history into these concepts. Historik was introduced especially by Droysen as a study or theory of the principles used in the writing of history or in the science of history. The term has been variously translated into English. For example, Droysen’s work Grundrisse der Historik was translated as Outline of the Principles of History by Benjamin Andrews (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1897). Other scholars use the word ‘historics’ or leave it untranslated. We use the expression ‘Theory of History’.

Chapter 17 1. ‘Von Lehrenden und Lernenden’ was the acceptance speech of the Karl Jaspers Prize on 15 June 1986 in the Alten Aula [‘Old Lecture Hall’] of the University of Heidelberg. It was first published in Rhein-Neckar Zeitung, 42, n. 163, 19–20 July 1986, p. 45. It is now in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1995, n. 10, pp. 331–5. 2. Philosophische Lehrjahre: Eine Rückschau. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1977. [Translators’ note: English translation: Philosophical Apprenticeships, trans. Robert Sullivan. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985]. See also the pieces on Jaspers, Krüger and Löwith in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10, Section 5. 3. Translators’ note: English translation: Man in the Modern Age, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul. London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1951.

Chapter 18 1. ‘Heidegger und die Sprache’ was given as a lecture under the title ‘Heideggers Sprachverständnis in philosophiegeschichtlicher Perspektive’ [‘Heidegger’s Understanding of Language from the Perspective of the History of Philosophy’] at the International Heidegger Symposium in Marburg, 7–8 October 1989. It was first published in Martin Heidegger – Faszination und Erschrecken. Die politische Dimension einer Philosophie [Martin Heidegger – Fascination and Shock. The Political Dimension of a Philosophy], ed. Peter Kemper. Frankfurt am Main / New York: Campus Verlag, 1990, pp. 95–113. It is now in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), n. 2, pp. 14–30.

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2. Translators’ note: The Greek is boulei, not boule, as Gadamer writes, and the reference is 522e and not 522c5. The passage reads: ‘And now, if you do not mind [ei de boulei], I would like to [ethelō] tell you a tale to show you that the case is so’ (in Plato, Lysis, Symposium, Gorgias, trans. W. R. Lamb. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983 [1925], p. 519). 3. Translators’ Note: This is a quotation from Juvenal, Satire VI. Juvenal puts this sentence in the mouth of a woman who would tell the man who is deeply in love with her: ‘This I want, so I order, let my will be the reason for it [hoc volo, sic jubeo, sit pro ratione voluntas]’ (Juvenal and Persius, ed. and trans. G. G. Ramsay. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979 [1918], p. 101. Translation modified). 4. Translators’ note: This is taken from ‘On Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense’, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufman. New York: Penguin Books, 1982, p. 44. Here is the full context of this line: ‘What, indeed, does man know of himself! [. . .] Does not nature keep much the most from him, even about his body, to spellbind and confine him in a proud, deceptive consciousness far from the coils of his intestines, the quick current of the blood stream, and the involved tremors of the fibers? She threw away the key; and woe to the calamitous curiosity which might peer just once through a crack in the chamber of consciousness and look down, and sense that man rests upon the merciless, the greedy, the insatiable, the murderous, in the indifference of his ignorance – hanging in dreams, as it were, upon the back of a tiger’. 5. Translators’ note: Joachin of Fiore was a twelfth-century Italian mystic who saw the trinity manifested in history in three ages, the age of the Old Testament under the aegis of the father (the law), the age of the New Testament under the aegis of the son (through faith and the Catholic Church) and the age of the spirit, which is yet to come and prepared by a transformed Church.

Chapter 19 1. ‘Heimat und Sprache’ was a lecture given at the occasion of the ninth BadenWürtemberg Literature festival in Karlsruhe, on 21 June to 5 July 1991. It was first published under the title ‘Rückkehr aus dem Exil’ [‘Return from Exile’] in Grenzüberschreitungen. Badem-Würtembergische Literaturtage in Karlsruhe [Border Transgressions. Baden-Würtemberg Literature Festival in Karlsruhe], ed. Regine Kress-Fricke. Karlsruhe: Edition G. Braun, 1992, pp. 123–31. It is now in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993, n. 34, pp. 366–72. 2. See on this ‘Hilde Domin, Dichterin der Rückkehr’, now in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993, n. 28, pp. 323–8. [Translators’ note: English translation: ‘Hilde Domin, Poet of Return’, trans. Margaret Korzus and Hilde Domin, The Denver Quarterly 6, no. 4 (1972): pp. 7–17]. 3. Translators’ note: English translation: ‘Language Mesh’, in Paul Celan. Poems. A Biligual Edition, trans. Michael Hamburger. Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1980, pp. 104–5. 4. Translators’ note: In English in the text.

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Chapter 20 1. ‘Unterwegs zur Schrift?’ was first published in Schrift und Gedächtnis. Beiträge zur Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation [Writing and Memory. Contributions to the Archaelology of Literary Communication], ed. Jan Ausmann, Aleida Ausmann and Christof Hardmeier. Munich: Fink, 1983, pp. 10–19. Now in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 7. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1991, n. 8, pp. 258–69. 2. Aristotle, Posterior Analytic Bēta 19. [Translators’ note: Posterior Analytics, in Posterior Analytics, Topica, trans. E. S. Foster. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966 [1960], pp. 259f]. 3. Translators’ note: The first verses of the poem read: ‘Let us begin to sing from the Heliconian Muses, who possess the great and holy mountain of Helicon, and dance on their soft feet around the violet-dark fountain and the altar of Cronus’ mighty son’ (Hesiod, Theogony, Works and Days, Testimonia, ed. and trans. Glenn W. Most. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006, p. 3). 4. See my review of Günter Rohr, Platos Stellung zur Geschichte [Plato’s Position on History] (1932), now in Gesammelte Werke. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1985, vol. 5, n. 10, pp. 327–31.

Chapter 21 1. ‘Stimme und Sprache’ was a lecture given at the Seminar on Romance Studies at the University of Heidelberg. First published in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993, n. 22, pp. 258–70. 2. Aristotle, On Interpretation 2, 16a19, 27; 4, 17a1. [Translators’ note: Aristotle defines a noun, for example, as a phōnē sēmantikē kata sunthēkēn: ‘a sound having a meaning established by convention’ (Categories. On Interpretation, trans. Harold P. Cooke and Hugh Tredennick. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938, p. 117)]. 3. On this, see ‘Der eminente Text und seine Wahrheit’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1999, n. 25, pp. 286–95. [Translators’ note: English translation: ‘The Eminent Text and its Truth’, trans. Geoffrey Waite, in The Horizon of Literature, ed. Paul Hernadi. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1982, pp. 337–47]. 4. Translators’ note: After speaking and writing, as mentioned in the triad of terms at the beginning. 5. Translators’ note: In English in the text. 6. Translators’ Note: Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949), Belgian playwright, poet and essayist who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1911. 7. Translators’ note: In English in the text. 8. Translators’ note: In English in the text. 9. Translators’ note: In his essay ‘Hearing – Seeing – Reading’, Gadamer elaborates upon this: ‘We know from a passage in Augustine that the Church Father Ambrosius drew astonishment because he could read without having to speak aloud’ (in this volume, p. 204). 10. For more on this, see the essay ‘Hearing – Seeing – Reading’, in this volume pp. 203–9.

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Chapter 22 1. ‘Hören – Sehen – Lesen’ was a lecture given at the Symposium in honour of Rudolf Sühnel, 30 June–2 July 1982 in the Seminar in English Studies at the University of Heidelberg. It was first published in Antike Tradition und Neuere Philologien. Symposium zu Ehren des 75. Geburtstag von Rudolf Sühnel [Ancient Tradition and Modern Philologies. Symposium in Honour of Rudolf Sühnel on His 75th Birthday], ed. Hans-Joachim Zimmermann. Heidelberg: Karl Winter University Press, 1984, pp. 9–18. It is now in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993, n. 23, pp. 271–8. 2. Translators’ note: We have translated the German idiom ‘da vergeht einem Hören and Sehen’ literally. The idiom means to be shocked and confused, to be dumbfounded, not to believe one’s eyes. 3. Translators’ note: Here is the text: ‘Not only with a view to action, but even when no action is contemplated, we prefer sight, generally speaking, to all the other senses. The reason of this is that of all the senses sight best helps us to know things, and reveals many distinctions’ (Aristotle, The Metaphysics, trans. Hugh Tredennick. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980, p. 3). 4. Translators’ note: In English in the text.

Chapter 23 1. ‘Lesen ist wie Übersetzen’ was a lecture given at the Michael Hamburger Symposium on 3–4 June 1987 at the German-American Institute in Heidelberg. It was first published in Italian under the title ‘Leggere è como tradurre’, in MondOperaio. Rivista mensile del Partido socialista italiano 19 (1988), n. 2: pp. 119–21. It was first published in German in Michael Hamburger – Dichter und Übersetzer. Beiträge des Michael-Hamburger-Symposiums am Deutsch-Amerikanischen Institut Heidelberg [Michael Hamburger – Poet and Translator. Contributions of the Michael Hamburger Symposium at the German-American Institute at Heidelberg], ed. Walter Eckel and Jakob Köhlhofer. Frankfurt am Main/Bern/New York/Paris: Peter Lang, 1989, pp. 117–24. It is now in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993, n. 24, pp. 279–85. 2. Translators’ note: This is taken from Friedrich Schlegel Philosophische Lehrjahre (1796–1806), Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe, vol. XVIII, ed. Ernst Behler. München/Paderborn/Wien: Ferdinand Schoningh; Zürich: Thomas-Verlag, 1963, p. 63, n. 434. 3. Translators’ note: Gadamer says ‘Latin’. 4. Translators’ note: Gadamer says ‘Latin’.

Appendix: Glossary of German Terms Abbau: dismantling, deconstruction Abbruch: break Abschied: farewell Andenken: remembrance Ansage: announcement Anschauung: intuition – anschaulich: vivid, figurative, visible, clear Anwesen: what grants presence, being present Anwesenheit: coming into presence, presence Aufbruch: breakthrough, irruption Auffassung: interpretation Auffüllung: filling in Ausfüllung: filling out Aussage: pronouncement, statement, proposition Beiklang: overtone, connotation bergen: to shelter Bergung: sheltering Bewahrung: preservation, protection Bewegtheit: motility, dynamism Beweislogik: logic of demonstration Beweismotiv: argument Bleibende, das: what remains Bruch: rift, rupture Destruktion: deconstruction Einbruch: disruption Eingriff: intrusion, intervention Einkehr: dwelling Einverständnis: agreement Entschlossensein: being resolute Entschluss: resolution Entzug: withdrawal Erfüllung: fulfilment Erhaltung: preservation Erhellung: elucidation, enlightenment Erinnerung: remembering, recollection ­erleiden: suffering Erneuerung: restoration, regeneration Erscheinung: appearance Fähigkeit: capacity Fortleben: continued life, perpetuation Gebilde: configuration, structure Gedächtnis: memory

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Gedenk: commemoration Gegenwart: present, actuality Gegenwärtigkeit: presence Gemeinsamkeit: commonality Geschehen: event Geschichte: story, history Geschick: fate Geselligkeit: conviviality Gespräch: dialogue, conversation Gestalt: form Gestalten: to configure, to shape, to form Gestaltung: configuration Gewissenhaftigkeit: conscientiousness Haushalt: business, management haushalten: to manage Heilsgeschichte: history of salvation Historik: theory of history Innesein: awareness Jeweiligkeit: being always unique Können: ability künstlich: artificial, technical Künstlichkeit: artificiality kunstvoll: artful, artistic, sophisticated Lebendigkeit: liveliness, vivacity, vitality, being-animated Leichtigkeit: effortlessness Lesedrama: dramatized reading Machenkönnen: productive ability mitgehen: going along with, being engaged in Moderne, die: the modern Nachdichtung: adaptation Neuzeit: modernity – neuzeitlich: modern Offenbarkeit: manifestation Rede: discourse, speech rezitieren: to recite Schau: vision, gaze, contemplation Sprachgitter: the grid of language Sprachlichkeit: the dimension of language, linguistic nature staunen: to be astonished – Staunen: astonishment ­Überlieferung: tradition, transmission unvernünftig: unreasonable Unvordenklichkeit: immemoriality Vergangenheitscharakter: pastness vernünftig: reasonable, rational Vernünftigkeit: reasonableness Verständigung: mutual understanding Verstehen: understanding verwirklichen: to realize Verwirklichung: realization, actualization Vielstelligkeit: plurivocity

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vollziehen: to effectuate, to actualize, to realize, to enact, to operate, to carry out Vollzug: exercise, performance, enactment, effectuation, execution, course – im Vollzug sein: being in exercise Vorgeformte, das: pre-existing forms vorgeprägt: pre-determined vorlesen: reading out, recitation – Vorlesen: public reading – Vorleser: public reader Vortrag: public presentation, lecture, public recitation Wachsamkeit: wakefulness Weltorientierung: orientation in the world Wesen: essence, unfolding wirken: to act upon, to influence – Wirken: activities Wirksamkeit: production Zugriff: intervention, access Zweckrationalität: instrumental rationality

248

Glossary of Ancient Greek Terms and Expressions agathos: good – to agathon: the good aidōs: shame aitia: cause – aitiai: causes akribeia: exactness allē alētheia: the other truth alloi d’allo: each differently allotrios: foreign alogos: without reason, without the capacity to speak amphisbētein: to have a disagreement – amphisbētousi: they disagree anamnēsis: recollection anthrōpinos agathos: human good apaideusia: lack of education aphrosunē: madness apodeixis: demonstration apokatastasis: restoration apophainesthai: to let appear apophansis: proposition – logos apophantikos: proposition, propositional sentence archē: beginning, principle – archai: principles archōn: magistrate aretē: excellence, virtue – aretai: virtues ­atopos: extraordinary, strange – to atopon: the extraordinary, the strange auta: themselves auta ta akribē: those things themselves which are exact autōn tōn akribōn mimēsis: imitation of the same exact ones auzēsis: augmentation bios anexetastos: unexamined life boskemata: cattle boulē: advice, counsel, deliberative council boulesthai: to want chōrismos: separation chrēsis: usage chrēsthai pasi (epistēmais) kai epitattein: to make use of everything (all the sciences) and master everything diairesis: division, separation; diaireses: separations dianoia: thought – dianoia orektikē: a thought involving desire diaphora kai planē: difference and variation dia ti: why this? dikaios: just– dikaios kai agathos: just and good – to dikaion: the just dioti: because doxai: opinions dunamis: potentiality

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dunasthai theōrēsai kai krinai ti kalōs ē tounantion: to be capable of studying and judging something as being well done or in the opposite manner ei de boulei ethelō: if you want, I would like to . . . eidos: aspect, form, essence – eidē: essences, forms eidotōn hupomnēsis: a reminding of what is known ek: from, out of elenchos: refutation eleos: pity empeiria: experience energeia: being at work, actuality epagōgē: bringing to oneself epieikēs: equitable epiponos: labourious epistemē: science, knowledge ergon: work, task eros: love esti: he/she/it is ethelein: to want, to wish ethnei: for the people ethos: habit, custom ēthos: character eti: furthermore eudaimonia: happiness eurethen: found, discovered exoterikoi logoi: exoteric discourses gar: for, indeed glotta: tongue gnōmē: right opinion gnōsis tēs psuchēs: the knowledge of the soul grammē: line hai praktikai tōn epistemōn: the practical among the sciences, the sciences concerned with action hēdonē: pleasure hexis: disposition – hexis meta logou: a disposition accompanied by reason homoiōs: similarly hōs dei: as it must, as it fits horos: limit – horoi: limits hoti: that, the fact that hupokeimenon: what serves as a basis, substratum hupomnēma: reminder hupomnēsis: act of reminding ideai: forms kairos: the right moment kalos: beautiful – to kalon: the beautiful kata synthēkēn: according to conventions kath’ hauto haireton: the desirable in itself kinein: to move kinēsis: movement kinoumena: things moved

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kinoun akineton: unmoved mover koinē sumpheron: useful for the community kosmos: right order krinein: to separate, to judge – krinein kalōs: to judge well ktēsis: acquisition kuriōtaton eidos tēs psychēs: the most important part of the soul labein: to grasp legein: to say legesthai: to be said lēthē: oblivion logos: reason, speech, language, discourse, argument – logoi: discourses, arguments – logon echon: having reason, having speech manthanein: to learn mathemata: things learnt mega ti kai huper autous: something which is grand and is beyond them metabolē: change methodos: investigation, the way one has to pursue metrion: the right measure mimēmata: imitated things mimēsis: imitation ­mnēmē: memory muthos: story noeien: to think nomoi bebaioi kai praxeis orthai: stable laws and right actions noūs: reason, mind oikeios: private – oikeios logos: germane argument ōpheleia: utility orexis dianoetikē: a desire involving thought orma: moves forward ormei: anchors ōste: in such a way that oudeis tōn theōn philosophei: nobody among the gods does philosophy oude . . . outōs ergon: no task . . . as ouk exetastos bios: non examined life ousia: substance, essence; property, assets, landed property; in Aristotle: what grants presence paideia: education paraklēsis: invocation paschein: to be affected, to suffer pathē: passions, sufferings – pathēmata: passions pepaideumenos: educated peri phuseōs te kai tēs allēs alētheias: about nature and all other truths peri tōn dikaiōn kai tōn sumpherontōn: about what is just and advantageous philosophia: philosophy – philosophos: philosophical phobos: fear phonē: sound phronein: to have good judgement phronēsis: good judgement, practical wisdom – phronēsis politikē: practical wisdom with regard to human affairs

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phronimos: having good judgement phusis: nature – phusei dikaion: what is just by nature – phusei onta: things which exist by nature poiēsis: making, production polis: city state – polesin: for all states Politeia: The Republic politeuesthai: to participate in the affairs of the city politikē: the political sphere politikos kai praktikos bios: the political and practical life polloi: the many, ordinary people – polloi logoi pros auta katabeblēntai: many arguments have been presented against them praktikē methodos: practical method, method of action praktikos bios: practical life prakton: what is made in action – prakton agathon: the good realized in action prattein: to act praxis: action ­proairesis: choice pros hous krinei ti dikaion kai ti kalon: according to which to judge what is just and what is beautiful prōta: the first proteron kai husteron: what comes first and what follows protreptikos: exhortatory, persuasive – protreptikoi logoi: exhortatory arguments protropē: exhortation – protpopai pros ton politikon kai praktikon bion: exhortations to a political and practical life pseudēs kanōn: the deceiving measure pseudos: false psuchē: the soul rhadios: effortless skopos: goal – skopos tou kalōs zēn: the goal of living well sophia: wisdom sophos: wise – sophoi: the sages sōzein: to preserve spoudaios: honest person stasis: rest stoicheion: letter suggnōmē: indulgence, forgiveness sumpheron: useful, advantageous suneidesis: conscious awareness sunesis: insightful understanding sunthēkē: convention ta legomena: what has been said, opinions technē: craft, technique; technai: crafts tektōn: carpenter tektonikē: the carpenter’s craft thaumazein: to wonder theasthai monon kai suneinai: only contemplating and being-with theatēs talēthous: contemplator of the true theion: the divine – theion einai monon: it alone is divine theōria: contemplation

Glossary of Ancient Greek Terms and Expressions thurathen: to the door ti: something timē tēs psyches: the honour of the soul to deiknumenon: what has been shown toinun: thus tōn men allōv technōn: of the other crafts tonos: tone to on legetai: being is said topos: topic touto monon athanaton kai aidion: this alone is immortal and eternal tuchē: chance tupos: outline ­zōon logon echon: rational animal, the animal which has speech

253

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actus (Lat): act – actus purus: pure act animal rationale: (Lat) rational animal arbre (Fr): tree artes liberales (Lat): liberal arts belles lettres (Fr): fine literature certitudo (Lat): certainty concetto (Ital): concept conscientia (Lat): conscious awareness dicere (Lat): to say dictare (Lat): to say by repeating, to dictate dire [Fr]: to say – le dire: the act of saying essentia (Lat): essence et illud transit (Lat): this too shall pass ex cathedra (Lat): from the chair, with full authority factum (Lat): fact flumen orationis aureum (Lat): the golden stream of eloquence fortuna (Lat): chance hic et nunc (Lat): here and now humaniora (Lat): humanities humanus (Lat): human idées simples (Fr): simple ideas in concreto (Lat): concretely in individuo (Lat.): in a single being limes (Lat): limit litterae (Lat): letters loci communes (Lat): common places mathématique picturale (Fr): pictorial mathematics memoria (Lat): memory mundus intelligibilis (Lat): intelligible world mundus sensibilis (Lat): sensible world obscuritas (Lat): obscurity occasio (Lat): occasion oeuvre (Fr): work peinture conceptuelle (Fr): conceptual painting petitio principii (Lat): laying claim to a principle, begging the question philosophie positive (Fr): positive philosophy prima vista (Ital): first sight

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ratio legis (Lat): reason for the law rationalité (Fr): rationality reasonnabilité (Fr): reasonableness singulare tantum (Lat): only singular sit pro ratione voluntas (Lat): be my will the reason for it subjectum (Lat): subject ­substantia (Lat): substance traduttore – traditore (Ital): translator – traitor un coup de dés (Fr): a roll of the dice velle (Lat): to want verbum (Lat): the word vérités de raison (Fr): rational truths voluntas (Lat): the will voix et langage (Fr): voice and language

Works Cited by Gadamer Note: This list includes all the works mentioned or cited by Gadamer. When a work is only mentioned we have listed it in its English translation. If it is cited we have completed the bibliographical information when needed and have added the English translation if available Apollinaire, Guillaume. Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War (1913–1916), trans. Anne Hyde Greet. Berkeley, CA/ London: University of California Press, 2004. Aristotle. Aristotelis qui ferebantur librorum fragmenta collegit Valentinus Rose. Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1886. Aristotle. Eudemian Ethics, in The Athenian Constitution, The Eudemian Ethics, On Virtues and Vices, trans. H. Rackham. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971 [1925]. Aristotle. Eudemische Ethik, übersetzt und kommentiert von Franz Dirlmeier. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1979 [1963]. Aristotle. Generation of Animals, trans A. L. Peck. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990 [1942]. Aristotle. Magna moralia, übersetzt und kommentiert von Franz Dirlmeier. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1979 [1964]. Aristotle. Metaphysics, trans. Hugh Tredennick. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980 [1933]. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934 [1926]. Aristotle. Nikomachische Ethik, übersetzt und kommentiert von Franz Dirlmeier. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1967 [1966]. Aristotle. On the Soul, in On the Soul, Parva Naturalia, On Breath, trans. W. S. Hett. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957. Aristotle. Parts of Animals, in Parts of Animals, Movement of Animals, Progression of Animals, trans. F. H. A. Marshall and E. S. Foster. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University press, 1937. Aristotle. Posterior Analytics; Topica, trans. Edward S. Foster and Hugh Tredennick. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960. Aristotle. The ‘Art’ of Rhetorik, trans. John Henry Freese. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University press, 1991 [1926]. Aristotle. The Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, trans. Hugh Tredennick. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983 [1938]. Aristotle. The Physics, trans. Philip Wicksteed and Francis Cornford. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957 [1929]. Aristotle. The Politics, trans. H. Rackham. The Loeb Classical Library. London: William Heineman/ New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1932. Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962.

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­Baudelaire, Charles. Les fleurs du mal: The Complete Text of The Flowers of Evil, trans. Richard Howard. Boston: D. R. Godine, 1982. Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1988. Celan, Paul. Poems. A Bilingual Edition, trans. Michael Hamburger. Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1980. Cho, Kah Kyung. Bewusstsein und Natursein: Phänomenologischer West-Ost Diwan. Freiburg/München: Karl Alber, 1987. Cicero. Academics, in On the Nature of the Gods. Academics, trans. H. Rackam. The Loeb Classical Library. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956 [1933]. Couloubaritsis, Lambros. ‘Le problème de la proairesis chez Aristote’, Annales de l’Institut de Philosophie (Bruxelles), 1972: 7–50. Dante, Alighieri. The Comedy of Dante Aliguieri: The Florentine, trans. Dorothy Sayers. Harmondsworth, UK/ Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1949–62. Dilthey, Willhelm. ‘Epistle 29th June 1911 to Edmund Husserl’, in Materialien zur Philosophie Wilhelm Diltheys, ed. Frithjof Rodi and Hans-Ulrich Lessing. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984. Droysen, Johann. Outline of the Principles of History, trans. Benjamin Andrews. Boston: Ginn and Company, 1897. Erlich, Victor. Russischer Formalismus, trans. Marle Lohner. Munich: Carl Hansen, 1964. [English original: Russian Formalism: History – Doctrine. The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1955]. Frank, Erich. ‘Mathematik und Musik und der griechische Geist’, Logos. Internationale Zeitschrift fur Philosophie der Kultur 9 (1920/1921): 222–59. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. A. A. Brill. New York: Macmillan, 1913. Fritz, Kurt von. ‘Die Rolle des Noūs’, in Um die Begriffswelt der Vorsokratiker, ed. HansGeorg Gadamer. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftlich Buchgesellschaft, 1968. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. ‘Auf dem Rückgang zum Anfang’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1987, n. 27: 394–416. [English translation: ‘On the Way Back to the Beginning (1986)’, in The Selected Writings of Hans-Georg Gadamer, vol. 1 Hermeneutics between History and Philosophy, ed. and trans. Pol Vandevelde and Arun Iyer. London: Bloomsbury, 2016, 247–69.] Gadamer, Hans-Georg. ‘Denken als Erlösung’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 7. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1991, n. 17, 407–17. [English translation: ‘Thinking as Redemption: Plotinus between Plato and Augustine’, in Hermeneutics, Religion, Ethics, trans. Joel Weinsheimer. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, pp. 76–90]. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. ‘Der eminente Text und seine Wahrheit’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1999, n. 25, 286–95. [English translation: ‘The Eminent Text and Its Truth’, trans. Geoffrey Waite, in The Horizon of Literature, ed. Paul Hernadi. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1982, 337–47]. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. ‘Dichten und Deuten’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993, n. 3, 18–24. [English translation: ‘Composition and Interpretation’, in Literature and Philosophy in Dialogue: Essays in German Literary Theory, ed. Dennis Schmidt, trans. Robert Paslick. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994, 66–73]. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. ‘Dichtung und Mimesis’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1999, n. 8, 80–5. [English translation: ‘Poetry and Mimesis’,

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in The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, ed. Robert Bernasconi, trans. Nicholas Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, 116–22]. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. ‘Die Gegenwärtigkeit Hölderlins’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993, n. 3, 39–41. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. ‘Die Idee des Guten zwischen Plato und Aristoteles’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 7. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1991, n. 6, 128–227. [English translation: The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy, trans. P. Christopher Smith. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986]. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. ‘Ethos und Ethik (MacIntyre u.a.)’, Philosophische Rundschau 32 (1985): 1–7. Reprinted in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1987, n. 25, 350–74. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. ‘Goethe und die Philosophie’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993, n. 3, 56–71. [English translation: ‘Goethe and Philosophy’, in Literature and Philosophy in Dialogue: Essays in German Literary Theory, ed. Dennis Schmidt, trans. Robert Paslick. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994, 1–19]. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. ‘Günter Rohr, Platos Stellung zur Geschichte (1932)’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 5. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1985, n. 10, 327–31. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. ‘Heideggers “theologische” Jugendschrift’, in Dilthey Jahrbuch 6 (1989): 228–34. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. ‘Hilde Domin, Dichterin der Rückkehr’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993, n. 28, 323–8. [English translation: ‘Hilde Domin, Poet of Return’, trans. Margaret Korzus and Hilde Domin, The Denver Quarterly 6 (4) (1972): 7–17]. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. ‘Hölderlin und die Antike (1943)’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993, n. 1, 1–19. [Translators’ note: ‘Hölderlin and Antiquity’, in Literature and Philosophy in Dialogue: Essays in German Literary Theory, trans. Robert Paslick. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994, pp. 67–86]. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. ‘Karl Jaspers’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1995, 392–400. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. ‘Kunst und Nachahmung’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1999, n. 4, 25–36. [English translation: ‘Art and Imitation’, in Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, ed. Robert Bernasconi, trans. Nicholas Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, 92–14]. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. ‘Mythologie und Offenbarungsreligion’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1999, n. 15, 175–9. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. ‘Philosophie und Poesie’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993, n. 20, 232–9. [English translation: ‘Philosophy and Poetry’, in The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, trans. Nicholas Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 131–139]. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Philosophische Lehrjahre: Eine Rückschau. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1977. [English translation: Philosophical Apprenticeships, trans. Robert Sullivan. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985]. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. ‘Poesie und Interpunktion’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993, n. 24, 282–8. [English translation: ‘Poetry and Punctuation’, in Literature and Philosophy in Dialogue: Essays in German Literary

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Theory, ed. Dennis Schmidt, trans. Robert Paslick. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994, 131–7]. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. ‘Praktisches Wissen’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 5. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1985, n. 5, 230–48. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. ‘Über die Möglichkeit einer philosophischen Ethik’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1987, n. 11, 175–88. [English translation: ‘On the Possibility of a Philosophical Ethics’, trans. Michael Kelly, in Kant and Political Philosophy: The Contemporary Legacy, ed. Ronald Beiner and William James Booth. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 361–73]. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. ‘Vom geistigen Lauf des Menschen. Studien zu unvollendeten Dichtungen Goethes’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993, n. 7, 80–111. [English translation: ‘On the Course of Human Spiritual Development: Studies of Goethe’s Unfinished Writings’, in Literature and Philosophy in Dialogue: Essays in German Literary Theory, ed. Dennis Schmidt, trans. Robert Paslick. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994, 31–66]. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. ‘Vom Verstummen des Bildes’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1999, n. 28, 315–22. [English translation: ‘Speechless Image’, in The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, ed. Robert Bernasconi, trans. Nicholas Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, 83–91]. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Wahrheit and Methode, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1. Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1990. [English translation: Truth and Method, 2nd rev. edn., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum, 1998]. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. ‘Werner Jaeger, Aristotles. Grundlegung einer Geschichte seiner Entwicklung. Berlin, 1923’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 5. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1985, 286–94. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. ‘Wort und Bild – so wahr, so seiend’, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993, n. 35, 373–99. [English translation: ‘The Artwork in Word and Image: So True, So Full of Being’, in The Gadamer Reader: A Bouquet of His Later Writings, ed. Richard E. Palmer. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007, 192–224]. Gehlen, Arnold. Der Mensch. Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1940. [English Translation: Man, His Nature and Place in the World, trans. Clare McMillan and Karl Pillemer. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988]. Gehlen, Arnold. Zeit-Bilder. Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum Verlag, 1960. Gethman-Siefert, Annemarie. Die Funktion der Kunst in der Geschichte. Untersuchungen zu Hegels Asthetik (Hegel Studien, Supplement 25). Bonn: Bouvier, 1984. Gethmann-Siefert, Annemarie. ‘Einleitung’, in Hegel, Die Philosophie der Kunst. Nach dem Vortrage des Herrn Professor Hegel. Im Sommer 1823. Berlin. Transcribed by H. Hotho Hamburg, 1986. [English translation: ‘Introduction: The Shape and Influence of Hegel’s Aesthetics’, in Lectures on the Philosophy of Art. The Hotho Transcript of the 1823 Berlin Lectures, ed. and trans. Robert Brown. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2014, 7–168]. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Der Zauberflöte zweiter Teil. Fragment. Hamburg: RaaminPresse, 1983. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Elective Affinities: A Novel, trans. David Constantine. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust I and II, edited and trans. Stuart Atkins. Princeton/ Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014.

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­Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. West-East Divan. The Poems, with ‘Notes and Essays’: Goethe’s Intercultural Dialogues, trans. Martin Bidney. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010. Gorgiades, Thrasyboulos. Nennen und Erklingen: die Zeit als Logos, ed. Irmgard Bengen, with an introduction by Hans-Georg Gadamer. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1985. Gorgiades, Thrasyboulos. Schubert: Musik und Lyrik, 2nd ed. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1979. Hamlin, Cyrus. ‘Die Poetik des Gedachtnisses. Aus einem Gespräch über Hölderlins Andenken’, in Hölderlin-Jahrbuch 24 (1984/85): 119–38. Hegel, G. W. F. Lectures on the Philosophy of Art. The Hotho Transcripts of the 1823 Berlin Lectures, ed. Robert Brown. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2014. Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977. Hegel, G. W. F. Werke. Vollständige Ausgabe durch einen Verein von Freunden des Verewigten. Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1845. Heidegger, Martin. ‘Andenken’, in Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung (1936–1968), GA 5, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1981, 79–151. [English translation: ‘Remembrance’, in Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, trans. Keith Hoeller. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000, 101–73]. Heidegger, Martin. Beiträge zur Philosophie (vom Ereignis), GA 65, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1989. [English translations: Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999; Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event) by Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012]. Heidegger, Martin. ‘Die Zeit des Weltbildes (1938)’, in Holzwege, GA 5, ed. FriedrichWilhelm von Herrmann. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1977, 75–113. [English translation: ‘The Age of the World Picture’, in Marin Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 57–85]. Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlins Hymne ‘Andenken’, ed. Curd Ochwadt. Frankfurt am Main: Kostermann, 1982. [English translation: Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘Remembrance’, trans. William McNeill and Julia Ireland. Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2018]. Heidegger, Martin. Ontologie (Hermeneutik der Faktizität), GA 63, ed. Käte BröckeOltmanns. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1988. [English translation: Ontology – The Hermeneutics of Facticity, trans. John van Buren. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008]. Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1984. [English translation: Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: HarperCollins, 1962]. Held, Klaus. ‘Grundbestimmung und Zeitkritik bei Heidegger’, in Zur philosophischen Aktualität Heideggers, vol. 1 Philosophie und Politik, ed. Dietrich Papenfuss and Otto Pöggeler. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1991, 31–56. Henkel, Arthur. ‘Das Ärgernis Faust’, in Versuche zu Goethe: Festschrift für Erich Heller zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Volker Dürr and Géza von Molnar. Heidelberg: L. Stiehm, 1976. Henkel, Arthur. Goethe-Erfahrungen. Studien und Vorträge. Stuttgart: Springer, 1982. Henrich, Dieter. Der Gang des Andenkens. Beobachtungen und Gedanken zu Hölderlins Gedicht. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1986.

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­Henrich, Dieter. ‘Kunst and Kunstphilosophie der Gegenwart. Überlegungen mit Rücksicht auf Hegel’, in Immanente Ästhetik - Ästhetische Reflexion. Lyrik als Paradigma der Moderne, ed. Wolfgang Iser. Munich: Fink, 1966, 11–32. Hesiod. Theogony, Works and Days, Testimonia, ed. and trans. Glenn W. Most. The Classical Loeb Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Hölderlin, Friedrich. Hälfte: Lesearten und Erläuterungen, in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, part. 2, ed. Friedrich Beissner. Stuttgart: J. G. Cottasche Buchhandlung Nachfolger, 1946 (Grosser Stuttgarter Hölderlin Ausgabe). Hölderlin, Friedrich. Sämtliche Werke. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. Norbert von Hellingrath in collaboration with Friedrich Seebass, vol. 4. Munich and Leipzig: Insel, 1916. Hölderlin, Friedrich. Selected Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger, ed. Jeremy Adler. London: Penguin Books, 1998. Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970. Husserl, Edmund. Logical Investigations, vol. 1 and 2, trans. J. N. Findlay, ed. Dermot Moran. London: Routledge, 2001. Iamblichus. Iamblichi, Protrepticus, ad finem codicis Florentini, ed. H. Pistelli. Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1888. Reprint: Stuttgart/Leipzig,1996. Ingarden, Roman. Das literarische Kunstwerk, 4th ed. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1972. [English translation: The Literary Work of Art, trans. George G. Grabowicz. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973]. Iser, Wolfgang (ed.). Immanente Ästhetik – Ästhetische Reflexion. Lyrik als Paradigma der Moderne. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1966. Jaeger, Werner. Aristoteles. Grundlegung einer Geschichte seiner Entwicklung. Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1923. [English translation: Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of His Development, 2nd edn., trans. Richard Robinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962 [1948]]. Jaeger, Werner. Studien zur Entshehungsgechichte der Metaphysik des Aristoteles. Berlin: Weidmann, 1923. Jaspers, Karl. Man in the Modern Age, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul. London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1951. Jauss, Hans Robert (ed.). Die nicht mehr schönen Künste. Grenzphänomene des Ästhetischen. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1968. Juvenal. Satire, in Juvenal and Persius, ed. and trans. G. G. Ramsay. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979 [1918]. Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henry. Juan Gris. Sa vie, son oeuvre, ses écrits. Paris: Gallimard, 1946. [English translation: Juan Gris: His life and Work, trans. Douglas Cooper. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1969]. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1987. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Kant, Immanuel. Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James W. Ellington. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993. Kenny, Anthony. The Aristotelian Ethics: A Study of the Relationship between the Eudemian and Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978. Knapp, Ernst. Das Verhältnis der eudemischen zur nikomachischen Ethika. Freiburg Dissertation, 1912.

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­Lipps, Hans. Untersuchungen zur hermeneutischen Logik, in Werke, vol. 2. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1976. Lucan. The Civil War (Pharsalia), trans. J. D. Duff. The Classical Loeb Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press/London: W. Heinemann, 1928. Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus. The Magic Flute, an Opera in Two Acts after the Libretto of Schikaneder and Giesecke, trans. W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman. New York: Random House, 1956. Musil, Robert. The Man without Qualities, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser. London: Secker & Warburg, 1953. Nietzsche, Friedrich. ‘On Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense’, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin Books, 1982, 42–7. Novalis. Hymns to the Night, trans. Dick Higgins. New Paltz, NY: McPherson, 1984. Palm, Erwin. ‘Spuren in Frankfurt’, in Die Wirkung Stefan Georges auf die Wissenschaft. Ein Symposium. Heidelberg 1985, ed. Hans-Joachim Zimmermann. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1985, 73–6. Plato. Alcibiades, in Charmides, Alcibiades I and II, Hipparchus, The Lovers, Theages, Minos, Epinomis, trans. W. R. Lamb. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927. Plato. Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus, trans. Arnold North Fowler. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914. Plato. Laches, Protagoras, Meno, Euthydemus, trans. W. R. Lamb. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924. Plato. Lysis, Symposium, Gorgias, trans. W. R. Lamb. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983 [1925]. Plato. Parmenides, in Cratylus, Parmenides, Greater Hippias, Lesser Hippias, trans. H. N. Fowler. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996 [1926]. Plato. Theatetus and Sophist, trans. H. N. Fowler. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002 [1921]. Plato. The Laws, trans. R. G. Bury. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926. Plato. The Republic, trans. Paul Shorey. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987 [1935]. Plato. The Statesman, Philebus, trans. W. R. M. Lamb. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001 [1925]. Plato. Timaeus, Critias, Cleitophon, Menexenus, Epistles, trans. R. G. Bury. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929. Proclus. Procli Diadochi in primum Euclidis Elementorum librum commentarii ex recognitione Godofredi Friedlein. Hildesheim/New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1992. Reinhardt, Karl. Kosmos und Sympathie. Neue Untersuchungen über Poseidonios. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1926. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Duino Elegies, trans. C. F. MacIntyre. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley University Press, 1961. Schlegel, Friedrich. Philosophische Lehrjahre (1796–1806), Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe, vol. XVIII, ed. Ernst Behler. München/Paderborn/Wien: Ferdinand Schoningh; Zürich: Thomas-Verlag, 1963. Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation, trans. Richard Aquila. New York: Routledge, 2008.

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Works Cited by Gadamer

­Schürer, Oskar. ‘Zu Caspar David Friedrichs Gemälde “Böhmische Landschaft”’, in Wissenschaft im Volkstumkampf: Festschrift für Erich Gierach zu seinem 60. Geburtstage, ed. Kurt Oberdorffer, Bruno Schier and Wilhelm Wostry. Reichenberg: Sudetendeutscher Verlag F. Kraus, 1941, 433–46. Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. C. H. Smith. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956 [1919]. Torstrik, Adolf. ‘Die Authentica der Berliner Ausgabe des Aristoteles’, Philologus. Zeitschrift für antike Literatur und ihre Rezeption 12 (1857): 494–530. Valéry, Paul. ‘The Seaside Cemetery’, trans. John Ridland, Able Muse Review 18 (2014): 131–7. van der Waereden, B. L. Science Awakening, trans. from Dutch Arnold Dresden. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961. von Fritz, Kurt. ‘Die Rolle des Noūs’, Reprinted in, Um die Begriffswelt der Vorsokratiker, ed. Hans-Georg Gadamer. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftlich Buchgesellschaft, 1968, 246–363. Warren, Austin and René Wellek. Theorie der Literatur. Frankfurt: Fischer Athenäum, 1963. [English original: Theory of Literature. New York: Harcourt, 1956]. Wellek, René. ‘Russian Formalism’, Arcadia – Internationale Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft/International Journal of Literary Studies 6, 2 (1971): 175–86.

Index of Names Adorno, Theodor 69, 80 Aeschylus 61,187 Anaxagoras xvii, 43–4 Anz, Wilhelm 159–60, 164 Apollinaire, Guillaume 56, 231n Aristotle viii, xi, xiv, xvi, xxiv, xxx, xxxvii, 3–25, 28–9, 31–34, 36, 39–45, 47–52, 79, 88, 132, 142, 148, 154–7, 163, 166–70, 172, 183–4, 194, 203, 208, 217n, 220n, 221n, 222n, 223n, 224n, 225n, 227n, 228n, 230n, 239n, 243n, 244n and ethics 14, 16–7, 22–3, 32, 40, 166, 222n and Heidegger 28–9, 31, 166–7 and metaphysics 9–10, 21, 33, 36, 44, 49, 79 and Plato viii, xiv, 7–8, 13, 20, 22, 34, 39, 49, 167 and politics 155, 230n Augustine 12, 202, 204, 222n, 243n Austin, J. L. 150, 240n

and the theory of history 156 Diotima 188–91, 220n Dirlmeier, Franz 25, 225n Domin, Hilde 179, 242n Droysen, Johann 62, 144, 156, 241n Faust xxxiii, 118, 121–5, 136, 148, 239n, 240n The ‘Lynceus Tower Song’ in xxxiii, xxxv, 121, 238n Friedländer, Paul xiv, 218n Friedrich, Caspar, David 102, 236n Fritz, Kurt von 41, 43, 229n

Celan, Paul 70, 179, 242n Collingwood, R. G. xxxi, 95 Croce, Benedetto 62, 211 Crocean 61 Curtius, Ernst Robert 125, 160

Galilei, Galileo 42, 92, 143, 171, 220n Galilean 170 Gehlen, Arnold xxxiv, 87–94, 233n, 234n, 235n Giorgione xxxii, 96, 98 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang viii, xxi, xxiii, xxvi, xxxi, xxxiii–xxxvi, 59, 66, 75, 114, 117–19, 121–5, 127–37, 148, 170, 209, 237n, 238n, 239n, 240n and convivial language, conviviality 132–3, 135 and Mozart 113, 115–16 and reading 205–6 and Schiller 130 West-East Divan 85, 233n see also Faust Gogarten, Friedrich 164–5 Gris, Juan 87–9, 234n Gundolf, Friedrich 205, 214

Derrida, Jacques xx–xxii, 183, 206 Diels, Hermann Alexander 10, 22, 24, 224n Dilthey, Wilhelm xii–xiii, xx, xxii–xxiii, xxvi, 42, 128, 167, 202, 207, 226n Diltheyan xi and Heidegger 28–9, 156, 169

Hamlin, Cyrus 103, 237n Hartlich, Christian 13, 223n Hartmann, Nicolai 28, 160, 168 Hegel, Georg Friedrich viii, xiii, xix, xxxiii,  xxxiv, 8, 35–6, 48, 59–60, 65–7, 77–85, 161–2, 164, 170–1, 173–4, 222n, 241n

Barth, Karl 164–5 Bernays, Jakob 9, 22 Blumenberg, Hans 55–6, 61 Bröcker, Walter 168, 234n Bultmann, Rudolf 121, 160, 164–5

266

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and art 63–6, 69, 71–2, 75, 77–85, 101, 103, 125, 144, 153, 231n, 232n, 233n, 236n, 237n and aesthetics 58–60, 66–8, 77–8, 81, 83 (see also Hegelian aesthetics) Hegelian xxxiv, 49, 64, 67, 69, 92, 95, 232n aesthetics xxxiv, 77 logic 35 (see also logic) system 82 and history 62, 66–7 and logic 167–8 post-Hegelian 69 young Hegelians 81 Heidegger, Martin xii–xv, xix, xxiv, 7, 27–38, 47–9, 66–8, 101–3, 105–7, 109, 111, 121, 129, 160–76, 181, 183, 206, 209, 217n, 218n, 221n, 225n, 226n, 229n, 231n, 235n, 236n, 241n and Being and Time 153, 217n early, young xi, 27–36, 163–5, 170 and existence, Dasein 153, 156 Heideggerean 29, 156, 165, 221n and hermeneutics of facticity 156 and language 35, 38, 162, 165, 173 Held, Klaus 29–31, 226n Henkel, Arthur 136, 239n Henrich, Dieter 27, 57, 233n, 236n and Hegelian aesthetics 58–60, 85 and Hölderlin’s Remembrance 102–3 Herder, Johann Gottfried 129–30, 147, 170, 173 Herodotus 62 Hesiod 185, 188, 190–1, 243n Hölderlin, Friedrich viii, xix, xxxiii, xxxvi, 38, 101–3, 105–11, 114, 121, 129, 134, 164, 175–6, 200, 221n, 235n, 236n, 237n, 238n and Goethe 121, 129, 134 and Hegel 101, 103, 237n and Heidegger 38, 101, 109, 111, 164, 175–6, 235n, 236n and Remembrance 101–3, 105–11 Homer (Homeric) 61, 185, 187, 190–1, 198–9, 204 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 144, 173, 225n Husserl, Edmund 89, 220n, 234n, 256n

and Heidegger 28–9, 166 and meaning 151, 183 and rationality 47 Iamblichus 10–3, 16–7, 20–2, 223n, 224n, 225n Imdahl, Max 63, 235n Ingarden, Roman 75, 99, 233n, 236n Iser, Wolfgang 63, 231n, 233n Jaeger, Werner 9–14, 16–19, 21–5, 32, 222n, 224n, 225n Jaspers, Karl xiii, 136, 159–61, 213, 226n, 241n and Goethe 125 Jauss, Hans Robert xxx, 57, 63, 231n, 232n Kandinsky, Wassily viii, 89–90, 93 Kant, Immanuel xii, xxvi–xxviii, 143, 206, 240n and aesthetics 66, 69, 78–80, 88, 91, 131 and the German language 35, 133, 169–71, 173 and Kantianism 234n and practical philosophy 40, 47–8, 51–2, 227n, 230n Kenny, Anthony 25, 225n Kierkegaard, Søren 29, 48–9, 81, 125, 136, 165–6 Klee, Paul viii 89–90 Klenze, Leo von 67, 232n Koselleck, Reinhardt 62, 153–7, 240n, 241n Kracauer, Siegfried 61–2 Kraft, Viktor 42, 229n Krüger, Gerhard 160, 241n Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 168, 220n Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 78, 132, 188, 220n Lessing, Ulrich 28, 167 Levinas, Emmanuel 47–8 Löwith, Karl 160, 241n Luther, Martin xxi, xxiii, 134, 162–3, 170, 196, 239n Lycurgus 190, 191 Lysias xxii, 186–7, 191

Index of Names MacIntyre, Alasdair 49, 230n Mallarmé, Stéphane 89, 202 Marées, Hans von 71, 232n, 234n Marquard, Odo 63–4 Meister Eckhart 163, 167–8, 170 Mondrian, Piet 87, 90–1, 93 Moritz, Karl Philipp 131, 134 Mozart, Wolgang Amadeus viii, xxxiv, 113–16, 118–19, 237n Natorp, Paul 28–9, 32, 166 Nietzsche, Friedrich 104, 66, 172, 175, 203, 221n, 242n Heidegger and 33, 66, 111, 175, 183 and nihilism 175 and the will to power 104 Overbeck, Johann Friedrich 59, 231n Parmenides 8, 22, 173–4, 180 Picasso, Pablo 71, 87–9, 93, 98 Pindar 200 Pindaresque 107 Plotinus 8, 169, 222n Pöggeler, Otto 164, 226n, 233n Pound, Ezra 57, 91, 104 Preisendanz, Wolfgang 57, 59, 63 Ranke, Leopold 62, 144 Rilke, Reiner Maria 31, 72, 105, 129, 200, 215, 221n, 237n

267

letters of 195–6 Rose, Valentin 13, 19, 224n, 225n Schelling, F. W. J. 29, 164, 170, 173, 208, 237n and immemoriality xix, 60, 177 Schikaneder, Emanuel xxxiv, 114–16, 118–19, 237n Schiller, Friedrich xxvi, 82, 130–1, 134, 164 and Goethe xxxiii, 127, 130 Schürer, Oskar 102, 236n Socrates xv–xviii, 3–4, 8, 43–4, 48–9, 162–3, 186–8, 190–1 and the flight into the logoi 168, 175 Solon 190, 191 Sophocles 61, 114 Staiger, Emil 135, 137, 206 Strauss, Leo 4, 32 Sühnel, Rudolf 205, 244n Taubes, Jacob 61, 62, 63 Tieck, Ludwig 201, 205, 214 Trakl, Georg 57, 121, 200 Valéry, Paul 56, 215, 231n Vasarely, Victor 57, 231n Vico, Giambattista 42, 56, 147 Weber, Max 32, 213 Warren, Austin 92, 234n Wellek, René 92, 234n, 235n

268

Index of Subjects aesthetics viii, x–xi, xiii, xxvi, xxxiv, 57, 63, 72, 92, 96, 220n, 231n, 234n aesthetic differentiation xxv–xxvii, xxix, xxxi, xxxiii, xxxvii, xxxix, 60, 68–9 of genius 64, 87, 131 Hegel’s 58–60, 66–8, 77–9, 81–3, 232n, 233n of reception 72 romantic 87 see also art agathon 15, 39, 227n See also good, the agreement xii, xxiii, 41, 50, 56, 85, 104, 142, 144–5, 162, 180, 194, 196 common xxii mutual 184 pre-existing xx tacit 141–4 see also understanding, disagreement alētheia xviii, 22, 173–4, 225n See also disclosure, truth, unconcealment anamnēsis 3, 31, 48, 187–8, 191 See also memory appearance xxxiv, 61–3, 70, 73–5, 78, 81, 173, 189, 206, 208, 224n and being 83, 174 as eidos xvi mere 187 sensuous 69–70, 79–80, 83 apperception 89, 234n See also perception archē, archai 21, 40, 51 research into 21, 23 architect xxxii, 73–4, 232n architecture viii, xxiv, xxx–xxxii, xxxviii, 67–8, 72–4, 77–8, 80, 83, 234n architectural xxxii, 67, 73, 95, 232n church 95 history of 95–6 and reading 97 style of 93 Western 95

aretē, aretai xi, 5, 24, 41, 228n See also virtue art, arts viii, x, xii, xxiii, xxvi–xxvii, xxix– xxx, xxxv–xxxix, 59–61, 68–85, 87, 89, 91–2, 96, 113–16, 118, 123, 129–33, 135, 152, 164, 169, 185–6, 190, 195, 197, 199–201, 208, 214, 221n, 234n, 236n artwork, work of art viii, xxiv, xxv– xxvii, xxviii–xxxiii, xxxvii–xxxix, 55, 58, 68, 70–1, 74–5, 83, 95–7, 99, 131, 190–1, 208 Baroque 129 Christian 84 classical xxxv, 57, 59, 64, 69, 83 conceptualizing, conceptual 60, 90 end of viii, 65, 76, 82–5, 231n, 232n fine 61, 67, 82, 181, 232n and history 60, 77, 83–4, 95–7, 100, 102, 231n mechanical 67 modern xxxiv–xxxv, 59, 70, 85, 91–2, 231n and music 113, 115 See also music no longer beautiful xxx, 60–1, 63, 231n–232n objectless 97 pastness of xix, xxxiv, 58, 60, 63–7, 77, 82–4, 231n, 232n plastic 97 and poetry, verse 58, 60, 72, 74, 109, 122, 131, 173, 190 of reading 193, 202–3 and religion 60, 63, 78, 82, 88 romantic 63–4, 77, 83–5 sociology of 92, 94 theory of 58, 63, 87–8 and truth viii, xxv, xxvii, xxxi, xxxiii, 66, 68 visual 91 Western 55, 63, 65, 83

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of writing xxxv, 193–4, 197, 202, 204, 212–13 see also Baroque, Renaissance under art Baroque 67–8, 85, 92, 129, 202 age 113 effects 57, 91 and poetry 104 see also art Beauty xxx, 63, 122, 124 and art xxvi, 60–1, 63 artistic 77, 79 the beautiful xxx, xxxii, 15, 18, 61, 69, 124, 131, 191, 197, 215, 232n ideal of 79 natural 68–9, 77, 79, 131 and truth 79 becoming xvi–xvii, 18, 35, 131 being and 6, 134 nothing (nothingness) and 35, 170 (see also nothingness) of the world xvii, 44 being xii, xv–xviii, xxxvii, 6, 8, 14–15, 21, 36, 59, 69, 79, 93, 108, 116, 118, 123, 135, 159, 167–70, 173–4, 181, 197, 209, 218n, 219n, 229n, 235n abandonment of 33 appearance and 83, 174 of art ix, xxvi–xxviii, xxx, xxxiii, xxxvii and becoming 6, 35, 134, 170 divine, holy xxxiii, 36, 84 experience of 167, 171 at home, homely xix, 176, 209 and language viii, xiii, xv, xviii, 49, 217n non- xvi and nothingness 35, 170, 180 oblivion of 33, 168 as ousia xv–xvi, 34, 167 present, and presence xxi, 167, 171, 206 question of 33, 66, 101, 111, 169–72, 195 -together, -with, with one another xii, 3, 172, 176, 181 in totality, the whole of 123, 168, 170 understanding of 171, 206 in the world 178 at work 20, 36, 168, 170 of the work of art xxviii

Being and Time 29, 31, 153, 155, 172–3, 217n belles lettres 195, 197, 213 see also literature bios 191 praktos 13 see also life category 35, 92, 175 chance 20, 62–3, 93–4 Christianity 7, 37, 65, 83, 92, 167 and its doctrine, message, tidings 33, 48, 66, 164–5 God of 67 classicism 60–1, 63, 67, 121, 129 classical xxx, 6, 42–3, 61, 63–4, 66, 71, 115, 204, 232n age 137, 186, 206 art xxxv, xxxviii, 57, 59, 69, 71, 77, 83 literature 205, 213 opera 116 painting xxxv, 231n philology, philologist xiv, 116, 160, 204, 218n text xxiv classicist 79, 82, 129, 232n classics 130 concealment 172, 174 See also alētheia, disclosure, truth, unconcealment concept xi, xxvi–xxix, xxxi–xxxv, 4–7, 14–15, 18–19, 25, 32–8, 41–5, 47–8, 51–2, 55–63, 66, 68–70, 72, 75, 78, 80–1, 83, 88–90, 93, 109, 130, 132, 141, 143–4, 148, 150, 155–6, 163, 165–72, 174–5, 184, 191, 193, 195, 197, 214, 220n, 221n, 223n, 225n, 226n, 229n, 241n conceptual xii–xiv, xxviii, xxxi, xxxiv, 6, 8, 14–15, 20, 30–1, 35–7, 41, 43–5, 48, 50, 60, 63, 69, 77–9, 87–8, 90, 130, 133, 143, 161, 163–7, 170–2, 174–5, 184 analysis 7, 43 art (see under art) history, tradition 43, 79, 132, 164 (see also history) language xxxiii, 14, 28–9, 35, 44, 69, 131, 165–6, 169, 171 (see also language)

Index of Subjects non- xxv, xxx, xxxii, xxxiii painting (see under painting) philosophical xxxiii speculative 59 universal 21, 85 see also counter-concept conceptuality xxxiv, 60, 130, 156, 166, 170, 172 non-conceptuality xxxiv conceptualization xxxiii, 6–7 consciousness xxvii–xxx, xxxii, 33, 51, 66–7, 70, 78, 83, 121, 129, 149, 154, 167, 171–2, 174–5, 217n, 242n aesthetic xxvi–xxvii, xxxii–xxxiii, xxxvii–xxxix false 145 general, public, social 68, 127–9, 147 historical 52, 67–8, 85, 167, 189 moral 51–2 philosophical 51, 81 self- 29 subjective xxx, 44, 67, 83, 109, 137, 160, 172, 175 conversation xii, xxxiv, 3, 27, 30, 73, 103, 108–9, 111, 119, 153, 178, 193, 212, 237n everyday xxxiii, xxxvi, 104 see also dialogue counter-concept 67 See also concept conviviality xxii, xxxvi, 132–3 convivial xxii, 132–3, 135, 137 convivially 135 see also life cubism 88–90, 234n cubist viii, 71, 87–8, 98, 231n, 234n see also conceptual art, conceptual painting culture xxii, 42–3, 70, 74, 92, 113, 127, 147, 149, 162, 178, 181, 185–6, 193, 198, 202, 227n aesthetic 65, 68 cultural ix, xxxii, 35, 121, 127–8, 161, 179, 181, 189, 235n history 102 life xi, 190 world 30, 85 cultured 181 enculturation xxi European 30, 34, 204 historical 68

271

musical 113 reading 193, 202, 205, 214 scientific 34, 169, 171, 173 and technology xiv, 113, 149 Western 93, 148 death 34, 49, 59, 103–4, 118–19, 127, 136–7, 156, 188, 196, 222n, 226n, 233n, 236n, 238n anxiety of, terror of 119, 166 experience of 37 life and 119 problem of, the question of 37 deconstruction xx, 92, 104, 171 as Destruktion, Abbau 37, 68, 92, 165, 169–70 dialectic 48, 175, 186–7, 218n, 219n dialectical 6, 22, 164–5, 217n, 218n, 219n dialectician 191 of question and answer xxxi, 95 see also dialogue dialogue xviii, xx–xxi, xxiii, xxvii, xxxi–xxxii, 3, 6, 19, 42, 48, 73, 144, 152–3, 165, 172, 175, 178, 187, 196, 218n, 219n, 223n, 229n, 231n, 233n, 235n, 237n, 238n, 239n Aristotelian 9, 223n dialogical xxv, xxxii, 7, 9, 12, 27, 95, 187, 223n and language xii, 173, 180 living, life of ix, xxiii, 196–7, 211 partner xx, xxxi, 45, 195 philosophical 27 Platonic, Plato’s xv, 3, 7–8, 10–12, 18, 22, 44, 97, 186, 191 Socratic, of Socrates 6–7, 27, 162 and soul 141, 187, 191 and work 100, 172 see also dialectic, discussion difference xxi, 3, 5, 12, 15–18, 21, 44, 50, 72, 130, 157, 189, 194–5, 202–3, 207, 214, 228n about art, artist 34, 131 about being xvii, 15 about language xxi, 151 about painting 91 about poet, poetry 80–1, 107, 114, 118–19, 130 about text 204 about theatre 91

272

Index of Subjects

disagreement xii, 13, 41, 56, 155 See also agreement disclosure 91, 174 disclosing 152 see also alētheia, truth, unconcealment discourse xx, xxvi, xxxvii, 12, 52, 98, 130, 132–3, 142, 151–3, 173, 184–7, 217n, 223n counter- 153 discursive xvii, xxvii, 115 exoteric 5, 24 living 183, 212 as logos xi, xiv, 3, 148, 163, 175, 185, 187 mediating 216 poetic 206 (see also poetry) rational xix (see also rationality) scientific xix, xx (see also science) discussion xv, xvi, xxviii, xxxii, 7, 10, 17, 22–3, 47–8, 50–2, 56, 60–3, 66, 71, 96, 101, 104, 119, 153, 160, 164–5, 172, 175, 191, 196, 199, 228n, 238n about beauty 79 about method 23, 40, 225n about theory and praxis 36, 40, 55 about truth 79 (see also truth) see also dialectic, dialogue dwelling xix, 174, 209, 231n in language xii, xix, 178 (see also language) eidos, eidē xvi, xviii, xxiv, 8, 18, 57, 224n See also theory of ideas enactment xi, 75, 119, 207, 221n of language xxiii, 178 re- ix, xi, xxiii, xxiv of the work 74 energeia 20, 36–7, 168, 170 and dunamis 44 and motility 44 and ousia 171 epistemē, epistēmai 6–7, 12–13, 19, 21, 25, 40 epistemological xvi, xvii, 16, 42 and noūs 15 and technē 7, 15

essence xxx, xxxii, 41, 50, 52, 57, 59, 63, 66, 75, 89, 118, 131, 141, 144, 148, 194, 200, 208, 227n of the beautiful 131, 168 as eidos 18, 57 as essentia 35, 171 of human beings 188 of language, of speech xxxvi, 56, 151–2, 172–3, 193–4, 207 of science 149, 220n as Wesen in the Hegelian sense 35, 167–8, 170 as Wesen in the Heideggerean sense 35, 167–9 ethics 5, 14, 16, 21, 40, 47, 49–50, 166, 219n, 222n ancient viii Aristotle’s, Aristotelian xi, 4, 9–11, 15, 18, 22–3, 25, 50, 133, 166, 222n Eudemian (see under Eudemian Ethics) exact, exactness in 14, 16, 18–19 and the good life xi Greek 50 Nicomachean (see under Nicomachean Ethics) normative 23 philosophical 4–5, 47–8, 51, 230n Platonic, Platonizing 15, 24–5 ethos 5–6, 43 as behaviour, as habit 40, 222n as character 5, 40–1, 50, 131, 222n and dianoia 50 and logos 5 and practical philosophy 52 and phusis 132–3 existence 13, 29–31, 37, 52, 74, 76, 78, 80, 82, 92, 94, 114, 118, 125, 131–2, 136, 148, 188–9, 191–2, 195, 198, 209, 211, 214, 218n, 224n, 227n analysis of 153, 217n as Dasein 156 existential xx, xxiii, 5, 33, 166 factual, fact of, factum of 18, 29, 32 human xii, xiv, xviii, xxv, xxx, xxxiv, xxxvii, xxxviii, 4, 19, 29, 50, 142–3, 159 of an idea 79 philosophy of 125 of a work of art, of a text xxxviii, 201

Index of Subjects experience xix, xvi, xxvi, xxx, 18–19, 23, 30–1, 34, 43, 45, 48–9, 52, 65, 69, 85, 89, 94, 96, 109, 110, 113, 133, 135, 141–3, 145, 152, 154–5, 159–61, 163–6, 168–9, 173–5, 177–80, 184, 193, 203, 209, 234n, 239n aesthetic xxvi, xxxix of architecture, of art, of the work of art, artistic xxv, xxvi–xxviii, xxxi–xxxii, 73, 75, 95 of death 37 as experiment xx Greek, of the Greeks xi, 31, 167, 171 hermeneutic xxv life, of life 107, 137, 143, 176 limit- 63 linguistic 34, 151, 171 lived xxiii, xxvi poetic, of the poet, of poetry xxxvi, 106, 109, 131, 169 of thinking 166–7, 171 transcendent, of transcendence xxvi, 169 worldly, of the world xii, xviii, xx, 37, 83–4, 217n, 219n eudaimonia xi, 41, 45, 228n, 230n See also happiness Eudemian Ethics 5, 10–11, 23–5, 225n, 228n fact xix, xxii, 10, 12, 15–16, 20, 22, 78, 145, 150, 163, 198, 222n, 241n brute 84 of reason 30 of science 35 see also factum facticity 29–30, 33, 157 hermeneutics of 28, 30–2, 37, 156, 226n of praxis 52 factum xx, 30, 143 of being xii of existence 29 of freedom xii see also fact form in the Platonic sense xiv, xvi, 44, 57 theory of (see under theory of ideas) see also idea, idea ideai freedom 30, 65, 83–5, 102, 117–18, 134, 141, 143, 146–7, 151, 154–5, 176, 197–8, 202

273

concept of 143–4 factum of xii, 143 good, the xiii–xvii, 3–4, 15, 18–19, 32, 39, 41, 44, 47–50, 52, 157, 191, 213, 218n, 219n, 227n in action 39, 230n and appearance 69, 158 beyond being xv idea of (see under idea) knowledge of 6, 15, 39–40 see also agathon Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals 40, 51, 169, 227n happiness xi, 41, 48, 122, 228n, 230n See also eudaimonia hearing viii, xxi, xxiv, 79, 193, 203–4, 206, 209, 220n, 229n inner 80 hermeneutics viii, xxx, xxxvi, xxxviii, xxxix, 28, 55, 97, 115, 141, 153, 155–6, 159, 161, 184, 218n, 221n, 222n, 226n, 229n, 230n, 232n, 233n, 235n of facticity 29–32, 37, 156, 226n hermeneutic xxvii, xxxvi, xxxviii, 28–9, 57, 90, 96, 142, 157, 173, 187, 191, 196, 200, 203–4, 211–12, 214, 218n, 221n, 222n, 226n analysis 42 anti- 104 decision xv–xvii, xx dimension 42 experience xxv imperative 211 nihilism xvii, 55 ontology xiii praxis 55 project xxxvi, 153 question xxxii situation 166, 212 philosophical viii, xi, xx, xxiv, 156 history viii, xiv, 9–10, 29–31, 37, 58, 61–3, 83, 85, 97, 114, 128, 131, 154–8, 161, 164, 189, 213–14, 223n, 226n, 229n, 233n, 234n, 240n, 241n, 242n, 243n of architecture 95–6

274

Index of Subjects

of art 60, 63, 77, 83–4, 231n beginning of 33 Christian 45 of the concept, conceptual 14, 37, 43, 132 cultural, of culture 102, 178 end of 65–6, 83 general 61–2 of humanity 65 intellectual 128, 161–2 of metaphysics 168 natural 131 of painting 70–1, 88, 96 particular 61–2 philosophy of 82, 101 of philosophy 165 pre- 164, 173, 183 of the problem 11, 22 of salvation 47, 67, 165 theory of 154, 156, 241n universal 61, 156 Western, of the West xxvi, 33, 65, 165 world 65, 67, 145 homeland viii, xix, 101–2, 106–8, 110, 177–8 and language xix, 177 horizon xiii, xxxi, 37, 44, 52, 100, 110, 152, 157, 227n, 243n of anticipation, of expectation 99, 154 of consciousness xxviii for questioning, of the question, of the problem 3, 153, 163 idea, ideai xv, 44 See also idea (in the Platonic sense) idea (in the Platonic sense) xvi, xxiv, 8, 18, 21, 44 of the agathon, of the good xiv, xv, 15, 18–19 (see also agathon) theory of, doctrine of, science of viii, xiv, xvi, 8–9, 14–15, 19–20, 22, 24 world of viii see also idea, ideai ideal, the 5, 14, 32, 34, 41, 45, 51–2, 63, 65, 69, 79–80, 94, 130, 134, 144, 181, 183, 198, 205, 207 of exactness 16–17, 19 of freedom 83 idealization 151

Platonic 16, 18 of science 42 idealism xiii, 35, 48, 59, 125 German 29, 44, 101, 103, 128, 162, 168, 172–3 idealist, idealistic xiv, 44, 88, 145, 232n ideality xxi–xxiii, 194, 196–7, 199, 201 immemoriality 60 See also memory immortality 162, 188–9, 191 interpretation xii, xvi–xvii, xxi, xxiii, xxvi, 10–11, 16, 22, 24–5, 50, 55, 57, 70, 84, 87–90, 96, 101, 103–4, 106, 115–17, 136, 167, 193, 207, 211, 215–16, 217n, 218n, 220n, 231n, 239n, 243n accurate, correct 55, 109, 184 Aristotle’s 184 of Aristotle 9, 28–9 of Hegel 35 Heidegger’s 102, 173 of Hölderlin 38, 236n Hotho’s 82 of the law 196 phenomenological 28, 217n philosophical 14 of the Protrepticus 10 rational 136 and reading 99 self- (see under self) theological 61 of Trakl 57 understanding and 55 intertextuality 75, 4 intertextual 103, 106 intuition xxvi, 17, 23, 59, 75, 78, 81, 163, 166, 171, 206–7, 237n art as 75 philosophical 17 of phusis 17 poetic 110 pure 21 irrationality 154 irrational xiv, 43, 142 see also rationality justice xxxviii, 97, 150 knowledge xv, xxxii–xxxiii, xxxv, 4, 7, 9, 18, 21, 27, 30–3, 37, 39–41, 43, 49, 62, 90, 96, 100, 117, 134–5, 142–3,

Index of Subjects 145, 147, 149, 154–7, 159, 174, 187–9, 191, 195, 204, 212, 219n, 224n, 227n, 228n, 241n absolute xxxiii action and 15, 18 conceptual 143 of the eidē 18 as epistemē 12 of the good 6, 15, 39 historical 156–7, 164, 175 philosophical 60 practical 4–7, 32, 40, 43, 222n, 230n rational 4 and science, scientific 21, 66, 220n theoretical xxvi, 6, 32, 36, 45, 222n theory of 35 universal 41, 161 and virtue 8, 15 language xi–xv, xvii–xxiv, xxxiv–xxxvii, 4, 6–7, 14–15, 28–31, 36–8, 41–4, 50, 52, 56–8, 67, 74, 78–80, 82, 90, 114–15, 117–18, 122–4, 129, 131, 133–4, 137, 141–2, 144–5, 147–57, 161, 163–85, 190, 193–203, 205–8, 211–16, 217n, 218n, 219n, 220n, 221n, 235n, 242n and aesthetics x and being viii, xiii, xv, xviii common 56, 100, 141, 224n conceptual, of concepts xxxiii, 14, 28–9, 35, 38, 44, 69, 131, 166, 169, 171 convivial 132 (see also conviviality, phrase) and dialogue xii, 180 the dimension of viii, xii, xiii, xv, xvii, xix, xxiii, xxiv, 141–2, 144, 156, 162, 217n, 219n dwelling in, as dwelling xii, xix, 177–8 enactment of xxiii and experience xii, xviii flash of 180–1 foreign 74, 114, 133, 151, 161, 181, 214 the French 37, 43, 133 the German ix, xxi, 35, 133–4, 163, 167–8, 170–1, 181 Goethe’s xxi, xxiii, 121, 127–30, 132–4, 137

275

Greek, Greek use of 6, 34, 36, 44–5, 171–2 grid of (Sprachgitter) 179–81 Hegel and, Hegelian 66, 69 Heidegger and xiv, 163–5, 231n and the homeland viii, xix and inscription xix, xx–xxi, 195 and life, living xii, xix–xx, 4, 29, 37, 146, 161, 169, 184, 211 literary 133 and music, musical, musicality of xxxiii–xxxv, 115, 119, 123 and ontology xi, xiii and performance xxiii philosophical, of philosophy 15, 133, 163, 172 and poetry, poetic xxiii, xxxiii–xxxiv, 56, 75, 80, 114–15, 119, 123, 133, 152, 179, 200, 202, 205, 208, 215, 237n poetizing of 55, 57 of science, scientific 27, 56, 146–7, 152, 171 and self-interpretation 37 and thought 17, 34 and understanding viii, 241n veil of 180 and world xiii, 173, 214 and writing 193, 195, 197 life x, xii–xiii, xv–xvi, xix–xx, xxii, xxv–xxvii, xxxiv, xxxvii–xxxix, 5, 18–19, 27–8, 31, 36–7, 43, 47, 49, 51–2, 58–9, 65, 68, 72–4, 92, 106–11, 119, 125, 127, 129, 132–3, 136–7, 146–7, 152, 154, 159, 161–2, 165–6, 169, 174–5, 177, 181, 184–5, 188–91, 195–6, 211, 231–2n, 234n connection of xii, xxix cultural xi, 127, 190 and death, of the dead 49, 119, 185 and ethics xi everyday, daily 56, 133, 208 in exile 177 experience, experience of 34, 107, 135, 137, 143, 145, 176 expression of 156 forms of 47, 76, 133 good, the good in xi, xv–xvi, 4, 19 highest form of 32

276

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and history 30 motility of 169 new 101, 113, 171 political 176 practical, praxis of 4, 13, 16, 32–4, 36, 40, 88, 158, 166, 230n self-interpretation of 37, 49, 51 (see also interpretation, understanding) situation of 172 social, of society, in common xxxviii, 128, 134, 144–6, 179, 229n still, without 88, 96, 102 theoretical 32–3, 40–1, 45, 50, 230 of thought 3, 34 -world xix, 72–3, 156, 166, 168 lifeless 72 see also bios literature xiv, xxxi–xxxii, xxxv, 3, 61, 74, 87, 103–4, 129, 178–9, 185–6, 190, 195–200, 202, 204–6, 208, 213–15, 231n, 234n, 235n, 237n, 239n, 242n, 243n beautiful, as belles lettres 195, 197, 213 classical 137, 205 epic 202 language of 134 Latin 61, 213 modern 213 Western xxv work of 97, 199 world 80, 97, 181, 214 logic xx, 10, 11, 32, 43, 71, 88, 93–4, 117, 148–50, 163, 168, 170, 173, 183, 198 Hegelian, Hegel’s 35, 67, 167–8 logical 23, 43, 52, 62, 90, 122, 151 argument 175 calculus 147 inference 148 Investigations (Husserl’s) 29, 151, 183 thinking 148 logician 42 propositional 148, 152 logos xi, xiv–xv, xvii–xviii, xx, xxiv, 5, 7, 15–16, 39–41, 43, 49–50, 79, 155, 163, 172–3, 184, 190, 192, 219n, 220n, 228n, 229n, 230n, 237n apophantikos xi, 148 and ethos 5

and muthos 3 and noūs 43 oikeios 41 mathematics 32, 39, 147, 172, 224n, 225n and cosmology 49 exact 17, 143 mathematical 143, 147–8, 181, 183, 219n exactness 17 ideal 19 mathematically 16, 143 mathematician 142, 157, 224n meta- 39 pictorial 89 meaning xii, xvi–xvii, xxi, xxiii, 7–8, 12, 20–1, 23, 55, 57–60, 62, 75, 80, 82, 91–2, 98–100, 105, 114–15, 119, 123–4, 146, 150–2, 154, 163, 167, 169–70, 179, 183–5, 190, 197–8, 200–1, 207–9, 212, 214, 236n, 243n act of 184 of art, of a work of art xxxviii, 87–8 deconstruction of 92 ethical 14 fundamental 64 -intention 100, 183, 190 and language 173, 206, 217n lexical, of words xvi, xix, 151, 161, 167, 183, 215, 217n objective 58 original, prototypical 12, 34, 75 of painting 87–8 of a poem 110 practical 15 of the text xxi, 212 theoretical 14 of writing 190 meaningfulness 115, 201, 185, 201 meaningful xxxviii, 29, 100, 105, 123, 150, 208, 216, 237n speech, utterance 74–5, 123 world xii meaningfully 5, 93, 223n memory xxi–xxii, xxiv, xxxvi, 66, 104, 106–11, 183, 185, 188, 190, 193, 195, 198–9, 204, 208, 237n, 243n memoria 58 mnēmē xxii, 183, 185, 187–8, 191, 204 see also anamnēsis

Index of Subjects metaphysics 8, 14, 22, 29, 33, 35, 43, 44, 47–9, 51–2, 79, 91, 143, 164, 166, 168–72, 189, 206, 219n Aristotle’s 9–12, 15, 21, 32, 34, 36, 45, 49, 79, 166–7, 203, 239n, 244n end of 65–7 Kant’s (see under Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals) overcoming of 101, 111, 172 substance xvi method xviii, xx, xxv–xxvi, xxxi, xxxv, 16–17, 23, 40–3, 92, 95, 100, 142–4, 174, 225n see also methodos, Truth and Method methodology xxvii, xxxv, 10, 12, 16–17, 19, 23–4, 34, 42, 55–6, 88, 100, 102–3, 143–4, 149, 183, 241n methodos 32, 34, 39–40 See also method modernity xi, xxv, xxvii, 34, 45, 57, 143–4, 162, 166–8, 170, 231n, 233n, 235n modern viii, xxxviii, 28, 30, 32, 34, 36, 50, 55–60, 64, 70–1, 73–4, 90–2, 94, 97, 104, 113, 115, 128, 133, 147–8, 150, 161, 165, 169, 170–2, 174, 185, 188–9, 202, 208, 213, 231n, 232n, 241n, 244n art, poetry xxxiv–xxxv, xxxviii, 57, 59, 70–1, 85, 87–8, 91–4, 208, 231n, 232n see also art science (see under science) (see also technology) post- 70 motility 36, 44, 169–71, 229n movement 29, 36, 44, 58, 123–4, 136, 157, 170, 172, 185, 204, 208, 229n German 128 Green 129 Nazi 121 phenomenological 29 philosophical 66 pietist 193 and play xxvii self- 59, 170 youth 114 music xxi, xxxi, xxxiii, xxxiv, xxxviii, 60, 66, 68–71, 77–8, 80–1, 83, 90, 99, 108, 113, 115–16, 119, 123, 181, 184, 202, 207, 215, 238n art of 115 (see also art)

277

historian 123 of language, of words, musical 115, 119, 123 (see also language) modern 115 of Mozart viii, xxxiv, 113 musical 81, 99, 114–16, 184 art 113 composition 90 culture 113 drama 114 language 119 notation 123 phrase 184 score, scoring 81, 115, 122–3 theatre xxxiv, 114 tone 80, 122 musician 90 and poetry 60, 80 theatre xxxiv (see also theatre) tonal, tones of 115, 194 see also musicality musicality xxxiii–xxxv of language (see also language) see also music myth 49, 93, 115, 188 mythical 39, 69, 117, 119, 187, 199 see also mythology mythology 92, 151, 168, 187, 232n See also myth nature xxvi, 33, 49, 69, 88, 120, 129–32, 143–4, 154–5, 170, 181, 188, 215, 220n, 231n, 242n human 118 mastery of, dominance of xx, xxxv, 169 as phusis 17, 19–22, 37, 39, 52, 131–3, 170, 194, 225n, 230n see also beauty under natural neo-Kantianism 28, 48, 88–9, 165, 172, 234n neo-Kantian 29, 48, 89 neo-Platonism 8, 14 neo-Platonic 16, 221n see also Platonism Nicomachean Ethics 4–8, 10–12, 14–18, 21, 23–5, 32, 39–41, 45, 49–50, 217n, 222n, 223n, 224n, 225n, 227n, 228n nihilism xxvii, 55, 127, 175

278

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non-differentiation xxxi, xxxiii, 68–9 nothingness, nothing 31, 35, 170, 180 noūs xiv, xvi–vii, 6–7, 14–15, 43–5, 229n object xv, xxiii, xxvi, xxviii, 14, 17, 49, 88, 91, 100, 108, 141, 144, 148, 152, 155–6, 174, 230n, 234n aesthetic xxxviii–xxxix of knowledge 4, 6, 18, 147, 183, 222n objective 10, 17–18, 20, 23–5, 58, 79, 85, 87, 98, 100, 149, 156, 223n, 225n objectless 68, 71, 97 of perception 89 of pleasure 91 subject- distinction xxvii see also objectification, objectivity objectification xxvi, 30, 174 See also object, objectivity objectivity 91, 171, 213, 227n See also object, objectification ontology xi, xiii, xv, 28, 39, 226n hermeneutical xiii opera xxxiv, 113–16, 119, 237n order 43–4, 49, 59, 73, 81, 83, 118, 145, 155, 162, 196 disorder 158 ordering 45, 68, 130, 148, 219n, 224n orientation 5, 169, 181, 224n, 226n in the world xii, xix, 34, 142, 144, 219n origin xii, xix, xxx, 12, 35, 89 original xii, xiv, xxi, xxii, 12, 23, 25, 34, 56, 74, 80, 131, 144, 165–7, 169–71, 175–6, 181, 185, 195–7, 199, 201, 211–16 originary 36, 185 originality 234n ousia xiii–xvii, 34–5, 167–8, 171 painting viii, xxiii, xxxi–xxxii, xxxvii–xxxviii, 57–8, 60, 66, 68, 70–2, 77–8, 83, 87–9, 91–6, 98–100, 102, 234n, 235n, 236n abstract xxxviii, 87 classical xxxv, 231n conceptual xxxiv–xxxxv, 87–93, 233n, 234n modern 57, 71, 87–8, 91, 93–4 objectless 68 (see also art) Renaissance 96

pastness of art xix, xxxiv, 58, 60, 63–7, 77, 82–4, 231n, 232n, 236n perception 89, 90, 184, 230n self- 73 see also object phenomenon xii, xxiv, xxvii, 66, 70, 91, 142, 144, 156, 184–5, 188, 198–200, 203 of language 141, 152, 172, 197, 200, 208 limit- 61, 63 phenomenology 29, 47, 151, 166, 226n, 229n phenomenological 47, 56, 72, 150–1, 164, 166–7, 217n (see also movement) phenomenologist 75, 99, 166–7 un-phenomenological 56 philology xiv, 28, 116, 154, 203, 208, 218n philological xiv, 4, 153 philologist xiv, 9, 31, 33, 38, 100, 116, 128, 160, 204, 213 philosophy xiii, xxvii, xxxiii–xxxv, 4, 12–14, 16–17, 20, 22, 27–8, 35, 37, 40, 43, 47, 51, 58–60, 66, 78–9, 82, 85, 88, 143–4, 154, 160–6, 168, 171–3, 180–1, 187–8, 190, 205, 218n, 223n, 226n, 227n, 228n, 230n, 231n, 233n, 234n, 235n, 237n, 239n, 241n ancient xii–xiv Anglo-American 163 Attic 163 Christian 8, 47 contemporary xiv Eleatic 44 English analytic 150 end of 66, 172 of existence 125 first 8 Greek xi, 15, 52, 180, 186, 218n of history 82, 101, 241n of identity 44 Kantian-Fichtean 131 modern 172 moral 47, 51, 143 positive 66 practical viii, xiv, 3–5, 8, 32, 39–42, 49–52, 222n, 226n, 227n of religion 82

Index of Subjects scholastic 8, 45 scientific 22 Stoic 172 theoretical 32, 42 transcendental 28–9, 35 phrase xxi, xxii–xxiii, 184–5 musical xxi, 184 subdued turns of xxi, 132 (see also conviviality) phronēsis 5–8, 12, 14–16, 19, 25, 30, 32, 36, 39–41, 45, 50–1, 166, 222n, 224n physics 8, 44, 147, 219n Aristotle’s 20, 24, 36, 44, 49, 62, 170, 208 modern 87, 170 Platonism 8, 10, 22, 69, 218n Platonic xvi–xviii, 3–6, 8, 10, 14–16, 18–22, 25, 31, 39, 48, 50, 59, 61, 79, 142, 168, 172, 187–8, 223n, 224n, 227n, 230n dialectic 48 dialogue(s) 6–8, 11–13, 18, 186, 190 doctrine of ideas 9, 14, 18 ethics 15, 23–5 metaphysics 14, 22 Socrates 4, 44, 163, 190 un- 8 see also neo-Platonism play xxiii, xxvii–xxxii, 70, 73, 91, 220–1n poem(s) viii, xxiii, xxxiii, xxxv–xxxvi, 56–8, 70, 73–5, 82, 104, 115, 130–1, 137, 199–202, 206–7, 215–16, 231n, 233n, 236n, 237n, 238n, 242n, 243n didactic 61 epic xxii Goethe’s xxxi, xxxiii, 75, 119, 121–3, 130, 135–6 Hölderlin’s 101–11, 121, 236n lyric xxxiii–xxxiv, 55–6, 74, 99, 101–2, 114 Stefan George’s 38 see also poetry poetizing xxxvi, 55–7, 101, 109, 130 poetics xxx, 55, 57–8, 60–1, 101, 230n, 232n, 233n, 237n poetry xxii, xxxiii–xxxv, xxxvii, 24, 38, 56–8, 60–1, 65, 72, 74–5, 77–83, 85, 102, 104, 114, 119, 122, 125, 130, 133, 136, 147, 157, 162, 169, 173, 179, 181, 190, 197, 200, 202, 205,

279

208–9, 215–16, 232n, 234n, 235n, 236n, 237n baroque 104, 129 epic 186, 204 Goethe’s xxxiv, 85, 127, 131, 137 Greek 61 Hölderlin’s 107–8, 110, 175–6, 236n lyric xxxiii–xxxv, 55–7, 80–1, 127, 185–6, 208, 214, 233n oral 198–9, 204 see also poem(s) politics 17, 18–20, 23, 40–1, 146, 227n Aristotle’s 10, 12, 17–19, 23–4, 40–1, 49, 51, 155, 224n, 230n positivism 35, 66 praxis viii, xiv, 4, 18, 20–1, 23, 32–4, 36, 39–41, 45, 51–2, 55, 195, 227n, 230n presence xxi, 36, 68, 80, 116, 132, 137, 152, 179, 190–1, 206–9, 214 coming into 34–5, 167, 171 living 114 of the past 67–8 that which grants 167, 169, 171 presentation xxii, xxvii, xxx, xxxv, 59, 63, 83, 198, 221n conceptual 48 self- xviii, xxx–xxxi, xxxviii, 18, 56, 221n pre-Socratic(s) xviii, 35, 168, 170, 173 proposition(s) xi, xx, 148–50, 152, 163, 239n propositional xii, xix, 3, 148–9, 152, 183 psychology xxvi, xxxv, 42, 57, 115–16, 185 depth 172 Gestalt 90, 207 psychological xxvi, 90, 104, 115, 120, 151, 189 psychologizing 92, 122 rationality xi, xxv–xxvi, xxxvii, 42–3, 45, 47, 50–2, 88, 90, 92, 229n hyper-rational 90 instrumental 49–51 rational xi, xx, xxxvii, 4, 30, 42–3, 50, 61, 142–3, 152, 155, 185, 220n, 239n see also irrationality rationalism xxvi, 42, 129, 220n rationalist(s) xxvi–xxvii, 220n

280

Index of Subjects

reading xxi, xxiv, xxiii–xxiv, xxxi–xxxiii, xxxv, 74, 80, 95, 98–100, 102, 104, 184, 193–5, 197–207, 209, 211, 212, 214–16, 220n, 235n, 238n, 243n of buildings xxxi–xxxii, 95–6, 235n culture 74, 205 realism 35 of art 232n reasonableness 7, 40–3, 51, 166 unreasonable 43 reflection 3, 30, 77, 83, 88, 91, 124, 152, 167, 183, 224n Goethe and 135–6 religion 37, 68, 82, 149, 156, 222n of art (see art under religion) philosophy of (see philosophy under of religion) revealed 78–9, 232n Renaissance 68, 91, 96, 170 art 201, 232n painting (see painting under Renaissance) poetics (see poetics) representation xix, 78–81, 84, 88, 149, 157, 240n non- xxxviii representational xxxviii, 91, 151 rhetoric xxxvii, 31, 42, 116, 130, 163, 176, 184, 186, 191, 204, 208, 211 Aristotle’s 31, 166 rhetorical 45, 130, 184, 186 rhetorician(s) 17 science 18–19, 23, 27, 31–4, 42, 52, 62, 128, 142–4, 146–7, 152, 160, 162, 164, 169, 171, 190, 208, 213, 220n, 226n, 229n, 234n, 236n, 238n empirical 51, 66, 143, 188 fact of 35 historical 42, 144, 241n human xx, 42, 100, 229n linguistic 173 modern viii, xxv, xxvi, xxxvi, 33–5, 41–3, 51–2, 87, 143, 149, 157, 170–2 (see also modernity) natural 42, 128, 143–4, 147, 172, 189 philosophical 21, 23 practical 40 social 42

self 7, 59, 74 -interpretation 37, 49, 51, 93, 156, 169 see also interpretation speaking xii–xiii, xix, xx–xxiv, 5, 34, 38, 58, 73, 114–17, 122–3, 130, 134, 144–8, 150–2, 157, 161–2, 168, 173–4, 176–80, 184, 186, 190, 193–208, 211, 216, 219n, 243n and works of art xxvii, xxxi, xxxii, xxxv, xxxvi, xxxviii, 87, 95–8 see also speaker(s) speaker(s) xix, xxi, xxiii, 100, 136, 168, 186, 199–201, 205, 212 See also speaking style xxi, 12, 34, 57, 62, 70–1, 85, 88–90, 93, 113, 122, 129–30, 133, 160, 190, 193, 197, 201, 213–14, 232n architectural 67, 93, 96 sophia 6–7, 14, 16, 40–1, 45, 50 subject xxvi–xxvii, 78, 91 subjective xxvi, xxviii, xxx, 73, 75, 84–5, 89, 15 subjectification xxvi as subjectum 171 (see also object under subject-object distinction, subject) subjectivism 41, 220n non-subjectivist xxviii, 221n subjectivity xxx, 59, 91, 171, 221n See also subject substance as ousia 34, 168 substance metaphysics xvi as substantia 171 Surrealism 93 technē 6–7, 15–17, 21, 34, 39–40, 131 technology 73, 92, 97, 149, 171 information 75, 179, 213 see also modern text xxi, xxiii, xxiv, xxxi, 37–8, 58, 69, 74–5, 97–8, 100, 103–4, 106, 114–16, 119, 122, 124, 151, 156–7, 173, 183, 190, 193, 195–7, 199–205, 207, 211–12, 214–16, 217n, 218n, 220n Biblical 164 eminent xxiv, xxxviii, 243n

Index of Subjects literary xxiv, 195 of Plato and Aristotle 3–4, 20, 44, 50, 155, 184, 190 poetic 74–5, 80, 114, 119, 123, 190, 213–14 textual 208, 215 see also textuality textuality 190 inter- see intertextuality see also text theatre xxiv, xxxi, 99, 115–16, 118, 122, 186, 198–9, 201–2, 205 Attic 69, 91, 115, 207 musical xxxiv, 114 (see also music) opera 114 Shakespearean 115 thinker(s) 42, 48–9, 51, 101, 128, 153, 160–2, 173, 213, 228n See also thinking thinking viii, xi, xiv, xix, xxi, xxxvi, 30–3, 35, 37–8, 44, 66, 78, 101, 109, 135, 141–3, 147, 153, 159–60,162, 166–7, 169, 171, 173–5, 181, 187, 189, 195, 222n, 236n aesthetic 57 ancient Greek xiii, 32, 34, 166, 169, 183, 224n calculative 110, 169 ethical 11 and Heidegger 34–5, 164–5, 167–9, 171, 173, 175–6, 236n and Hegel 35, 95, 161 logical 148 (see also logic) modern scientific 34 (see also science) as noein 15, 184 phenomenological 47 (see also phenomenology) social scientific 42 speculative 14 to think xx, xxiv, 5, 29, 36, 41, 107, 159, 169, 174, 188, 219n see also thinker(s) see also neo-Kantianism under neoKantian, Platonism under Platonic, thinker(s) time xix, 50, 78, 88, 119, 148, 155, 157, 173, 175, 178, 189, 191, 201, 206–8, 237n, 241n

281

timelessness 82, 119 pictures xxxiv, 87, 94, 234n see also Being and Time tradition viii, xi, xxiv, xxvi, xxix, xxxiii, xxxv, xxxix, 30, 33, 42, 57–60, 71, 76, 79, 85, 92, 116, 156, 161–2, 164–6, 168, 172, 181, 183, 198–9, 204, 221n, 235n, 244n Christian 67, 164, 174 classical 59 Greco-Christian 30 Jewish 33 Kantian xxviii linguistic 31 (see also language) of metaphysics 35, 52, 67–8, 79, 143, 171 (see also metaphysics) of philosophy 35 (see also philosophy) religious 88, 199 (see also religion) Western xvi, xxiv, 55, 68 see also Plato under Platonic transcendence self- 84 transcendent xxvi, xxix, xxxiii, 16, 169 transcendental xii, xxi, xxvi, 28–9, 35 ego 29 transformation, to transform xxvi, xxviii, xxxviii, xxxix, 6, 29, 34, 43, 49, 55, 71, 73, 75, 77, 80, 100, 117–18, 124, 128–9, 133–5, 143–7, 152, 168, 170–2, 204–5, 216, 242n poetic 102 self- 146 into structure xxx–xxxi translating, translation xxi, xxiv, xxxi, xxxiii–xxxv, 27, 38, 99, 114, 133, 148, 151–2, 161, 163, 168, 181, 196, 205, 211–15 of alētheia 173 of hypokeimenon 168 of literature, poetry, poems xxxiii, xxxv, 74, 80–1, 114, 213–16 of logos xviii of ousia 35, 168 untranslatability 211, 214–15 truth xviii, xix, xxiv, xxvii, xxxvii–xxxviii, 3, 6, 16, 22, 59–60, 66–7, 79, 81, 83, 125, 149, 152, 154, 163, 168, 174–5, 181, 187–8, 190, 194, 225n, 229n, 236n, 242n, 243n

282

Index of Subjects

of art viii, xxv, xxvii, xxxi, xxxiii–xxxvi, 6, 56, 59–60, 66, 68, 83, 102, 111, 190 as disclosure 173–4 historical 157 philosophical 29, 60 propositional 149 (see also concept under non-conceptual) see also alētheia, disclosure, truthfulness, unconcealment Truth and Method viii, xii–xiv, xviii, xxiv–xxv, xxvii, xxix, xxxi, xxxiii, 217n, 218n, 219n, 220n, 221n, 232n, 234–5n truthfulness 130, 190 See also truth unconcealment 36, 173–4 See also alētheia, concealment, disclosure, truth understanding viii, xi–xv, xvii, xx, xxiii–xxiv, xxviii, xxx–xxxv, 7–8, 29, 38, 55–6, 63, 67, 70, 73, 91, 95–100, 104, 114–15, 136, 141–5, 151–6, 158, 165, 172, 184, 190, 196–8, 200, 203–4, 207–8, 212–13, 215–16, 217n, 218n, 219n, 220n, 226n, 228n, 236n, 239n of being 171–2, 206 concept of the 89 conceptual xxxv dialogical xxv, 95, 178, 187 mis- 141, 144, 186–7, 196, 213 mutual 100, 104, 141–2, 145–6, 178, 180, 183, 215 non- xii of paintings 97–9 of poetry 103–5, 122, 136, 201, 206 self- 144, 162 (see also self, selfinterpretation) tacit 141 see also agreement virtue 5, 8, 12, 15, 24, 41, 45, 48, 97, 132, 222n civic 68, 137 dianoetic 6, 40, 228n ethical 6, 12–13, 40, 222n see also aretē, aretai

will 36, 169–70, 172, 174, 240n blind 169–70 to know 43, 149 to power xx, 104, 169, 175 to understand 142 world viii, xii–xvi, xix, xx, xxiii–xxiv, xxvi–xxix, xxxii, xxxv–xxxvi, xxxix, 8, 30–1, 38, 42, 44–5, 50, 52, 63, 75, 81, 88, 93–4, 100, 113, 117, 119, 121–3, 127, 143, 145, 147, 149, 152, 154–7, 162, 169, 171–2, 174, 179, 181, 183, 196, 214, 219n, 240n of art 57, 63 being-in-the 178 being of the xvii, 15 bourgeoisie 127 Christian 113 cultural 30, 85 experience of the xii, xviii, xx, xxxix, 37, 83–4, 151, 217n, 219n history 65, 67, 145 human 47, 113 of Hyperion 105–10 life- xix, 72–3, 156, 166, 168 linguistic 28, 35, 74, 162, 173, 177 literature 80, 97, 181, 214 nether- xxxiv -picture 31, 33, 226n romantic 83, 92 social xxxiii, xxxvi, 145 two-world theory viii, xvi, 8, 69 worldview xiii, 60, 84, 143 otherworldly 47 see also orientation in the world word xii, xvi, xviii, xxi, xxiii–xxiv, xxxii, xxxiv, xxxvi, 3, 6, 31, 34, 37–8, 58, 60, 72, 80–1, 99, 115, 118–19, 141–2, 147–8, 150–2, 161, 169, 172–5, 178–81, 183–4, 192, 194–9, 201, 203, 205, 207–8, 211–15, 217n, 231n, 235n, 236n, 240n conceptual 6, 35, 37 poetic 6, 56–8, 60, 74–5, 104, 109–10, 114–15, 118, 122–4, 130, 134, 152, 179, 206, 209, 231n writing, the written xxi–xxiv, xxxi, xxxiv–xxxv, 14, 27, 58, 62, 69, 80, 97, 99, 116, 136, 141, 156–7, 161,

Index of Subjects 179, 183, 185–90, 192–200, 202–4, 206, 211–13, 215, 240n, 241n, 243n the dimension of xx, xxii, 130, 183, 185–7, 190–1, 193, 195, 197, 199, 204 see also writer

283

writer 178–9, 195–7, 201–2, 204, 211–12 See also writing zōon xi, 156, 230n logon echon xi, 5, 156 politikon 230n­

284

285

286

287

288