Heidegger, Ethics and the Practice of Ontology 9781472546807, 9781847065889, 9781441191267

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To make a study of being, in my opinion, it is preferable to follow all the ontological deviations of the various experiences of being. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

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Acknowledgements

Many friends, colleagues and students have helped me bring this book to completion, by making suggestions, offering criticism, inspiring me through their own work, and generally encouraging me think a little harder. In particular, I would like to mention: Douglas Burnham, Robin Durie, Joanna Hodge, Donny Frangeskou, Will Large, Bill Ross, Franco Volpi and Harvey Young. Special thanks go to Angela and Francesca. Versions of the following chapters have appeared previously in journals. Chapter 1: ‘Continuity and Difference in Heidegger’s Sophist’, The Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol. 38, no. 1, (Spring 2000), 145–169. Chapter 2: ‘Thinking as Mortals: Heidegger and the Finitude of Philosophical Existence’, Philosophy Today, vol. 45 (Fall 2001), 211–224. Chapter 3: ‘The Contingency of Freedom: Heidegger Reading Kant’, International Studies in Philosophy, vol. 36-1 (Winter 2004), 189–214. Chapter 5: ‘Heidegger et Weyl: nombre, mouvement et continuité’, Noesis (Jan 2006), 85–102. Ancient Greek lettering has been transliterated and italicized.

Abbreviations

B

BW CO GA18 GA19

GA20

GA21 GA22 GA24

GA26

GA29/30

M Heidegger, Beiträge (vom Ereignis) (1989), Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann: Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) (1999), trans. P Emad and K Maly, Bloomington, Indiana University Press. M Heidegger, Basic Writings (1993), ed. D Farrell Krell, London, Routledge. H Weyl, The Continuum: A Critical Examination of the Foundation of Analysis (1994), New York, Dover Books. M Heidegger, Grundbefriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie (2002), Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann. M Heidegger, Platon: Sophistes (1992), Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann: Plato’s Sophist (1997), trans. R Rojcewicz and A Schuwer, Bloomington, Indiana University Press. M Heidegger, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitsbegriffs (1979), Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann: History of the Concept of Time (1985), trans. T Kisiel, Bloomington, Indiana University Press. M Heidegger, Logik: der Frage nach der Wahrheit (1976), Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann. M Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der antiken Philosophie (2004), Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann. M Heidegger, Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (1975), Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann: The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (1982), trans. A Hofstadter, Bloomington, Indiana University Press. M Heidegger, Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik (1978), Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann: The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic (1984), trans. M Heim, Bloomington, Indiana University Press. M Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. Welt – Endlichkeit – Einsamkeit (1983), Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann: The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude,

x

GA31

GA33

GA34

GA62

GA63

GMM

KRV

MET

NE

PH

Abbreviations Solitude (1995), trans. W McNeill and N Walker, Bloomington, Indiana University Press. M Heidegger, Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit. Einleitung in der Philosophie (1982), Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann: On the Essence of Human Freedom: The Essence of Human Freedom: An Introduction to Philosophy (2002), trans. T Sadler, London, Continuum. M Heidegger, Aristotele, Metaphysik Θ 1–3, Von Wesen und Wirklichkeit der Kraft (1981), Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann: Aristotle’s Metaphysics Θ 1–3, On the Essence and Actuality of Force (1995), trans. W Brogan and P Warnek, Bloomington, Indiana University Press. M Heidegger, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit: zu Platons Hôhlengleichnis und Theätet (1988), Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann: The Essence of Truth (2002), trans. T Sadler, London, Continuum. M Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen ausgewhlter Abhandlungen des Aristoteles zur Ontologie und Logik (2005), Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann. M Heidegger, Ontologie (Hermeneutik der Faktizität) (1988), Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann: Ontology – The Hermeneutics of Facticity (1998), trans. J van Buren, Bloomington, Indiana University Press. I Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1983), Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft: Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1964), trans. H J Paton, New York and London, Harper and Row. I Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1992), Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp: Critique of Pure Reason (1983), trans. N Kemp Smith, Macmillan, London. Aristotle, Metaphysics I-IX (1933), trans. H Trendennick, Cambridge Massachusetts and London, Harvard University Press and William Heinemann. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (1926), trans. H Rackham, Cambridge Massachusetts and London, Harvard University Press and William Heinemann. Aristotle, Physics (1929), trans. P H Wicksteed and F M Cornford, Cambridge Massachusetts and London, Harvard University Press and William Heinemann.

Abbreviations PIA

PLT SZ

US

WM

xi

Heidegger, ‘Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles (Anzeige der hermeneutischen Situation) (1989), Dilthey Jahrbuch Band 6/1989, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht: ‘Phenomenological interpretations in connection with Aristotle: An indication of the hermeneutic situation’, trans. M Baur, in Martin Heidegger, Supplements: From the Earliest Essays to Being and Time and Beyond (2002), ed. John van Buren, Albany, SUNY Press, 111–145. M Heidegger, Poetry Language and Thought (1971), trans. A Hofstadter, New York, Harper and Row. M Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (1986), Tübingen, Max Niemeyer Verlag: Being and Time (1980), trans. J Macquarrie and E Robinson, Oxford, Blackwells. M Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache (1959), Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann: On the Way to Language (1982), trans. P Herz, San Francisco, Harper and Row. M Heidegger, Wegmarken (1967), Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann: Pathmarks (1998), ed. W McNeill, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

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Introduction

The relation between ontology and ethics in Heidegger is embedded in the question of Being and the thinking of ontological difference. For this reason, it does not lend itself easily to the language that we use to describe things, and can appear remote from the more concrete concerns over how we live our lives. While this distance may be regarded as a good reason not to expect much in the way of ethics from Heidegger’s work, it is also why attending to the relation between ontology and ethics in Heidegger may challenge our habitual way of thinking about these matters. However, the ambiguity that suffuses the issue of ethics in Heidegger also works the other way around: the pull towards existence as it is lived threatens to displace Heidegger’s thought from the deeper reaches of the question of Being. This is why raising the question of ethics with regard to Heidegger is sometimes regarded as a distraction from the more serious business of ontology. Yet it is also why elements of the question may elude the more firmly established framework of Heidegger’s thought and for this very reason present themselves as a challenge to the usual ontological reading of Heidegger’s work. Aristotle’s well-known declaration that things are said to be in a variety of ways traditionally leaves ontology facing a dilemma; either it must discover a unity to the different significations of Being, or it must concede that not only is there a profound ambiguity to any talk of Being, but there may be no basic or fundamental sense there to be had at all. The various paths beaten and followed by ontological thought from Aristotle to the present day could all be understood as different responses to this problem. Most have sought to discover a unifying principle of some kind, and a few have explored the possibility of an ontology given over to multiplicity or difference. For example, in different ways, Bergson, Bachelard, Serres, Lyotard, Levinas, Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze have all disputed the assumption that every event by which things are given in experience may be accommodated within a single form. Their influence on my approach to Heidegger comes to the fore in the concern with multiplicity and contingency that lies behind many of the questions I pose. In this respect, the work of Serres and Foucault has

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been particularly influential for me, though I have not adopted their problematics or their methodologies directly here; my intent is not to criticize Heidegger for what he didn’t do, but rather to allow the concerns of such writers to open up lines of inquiry from deep within Heidegger’s own work. Heidegger’s great contribution to philosophy is the idea of the ontological difference: the difference between beings and Being, and the recognition that Being cannot be conceived using the same terms and categories we apply to beings. The ontological difference opens up a new dimension for philosophical thought, making it possible to pose questions in new ways, and to pursue them in new directions. However, in one fundamental respect, Heidegger’s thought remains faithful to the ontological tradition, and that is in its insistence on unity as a condition of thinking Being. This condition appears in different guises throughout his work: for example, as the unity of the horizons of ecstatic temporality, as the simplicity of Being, as the silence in the Saying of Being in language, and as the uniqueness of the ontological difference that is everywhere the same. However, although unity, in its various forms, lies at the very heart of his work, Heidegger also welcomes its problematization. Pursuing this problematization allows one to broach the question of the relation between ontology and ethics in Heidegger’s work. However, before considering how this becomes possible, it has to be acknowledged that from a Heideggerian point of view the idea of a challenge to the unity of Being and the uniqueness of the ontological difference is barely even coherent. Historically speaking, it contravenes the condition of unity that Aristotle placed on any fundamental treatment of the significations of being. In Heidegger’s own terms, the question leads back to the priority of the form of givenness over the particularity of each concrete event in which a being is given, and thus to what is for Heidegger the priority of Being over beings. According to this principle, anything that is will be given in a way consistent with a single form of givenness; one that was, in Heidegger’s earlier writing, based on the temporal structure of Dasein’s transcendence. Indeed, one might go further and say that any such thing must be given in a way that is consistent with the most fundamental form of givenness, otherwise it would not ‘be’ at all. To acknowledge that there is any sense whatsoever in speaking of Being as such and as a whole is already to suppose that such a form of unity exists, however illdefined it may be for the most part. Yet at the same time, the very radicality of what is supposed shields the idea of fundamental ontology from criticism, and does to by setting up an apparent dilemma; one must either accept the premise of unity and reject the question, or accept the question

Introduction

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and reject the premise. In effect, one is immediately forced into a position of being either with Heidegger or against him. This seems unsatisfactory. My proposal, which the chapters in this book seek to explore, is that one avoids the dilemma by finding a way for the unity of Being and the uniqueness of the ontological difference to become questionable from within Heidegger’s work. To open up this question requires an examination of what Heidegger describes as the return of ontological thinking to the ontic dimension that is its point of departure. Inevitably, the motif of a departure from the world of beings to the ontological domain followed by a return recalls the imperative to descend back into the cave that, in the Republic, Socrates and Glaucon agree must lie on the shoulders of the one who pursues philosophy and leaves the world of shadows for the light above. In Heidegger’s terms, it may be regarded as equivalent to the methodological requirement that phenomenological interpretation develop and renew itself through what he calls the hermeneutic circle; the formal truths of phenomenology are empty until fulfilled in the concrete life of the thinker, and it is easy to see this movement as one of departure and return, or ascent and descent, as though the phases were quite distinct from one another. By contrast, the studies in this book argue that the movements by which ontological thought arises from the ontic and returns to it are inseparable from one another, and that it would be more accurate to say that ontological thought never really leaves the ontic dimension at all. One way to account for the sameness of the departure and return is to describe the movement between them as continuous, which conjures up images of circularity quite consistent with hermeneutic practice. However, there is more to this idea of continuity. Already in his early writing, Heidegger conceives of the event of disclosure as a form of movement and, following Aristotle, understands all movement to be grounded in a formal dimension characterized by continuity. In Aristotle, continuity is associated with wholeness, and similarly in Heidegger we find that continuity is linked both to the sense of Being as a whole with which fundamental ontology engages, and to the finitude of Dasein as a site of disclosure. To describe the movement between the ontic and the ontological as continuous is therefore to say that these levels belong together, but also to expose a certain condition underlying the relation between the ontic and the ontological, and therefore the very idea of the ontological difference. For this reason, the theme of continuity is pivotal to most of this book. The thesis that emerges is that if movement is indeed fundamental to the way Heidegger conceives the event of the ontological difference, the continuity of that movement entails that the

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ontic and ontological aspects remain bound to one another in such a way that the simple priority of the ontological over the ontic can no longer be sustained and the relation is revealed as a loop of influence back and forth, or as a continual two-way communication. Now, there is a contingency and multiplicity to the ontic that can be constrained within a singular form only by electing from the outset to ground them in a fundamental unity, allowing the revisionary movement of the turn and return, the hermeneutic circle, to sanction such troubling characteristics as merely provisional. To adopt this reading would be to move back towards the usual sense of the hermeneutic circle. By contrast, if the challenge posed by the contingency and multiplicity of the ontic to the fundamental unity of ontology is acknowledged as genuine, the indefinite character of the understanding of Being will derive not from the revisions that lie ahead, but rather from a more deep seated, and perhaps ineliminable, incompleteness; or, as it were, an essential relation to impossibility on the part of ontological thought. This amounts to conceding a challenge to fundamental ontology. However, to doubt the possibility of addressing Being as such and as a whole, or of discovering a single fundamental form of givenness, does not necessarily mean retreating to an acceptance of ‘regional’ ontologies in the absence of any account capable of engaging with their common ground. Heidegger’s thought itself moves in the direction of an alternative, though perhaps not as far as it might. The possibility of thinking ontologically, in a sense profoundly inspired by Heidegger, while still acknowledging the problematic character of the unity and simplicity of fundamental ontology arises from Heidegger’s own preoccupation with the concept of continuity. As a key term for Aristotle, it enters directly into Heidegger’s thought. But whereas other concepts that Heidegger has taken over from Aristotle – such as potentiality, actuality, movement, praxis, phronesis, sophia, not to mention ousia and the Aristotelian account of time – have been subjected to a rigorous critique and the transformations that they have undergone in their adoption carefully charted, the same cannot be said for continuity. Its role, and the changes it undergoes, are far more discreet, but no less important for that. What one finds, I argue, is that Heidegger performed an ontological radicalization of continuity that removed from it problematic references to spatial characteristics and relations that belong to an ontic perspective. With a simple interpretation of continuity as constituted by limits set aside, the sense of unity associated with it becomes tied more closely to the nature of the relations within the continuous element, which in order to be continuous at all must involve precisely the kind of two-way relation in which no one

Introduction

5

element is set apart from the others. All this becomes especially significant for Heidegger’s ontology when one recognizes that the ontological difference itself can be conceived on the basis of movement, and thereby continuity; that is, the ontological and ontic dimensions of Heidegger’s thought are continuous with one another. Pursuing this interpretation therefore problematizes the unity and simplicity associated with Heidegger’s ontology, insofar as this unity is protected by the priority of the ontological over the ontic, the priority of unity over the various forms it can take, and the various cases it can underpin. Ontology is no longer so clearly impervious to any influence or effect arising from the ontic. This book begins to examine the possibility of such a shift, and two related implications become evident. First, the form of givenness as such no longer has priority over the individual events in which beings are given to us in experience. Thus, ‘fundamental’ ontological thought is no longer necessarily insulated from the vicissitudes of experience, the changing forms of cultural life and so forth. Second, since ontological thought remains planted in our concrete experience, it is bound to the existential concern over who we are and how we live; that is, ontology is inseparable from ethics. It is primarily with the second of these possibilities that I shall be concerned, but before outlining the form this concern will take I will say a few words about the first possibility. As a consequence of the radicalization of continuity, we no longer face a straight choice between endorsing unity or giving it up. What we mean when we say that something ‘is’ must therefore remain a question for us, even when we no longer expect there to be a single answer to this question that must hold in every instance. To speak of ‘regional ontologies’ is to recognize the specificity that properly belongs to the disclosure of beings in different domains, but if these ontologies are to remain genuinely open to the new and the surprising, they can neither all be grounded in a single and more fundamental form of givenness, nor remain impervious to influence from the wider field of beings in which they occur. Rather than disclosing the formal characteristics that unify different domains, an ontology that is fundamental in the sense that it is not merely regional may emerge as a practice of thinking that maintains the openness of relations between them at an ontological level. Such a thinking would be a place of ‘experiment’ where new possibilities for thinking and being emerge from this complex interrelation. The ‘return’ of the ontological to the ontic also raises the question of ethics in relation to Heidegger’s ontology. Rather than seeing Heidegger’s ontological thought as lacking an ethical dimension, I shall argue that Heidegger’s ontological thought can never free itself from the concrete

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situation of Dasein’s existence and in this respect is always already ethical. This breaks with the more usual ways of reading Heidegger’s ontologization of the ethical philosophies of Aristotle and Kant, according to which one either laments that their translation into the ontological register has emptied them of any truly ethical significance, or else seeks to recover an ethical meaning from the ontologized language of responsibility, care, solicitude, Being-with and other such terms. What these readings share is a tendency to view ontology and ethics as fundamentally separate, as though their comingling could only spell confusion. By contrast, acknowledging that the practice of philosophy cannot be separated from the concrete situation of one’s existence means that the questions normally attributed to ethics – How should I act? Who am I in my relations to others? Am I responsible for the choices I make? – cannot be resolved independently of ontology and, conversely, that ontology cannot be conducted as though it could raise itself above the fray and leave such questions aside for a ‘second’ philosophy. Chapter 1 argues that far from returning to the ontic domain from which it arises, ontological thought in fact never leaves it behind at all. In a reading of Heidegger’s 1924/25 lecture course on Plato’s Sophist, this is examined in terms of the codependence of phronesis and sophia in his ontological appropriation of Aristotle’s ethics. The same impossibility of separating phronesis and sophia is addressed in Chapter 2, where the point is also developed through an interpretation of Heidegger’s remarks on the relation of ontology and ethics in The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic. The recognition that the ontological dimension of Heidegger’s thought cannot free itself from its ontic foundation leaves the priority of the ontological over what is disclosed in each particular case in doubt. But it is precisely by virtue of this priority that Heidegger can speak of ‘Being as such’, over and above the multiplicity of beings that it encounters. Moreover, this priority is also responsible for diminishing the sense of contingency that can be associated Heidegger’s thought, since only that whose Being has been prefigured in advance can be encountered at all. Once this priority is called into question, therefore, it becomes possible to open Heidegger’s thought to the risk of a more radical contingency. This proposal is developed primarily in Chapter 3, which addresses Heidegger’s reading of Kant’s Critique of Practical Philosophy. In this reading, Heidegger sets out to move beyond Kant’s account of freedom as a cause by returning to Aristotle’s conception of causality. However, as I point out, Aristotle’s rejection of the atomist thesis on radical contingency is echoed in Heidegger’s own approach, which in turn keeps him from recognizing the extent to which ontological thought

Introduction

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is disrupted by the impossibility of its surpassing the concrete context of its ontic foundation. The question of the priority of the unity of Being is given a more comprehensive treatment in Chapter 4, where it is attributed to the way Heidegger conceives of the formal dimension of the event of disclosure in relation to movement, continuity and time. Chapter 5 tackles the importance of continuity for Heidegger from a different perspective, taking its point of departure from positive comments that Heidegger makes about the work of the mathematician Herman Weyl in his 1926 lecture course on Plato’s Sophist. Tracing what it is that attracts Heidegger about this work deepens our understanding of the role of continuity in his work, while also revealing a far more thoughtful and sympathetic engagement with modern mathematical science than is usually attributed to him. Finally, Chapter 6 brings together many of the themes raised in earlier chapters through an analysis of what is involved in Heidegger’s determination, set out in the later essays on language, that we should be brought to the point of undergoing an experience with language as such. My reading aims to show how the ontological radicalization of continuity takes place, and how it is reflected in Heidegger’s reading of Being-towards-death. This in turn helps us to understand what is involved in Heidegger’s introduction of the idea of time-space, its continuity, and its role in the configuration of language and its relation to the Saying by virtue of which we are first exposed to language.

Chapter 1

Continuity and Difference in Heidegger’s Sophist

Phronesis and sophia within ontology In this first chapter, I shall argue that ontology and ethics are inextricably bound up with one another. The key to this relation is the concept of continuity, which in Aristotle is closely related to the ideas of wholeness and unity, and also to the dimension characteristic of time and movement. It takes on a new significance in Heidegger by virtue of the central role that movement plays in his understanding of Being, thinking, transcendence and the ontological difference. By examining his reading of nous and logos in Plato’s Sophist, and also the way Heidegger’s understanding of the relation of phronesis and sophia bears on his interpretation of the Good in Plato, I shall argue that the relation between ontology and ethics are continuous with one another, without thereby being equivalent, or one being reducible to the other. For Heidegger, the task of philosophy is to articulate the difference between Being and beings. Following in the footsteps of Husserl, Kant and many others back to Aristotle, Plato and even beyond, Heidegger recognized the importance of intuition, noein, to such an articulation. However, he was also aware that the form of disclosure which belongs to noein is itself open to question, and depends in part on the form of language, logos, animating the philosophical discourse in which the disclosure is to be set out. The question of the balance between these two forms of disclosure runs throughout Heidegger’s 1924–25 lecture course on Plato’s Sophist. However, its treatment is mediated by the extended discussion of another theme: Heidegger’s recognition that the instance of truth which occurs in phronesis, Aristotle’s term for practical wisdom regarding one’s own existence, has a role to play alongside sophia in ontological enquiry. There are therefore two key oppositions at play in lecture course as a whole: that between nous and logos, and that between phronesis and sophia. What is at

Continuity and Difference in Heidegger’s Sophist

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stake for Heidegger as he addresses the relation between these terms is the possibility of achieving a form of phenomenological discourse that preserves the ontological perspective opened up via nous. Yet conversely, through the course of his reading, there is delineated a relation between truth, the logos and human existence that is at once more intimate and more complex than in either Aristotle or Plato alone. My argument in this chapter comprises four claims. First, that Heidegger’s interpretation of nous and logos can only be fully understood in conjunction with his reading of phronesis and sophia. Second, that the way in which the two pairs of terms bear upon each other turns at a series of levels on the question of relation. Third, that for Heidegger the question of relation is articulated in terms of movement, and moreover that Heidegger wishes movement, and thereby relation, to show itself as itself without being reduced either to a thing or to a subsequent relation between pre-existing things. Fourth, that while Heidegger’s reception of the Aristotelian conception of movement as ‘continuous’ helps to hold open the possibility of a more fundamentally ontological discourse than is possible within the dialectical form of enquiry as presented in Plato’s Sophist, it is also Heidegger’s deployment of ‘continuity’ that in a certain sense suspends the movement by which philosophy aims to articulate the ontological difference. As a result, Heidegger’s attempt to secure a more ‘fundamental’ philosophical relation to Being also draws philosophy back into the concreteness of human existence. Although extraordinarily rich, the readings of both Plato’s Sophist and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics that Heidegger gives in the 1924–25 lecture course have been the subject of considerable criticism. Some hoped to find in Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle’s ethics a resource for the retrieval of a radical conception of praxis from the thinking of Being and Time.1 On the face of it, however, such hopes were dashed. Instead, Heidegger’s apparent endorsement of the priority of sophia and theoria over their ‘practical’ counterparts phronesis and praxis seemed to confirm the fears of those who saw in Heidegger’s work a retreat from the promise of a radical praxis. Worse, in spite of everything it seemed as though philosophy were to remain above all an affair of theoria, its province sheltered from the contingency and uncertainty of everyday life. Others have pointed to Heidegger’s apparent insensitivity to the dramatic character of Plato’s dialogue, and to his readiness to approach Plato via Aristotle, thereby placing Plato in the shadow of his successor.2 Yet Heidegger cannot be read as either simply Aristotelian or simply Platonist, and in trying to situate him too unambiguously in relation to them one risks missing what is, in

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my view, the most significant aspect of his interpretation of their work. Instead, if the problem of sustaining thematically a mode of disclosure in which things show themselves as themselves is taken as the leitmotiv in reading Heidegger’s Sophist, and especially if his interpretation of Aristotle is approached in the light of the questions at stake in his reading of Plato, one is led to an understanding of the interrelation between the Aristotelian conceptions of phronesis and sophia that undermines both the case for a retrieval of a ‘radical’ praxis over against the dominance of theory, and for criticizing Heidegger for having accepted more or less uncritically the (for the most part Platonic) pre-eminence of theoria and sophia. In fact, while Heidegger follows Aristotle in setting phronesis and sophia apart, his thinking remains orientated towards the way they belong together in a kind of loose dynamic unity.3 At issue here is less the consequences of their separation than the nature of the bond surviving between them, and thereby also the question of philosophy and its relation to concrete human existence.

Nous and logos: The task of dialectic Mid-way through Plato’s dialogue the Sophist, the Stranger looks back to the variety of ways in which earlier thinkers had sought to address the question of unity and multiplicity in relation to Being. Reserving judgement on the merits of what they achieved, he remarks that there is nonetheless one thing that may be asserted with confidence: That they paid too little attention and consideration to the mass of people like ourselves. For they go on to the end, each in his own way, without caring whether their arguments carry us along with them, or whether we are left behind. (243a–b) The thinkers we now call Pre-Socratic were, it is suggested, indifferent to the challenge of communicating the fruit of their thought. Whatever truth their intuitions may have revealed was not given a discursive presentation such that others could follow easily, seeing what steps were required to arrive at the desired disclosure. As a result, the Stranger is unwilling to say ‘whether any of them spoke the truth’; he is literally cut off from the truth such thinking claimed to have discovered. Heidegger interprets this as indicating that the Pre-Socratics overlooked the need for a ‘proper logos’ as a medium for demonstration ‘such that everyone sees the things themselves

Continuity and Difference in Heidegger’s Sophist

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as they are and does not simply have to look for the things in isolation, in arbitrary speculation’ (GA19 443: 306). In the absence of such a medium for demonstration, we cannot be sure that the Pre-Socratics were not just ‘telling tales’ (and in the same way, one’s own relation to the truth remains precarious). At bottom, the criticism concerns the incommunicability of the truth disclosed through the philosophical intuition of the thinker (an incommunicability from which the thinker in question suffers almost as much as do those who would follow after). Plato’s conception of dialectic is intended to resolve this predicament by providing a demonstrable discursive path towards the truth that is ultimately disclosed. By its very nature, therefore, it raises the question of the relation between logos (as dialectic) and nous (philosophical intuition). To be successful, dialectic would have to serve as a bridge between the individual and the truth disclosed via nous, and do so in such a way that it might convey the one to the other with as little interruption or disturbance as possible. For Heidegger, the problems begin with the structure of the relation to truth in the logos itself. This relation is articulated as judgement, which in turn involves predication, or the determination of something ‘as’ something. Once this structure is operative, however, there is also the possibility that something may show itself ‘as’ other than it is (SZ 33: 57). In this way, error and falsity shadow all judgement. But judgement is not the fundamental or most original locus of truth. For example, before I can make any judgement regarding the properties of this desk, or its relations to other things, it must first have shown itself to me. Prior then to truth as it occurs in judgement, there is a moment of givenness – of truth – which is accomplished not via the logos, but via nous. The recovery of this moment is important for Heidegger not just in order to provide a complete picture of what happens in the event of disclosure associated with truth, but also in order to secure an ontological perspective.4 For if the theme of every enquiry were to be addressed ‘as’ something, all understanding would be (in Heidegger’s terms) ontic in character. Where the archai or first principles are concerned, this would be a mistake, since they cannot be defined or understood ‘as’ something without undermining their status as simple ‘ultimates’ (eschata) (GA19 180: 124). Indeed, given that we are talking about principles such as ‘unity’, ‘plurality’ and ‘otherness’, noein is not to address them as things at all: ‘Pure noein is the perception of the simplest determinate ways of Being which entities possess, and it perceives them just by looking at them’ (SZ 33: 57). Ideally, it should be the task of dialectic to deliver this simple ‘looking on’ (hinsehende Vernehmen): that is, the consideration of the matter in various respects should culminate in a simple grasp

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untrammelled by the constraints of the logos. Strictly speaking, however, such purity is beyond the reach of the human being as a zoon logon echon. ‘The nous in the human soul is not a noein, a straightforward seeing, but a dianoein, because the human soul is determined by logos. On the basis of logos, the assertion of something as something, noein becomes dianoein’ (GA19 59: 41). Human nous is therefore not the ‘proper one’, but rather an adulterated nous, accomplished in and through a speaking or discussion: it is a dia-noein (literally a ‘through-looking’). Dialectic is, in this sense, a ‘speaking about things which looks upon them (ein hinblickendes Sprechen über)’5 (GA19 349: 242). By virtue of this implication of nous in logos, the instance of truth as simple uncovering is adulterated. Similarly, it becomes harder to see how one might travel through logos towards a more original disclosure in nous. For if the archai are by definition ‘simple’ (haplos), the involvement of the logos should be sufficient to preclude their disclosure altogether.6 As Heidegger writes: ‘Everything eschaton and everything proton can be grasped properly only if the noein is not a dianoein but a pure onlooking (reines Hinsehen). Here the disclosure in the mode of the carrying out of logos fails and recedes’ (GA19 180: 124). It is not clear whether the resources of the logos are such that the ‘speaking’ named dialectic can sustain a ‘looking-through’ (dia-noein) that can in turn stand in for the ‘pure onlooking’ that is noein – thereby holding in abeyance the otherwise dominant schema of the ‘as-structure’. As Heidegger sees it, in trying to establish dialectic as a medium in which the truth of pure intuition (nous) may become demonstrable, Plato faces a dilemma: either subsume the truth as given in nous within the structure of the logos (whereupon it loses its specifically ontological character), or allow it an independence which then threatens to be inarticulable and undemonstrable. Although the apparently disjunctive nature of this relation is problematized insofar as human finitude means that noein is in each case a dianoein, the character of the relation between nous and the discourse arising from it, the relation between seeing and speaking, remains very much in question.7 Specifically, it is the question of how the movement indicated by the term dia-, ‘through’, is related to the desired purity of intuition. In the end, this concerns the possibility of phenomenology itself, as a logos of the disclosure achieved in perception and intuition.

Movement, dialectic and otherness Let us now take a closer look at the place of movement in Heidegger’s interpretation of dialectic as it is presented in Plato’s Sophist. The dialogue is

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addressed primarily to the difficulty of speaking of what is not without thereby conferring existence upon it. Can being and non-being combine within the logos? Can one ignore the Parmenidean injunction to speak only of ‘what is’ without lapsing into incoherency (or sophism)? At issue is the relation between being and non-being, and the relation of both of them to logos. Indeed, if a being is to exist in anything but an isolation so splendid as to conceal it completely, to render it inert, invisible, and ultimately beyond the reach of language, it must in some respect exist in relation to what is other than itself (GA19 576: 399). ‘To be’, proposes the Stranger, is to have the power (dunamis) to change another or be changed by another (247d–e); whereupon Being as such is understood in view of the possibility of the coexistence and interrelation of distinct and even conflictual elements (dunamis koinonias – 248b; GA19 478: 331). This is worked out initially in terms of the gene (classes: where the term ‘genus’ denotes the ‘stem, descent, lineage’ of a thing, ‘That from which something originates’ (GA19 524: 362) kinesis (movement), stasis (rest) and on (being) (371–372); and subsequently in terms of tauton (same) and heteron (other) (254d–e, GA19 536–548: 372–379) – where heteron designates the principle of discrimination whereby one thing can be in relation to what is ‘other’ than itself. Ultimately, it is the concept of heteron that will provide the Stranger with the basis for an understanding of negation that permits the saying of ‘not-being’ (257b2–3). Heidegger remarks that in the course of the discussion of heteron Plato does not ‘succeed in distinguishing the heteron as “an other” from the heteron as “being-other” or “otherness”’ (GA19 543: 376). Insofar as the registers of heteron – and the same could be said of kinesis, stasis, tauton and on – are not separated out, the ontological dimension to the problematic is concealed. More specifically, what is covered over, what does not show itself, is the constitution of otherness as relation. In particular, Heidegger notes that ‘there resides in the structure of the heteron itself a still more original character, one which Plato does not here establish firmly, the pros ti’ (GA19 544: 377).8 The pros ti indicates a being in relation, and in thus to be ‘other’ is to be ‘other than’ (255d1). While this may seem an unnecessary precision, it highlights what might otherwise remain discreetly covered over as the ground for any determination of one thing as different to another, namely, the fact of relation itself. As long as the ambiguity deep in the signification of heteron is left unacknowledged (it may not simply be removed), to speak of something as ‘other’ will be to describe it by way of an attribution. The risk, as Heidegger sees it here, is that as a consequence the possibility of relation may itself be treated as an attribute like any other; that is, as ontologically subordinate to the substance or thing in question, which would by

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implication then itself be treated as independent of relation. But this would be to elevate substance above all time and becoming. Only if the ambiguity in the sense of heteron is acknowledged and its signification as ‘otherness’ recognized, can the eclipse of relation as such beneath the thing and its properties be held in check. Moreover, only then could there be any prospect of success for Plato in the identification of heteron as the basis for a rethinking of negation that would in turn allow for the coexistence of being and non-being. For if to be ‘not-this’ is not to ‘not be’ tout court, but simply to ‘be other’, then otherness must itself be brought into view as a relation, and not just as another genus in quasi-hypostatized form.9 The sense of heteron as ‘otherness’ (as opposed to ‘what is other’) rests on the relational expression pros ti implicit within it. Yet not only is the phenomenon of the pros ti not made visible, according to Heidegger it could not be made visible in terms of the conception of dialectic deployed by Plato (GA19 544: 377). Heidegger remarks that Plato’s formulation and deployment of dialectic does not reflect on ‘what is genuinely presupposed in the dunamis koinonias’ (GA19 533: 369). What is presupposed, for Heidegger, is precisely movement – as that which underlies all usages of the term dunamis.10 To speak of the dunamis koinonias by which elements exist in relation to one another is to refer not to the simple juxtaposition of relata, but specifically to their relation – or rather, to the dunamis by virtue of which that relation can become actual. If this relation is treated as a realization of the dunamis koinonias understood as a ‘logical’ possibility, then movement plays no part. On such a reading, attributed to Plato, because kinesis is not implicated in relatedness as such, it can be treated as one of the five gene because whose mutual relations are at stake.

Separation, continuity and dialectic Yet as Heidegger argues in the Sophist lectures, it is ‘possible to determine the archai of the moving phusei onta in such a way that the archai are not taken as divorced from motion and furthermore such that kinesis itself is not taken as an idea’ (GA19 103: 71). This shift in perspective is set out more fully in the discussion of movement Heidegger undertakes in his 1931 lecture course on Aristotle’s Metaphysics Θ 1–3. If we consider the movements involved in building a house, he writes there, we think of materials being cut and assembled: But we are not viewing here movement as movement, not viewing the kinoumenon he kinoumenon: we are not asking what moved-being as such

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might be. We are not taking the kinoumenon he on, and we are not taking kinesis as einai. (GA33 44: 54–55) The difference Heidegger wishes to highlight in telling the final sentence is that between asking about a given relation to movement and asking in such a way that movement itself is allowed to ‘speak’ – to show itself – without being reduced either to a thing or to a subsequent relation between pre-existing things. This is especially relevant to the Sophist, where what is at stake is ultimately the disclosure not of a single eidos (e.g. virtue, justice, sameness or otherness), but rather of the capacity (dunamis) to belong together characteristic of the archai as an ensemble. The kinoumenon as kinoumenon must, Heidegger writes, be ‘co-perceived’ (mitgesehen) along with the archai (GA19 103: 71), not as a thing, but as the ‘topos’ that ‘constitutes . . . the possibility of the proper presence of the being in question’ (GA19 105: 73). If movement itself belongs to beings, it is not as something accidental to them, but as an intrinsic feature of their existence and their disclosure as complex, multifarious individuals. Relation as such is a function of movement; that is, it is by virtue of movement, that relation occurs at all. In Heidegger’s view, the fact that Plato did not adequately recognize the signification of heteron as ‘otherness’ or ‘being-other’ – and thereby failed to achieve the ontological perspective on negation by virtue of which being and not-being might have been woven together within the logos – is ultimately attributable to his not having clarified movement as the condition of relation. To understand why, in Heidegger’s view, Plato’s account remained blocked in this way it is helpful to turn to an ‘Excursus’ in the early part of the course in which Heidegger discusses the concept of chorizein – separation – and the relative characteristics of geometry and arithmetic. Following Aristotle’s own critique of Plato, Heidegger quotes from Physics II, criticizing the manner in which Plato’s abstraction of ideas removes them from the domain of change that they are intended to ground.11 The problem, in Heidegger’s view, lies in the way that Plato takes arithmetic as the model for relations between elements in his own philosophical project. This has far-reaching consequences. First, the principles of the physical order are extracted in such a way that they are treated, like numbers, as entities quite distinct both from each other and from the order whose ways of being they are meant to describe. Moreover, the mode of belonging together appropriate to arithmetic is succession, whereupon the manifold of elements – the ensemble of the archai in their mutual relations – would have to be built up piece by piece. Taken together, these conditions impose an ontic perspective on the archai.

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Contrasted to this model is that derived from the conceptualization of the physical world through geometry. Here, we see an abstraction at work that, while constituting the geometrical object separately from physical space, nonetheless preserves the relations of direction and orientation – named here as thesis – by virtue of which each element is related to its counterparts. Moreover, in this way it is possible, Heidegger argues, ‘to determine the archai of the moving phusei onta in such a way that the archai are not taken as divorced from motion and, furthermore, such that kinesis itself is not taken as an idea and hence as choriston’ (GA19 104: 71).12 Finally, the geometrical manifold is ordered according to the relation of continuity: that is, it cannot be made up by the addition or juxtaposition of one element to the next, but must be grasped as a whole, where each element has its place within that whole. The elements in the geometrical order ‘belong together’ – and Heidegger speaks here of koinonein – in a way that the numbers in an arithmetical series do not (GA19 118–121: 81–83). Their belonging together is grounded in the whole – or katholou – which serves as a horizon in view of which each element may be grasped in itself and in its relation to the rest of the order. In this way, the archai would be conceived not as individual elements or entities, but as various mutually related articulations of the whole. Interestingly, in spite of the advantage of conceiving of movement in terms of the connectedness characteristic of movement, Heidegger also concedes that number is ontologically more fundamental. Later, in Chapter 5, I shall look at this apparent tension and Heidegger’s attempt to deal with it by reopening the question of what it means to count; that is, to arrive at number. I have already noted that the ‘as-structure’ characteristic of the logos risks producing what is for Heidegger an ontic determination. Insofar as this is true, kinesis is treated as another thing to which the remaining archai (on, stasis, tauton, heteron) are related, whereupon those archai themselves stand outside kinesis, as somehow ‘other’ than kinesis. The conception of continuity operative in the geometrical and physical models is central to overcoming this perspective on kinesis and thereby to the achievement of the ontological attitude Heidegger seeks. Insofar as Plato adheres to the arithmetic model, and in spite of the profound ontological significance of number and of the pressure his own insights exert, he remains committed to addressing a series of elements as discrete entities whose ‘belonging together’ will be a relation supplementary to their basic existence. In brief: movement, as the implicit condition of belonging together, remains a single element within an ordered system and not, as Heidegger thinks it should

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be, a name for the relation by virtue of which the ordered whole occurs in the first place. The implications of Plato’s failure to exploit his sensitivity to the pros ti structure implicit within the term ‘heteron’ and to allow himself to be led by the ‘directedness’ it signifies to the issue of relation or relatedness itself are now plain. If movement is the condition of the belonging together into which the dialogue is enquiring, then it will be sufficient neither for movement to be treated ontically as a thing, nor for it to remain an undeveloped theme. Yet this is all that dialectic, running through each archai and detailing the nature of its relation to the rest, can manage: at no point does it reveal movement itself as the condition of the belonging together of the different archai. In effect, the moment of nous by which the ontological condition for the appearing of each thing might be disclosed is closed off by the very movement of dialectic itself. Dialectic can neither render thematic the character of movement as movement – nor let movement show (speak) itself from itself. Only if the relational structure of disclosure were itself to become evident or to speak in this way could the whole determined by the archai be seen ‘as a whole’ and not merely as an aggregated series of elements. Yet this can only happen if the logos can convey without prejudice or influence the truth as disclosed by nous. As Heidegger is aware, however, there is a problem of language here.13 The truth of nous, a simple disclosure of the archai as ultimate or extreme points (eschata), cannot be rendered adequately in thematic discourse. Moreover, the problem is compounded by the nature of that which is to be disclosed, namely, the continuous relational whole articulated via movement. For insofar as it relies on what Heidegger calls the ‘as’ structure, the logos manifests an affinity with the form of relation that we have found to be characteristic of arithmetic. Plato’s mistake, in Heidegger’s eyes, is to have allowed the predominant form of disclosure specific to the logos to have overtaken the possibilities of disclosure inherent within nous. The logos is allowed to foist what is in this context its own relatively impoverished ontological attitude upon nous. By contrast, the adequate disclosure of the capacity to exist together in relation that characterizes the geometrical manifold as a continuous whole – the relatedness of continuous motion – will depend on the extent to which the discrepancy between what is to be disclosed and the form of disclosure can be reduced and ultimately overcome: movement as the belonging together of the archai in and as a continuous whole must be brought to light itself in the movement of discourse. This cannot be in the usual thematic sense, which treats movement as a thing and thereby achieves only an ontic grasp of its relational character. Yet it also needs to be more than just the

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exemplification of movement in dialogical form of dialectic; ultimately, and contrary to a widely accepted view, this is no more than a mimetic repetition, a translation of the relational character of movement into the movement of discourse, but not a presentation of movement itself. Rather than merely setting language in motion through the problematization of concepts and a recognition of the dynamic character of dialogue, Heidegger is urging his readers to consider the development of a new philosophical language. Nous needs to be present within logos in such a way that it does not relinquish the possibilities of disclosure specific to it; as Heidegger notes, as long as the noein at work in phronesis and sophia is meta logou, it remains distinct from ‘sheer dialegesthai’ (GA19 142: 98): ‘There is alive in it something like pure noein . . . beyond the legein and logizesthai and yet in connection with them . . .’ (GA19 145: 100). The conjunction of nous and logos must occur as a continuous movement.

Philosophy and the relation between phronesis and sophia Turning now to Aristotle, we find that his conception of the movement of philosophical enquiry is twofold. It begins from our perception of a concrete individual substance (e.g. the horse, the man), which one then ‘passes’ or ‘runs’ through towards the broader scope of sophia, a knowledge of the whole determined by one’s grasp of the archai. The archai themselves – as eschata – cannot be understood (spoken of) via the ‘as-structure’ characteristic of the logos, but only grasped (seen) by nous (GA19 180: 124). Conversely, thinking also turns from the generality of the whole established on the basis of the archai to arrive at a complete and articulated grasp of the particular. The movement of understanding or thinking in this way mediates between the whole and the particular. In its fullest form, this knowledge is sophia, the sense of wisdom relating to the cosmos as a whole. Aristotle’s distinction between phronesis and sophia is understood to have ‘liberated’ sophia from the confusion and contingency of everyday life, while at the same time opening up the possibility of a form of practical reason specific to human existence. What is less often noted is that the separation of sophia also frees up phronesis in ways that interest Heidegger specifically with regard to ontology. For phronesis, like sophia, comprises a moment of nous, but one directed towards the grasp of the concrete particularity of a given situation. If thinking were to begin from a grasp of the particular in some neutral grasp of sense data, then a simple aisthesis might suffice. But Heidegger, following Husserl, describes the way in which, as we compile

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a series of perceptions by moving around an object, ‘every single phase of perception in the whole of the continuous sequence is in itself a full perception of the thing’ (GA20 82: 60–61). What might otherwise have remained isolated profiles are embedded in the simplicity of the intentional object, and the thing is disclosed as what it is. What is given in perception thereby goes beyond the object of an isolated aisthesis, and does so by virtue of the continuity that articulates the instance of nous within perception. This much, Heidegger already draws straight from Husserl. However, as I shall suggest in a moment, the separation of phronesis in Aristotle means that Heidegger can develop this same idea, but in a way opened up to Dasein’s Being-in-the-world and less narrowly based on the theoretical attitude. For Heidegger, the immediate grasp of the particular as it shows itself to us is where the instance of nous within phronesis is important because it secures the prelogical givenness of things in the concreteness of their situation, and not as already an abstract determination of a being as objective or as the culmination of a supplementary synthesis. 14 In this way, the separation of phronesis and sophia in Aristotle establishes the possibility of two instances of nous: the first directed towards the formal universality of the whole (one) in sophia, and the other directed towards concrete particularity in phronesis. Taken together, they offer the prospect of a disclosure in which: beings, according to the basic modes of their Being, are ultimately disclosed and become graspable ep amphotera (Nic Eth. VI, 12, 1143a35f), ‘from both sides’ up to their archai. On the basis of their being related to the archai, phronesis and sophia are the highest possibilities of the disclosure of beings themselves. (GA19 164: 113) Since the two instances of nous remain split between phronesis and sophia, the possibility of an ontological enquiry conducted via nous depends on their successful conjunction. In effect, Heidegger applauds Aristotle for separating these two modes of disclosure, only then to work at drawing them back together again. However, the resulting relation will inevitably comprise the difference that has been introduced between them, and this difference is all-important here. For Heidegger, the accomplishment of an ontological enquiry involving both phronesis and sophia must avoid the reduction of either one to the other. Rather, thinking occurs between them as complementary elements. This is akin to what Aristotle denotes by metabainon: the movement ‘through’ what is familiar towards a grasp of the whole in view of which the particular will itself be disclosed more fundamentally.

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The picture is complicated by the fact that the first moment of nous is lodged in phronesis. For not only does phronesis concern the existence of the individual as a whole, it is itself embedded in the concrete praxis of human existence. It is not a form of knowledge that is prior to or in any way separable from the situation of the acting being. Insofar as philosophy combines the noetic moments of phronesis and sophia, it must therefore exceed the bounds of theoria as an exclusive activity held apart from the everyday concerns of existence. In spite of the disinterestedness characteristic of sophia, the movement of thinking is therefore neither remote from human existence, nor directed beyond human existence, but rather traverses human existence as such as an excessive moment necessarily planted in the concreteness of human concerns, action and decision by virtue of phronesis.15 In this way, the identification of a disclosive moment in nous other than that which occurs via the logos has a twofold effect. On the one hand it opens the possibility of an ‘ontological’ relation to the Being of beings carried out via theoria. But on the other hand, by virtue of its genesis in concrete situations, it is also responsible for the reintegration of such a relation into the existence of the individual as a whole. By way of illustration, one may consider the case of categorial intuition, which is responsible for the disclosure of ontological principles or archai such as ‘unity’, ‘plurality’, ‘thisness’ that are not themselves primarily objects of sensory intuition or perception.16 In spite of this independence of ‘pure’ categorial intuitions from sensory content, they remain founded. This is to say, there cannot be a pure categorial intuition that is wholly independent of content organized by the structure so intuited. Categorial intuitions in each case ‘rest’ on a sensory basis, insofar as they are always ‘an explication of something already given’ (GA20 94: 69). In turn, the nature of the act upon which categorial intuition rests is anything but simple. As became evident above, each apparently simple perception contains far more than the immediate data. My access in each case proceeds out of my concerned involvement with the things around me, a kind of sight or intuition that Heidegger calls ‘circumspection’ (Umsicht).17 In this way, even ‘pure’ categorial intuition is embedded within the concreteness of Dasein’s everyday concerns; which should not be surprising, given that the aim of fundamental ontology is precisely to radicalize the ‘pre-ontological understanding of Being’ that belongs to Dasein into a thematic ontology (SZ 15: 35), a task whose accomplishment cannot involve the separation of theoria from the milieu in which it arises, and so cannot involve casting off the ontic foundation of ontology (SZ §4). In this way, Heidegger’s critique of dialectic in Plato’s dialogues, developed in view of Aristotle’s conception of phronesis and sophia, is not just the reflection of

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a dispute within philosophy. It also raises important questions regarding the relation between philosophy and the ethical or practical life. Does the reintegration of sophia and phronesis simply serve to remind us of the essential finitude of human philosophizing, that is, the impossibility of ‘pure’ theoria? Does it lead to the subsumption of ethical life under the project of ontology? Or can one begin to see a closer and more original relation between ethics and ontology?

Ethical and ontological significations of the agathon At the heart of such questions is the relation between Being and the good, and there is an equivocality in Heidegger’s attitude towards this. I have stressed the importance for Heidegger of a close relation between sophia and phronesis, and thereby between ontology and ethics, yet he is also concerned to avoid their relation allowing for the reintroduction of an ontical interpretation of Being. This insistence on keeping the ontological and the ethical apart, might be regarded as evidence that Heidegger never fully engaged with Plato’s thought, insofar as it is from Plato that we learn the impossibility of characterizing the good in either exclusively ontological or ethical terms.18 Yet if Heidegger struggled to find a single settled position on the matter, this is not a consequence of his having missed something in Plato. On the contrary, his separation of the ethical and ontological significations of the agathon conceals a measure of agreement with Plato over its undecidability. At the same time, he was also aware of the dangers inherent in Plato’s own articulation of the problem – most especially, with regard to the treatment of the gene, and ultimately even the agathon itself, as ideas. Heidegger’s equivocation over the agathon – whether it is to be equated with Being or dismissed as an ontic interpretation of ground – reflects uncertainty on his part as to whether it is possible to salvage an interpretation of the good beyond Being as opening up the question of the truth of Being without paying too dearly in other respects. It seems that in the end he concludes that it was not possible, or at least that the price was too high.19 If the agathon is treated as an idea, then an ontic interpretation will follow in which it is either equated with hypostasized onto-theological understanding of Being, or else given a purely ethical sense that fails to do justice to the important metaphysical problems at stake. As long as the perspective on ideas remains unchanged, nothing is gained by the recognition of an undecidability between ethical and ontological interpretations, as this would merely merge perspectives that were ill-conceived at the outset. To say

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that the undecidability follows from the fact that the ethical and ontological significations of the agathon are inseparable in this sense is moreover to assume a congruence between the human and the broader ontology of non-human beings. By contrast, the real drama and tension of metaphysical thinking arises from the necessity with which the totality of beings is disclosed within the finitude of Dasein, while the transcendence of Dasein reaches towards beings as a whole, as what exceeds its own Being. To say that Heidegger’s refusal to admit an ethico-practical significance to the agathon represents his insistence on the outright separation of ontology and ethics is therefore to tell only half the story. This separation, itself a precondition for a radicalized account of the transcendence of Dasein, is simply a step that has to be made to avoid the reductive tendency implicit within their equation. To speak of the interpretation of the agathon as ‘undecided’ is in this way to acknowledge a separation between significations, while at the same time conceding that one cannot distinguish the significations sufficiently to provide an objective account of the relation between them. It is this difficulty in thematizing their relation that lies at the basis of the undecidability between the ethical and the ontological significations of the agathon. The conception of movement associated with the translation between the noetic moments of phronesis and sophia plays an interesting role in this respect. Heidegger was certainly struck by the way that Aristotle describes human existence as characterized by the desire to see and to know, a desire that is ultimately accomplished in the philosophical life. Phronesis and sophia are thereby linked by their belonging in common to a movement of human existence, something that Heidegger himself would describe in terms of their both being possibilities of Dasein as a being with the single ontological, and temporal, structure of care. It remains true, however, that Heidegger seems happy to go along with a certain subordination of the ethical-practical to the ontological. For if the ethical and the ontological are related by virtue of their belonging to a single movement, it is a movement accomplished in sophia and theoria. However, while this suggests that the full potential of human existence is only realized in theoria, it does not necessarily mean that phronesis and praxis are marginalized or otherwise emptied of significance. On the one hand, it can be argued that within human existence conceived as a single movement phronesis is inevitably assimilated to sophia, relegating the ethical and practical dimension to a secondary position or rank.20 As phronesis is ontologized, the argument goes, its ethical and practical content are left behind. But this misunderstands the nature of the ‘movement’ involved. The movement in which the ethical

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and the practical are implicated may culminate in the ontological, but this does not mean that the ethical and the practical are simply superseded. According to Heidegger’s reading, the movement by which the ethical and the practical are related to the ontological must be characterized by continuity, and this means that the practical and the ontological are held together in a shared dimension. Phronesis and sophia belong together by virtue of a movement whose accomplishment precisely does not entail a break with its point of departure. Indeed one could only draw such a conclusion on two related conditions: first, that the movement of human existence (in the present case, that between phronesis and sophia) were linear and the connection between elements successive; a reading that I have argued against here, that would not achieve a properly ontological perspective on the movement involved, and which Heidegger’s own work avoids by way of his account of original temporality: second, that one insisted on a conception of ethics comprising a positive determination of the good life (prefiguring a possible value-based conception of the ethical), thereby rendering an exclusive disjunction between the ethical and the ontological not merely possible, but inevitable. But in what then does the exclusiveness of theoria consist? What is it that is made thematic in theoria? It is, writes Heidegger in paraphrase of Aristotle, the malista episteton (GA19 122: 84; MET I.3, 982a30–31), which he glosses as that ‘which most of all turns knowledge into something genuinely formative’. This ‘ultimate’ is a ‘hou heneka’ (for-the-sake-of-which), a telos and an agathon. It ‘provides insight about that for the sake of which each single thing is to be accomplished precisely in such and such a way’ (GA19 122: 84, 982b5–6), and it is of course sophia that asks after such an agathon. Sophia itself, by virtue of the fact that its thematic object is not in turn the means towards any further end, is ‘guiding and autonomous’. On the one hand, then, sophia aims at an agathon, and is thereby revealed as a praxis: yet on the other hand it is not ‘for’ anything. In essence, the tension between these two determinations is resolved by differentiating the agathon as an object of theoria from the agathon prakton, which continues to orient praxis in its usual (restricted) sense. However, it is the nature of this distinction as Aristotle makes it that interests Heidegger here: what is most important is not simply that for Aristotle the agathon is an aition but that he succeeded in showing for the first time that the agathon is nothing else than an ontological character of beings: it applies to those beings which are determined by a telos. To the extent that a being reaches its telos and is complete, it is as it is meant to be, eu. The agathon has at first

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no relation to praxis at all; instead it is a determination of beings insofar as they are finished, com-plete. (GA19 123: 84–85).21 The agathon is ‘ontological’ in character insofar as it speaks of a ‘way of being’ proper to a given being: namely, that way of being which would constitute the telos of such a being. The agathon therefore determines as ‘good’ the accomplishment of an activity or movement, regardless of what that movement may be: the good is ‘being-at-an-end’, or ‘fulfilment’. This determination of the agathon is therefore purely formal, wholly without positive ethical content. Consequently, when Heidegger declares there to be ‘a comportment that, as theoretical, presents the correct relation to the agathon’ (GA19 124: 85), and that the agathon ‘is not a prakton’, he is not saying that phronesis and praxis are unrelated to the agathon properly understood. The agathon is not a prakton because to be a prakton is to be a being with a determinate character: to be this or that. The agathon therefore has no direct ethical interpretation: it does not yield a specific goal or orientation for action. As a declaration of the formal condition of accomplishment, it indicates that the accomplishment of human existence will lie in the achievement of a given relation to its end. While the agathon in its highest sense may be the condition for the agathon prakton, in that it is the original determination of goodness, it does not stand above the agathon prakton as a separable entity in its own right. The ‘purity’ of the agathon as a theme of theoria is therefore due not to its existence in a realm apart, but to its ‘universality’ as a formal characteristic of all beings that participate in movement. Its ‘separation’ is the result of an abstraction that, as in geometrical method, takes what is seen ‘out of’ its place without assuming that it must therefore be placed elsewhere.22 If, as Heidegger believes, the archai are ways of being, then treating them as objects of intuition set apart from the order they are supposed to ground will inevitably compromise their disclosure, once again obscuring the question of their relation to that order: that is, it would privilege the differentia at the expense of the difference itself. This is an inevitable consequence of treating the ideas ontically as beings, and in the process relegating movement to an eidos or genus that must then be combined with others. The separation of the object of intuition from the order it grounds is reflected in the enclosure of intuition itself as an act independent of dialectic, which is then regarded as ‘preparatory’. Yet this separation of nous from logos is of course precisely what Heidegger (following Aristotle) rejected in his own characterization of noein as inescapably dianoein. The implication of nous in the logos complicates the claim that the disclosure of the archai in intuition

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comes after the dialectical logos in a distinct phase of enquiry. Once nous is implicated in the logos, so the moment of disclosure or truth it effects must itself be carried out through the very movement of dialectic itself. It has already become clear that in Heidegger’s view Platonic dialectic is unable to do this, by virtue of its inadequate conceptualization of movement. However, one should not assume in advance that the movement of dialectic (as opposed to the idea of movement thematized as a result of dialectic) itself need be regarded as a threat to the purity of the intuition (and thereby as an obstacle to be surmounted). For it is precisely movement, as relation, that must be disclosed. The problem is that since movement does not exist in and of itself, independently of moving things, it must be approached by way of moving things. Yet Heidegger also tells us that the disclosure of the particular tends to occur at the expense of the horizon against which it becomes intelligible, namely movement itself.

Errancy, continuity and the movement of philosophy Heidegger explores this dilemma in the essay ‘On the Essence of Truth’ through the idea of errancy. The disclosure of specific beings so absorbs our attention, he writes, that not only is the horizon of beings as a whole concealed, but we forget that this concealment has even taken place. ‘Errancy’ is this forgottenness, this concealment of concealment.23 It is not, he emphasizes, some casual mistake, but rather a central element in the destiny of the metaphysical tradition to which we belong, and an ineliminable feature of the constitution of Dasein itself (WM 92: 150). All the more reason to be alarmed, therefore, when one recognizes that the apparently exclusive disjunction between the respective disclosure of specific beings and beings as a whole implies the impossibility of the reintegration that we have suggested Heidegger sought between the noetic moments of phronesis and sophia. Insofar as errancy is the turning away from beings as a whole towards the specific being, it is akin to the enactment of the very relation required – yet in a manner that forgets itself. However, Heidegger suggests that this forgetting may be mitigated insofar as Dasein can become aware of its errancy. This cannot involve Dasein’s holding a given being and beings as a whole present together in a single intuition. Rather, it may be achieved, Heidegger suggests, ‘by experiencing errancy itself’ (WM 93: 151). It is therefore in the experience of errancy, and more precisely in Dasein’s experience of its own experience of errancy, that the disjunction between the given and its horizon of the givenness is bridged.

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Yet what form does this bridge take? What is it to experience errancy? It must involve, it seems, a recognition of the inevitability with which the disclosure of particular beings is accompanied by the concealment of beings as a whole. Given the impossibility of a thematic grasp of both elements at once, as long as one remains oriented towards particular beings the experience of errancy as errancy will involve the concealment of beings as a whole becoming evident without appearing as the object of an intuition. Philosophical thinking, writes Heidegger, comprises an ‘openness that does not disrupt the concealing, but entreats its unbroken essence into the open region of understanding and thus into its own truth’ (WM 94–95: 152). The entreaty takes the form of a question; or rather, a ‘questioning’ in which beings as a whole are brought into question as what remains concealed. Yet insofar as beings as a whole are disclosed ‘as’ what remains concealed, their disclosure adheres to the pattern of the logos in which things show themselves ‘as something’. In this case, however, the only possible determination of beings as a whole by the logos is as that which does not show itself ‘as’ anything at all. In this way, the experience of errancy involves the logos itself encountering its limit. It is here that the logos most nearly accomplishes its appointed task of standing in for the pure noein that it must mediate, and thereby inevitably disrupt. However, to be drawn into this questioning is not for the relation between the particular being and beings as a whole to be disclosed thematically, but rather for the relation between them to be brought to light in, or indeed as, the very movement that Dasein itself undergoes through the experience. Heidegger then adds the following remark. This questioning thinks the question of the Being of beings, a question that is essentially misleading and thus in its manifold meaning is still not mastered. The thinking of Being, from which such questioning originarily stems, has since Plato been understood as ‘philosophy’, and later received the title ‘metaphysics’. (WM 94: 151–152; italics in the original) That the question of the Being of beings is ‘essentially misleading’ recalls the importance of the experience of errancy as a movement relating the particular being and beings as a whole to one another. In addition, however, Heidegger implies that the tradition of metaphysical thinking has not ‘mastered’ the meaning of this question, which is to say that metaphysics has not experienced errancy as errancy. In Plato, the dimension of errancy resides in the undecidability within the interpretation of the agathon. As ‘beyond Being’, it serves as a necessary

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horizon for opening the question of Being: yet this possible opening is foreclosed and concealed insofar as the agathon is treated as a being, and subsequently even as value.24 If thinking fails to recognize the ambiguity within the agathon, it will remain outside the dimension of errancy in which the thinking of Being occurs – in which, that is, the ontological difference stops being a concept and becomes an experience and a movement for thinking to undergo. Heidegger’s concern is that Plato’s thinking, however rich, cannot proceed beyond a conceptual relation to that which lies beyond beings, and as such is condemned to err unwittingly, errantly, oblivious to the experience of errancy. To regard Heidegger’s approach to the problem of the agathon in terms of a simple dichotomy between ontological and (ontic) ethical interpretations is therefore itself a symptom of the neglect or forgetfulness of errancy characteristic of metaphysics. What Heidegger’s indecision with regard to the characterization of the agathon in ontological or ethical terms indicates is less a failure to encounter Plato’s thought, than a struggle to avoid this dichotomy being experienced as a dilemma between mutually exclusive alternatives: a struggle, that is, to resist the tide of forgetfulness that has overcome metaphysical thinking. In Aristotle, on the other hand, Heidegger finds the resources for a positive development of the problems Plato had laid bare. First, the dimension of what might here be called errancy is opened up by the division between phronesis and sophia. Their separation promises clarity in the link between the particular and whole, which it seems might now be held together in the relation between the two forms of disclosure. His recognition of an instance of truth in nous prior to that given via logos is vital to this endeavour. Ironically, however, Heidegger’s radicalization of this insight, and most especially his emphasis on the moment of nous in phronesis, actually forestalls the constitution of a purely ontological ‘sight’ by leading to the reintegration of the disclosive moment into concrete human existence. In addition, however, Aristotle provided the conceptual tools for articulating movement as itself the medium in which the coexistence of distinct determinations of being (and non-being) belong together. Heidegger draws on these tools in his own articulation of the movement constitutive of the ontological difference, while at the same time recognizing that this articulation cannot remain a purely conceptual matter. The embeddedness of phronesis, and specifically its noetic moment of disclosure, within concrete human existence ensures this. To the extent that the Platonic conception of dialectic remains preparatory to the intuition of the gene as objects of intuition, it stops at the very point that Heidegger would have the movement of thinking truly

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begin: the point, that is, where thinking itself undergoes the movement by which the ontic and the ontological are bound together in a relation of sameness and difference.25 The description of this movement as ‘continuous’ tells us that it cannot be broken down into distinct parts or phases without disturbing the intimacy of the relation indicated by the notion of continuity itself. Indeed, if there is a temptation to understand the accomplishment of the ethico-practical in ontology as an eclipse or abandonment of the ethico-practical, this is due in the main to a genuine difficulty in articulating the relation indicated by a ‘continuous movement’ without reducing the relation of its ‘parts’ either to identity or homogeneity (conjunction of agathon prakton and agathon: conjunction of phronesis and sophia), or to the succession of one after the other (the separation of the agathon prakton and the agathon: the separation of phronesis and sophia).26 It is through its refusal to be bound by the terms of this dichotomy that Heidegger’s reading demands that we keep open the question of the movement associated with thinking.27 This acknowledgement of the essential finitude of philosophizing provides new insights into the relation between ontological thinking and ethical life. Not only does it expose the deeply problematic nature of any claim to be able to move freely from ethical life to ontology or vice versa, it also shows the naivety of supposing that the two perspectives may be simply set apart and treated separately. It demonstrates that the task of exhibiting the movement characteristic of Being in its continuity cannot be undertaken apart from the practice of existing. In the same way, the problems of ontology should animate, and be animated within, one’s existence as a whole, with all the risks of weakness, forgetfulness and partiality that this entails.

Chapter 2

To Think as Mortals: Heidegger and the Finitude of Philosophical Existence

The ontic foundation of ontology and the art of existence The relation between philosophy and the existence of Dasein is a recurrent theme in Heidegger’s writing. Analyses of anxiety, conscience and resoluteness sit alongside reminders of the demands made by a philosophical life and calls for commitment on the part of his students. It is not just that philosophy is difficult or time consuming. For Heidegger, there is an unbreakable link between philosophy and the existence of Dasein, insofar as the temporal horizon for the disclosure of Being is to be elicited from the existence of Dasein itself, in and through which the ontological difference occurs. Fundamental ontology rests on an ‘ontic foundation’ (SZ §4). Moreover, fundamental ontology depends for its success on the extent to which Heidegger’s philosophical analysis can preserve the dimension of the ontological difference, while at the same time affirming the necessity of the relation between the ontic and the ontological. The recognition of this necessity, which informs the problematic of Being and Time, amounts to an acknowledgement that philosophy itself is inextricably linked to the finitude of human existence: to its temporality, affectivity, understanding and above all to its mortality. It is for this reason that in Heidegger’s view philosophy cannot be undertaken as a specialism abstracted or otherwise set apart from one’s existence as a whole. Even as we read denials that authenticity is ethically privileged, it is plain that Heidegger regards philosophy as making extraordinary demands on the individual. Indeed, the ‘involvement’ and ‘engagement’ it demands are such as to require the ‘illusion, as it were, that the given task at hand is the one and only necessary task’; to accomplish anything at all one must, says Heidegger, have acquired that ‘art of existing’ (Existierkunst) by which this illusion of necessity sustained within the finitude of existence (GA26 201: 158). Given that Heidegger regards philosophy as a distinctive possibility essential to the existence of Dasein as such,

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two questions present themselves. First, what are the repercussions for philosophy of its ontic foundation in the existence of Dasein? Second, does the activity of philosophy represent the accomplishment of the existence of each individual Dasein? To these, perhaps a third may also be added: namely, why is the unique ‘necessity’ of philosophy said by Heidegger to be an ‘illusion’? To approach these questions, I shall return to the issue of phronesis and sophia that was addressed in Chapter 1. Considering this relation in the light of the ontic foundation of ontology, and the accompanying interest in the mutual implication of philosophy and existence, will help to clarify both on Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle and, above all, his understanding of the finitude of philosophy as a practice.

Phronesis and sophia In the course of making the case for sophia as the crowning accomplishment of a good life, Aristotle exhorts us, in line with the overarching teleology that governs his philosophy, not to be satisfied with the Euripidean advice to think as mortals, but rather to be true to the highest, divine, element within our souls.1 The opposition between phronesis and sophia is thereby aligned with that between the human and the divine, the mortal and the immortal. Their crossing, which is never a reduction or subordination, poses the question of mortality in relation to philosophy. In view of Heidegger’s acknowledgement of the implication of philosophy in the finitude of human existence, we can reconsider this interrelation of the human and the divine, the mortal and the immortal, and ask: In what way do the mortal and the immortal give on to one another and what trace does their border leave in the project of philosophy itself? I shall approach this question initially by setting out a reading of phronesis and sophia as complementary to one another. This complementarity is, I shall suggest, implicitly deepened in Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle and reflected in a still more radical form in Heidegger’s own philosophical writing in the light of his formulation of a response to the ontic foundation of fundamental ontology. As Heidegger works through the full implications of this rootedness in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the impossibility, at once necessary and damaging, of releasing the ontological enquiry from its ontic foundation in the existence of Dasein begins to make itself felt. Most especially, this rootedness contributes to the reversal of fundamental ontology into what in Heidegger’s text is called ‘metontology’, a reversal by virtue of which ontology is accomplished in an existentiell dimension of questioning.2

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Phronesis is the disposition that ensures sound reasoning ‘in relation to things that are good and bad for human beings’ (NE 1140b6). Moreover, it is concerned not with a single region of one’s activity, but with the wellbeing of Dasein as a whole (to eu zen holon), that is, with eudaimonia or eupraxia (1140a28–32). In Heidegger’s idiom, it denotes Dasein’s relation to its existence as a whole. Though a form of self-relation, phronesis is not a reflexive modification of one’s relation to objects, that is, of the relation that obtains in the case of techne. The arche of techne is the image that is held in advance by the agent and which must then govern the formation of the raw material into the actual result. One could therefore describe techne as a form of knowledge that relates the individual agent to the work he or she sets out to produce. The adaptation of this model to the case of self-relation leads to the treatment of oneself as at once the raw material and the finished article. Because techne treats its object primarily in isolation from its context, such an approach leads to a piecemeal and essentially exclusive relation (hence models of consciousness that begin with a conception of self-consciousness based on this form of relation tend to be dogged by the problem of solipsism). By contrast, phronesis does not depend on the capacity to imprint one’s design and, which amounts to the same thing, it does not begin with the agent as such. Both its arche and its telos lie within the situation of activity itself (1140b17) and phronesis has in each case to be accomplished in and through the act of choice (prohairesis) and its articulation in praxis. Consequently, phronesis does not have the detachment from its object characteristic of the representational relation proper to techne, a point worth bearing in mind when reading Heidegger’s translation of Aristotle’s definition of phronesis (1140b21–22) as ‘a disposition (Gestelltsein) of human Dasein such that in it I have at my disposal my own transparency’ (GA19 53: 37). Dasein’s self-transparency arises only insofar as phronesis ‘makes an activity transparent in itself’ (GA19 53: 37) and for this to happen phronesis has to make the situation of activity accessible by securing the hou heneka or final end, which is the ‘eu’ of eudaimonia, or the agathon prakton. This is not itself a universal of any kind, but precisely the particular (ekaston) that phronesis is to disclose in the very situation itself. It is through this disclosure that the act for which the situation calls is revealed in its turn. Everything depends, therefore, on the capacity of phronesis to grasp the singularity of the situation in which Dasein finds itself – which phronesis achieves by virtue of the moment of intuition, nous, that it comprises. Securing the arche of activity in this way, Dasein sees how to accomplish the disclosure (aletheuein) proper to phronesis, by which it is at the same time delivered over to itself in a moment of individuation.

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Phronesis, therefore, designates a relation to one’s own existence as a whole that is not mediated by the singularity of the situation in which one finds oneself so much as precipitated by it (GA19 §22a). To exercise phronesis, then, is to act knowing both that one cannot prescind from acting and that one cannot remain anonymous behind one’s actions. It is to reason about one’s life in such a way as to accept responsibility for one’s future, since not everything is possible in the finite time that we have at our disposal and therefore one must choose. To engage in phronesis is to acknowledge one’s own finitude, one’s own mortality. Aristotle’s most complete account of sophia is to be found not in the Nicomachean Ethics but in the Metaphysics, where it is introduced by way of comparison with experience and knowledge (980b25–983a23). Those whose acquaintance with a certain field of activity is restricted to theoretical knowledge alone will generally be at a disadvantage with respect to those whose ability derives instead from experience. This is because theoretical knowledge deals with universals, whereas the experienced eye picks out the individual cases, and ‘the physician does not cure man, except in an incidental way, but Callias or Socrates or some other such individual name, who happens to be a man’ (MET 981a17–20).3 Sophia comprises both knowledge and experience. Accordingly, master craftsmen were commonly thought to be wise precisely because they could tell not only what to do but also why to do it. In effect, Aristotle extends the scope of this common conception from specific pursuits to the widest possible horizons, and this comprehensiveness serves as a point of departure from which Aristotle sets out four features that mark sophia off from the other forms of knowledge (982a8–9): (1) the sophos knows all things, though without having detailed acquaintance with each of them; (2) the sophos can learn things that are difficult and does not rely on the sense alone; (3) the sophos has a more fundamental grasp of things and is better able to teach their causes; and (4) sophia is desirable on its own account and not on account of its results. By the first of these features Aristotle does not mean that the sophos apprehends things case by case in a feat of obstinate encyclopaedic passion. The particular cannot be grasped fully in and of itself, since the primary mode of access to things is aisthesis, which as Heidegger emphasizes, ‘contains little or nothing of beings themselves’ (GA19 84: 58). Aisthesis discloses only the particular (ekaston), whereas ‘The way on which beings are uncovered in their most proper Being thus proceeds from the kath ekaston and passes through it (metabainon), to the katholou’ (GA19 86: 59).4 The term ‘katholou’ is usually rendered by ‘universal’. However, Heidegger deliberately avoids this expression, presenting instead a reading of katholou

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as at once the totality disclosed via the logos (holon legomenon) and the integral character conferred upon a thing by its involvement in that totality (GA19 88–89: 61). If Dasein is to gain an understanding of all things, it must first overcome an inherent tendency to remain entranced by the spectacle of whatever is before its eyes and turn its attention to the totality of beings as such. That this requires a positive and even strenuous effort accounts for the difficulty attached to sophia (second point). However, if the impulse to go beyond the particular begins with what, in Heidegger’s translation of the Greek procheira, openly ‘von der Hand liegt’ (is at one’s disposal, lies to hand) (982b13; GA19 126: 87), it soon leads Dasein away from its everyday concern to ‘higher things’. Returning to the particular from the horizon of the totality of beings, the sophos is able to see things not as they proximally appear, but according to their first principles and is thus better able to pass on knowledge of what they are (third point). Explication of the fourth point requires a closer look at the nature of the agathon and the way in which it becomes accessible to knowledge. In this regard, Heidegger applauds Aristotle for having shown: that the agathon is nothing else than an ontological character of beings: it applies to those beings which are determined by a telos. To the extent that a being reaches its telos and is complete, it is as it is meant to be, eu. (GA19 123: 84; italics mine) By endorsing a reading of the eu as rooted firmly in teleology and the relation of beings to change, Heidegger underlines that the agathon as such is contrasted with the Platonic idea of the good as a distinct and separable form in itself. However, if in Aristotle the agathon is distinguished from the Platonic idea of the good, this is not to say that it is assimilated to the agathon prakton (1096b30–31). As Heidegger is careful to remind us, theoria, not phronesis, is the proper mode of access to the agathon (GA19 124: 85). The crucial point is that the agathon is not to be treated as a quasi-entity of any kind, but rather as a purely formal designation of fulfilment or ‘beingat-an-end’. The agathon, therefore, is neither a transcendent ideal, nor anything that can be done (a prakton or ergon). If, as Aristotle proposes, the agathon is understood to be an arche, it is disclosed in theoria simply as arche and not as the arche of a specific act or form of knowledge, as in the case of activity. This helps to detach the agathon from the world of human affairs and thereby to determine that knowledge of it in the form of sophia cannot be put to practical use and must be sought for its own sake alone (the fourth point).

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The question of the priority of phronesis and sophia Describing what we are as human beings in terms of phronesis and sophia inevitably leads to the question of their priority: which of them is the highest or most fundamental determination? There is no doubt that Aristotle regarded sophia as superior to phronesis (1143b33). This has proved a hurdle to those who would defend an inclusivist reading of eudaimonia (of the good life as a whole) and regard Heidegger’s apparent elevation of sophia as a concession to a more orthodox Platonic agenda by virtue of which the more radical possibilities opened by Aristotle’s text (such as the non-theoretical character of practical reason) are diminished. Heidegger seems to adhere to the letter of Aristotle’s text here and (according to one reading at least) follows Aristotle himself in breaking with its spirit. The disappointment evoked by this is sharpened by Aristotle’s own rejection of the Euripidean view that mortals should have mortal thoughts and his enjoinder to live in accordance with what is highest in human being. Yet we should beware of engaging the question at face value, for it does not come down to a straightforward choice between exclusive alternatives, especially when the categories in question are as problematic and changeable as the ‘human’ and the ‘divine’. Indeed, if what is most plainly at stake so far is the structure of transcendence within which philosophical thinking unfolds, it will soon become evident that the traditional roles of the human and the divine within such a structure are themselves placed in question. A sensitivity to this issue will make possible a more nuanced and less partial reading of Aristotle’s text, allowing the opposition between a retrieval of radical praxis and an endorsement of the priority of theoria to be undone. Although Heidegger entertains the view that phronesis may have priority on account of the fact that it is concerned with the arche of the existence of Dasein itself and as a whole (GA19 §19), he also recognizes that phronesis is compromised by this same point. As he underlines: ‘For Aristotle and the Greeks, as indeed for the tradition, the authentic being is that which always is and which is constantly already there’ (GA19 137: 94). By contrast, the arche of human existence is, like that existence itself, finite and temporal. It is ultimately on this simple fact of the ontological priority of the being with which it is concerned that the priority of sophia is settled. It has been persuasively argued that in recognizing sophia as the supreme virtue over and above phronesis Heidegger complies with a tendency to ‘Platonise’ or even ‘hyper-Platonise’ Aristotle and thereby fails to exploit the more radical possibilities present within Aristotle’s own text.5 While Heidegger is frequently unequivocal in championing the practice of fundamental ontology

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over praxis in the specifically ethical sense, it is plainly not his intention simply to pit Plato against Aristotle. Indeed, the extent to which Heidegger appropriates motifs from the Nicomachean Ethics does raise expectations of a recognizably Aristotelian, that is anti-Platonic, accent. However, we shall see that it is misleading to cast the problem as a straightforward tussle for supremacy between phronesis and sophia, and once the limitation of this view is recognized, the charge that Heidegger suppressed the distinctively Aristotelian formulation of political activity falters. In the first place, we should acknowledge a basic sense in which Heidegger clearly does side with Aristotle against Plato. For Plato, phronesis signified knowledge about what is good for human beings. But this ‘practical’ knowledge was grounded in knowledge of the absolute good, whereupon phronesis also served as a name of philosophy as such. By distinguishing phronesis from sophia, Aristotle withdrew ethical and political activity from the domain of science and gave them an autonomous region of experience with a structure and form of reasoning of their own. In Aristotle, then, phronesis is not directly subordinate to sophia and, while it may be that Aristotle regarded the contemplation of the heavens as ultimately more rewarding, the vicissitudes of life in the polis are left to themselves. Since Heidegger adopts Aristotle’s definitions of phronesis and sophia, the same anti-Platonic current runs through his own readings, at least up to a point. There can be no straightforward subordination of phronesis to sophia. The fact that phronesis and sophia are recognized as the sole virtues at the head of their respective branches of the soul speaks against their being ordered in this way; the fact that sophia is ‘higher’ than phronesis does not imply the subsumption of political praxis under theoria, but simply describes their respective placement vis-à-vis human existence.6 The problem is one of assessing the coordination of two relatively autonomous concepts, between which there is no direct order of dependence. As Heidegger writes: ‘sophia is the other highest possibility of aletheuein, the second beliste hexis alongside phronesis’ (GA19 61: 42). However, while there may be no direct order of dependence, if Aristotle disengaged phronesis from sophia, and thus also the agathon prakton from the agathon in its absolute sense, this disengagement was by no means total – and the question of the relative weight attached to phronesis and sophia, above all in Heidegger, turns on the extent and manner of their interrelation. We have already seen that in the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle argues against the existence of a single idea of the good over and above its particular significations.7 In this denial of the separate existence of an idea of the good, he departs from Plato. But in what sense? It is easy to suppose that by

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diverting our gaze away from a putative absolute towards those goods relative to ‘concrete activity’, Aristotle is insisting on the demarcation between the human and the divine. In this way, Aristotle is often said to have tailored ethics to a human proportion. Yet by insisting on a rigid demarcation between the human and divine fields of possibility, one invites the very elevation of the divine over the human that advocates of a radicalized Aristotelian practical philosophy deplore. Such a reading effectively launches its opposition to Plato on the basis of the very residual Platonism it seeks to expunge: asserting the independence of the human from the divine in the name of anti-Platonism unwittingly hands priority back to the very power it resists. And as I have suggested, while Aristotle distinguishes here between the divine and the human, elsewhere the distinction is blurred by the presence of divinity within the human (1177b25, 1178a21–22) and by his own exhortation that human beings should pursue a divine science (982b27–983a11). Rather than trying to disentangle the human from the divine in an attempt to delimit the ‘properly’ human, identified as the source of a ‘radical’ Aristotelianism within the trappings of a Platonic science, it is worth considering the challenge posed to such a reading by the recognition that Aristotle’s text invites a rethinking of the human vis-à-vis the divine, of the mortal vis-à-vis the immortal.

Being-towards-death Success in phronesis involves a recognition of one’s mortality. By contrast, success in sophia seems to depend on the extent to which it can be insulated from the finitude of human existence as a whole.8 The possibility of theoria rests on the suppression, or at least the suspension, of mortality, by which one’s existence temporarily borrows the garb of the divine. However, not only does the sense in which theoria is ‘divine’ become problematic, so does the purportedly human dimension to which Aristotle bids us confine our concern (i.e. as distinct from the absolute and universal idea of the Good). For if, as human, one is to set aside the absolute Good and seek a good within our reach, the pursuit of such a good nonetheless leads us beyond that which is ‘most human’ (1178a9–10). To bring eudaimonia, the good life, to fruition in sophia, one must cross the limit that runs between the human and the divine, between the mortal and the immortal. To live well ultimately requires that the dimension in which the possibilities most proper to the human be set aside. Yet our finitude, our mortality, dictates that this condition cannot be definitively left behind. As Aristotle concedes, our mortal condition will always reassert itself, its temporal dispersion

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disrupting the mimetic repetition of the divine achieved in theoria, and relegating the human individual to a less exalted life – the life of the body, but also that of ethics and politics (1177b31–35). To be human, then, is to transcend the purely human. Human being is, in effect, accomplished in a form of existence that is beyond the human (1177b27–28). This retains an air of paradox only as long as one insists on the isolation of the human from the divine as two quite distinct forms or states of being separated by a clear and untransgressible limit. Yet the mortal condition as Aristotle describes it is characterized precisely by the traversal of this limit. It is announced in both the initial possibility of transcendence represented by the divine activity of theoria, and in the resurgence of the body and of ethical life by which this fleeting immortality is disrupted. Indeed, it is the very passage between them that is the most truly human or mortal figure. As a consequence, our mortal condition is to be understood not in simple opposition to immortality, but rather in terms of the dimension between the mortal and the immortal, between the concern with practical affairs and the tentative grasp of eternal first principles.9 Central to Heidegger’s response to this classical opposition is his introduction of a conception of mortality in terms of Being-towards-death that inscribes the tension between praxis and theoria wholly within the finitude of human existence. To be mortal is to be capable of death, that is, capable of bearing oneself towards the ultimate and non-relational limit of one’s own existence (SZ 250–251: 294). Through a confrontation with its own mortality, Dasein is released from the grip of its everyday concerns. But in the same movement as Dasein is drawn away from its practical involvements, it is thrown back on the fact of its own Being-in-the-world as such. Facing the temporal horizons of its own existence, Dasein is able to grasp its own Being-a-whole. This in turn allows not just for a renewed relation to its own potentialities, but also for the possibility of a more ‘authentic’ relation to Being. Moreover, the coincidence of Dasein’s own temporal horizons with those of the clearing in which Being is disclosed means that Dasein’s confrontation with its own mortality in Being-towards-death is a moment of ‘crossing’, whereby Dasein’s concern with itself, its own being for-the-sakeof-itself, comprises at the same time its care for Being. It is only through being thrown back upon itself that it is opened to Being: that is, impelled to recollect that it had forgotten Being and thereby to think, to experience, that forgottenness itself. It is the very confrontation with mortality that allows Dasein’s concern for its own being to open onto a care for Being. In this way, the conditions of the human and the divine that (in spite of the complications surrounding the place of nous within human being) Aristotle had set in opposition, Heidegger openly draws into a coordinate relation.

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The resistance of praxis I noted earlier that the agathon in its absolute sense is not a Platonic idea and is inseparable from the order it grounds. However, I also said that it is precisely by virtue of the detachment of the agathon in its absolute sense from the world of human affairs (as indeed from the natural world) that sophia is accorded priority. How can one reconcile the apparently conflicting demands of inseparability and detachment? In fact, the problem only arises insofar as we continue to deploy a regional conception of detachment. Rather than understanding sophia as the study of a specific region of Being (unchanging arche), I have already argued that it as concerned with the katholou, with the totality. Accordingly, the detachment of sophia derives not from the exclusiveness of the agathon, but rather from the fact that it concerns the arche of the totality as such and is not circumscribed within any specific region. It is independent because it concerns the whole and not because it is cut off from the whole. Consequently, the agathon is not other-worldly. Its absoluteness arises through its connection with the totality of beings as such. Moreover this concern with the totality is itself linked to the distinctively Aristotelian withdrawal of ethical and political activity from the range of theory.10 For when Aristotle denies that the good is an independent absolute, he is not rejecting a conception of the good beyond being as such, but qualifying the notion of its independence along the lines traced out above. Access to the agathon, even as absolute, cannot proceed from nowhere, or from some ‘Archimedean’ point beyond the existence of that being for which it is a question. Pursuit of the agathon does not permit, still less entail, that the domain of human existence be left behind. The question cannot circumvent the ground of its possibility. The unsurpassable character of the questioning existence is encapsulated in Heidegger’s recognition of the ontic foundation of ontology in the existential analytic of Dasein. The purpose of the existential analytic is to secure the ontic foundation of the inquiry into the meaning of Being by making Dasein ontologically transparent in its facticity. However, the determination of Being achieved does not stand in isolation. Philosophy is universal phenomenological ontology, and takes its point of departure from the hermeneutic of Dasein, which, as an analytic of existence, has made fast the guiding line for all philosophical inquiry at the point where it arises and to which it returns. (SZ 38: 62; italics in the original)

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The accomplishment of universal phenomenology thereby depends on the success of the existential analytic. But can the existential analytic arrive at a definitive formulation of the structure of Dasein’s factical existence? How complete a presentation of Dasein’s factical existence can it achieve? How confident can Heidegger be in anticipating that this foundation will have been ‘made fast’? There are at least two reasons for caution. First, as Heidegger acknowledges, the inquiry is inevitably informed by a ‘factical ideal’ that eludes the grasp of the analysis (SZ 310: 358). One of the tasks of philosophy is gradually to map ‘with more and more penetration both the presuppositions themselves and that for which they are presuppositions’ (SZ 310: 358). This is an ongoing task and the inquiry into Being must return again and again to the existential analytic to continue the elaboration of its own basis. Second, if the task of the existential analytic is to secure the ontic foundation of the inquiry into Being, in what is the guiding line to be made fast? The ontic foundation is ultimately not the existential structures elicited by the analytic but rather the factical existence of Dasein itself that they present, and this existence is praxis. In the end, the fate of the inquiry into being hinges on its capacity to reduce to a minimum the disjunction between the existential analytic and the form and movement of factical existence itself. The most intractable obstacle to achieving this is quite simply the thematic character of the analytic; as Heidegger openly concedes, the language for such an account is lacking (SZ 38–39: 63). The resistance of praxis to thematic exposition marks the finitude of philosophical inquiry. Heidegger, rather than approaching this as an external limit, thereby consolidating the identity of philosophy, opens the body of philosophical inquiry to allow the inscription of finitude within its structure and practice. This bears not just on what philosophy can address or think as such, but on the very nature of its undertaking and its possible accomplishment. We have already seen that Heidegger acknowledges the difficulty encountered by the existential analytic in providing an articulation of the ontic foundation of ontology in a language still shaped by metaphysical tropes, and we have seen how this difficulty leads Heidegger to recognize the necessity of philosophy’s return to the foundation from which it arises. However, the characterization of the mortal condition in terms of passage and return across the putative limit separating the mortal from the immortal suggests this ascent and return of philosophy need not be conceived as a simple switch between alternative levels of analysis. Rather, philosophical thinking itself brings the ontic and the ontological into relation. In the ‘Letter on Humanism’ Heidegger looked back to Being and Time and speculated on why it had been impossible to complete the project as

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initially intended with the addition of a third division titled ‘Time and Being’. Here everything is reversed. The division in question was held back because thinking failed in the adequate saying of this turning [Kehre] and did not succeed with the help of the language of metaphysics. (WM 327–328: 249–250) The passage of thinking from the existential analytic through its repetition in view of the temporal structure of the existence of Dasein towards a determination of the temporality of Being itself remained incomplete, at least in part on account of two problems relating to the language of metaphysics. First, any representation of Being in language would treat it as a being and thereby obscure the ontological difference, concealing even the experience of the oblivion of Being which genuine thinking must have as a point of departure. Second, and perhaps most significantly here, representational language would also inevitably fail to render thematic the existence of Dasein that is the ontic foundation of ontology, since any thematization will lie outside of the dynamic of existence itself as lived; the best it can hope for is to present the structures through which this existence occurs. Nonetheless, the task of presenting the ontic foundation of ontology is inseparable from the experience of the ontological difference. This is not to say that the preliminary outline of the ontic foundation is already ontological in any definitive sense. Indeed, the experience of the ontological difference may take the form of an experience of its oblivion. The ‘presentation’ of the ontic foundation is thus itself conditional on the recognition of the impossibility of its final accomplishment and the necessity of its repetition: that is, on the movement thinking undergoes in view of this impossibility. The turn, therefore, is less a preliminary to the accomplishment of thinking than the movement of thinking itself in its finitude.

Metontology The imperative for the ontological project to return to the ontic is given a new twist in the Appendix to §10 of The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, which opens with a description of three phases in the overall project of fundamental ontology: (1) The interpretation of Dasein as temporality. (2) The temporal exposition of Being. (3) The development of the self-understanding of this problematic, its task and limits – the overturning (Umschlag ). The first

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phase corresponds to Being and Time as we know it, and the second to the projected second division of Being and Time that was never published, but which is tentatively presented in the final sections of Basic Problems of Phenomenology.11 The third stage, however, announces a further development. One might have imagined that the place and significance of the existential analytic within the project of fundamental ontology had been well established. However, it seems that Heidegger wished to revisit this question and the majority of the Appendix revolves around this issue. ‘What is meant here by “existence”?’ Heidegger asks (GA26 196: 154). The analysis of existence is described as ‘metaphysical history’ (GA26 196: 154), drawing our attention to the way in which the phenomenological analysis is allied to the destruction or dismantling of the history of metaphysics, and to how both this and the meaning of ‘humanitas’ are to be treated in view of the ‘full concept of metaphysics’ (GA26 196: 154).12 This is to say that existence, treated historically, is to be understood in terms of the character of Dasein as transcendence that forms the principal theme of the lecture course as a whole. Transcendence is the movement by which Dasein surpasses beings to open up the ontological difference and thereby the possibility of a relation to Being as such. Since existence itself comprises this opening of the dimension constituting the ontological difference, fundamental ontology is duly said to concern problems which ‘themselves belong to the existence of human beings, to the metaphysical essence of Dasein’ (GA26 196–197: 155). To clarify the relation between the existence of Dasein and philosophy, we need to look more closely at the nature of this belonging. Because philosophy is an affair of finitude, Heidegger continues, ‘every concretion of factical philosophy must in turn fall victim to this facticity’ (GA26 198: 156); and falling victim, it is obliged to renew its efforts endlessly. That this ‘intrinsic necessity for ontology to turn back to its point of origin’ is linked to the character of human existence as an understanding of Being through which the distinction between Being and beings occurs is familiar from the expositions of the structure of fundamental ontology to be found in Being and Time and other texts from the period. However, the remainder of the Appendix brings out a necessary moment of the structure of questioning that had not previously been given such explicit recognition: the possibility that being is there in the understanding presupposes the factical existence of Dasein, and this in turn presupposes the factual extantness of nature. Right within the horizon of the problem of being,

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when posed radically, it appears that all this is visible and can become understood as being, only if a possible totality of beings is already there. (GA26 199: 156–157) The opening of the ontological difference in the transcendence of Dasein presupposes not just Dasein itself, but also the totality of beings that Dasein surpasses, whose Being is thereby disclosed precisely as the theme of fundamental ontology. The totality of beings is given its own problematic, and it is this that we find termed ‘metontology’. Several key characteristics of metontology then emerge. First, it is in no way to be conceived as a meta-ontological project; nor can it be a ‘fixed discipline’ that will occupy a crowning place within a hitherto incomplete metaphysics. Indeed, Heidegger writes that such a place ‘is, in every philosophy, an occupied place, and it is in each case transformed’ (GA26 200: 157). That is, such a ‘crowning place’ is filled by some projection from the factical ideal to which every enquiry falls victim, and which is in turn transformed through the action of history and historically oriented thinking. Second, metontology is possible only along with a radical ontology. This conjunction is to be thought in the strongest terms, to the point where what is presented as twofold ‘is actually one’ (GA26 200: 157). Heidegger goes on to elaborate this idea, indicating that the second of the stages announced at the outset, the analysis of the temporality of Being, itself already comprises this third stage, the discipline named here as metontology: the temporal analysis is at the same time the turning-around (Kehre), where ontology itself expressly runs back into the metaphysical ontic in which it implicitly always remains. Through the movement of radicalizing and universalizing, the aim is to bring ontology to its latent overturning (Umschlag). Here the turn-around (Kehre) is carried out, and it is turned over into the metontology. (GA26 201: 158; italics mine) The movement towards the horizon of the temporality of Being is already a running back into the ontic in which it in fact always remains implicated.13 In view of this movement, apparently contradictory and at the least riven with a profound tension, one is bound to ask what is the place or dimension of such a questioning? Heidegger seems to provide something like an answer to this earlier in the Appendix. Having designated the set of questions regarding beings as a whole ‘metontology’, he writes ‘And here also, in the domain of metontological-existentiell questioning, is the domain of

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the metaphysics of existence (and here the question of an ethics may be properly raised for the first time)’ (GA26 199: 157). Insofar as the ontic foundation of ontology is not left behind, but carried along into the development of the ontological problematic, and insofar as the elaboration of the temporal analysis of Being already runs back into the ontic, the metontological problematic, which is essentially one with fundamental ontology itself, is carried out in the existentiell domain: that is, in that domain where questions of existence are addressed ‘through existing itself’ (SZ 12: 33). The importance of this is such that Heidegger can assert that ‘Only if the inquiry of philosophical research is itself seized upon in an existentiell manner as a possibility of the Being of each existing Dasein, does it become at all possible to disclose the existentiality of existence and to undertake an adequately founded ontological problematic’ (SZ 13: 34). The whole notion of an initial transition and subsequent return is complicated by the fact that these phases of the overall ontological project are not sequential, and are separable only in the abstract. Moreover, insofar as one can speak of return, that to which thinking returns is not an existential analytic as such, but rather, in the guise of a problematic concerning beings as a whole, a domain of questioning that is existentiell. The figure of return does not just indicate a circling between a methodological point of departure and the sought after ground (the temporal horizon of Being). Rather, insofar as the return is concomitant with the elaboration of the temporality of Being, and is a return into the existentiell domain, the impossibility of transcending the ontic foundation and securing access to a purely ontological thinking is given positive expression. It becomes constitutive of the very movement of thinking – where such movement is not towards an eventual accomplishment, but is itself an accomplishment. However, it is only an accomplishment insofar as it is carried out through the existence of Dasein, which amounts to its encompassing that existence in its everydayness. The existential analytic and the determination of the meaning of Being proper no longer stand as strict alternatives, separated by a simple limit across which the inquiry has periodically to move. The turn from the ontic foundation to the ontological matter itself can no longer be viewed as a necessary step by which we are introduced to a new level of questioning. Rather, it has become clear that philosophical questioning, in the sense that Heidegger understands it, is a perpetual turning from ontic to ontological, from the existential analytic to the ontological horizon. If our mortal condition is characterized as passage and return, that is, in terms of finite transcendence as the opening of difference, then this is also the character and milieu of philosophy itself: the impossibility of definitive transcendence

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and the necessity of return leave philosophy perpetually on the way towards an accomplishment of the turn. The limit between the mortal and the immortal is experienced as the inexhaustibility of the beginning, an endlessness that demands perpetual repetition. The turn of philosophy from the ontic foundation into the ontological difference is already a return to the ontic itself, which in truth it had never left.

Philosophy and existence At the outset we asked two questions. First, what are the repercussions for philosophy of its ontic foundation in the existence of Dasein? Second, in what respect is existence accomplished as philosophy? In answer to the first, we can see now that its ontic foundation commits philosophy to endless return and renewal. The point of this is not continually to repeat the temporal interpretation of the existential analytic (on the model of Division One of Being and Time), but to sustain the ontological difference that transcendence opens. It is therefore a necessary condition for any thinking that explores the ontological dimension as Heidegger understands it, and is in no way merely the nostalgic pursuit of a recessive origin.14 In relation to the second question, we have to consider the significance of philosophy for the existence of the individual. To ask this question of Aristotle is to ask the question of inclusive versus monolithic ends.15 Arguably, in either case the implication is that human existence will remain ultimately unfulfilled in the absence of philosophy, even though philosophy may not itself be the sole end of human existence. In the reading set out here the end is the agathon, whose disclosure requires both phronesis and sophia – both the recognition of one’s mortality and its suspension. Heidegger resolves the tension between these two senses in part by introducing a conception of mortality that dissolves the opposition between them: the recognition of mortality in Aristotle leads to care of self, and therefore away from the first principles of all things – whereas in Heidegger the recognition of mortality leads precisely to the first principle of all things via care of self in the form of the resoluteness and authenticity of Dasein. In this respect Heidegger draws the everyday life of the individual and philosophy closer together. Yet in their proximity, the life of the individual and philosophy are at the same time also more sharply separated from one another. For on the one hand, Heidegger’s ontological interpretation of Aristotle’s ethical philosophy strengthens the tie between life and philosophy; yet on the other hand, by virtue of their superposition, one upon the

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other, the teleological relation that mediates them in Aristotle collapses. Philosophy is no longer the accomplishment of life in the sense of that towards which we aspire as the highest expression of our well-being and endeavour. It is precisely as a consequence of the way that philosophy is rooted in life that life is freed from any ethical imperative to engage in philosophy. One can bracket the ethical significance of his ontological method, leaving Dasein to manage its everyday life without recourse to philosophy either as a guide or as an aspiration (it is not hard to imagine an individual living a life of ethical worth without embarking on fundamental ontology; by acting in a way we currently regard as virtuous and even by confronting their own finitude and being resolute, achieving a measure of what Heidegger calls authenticity in their existence).16 However, while our existence is not necessarily committed to philosophy, the reverse is not true: as we have seen, by virtue of its ontic foundation philosophy needs the existence of the individual, must remain embedded within it, and cannot flourish independently from it. Here the question of the ‘illusion’ arises again. As we noted at the outset, Heidegger writes that if one is to accomplish anything, one must create the illusion that ‘the given task at hand is the one and only necessary task’ (GA26 200: 158). Accomplishment requires this illusion of unique and special purpose. While this may be so for all pursuits in life, for Heidegger it seems to be especially true for philosophy. Moreover, in the case of philosophy the requisite single-mindedness does not translate directly into a narrowing of focus. The finitude of philosophy consists not in the fact that it comes up against limits and cannot proceed further. It rather consists in this: in the singleness and simplicity of its central problematic, philosophy conceals a richness that again and again demands a renewed awakening. (GA26 198: 156) The simplicity of its problematic is that it is concerned with the question of Being alone. The richness it conceals arises from the need to displace the factical ideal informing our thought by confronting it again and again with the facticity in which that ideal is rooted and through which Being is disclosed, a facticity whose endless variations may not always, or indeed at any time, be reducible to a single account. While Heidegger is anxious to remind us that philosophy has forgotten the simplicity of the ontological difference, the emphasis here is reversed; such simplicity could not exist without the richness it conceals. Whereas Heidegger generally associates

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richness with the simplicity of an origin yet to unfold, one can see here that richness may be the degree of variety and multiplicity concealed beneath a simple form. Indeed, taken by itself, simplicity seems here almost to be an illusion masking the very complexity of the movement that Heidegger regarded as the vital impetus of philosophy. To maintain the illusion would be to support the elevation of philosophy as an end of singular importance to life. I have already suggested that for Heidegger, contra Aristotle, such an elevation is not necessary for life, only for philosophy. Now it seems that it may not be necessary even for philosophy. To recover the question of Being from the oblivion into which it has fallen, it is not enough to recognize its fundamental simplicity. One must also recognize the richness concealed beneath this simplicity, that is, one must see the illusion. Moreover, one must see it as an illusion, without thereby regarding it simply as false. It is not a poor likeness of the truth, but the very bond between philosophy and life. This bond is at once the nourishment of philosophy and its constraint: it makes philosophy matter enough for one to choose it – yet without thereby concealing or diminishing the inexhaustible variety of the life from which it arises as a possibility. One must let thinking itself be sensible to the ontic foundation of ontology and to the ultimate opacity of the existence of Dasein. To think mortal thoughts is to open the simplicity of the question of Being to the existence of Dasein wherein lies the multiplicity that sustains it as a question.

Chapter 3

The Contingency of Freedom: Heidegger Reading Kant

Truth and freedom An examination of Heidegger’s account of freedom can shed light on a difficulty relating to praxis and the articulation of ontological difference. The difficulty takes the form of a constraint that Heidegger’s account places on the idea of concreteness, and the source of this constraint, I shall argue, can be traced back to the tacit approval he gives to Aristotle’s rejection of the Democritean thesis on chance and necessity. This serves to lodge in Heidegger’s interpretation of freedom a distinction between autonomy and heteronomy that forecloses the possibility of a radical approach to the question of contingency.1 In ‘On the Essence of Truth’, Heidegger elaborates a critique of the view that propositions are the original locus of truth.2 What this view has long neglected to recognize, he claims, is that before we can say anything about a thing, it must first have shown itself to us. This prior disclosure is identified as a more original moment of truth: truth as unconcealment (aletheia). But Heidegger then goes further, declaring that even this prior disclosure in which a thing simply shows itself must in turn depend on our being open to the possibility of such an event. This being ‘open to’ is in turn called freedom. Only because there is such freedom can anything show itself to us at all, and freedom in this ontological sense is distinct from any sense of subjective free will. In fact, such freedom does not belong to Dasein, but rather the reverse: Dasein belongs to freedom in the sense that freedom precedes Dasein understood as the site in and through which Being is disclosed. Although the integrity of the ontological signification of freedom that Heidegger introduces here depends on its remaining distinct from any simple practical conception of free will, it is also the case that ontological determinations cannot be treated in isolation from their ontic counterparts,

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as if the two belonged to wholly distinct domains of discourse. The need for ontological inquiry to turn back into the ontic is a constant refrain in Heidegger’s texts from the late 1920s and early 1930s. The question therefore arises as to the repercussions of the ontological account of freedom on or within the concrete practice of Dasein. It is with this problem in mind that I intend here to set out the framework within which Heidegger develops his understanding of freedom in relation to Kant. In particular, I shall argue that the theme of contingency brings to light a limitation in Heidegger’s understanding of practical freedom.

Contingency In 1931, Heidegger lectured on the idea of freedom in Kant. Towards the end of the first part of this course, he writes: ‘Man is only an administrator [Verwalter] of freedom, i.e. he can only let-be the freedom which is accorded to him, in such a way that, through man, the whole contingency [Zufälligkeit] of freedom comes into view’ (GA31 134–135: 93; italics in the original). This reference to freedom as contingent should give us pause for thought when we recall Kant’s concern with the ‘absolute necessity of the laws of action’ to which the practical use of reason with respect to freedom leads (GMM 127: 131). For Kant, human freedom is most fully realized in autonomy, that is, in a free relation to law. Heidegger’s assertion of the contingency of freedom seems at first glance to have little in common with this view. Yet even a cursory reading of Heidegger’s work will tell us that in speaking of freedom as contingent, he is not referring to the free play of the arbitrary. A second alternative presents itself in the guise of Kant’s assertion that reason cannot acquire insight into the necessity of any given event without placing it under some further condition, thereby removing its unconditional status. In seeking to grasp what is unconditionally necessary, reason can aspire at best to the comprehension of its incomprehensibility (GMM 128: 131). To understand freedom as contingent because it is causally unconditioned, in the sense that it is inexplicable from within the order of appearances, is certainly more plausible from Heidegger’s perspective. However, as Kant himself suggests, that freedom is unconditioned in this sense indicates less its contingency than precisely its necessity. Any straightforward endorsement of the idea of freedom as unconditioned, and as ‘contingent’ because unconditioned, would have to account for this apparent convergence in the senses of ‘contingency’ and ‘necessity’.3 Here, then, are two possible and quite different interpretations of contingency: the first attributes contingency to what is conditioned (and could

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have been otherwise), the second to what is unconditioned (and is bound by no higher law). While the first sense is generally associated with the order of things and events, the second may be linked to the first principle, ground or cause of the order of things and events. As we have noted, the second sense is for this reason more usually named ‘necessity’. In modern philosophy, their distinction traces that drawn between the empirical and transcendental orders. Were one to insist on the use of the term ‘contingent’ in both cases, the conflict between the two senses would in this way be mitigated by the separation of their point of application, one to the empirical order and the other to the transcendental. Heidegger’s attempt to negotiate this fundamental distinction is evident in his formulation of the ontological difference, in his insistence on the concretion of formal determinations, and perhaps above all in the ontological interpretation of the transcendens as ‘that which oversteps as such, not that toward which I step over’; namely, as Dasein itself (GA24 424: 299; italics in the original). Each of these themes illustrates the fact that Heidegger sought to overcome a ‘static’ formulation of the transcendental/empirical divide via a thinking of difference as differentiation. To the extent that the transcendental and empirical registers are no longer treated as simply distinct, we are brought back to the question of contingency, and to the tension within its determination between the two senses we have identified. For Heidegger, freedom cannot be contingent because it is determined by some antecedent cause; yet neither can it be contingent because it is simply unconditioned. Freedom can be neither empirical nor transcendental. At stake in Heidegger’s interpretation of freedom in its contingency, therefore, is the orientation and eventual radicality of the departure that he initiates from Kant. The sense given to contingency, and its implications for freedom, depends in the present context on the interpretation of practical reason in Kant, and most especially on the interpretation of the idea of pure practical reason. We shall see that in one respect Heidegger seems to preserve the Kantian formulation of pure practical reason – good will as will willing itself – with remarkable fidelity. However, I shall argue that the survival of the ‘purity’ of practical reason in Heidegger’s interpretation of freedom is in fact a mark less of his fidelity to Kant than to the debt his critical perspective on Kant owes to his reading of Aristotle, and most especially to Aristotle’s partial engagement with Democritus on the very issue of chance and contingency. As a consequence of this debt, Heidegger’s interpretation of freedom is divided with regard to contingency, at odds with itself: the contingency of freedom itself as at once ungrounded and ineluctable is embraced as the essential ontological condition of Dasein, while the contingency of events continues to be regarded as a threat to the autonomy of Dasein, or else

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passed off as being of significance merely to things and therefore as marginal to the ontological problematic. As long as contingency is conceived in this way Heidegger’s understanding of freedom will stand under a decisive constraint: ontologically radical, it will remain conservative in its implications for thinking freedom in concrete action. We shall see this reflected above all in the inability of such an approach to accommodate the idea of an original multiplicity of causes, or the radical contingency this would entail. A recovery of the Democritean thesis on chance and necessity from Aristotle’s reformulation and rebuttal of it will throw the limitations of Heidegger’s own interpretation of freedom into relief.

Freedom, causality and movement Heidegger describes Kant’s doctrine of freedom as occupying a distinctive position within philosophy. Previously, he writes, the question of freedom had always arisen in the context of the determination of human being in its independence from God and from the world as God’s creation. Since treating of freedom therefore entailed also treating of God and world, it was already clear that the question of freedom required the thematization of ‘the totality of what is . . . and not just the limit or border’ (GA31 14: 9). However, the concept of freedom itself was formulated only in a negative sense as ‘freedom from’. To this determination Kant added the concept of positive freedom, ‘being-free-for . . .’ as absolute self-activity (Selbstätigkeit) and as self-determination (Selbstbestimmung).4 These two formulations correspond respectively to cosmological and practical senses of freedom. By cosmological freedom Heidegger understands the power of initiating a state spontaneously in a way that is not itself determined by a further cause in time, that is, in the order of appearances. Freedom as absolute spontaneity, freedom in the cosmological sense, is in this way transcendental. Turning to practical freedom, Heidegger remarks on a question raised by its initial definition. He had already suggested that practical freedom was itself to be understood as positive freedom. Yet Kant’s characterization of it as ‘the will’s independence of coercion through sensuous impulses’ (KRV A533–534, B501–502) seems to align it instead with negative freedom. This presentation from the Critique of Pure Reason is of course complemented and developed in the ethical writings, where practical freedom is understood in view of ‘the property of the will to be a law to itself’ (GMM 87: 108); namely, as autonomy. If transcendental freedom, absolute spontaneity, is the simple power of origination, practical freedom is this self-origination as

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it manifests itself in the specific domain of human activity as the activity of a rational being. In Heidegger’s terms, ‘Autonomy is a kind of absolute spontaneity’ and ‘practical freedom is grounded in transcendental freedom’ (GA31 25: 18). In taking transcendental freedom to be the essence of practical freedom, Heidegger situates the question of the essence of human freedom within the framework established by the account of transcendental freedom given in the Critique of Pure Reason, and specifically in the Third Antinomy (where Kant negotiates the contrasting claims of natural law and human freedom as causes within the order of appearances). Human freedom will therefore be understood as a form of causality. For Heidegger this means that in order to determine the distinctive causality of human freedom in its relation to the account of causality as operative in nature, one must first take up the problem of ‘causality in general (überhaupt)’ (GA31 191–192: 133).5 What does it mean, then, to ‘be a cause’?6 Heidegger observes that the idea of Being-a-cause leads us back to the question of movement. However, not all movement follows the same pattern: For example, what is true of so-called mechanical movement, of the mere shifting of particles of matter, or of the mere running on ahead of a process, does not necessarily apply to movement in the sense of growth and degeneration. In each case, being-a-cause, letting follow on, origination and outcome, are different. (GA31 30: 22) Most significantly, the case of movement in animals and above all the comportment (Sichverhalten) of human beings are different again. In view of this diversity, we cannot assume that the structure of causality in general (überhaupt) can be read off directly from the nearest example; or indeed from any specific case of causality at all. To clarify the idea of causality in general, writes Heidegger, we need first to understand the essence of movement in general, and since being moved or at rest are themselves fundamental determinations of Being, the problem of movement – and that of freedom along with it – ‘is grounded in the question concerning the essence of beings as such’ (GA31 31: 23). In this way, the question of freedom leads back into the ontological problematic. What emerges as decisive for Heidegger’s interpretation here is the fact that in his view Kant fails to make movement itself into a philosophical problem. As a result, Kant takes over what is for Heidegger an ontology of natural beings as ‘extant’ and generalizes it to all cases, including that of human being for which it is singularly inappropriate (GA31 193: 134).7

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To be sure, it was not Kant’s intention to undermine the distinctiveness of human freedom vis-à-vis the natural world; quite the reverse. Yet at best, Kant found that freedom, as the distinctive characteristic of human beings, lay beyond the power of human understanding. In the absence of a further analysis of the idea of movement – and in spite of the explicit caution exercised by Kant in this respect – the form of causality operative in the natural order is thereby carried over into the determination of human freedom where it does not belong. To remedy this situation requires, in Heidegger’s view, that one broach the question of human freedom by way of a critical consideration not just of movement, but of the terminology by which metaphysics secured the meaning of Being on the basis of extantness. To inquire into the essence of freedom is therefore to place the conception of ‘essence’ in question every bit as much as that of ‘freedom’.8 Indeed, Heidegger goes further, saying that the problem of freedom has at its centre not even the question of causality, but rather that of possibility and actuality. It follows from this that the nature of the relation between transcendental freedom (absolute spontaneity) and practical freedom (autonomy) will itself come under scrutiny, since the former can no longer be regarded as unproblematically the ‘essence’ of the latter; that is, practical freedom is not just the instantiation of a predetermined essence. For Heidegger, the two ways to freedom – that which concerns the unity of our experience as a finite being (transcendental) and that which is concerned with the determination of human being in its specificity (practical) – ‘converge in the problem of metaphysics as such’ (GA31 202: 140). Heidegger’s reading thereby adopts the following perspective. In responding to Kant, his interest gravitates towards the formulation of practical freedom, since this is less directly tied to the idea of causality that guides the presentation of transcendental freedom. Practical freedom, as freedom in its actuality, is to be taken as an indication of the essence of freedom. At the same time, however, the interpretation of practical freedom is itself prepared by the ‘destructive’ reading of transcendental freedom in which Heidegger seeks to destabilize the Kantian account, as I have outlined, via a critical exposure of the concepts of causality, movement and ultimately Being deployed within it. Significantly, this proposed advance on the Kantian account is prepared by a return to Aristotle; chapter two of part one of the 1931 lecture course, a total of 70 pages, is devoted entirely to Aristotle and to the questions of Being, movement and truth. The concept of causality as it appears in Kant is in this way referred back to the understanding of movement in Aristotle.9

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The originality of Aristotle’s approach to the problem of movement lies in the intimate relation he describes between movement and Being, an achievement made possible by his introduction of the language of potentiality and actuality in which this relation finds expression. For Aristotle, all movement could be conceived in terms of the actualization of potentiality. While the precise interpretation of these concepts has remained a question of debate from Aristotle’s time down to ours, it is unarguably true that for Aristotle movement is in every case the actualization of a potentiality that pre-exists the event of change itself.10 Moreover, for a potentiality to exist in this way is for it already to be related to its end, prior to the movement that will realize that end. Movement is thus conceived not just as a transition between independent states, but as a unity, its beginning and end always already bound together by the movement that will bring the final state into actual existence. That movement is to be treated as a unitary structure is also evident from Aristotle’s own account of causality in Physics II, where it is the conjunction of efficient, material, formal and final causes that determines the movement by which a thing becomes what it is: none of these individual causes can survive independently of their mutual interrelation. Significantly, this unitary structure of movement also has important consequences for Aristotle’s discussion of tuche (chance/luck), automaton (accident/spontaneity) and sumbebekos (incidentality) that follows the account of the four causes in Physics II. In the context of Heidegger’s response to Kant on the question of freedom, it is worth noting that Heidegger himself described these chapters in Aristotle as being ‘of decisive importance with respect to the problem of facticity as such’, and more precisely as providing an ontological explication of ‘the “historical” movement of factical life’ (PIA 266–267: 142–143).

Tuche, automaton and contingency In Physics II.iv, Aristotle poses two questions. First, people (he means Democritus) frequently speak of ‘chance events’ and of chance being a cause, yet it is always possible to find some other determinate cause than chance: should we not then deny the existence of chance as a cause? Second, there are those (Democritus again) who regard our universe as arising as an entirely spontaneous event (automaton): whereas the heavens are the sphere in which Aristotle himself detects the most supreme measure of order. His own resolution of these two points involves the subordination of chance and accident.

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Tuche names that ‘by which’ a human purpose is accomplished fortuitously. Aristotle’s example is of a man going to market and unexpectedly collecting a debt owed by one he chances to meet there: while he certainly intended to collect the debt at some point, this was not the ‘final cause’ – the purpose – of his leaving home that morning. Tuche, then, is a cause that ‘incidentally inheres in deliberately purposeful action’ (197a6). Automaton is the more general case, since it is not strictly confined to the sphere of human agency. As Aristotle describes it, ‘if a tripod chances to fall on its feet for a man to sit down upon, this is due to automaton’ (197b18), for this was not the purpose of its fall. Events that are automaton are distinguished by their giving rise to ends that were not viewed and held in advance. The stool did not fall ‘for the sake of’ landing upright, but the fact that it did so allows that event to be drawn into the fabric of purposefulness, in that it may then be used for the sake of some further end, namely sitting. Similarly, if one is hit by a falling stone, it is right to say that it fell ‘by itself’, since it might have been a deliberate action to some end. Only where an end is accomplished that could have been the outcome of either natural or deliberate purpose is it right to attribute automaton as a cause (197b29; 198a6). As a consequence, Aristotle concludes that automaton and tuche ‘imply the antecedent activity of mind and nature as causes’ (198a10). The recognition that such events do not occur as the result of a desire on the part of the thing moved – the stool, the stone – leads Aristotle to conclude that events rightly called automaton have external causes; their causes are heteron. By this he means that such events have no final cause and do not conform to a prefigured order (nature, human purpose). However, they may be described as automaton only insofar as they can be made to serve some such order. What Aristotle rules impermissible is that some events might arise ‘by themselves’ and to no apparent purpose whatsoever. In other words, what he cannot accept is the possibility that an event may be ‘determined’, yet be without any final cause. To be determined, for Aristotle, is to exist in relation to an end. Or, similarly, if chance is to be considered a cause, it must exist in relation to an end; if not its own directly, then one to which it can be made to contribute. Democritus, by contrast, asserts the existence of determination without finality. When Diogenes Laertius reports that for Democritus ‘the cause of the coming to be of all things is the whirl (dines), which he calls necessity’, the sense of necessity (ananke) or constraint intended here has nothing to do with the idea of a final end or purpose.11 Rather, as Aetius tells us, ‘Democritus means by it the resistance and movement and blows of matter’ – which themselves have no preordained order.12

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This movement is not related to an end; it is neither bound within a prefigured whole governed by purpose, nor conceived in relation to such a whole. To Simplicius, speaking from closer to the Aristotelian perspective, when Democritus refers to the coming to be of all things from the whirl, ‘he seems to generate it by accident or chance (apo tautomatou kai tuches)’.13 On this reading, automaton is equivalent to what Democritus names necessity (ananke): an event may be at once determined, in that it was influenced by antecedent events, and yet unconditioned, in that it fulfils no purpose, is not a means towards any end, does not belong within any delimitable whole. For Democritus, therefore, there is no conflict between contingency and determination. Does this mean that Democritus had only the sense that we have called here ‘empirical contingency’; the contingency of events caused by events that are themselves contingent? What of the sense of contingency that we associated earlier with the ‘unconditioned’? It is important to see that in this usage of ‘unconditioned’, the emphasis should not lie with the efficient cause; the unconditioned in this sense is not that which has no antecedent event, but rather that which comprises its own final cause, that whose movement is not determined by the purpose or potential (power) of another. It is of course just such a determination that Democritus excludes. Since events are themselves are not without a final cause in a strictly privative sense, as though they might have had such a cause, the criterion Aristotle deploys in order to distinguish what occurs automaton has no purchase whatsoever: for Democritus there is nothing, no original project or purpose, to which the efficient cause can be internal or external. As a consequence, the distinction on which the purported failure to address the unconditioned is based cannot be made and the accusation falls. To say that Aristotle’s negligence in this respect is of a piece with the teleological frame of his work is no doubt true, but what is important here is to determine more precisely the consequences of this exclusion for our own understanding of contingency. This primacy of the project, of purpose and intention, in Aristotle provides a benchmark against which all causes may be judged ‘internal’ or ‘external’. Moreover, it determines a precise sense for ‘external’: not ‘outside all purpose and intention’, ‘outside all projected fulfilment’, but ‘outside the original order of this purpose and intention’, ‘outside this projected fulfilment’. The criterion Aristotle produces for distinguishing automaton as a cause is based on the consideration of movement as a single whole structure comprising arche and telos. The priority of final cause in Aristotle, the acknowledgement of contingency only where an antecedent whole exists that can assimilate the ‘chance’ event, thereby

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forecloses the possibility of a more radical contingency arising out of an original multiplicity of determining causes relative to a single event. For from such a perspective, a multiplicity of causes could only be recognized against the backdrop of the unity of an existing relation to a final end. Multiplicity could not be original, however many individual causal trajectories nature as a whole may comprise. Shortly, I shall show how both the general sense of chance as necessarily referred to an antecedent purpose and the specific sense of ‘external’ as ‘external to a given purpose’ are taken over by Heidegger in his own interpretation of contingency. However, they also have a bearing on Kant’s conception of freedom and it is to this that I shall return first.

Nature, history, world: towards unity A brief recap of what has emerged so far: Heidegger is critical of Kant for conceiving of human freedom as a kind of causality and then treating causality as such on the basis of natural causality. On this reading, Kant’s failing is twofold: first, he offers no account of human freedom in its specificity; second, there is no genuine account of causality ‘as such’ – the unifying ground beneath the distinction between human freedom and natural causality. Heidegger’s reading of Kant in The Essence of Human Freedom does not itself seek to rectify these perceived shortcomings or depart markedly from Kant’s own philosophical project. We do not, for example, find there a full account of causality ‘as such’ or of the sense of freedom that would be associated with it. Nonetheless, Heidegger’s reading provides some important indications of the direction his reformulation of the Kantian approach to the question of freedom takes in his own writing. The Second Analogy in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason addresses the question of the role of causality in our experience as finite beings. Since time itself cannot be perceived, the order between two events cannot be determined empirically. It is rather the task of the imagination to carry out this determination, which moreover it does in accordance with the rule of cause and effect: ‘Experience itself . . . is only possible in so far as we subject the succession of appearances . . . to the law of causality’ (KRV A189, B234). It is by virtue of this subjection that I can distinguish between an actual event and the succession of appearances that occurs when, for example, I turn my head to look around the room. For the law of causality provides the rule by virtue of which the order of my representations of the room may be reversed, but the order of events may not: ‘in the perception of an event, there is

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always a rule that makes the order in which the perceptions (in the apprehension of this appearance) follow upon one another a necessary order’ (KRV A193, B238). That something happens is, therefore, a perception which belongs to a possible experience. This experience becomes actual when I regard the appearance as determined in its position in time, and therefore as an object that can always be found in the connection of perceptions in accordance with a rule. (KRV A200, B245) As Heidegger describes it, to perceive an event, that is, to regard an appearance as determined in accordance with a rule, requires ‘knowing in advance that this follows on from something earlier’ (GA31 177: 124; italics mine). However, an event can only show itself as having followed on from another insofar as consciousness places it in relation to what came before it, and this relation must in addition be causal. While the causal relation does not itself occur in time, it is ‘determined in its relational character as a temporal relation’ (GA31 188: 131; italics in the original). ‘Following on’ is therefore a temporal relation of a specific kind, insofar as it is contains a principle of linkage over and above mere sequentiality. The additional quality that distinguishes the way that effects ‘follow’ causes from sequentiality is prepared by the First Analogy, where Kant determines all change in the phenomenal realm as alteration (Veränderung), underpinned by a substratum that persists throughout change. This substratum is ultimately time itself as ‘the primal form of all permanence’ and the horizon against which the relations of succession and simultaneity are determined (GA31 166: 177). As such, the permanence of time itself is the condition for the possibility of experience as an order in which appearances ‘follow on’ from one another. In the Second Analogy, the temporal form of causality is identified as succession. And in the Third Analogy, it is presented as the temporal form of coexistence. In each case, time is not given empirically, but underlies experience as an a priori form. Kant writes that ‘Taken together, the analogies thus declare that all appearances lie, and must lie, in one nature, because without this a priori unity no unity of experience, and therefore no determination of objects in it, would be possible’ (KRV A216, B263; italics in the original). The unity of the manifold of appearances is thereby secured by the temporal character of the causal relation between events, and ultimately, this unity is demanded by reason, for which ‘if the conditioned is given, the entire sum of conditions, and thus consequently the absolutely unconditioned . . . is also given’ (KRV A409, B436; italics in the original). As Heidegger

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observes, reason arrives at the representation of this sequence of conditions as complete by proceeding backwards towards each antecedent condition until it can go no further. This ‘first cause’ that acts ‘from itself’ is the idea of transcendental freedom. Noting the implication of this idea of freedom in the form of causality operative in nature, Heidegger goes on to argue that while this representation of the unity of the manifold of experience as grounded in transcendental freedom is applicable to nature, it is not applicable to history (GA31 213: 147): for whereas natural occurrences are understood by Kant on the basis of their antecedent conditions, ‘a historical occurrence is understood essentially from its consequences’ (GA31 213: 147); and the consequences of an event ‘cannot be understood merely as following on in time’ (GA31 213: 147). The historical past, writes Heidegger, is defined through its future as possibility. In saying this, Heidegger delimits the Kantian account of cosmological unity, opening the prospect of a more fundamental determination of ‘world’ as the unity towards which transcendence is directed and which embraces the totality of both natural and historical beings.14 Such unity would in turn be grounded by a more original temporality as set out in texts such as Being and Time, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology and The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic. While I shall not enter into a discussion of temporality and world here, it is important to see that Heidegger establishes the unity of world as a totality of appearances by way of a linkage of events that comprises past, present, and future alike, rather than simply tracing back in linear fashion from the present to the past. In describing the time of history in terms of its future as possibility, Heidegger draws on the Aristotelian conception of potentiality and actuality and, in spite of the various partial displacements that he introduces with respect these terms, origin and end together still bind the movement of existence into a whole. In this way, Heidegger’s return to the account of movement, potentiality and actuality in Aristotle facilitates an ontological radicalization in which the orders of natural causality and human freedom as conceived by Kant are drawn back to a common ground. As a consequence, where the linkage of appearances in Kant is a dynamical synthesis of heterogenous elements, in Heidegger all events are bound originally within a whole whose structure, by virtue of its reliance on the concept of potentiality, retains the imprint of Aristotelian teleology.15 For Heidegger, heterogeneity is grounded in the unity of temporality and ultimately of movement. Although Heidegger does not take issue here with Kant’s thesis that events may be determined by two causes – the proximate empirical cause and transcendental freedom – and in addition concedes that this second

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cause is only evident in the action of will, his own interpretation opens onto a further possibility. Not only might the action of will in practical freedom evidence the nature of transcendental freedom, it may also serve as a formal indication of the ontological ground of the two determinations of freedom in Kant. Following Heidegger’s reading of the action of will, one can see how the reference of heterogeneity to the unity of movement and temporality outlined above is reflected in a bias towards autonomy over heteronomy, and a consequent suppression of contingency.

Pure reason as practical Kant proposes that the actuality of freedom may be demonstrated in and through the practical laws of pure reason. ‘Practical’, here, denotes action that follows from the causality of will, where will and reason belongs together in the representation that determines action by showing something that is to be brought about. ‘Pure reason’ therefore involves the representation of something that cannot be found in experience. Heidegger then poses the question: ‘When is practical reason practical as pure reason?’ (GA31 276: 188; italics in the original). In other words, how can the figure of autonomy characteristic of pure reason be instantiated in concrete willing and action? Or again, how can the formal unity of pure reason be preserved in the conditions of concrete willing and action? For pure reason itself to be practical is for will to be determined by the representation of itself as willing. In this way will ‘determines itself from what it is itself in its essence’ (GA31 277: 189). Such a will is pure and ‘Pure willing is the willing of one’s own essence as will’ (GA31 278: 190). As Heidegger remarks, it is the universality of pure willing that ‘raises the individual up beyond the contingencies (Zufälligkeiten) of his particular circumstances’ (GA31 284: 193). This is exemplified in Heidegger’s account of resoluteness in Being and Time, where both the strengths and, I suggest, also the limitations of his interpretation are most evident. Resoluteness (Entschlossenheit) is that attitude in which Dasein holds itself open to, or free for, the possibilities before which it stands in such a way as to take responsibility for its own finitude (SZ §§61– 62). To be free is to will this being open or ‘free for’. While Heidegger insists that one cannot become resolute simply by choosing to be so, he concedes that one can ‘choose to choose’ in favour of resoluteness.16 There can be a willing of willing, a choosing of choosing, insofar as the prior willing or choosing is distinguished from the ‘empirical’. Will is doubled in such a way that the two forms are at once like and unlike: like insofar as the

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prior will is still will; unlike insofar as it has no end or object other than itself and is not heteronomously determined.17 For practical reason not to be heteronomous, for practical freedom really to be freedom, it must have within it pure reason as practical: a pure will willing itself. The figure of will willing itself may strike as strange, because we are so accustomed to will having a distinct object, which is precisely what it does not have in this instance.18 In fact, the prior instance of will is formulated as an extrapolation of the structure of the secondary will (i.e. in Heidegger’s own terms, as will already in relation to something willed (SZ 194: 239)), emptied of all heterogenous content to become pure form. This is why it is problematic for Heidegger to claim there is no sense in which Entschlossenheit is ‘willing’: it is irreducible to willing only insofar as will must always will something other than itself. But here we can see that the possibility of this extrapolation is itself conditioned by the fact that the movement of will is simple, an unbreakable whole.19 As such, it is not irreducibly heterogenous, and is therefore susceptible to the folding back of willing on itself as the willing of willing. If the unity of willing were not guaranteed in advance, if it did not always already exist in relation to an end, if the world were not always already its own or if it occurred in the context of a multiplicity of contributing causes, then it could not be reduced to the pure form of will willing itself. As it stands, however, and as Heidegger describes it, will harbours within itself the possibility of willing itself alone, and this pure form is constitutive of Heidegger’s understanding of resoluteness. As resolute, Dasein discloses the situation in which action can be taken and determines what is factically possible for it at any time. In this way, resoluteness is to be contrasted to Dasein’s indifferent everydayness, where Dasein falls into step with the ‘they’ and just goes along with whatever presents itself. As Heidegger explains, ‘The “they” knows only the “general situation”, loses itself in those “opportunities” which are closest to it and pays Dasein’s way by a reckoning up of “accidents” [Zufälle] which it fails to recognize, deems its own achievement, and passes off as such’ (SZ 300: 346–347; italics in the original). Only Dasein as resolute can recognize accidents as accidents – the contingent as contingent – because only insofar as Dasein is responsive to the ineluctable condition of Being itself as a whole is there a unity against which the accidental can be thrown into relief: ‘What we call “accidents” [Zufälle] in the with-world and the surrounding world can only be-fall (italics in the original) [zu-fallen] resoluteness’ (SZ 300: 346). Heidegger clearly preserves the priority of a fundamental unity as a backdrop against which the singular and the contingent can appear as such. For Heidegger, the experience of contingency requires a sharpening of the

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division between the original whole and that which interrupts it from outside. His treatment of contingency thereby reproduces the opposition between autonomy and heteronomy in a way that is taken over from Kant, but decisively inflected by his reading of Aristotle.

Freedom and totality The theme of freedom can now be taken up again with particular reference to the sense of Dasein’s relation to the disclosure of Being. In the essay ‘On the Essence of Truth’, Heidegger writes: Freedom is not merely what common sense is content to let pass under this name: the caprice, turning up occasionally in our choosing, of inclining in this or that direction. Freedom is not mere absence of constraint with respect to what we can or cannot do. Nor is it on the other hand mere readiness for what is required and necessary (and so somehow a being). Prior to all this (‘negative’ and ‘positive’ freedom), freedom is engagement in the disclosure of beings as such. (WM 84: 145) It is because Dasein is free that it can be open to beings as such: freedom is the condition for Dasein’s being open to beings as such. However, Heidegger does not say that this condition is ‘prior’ or otherwise transcendent to the engagement that follows from this being open. Rather, freedom is said to be this very engagement itself. There is no pure ontological ‘state’ of being free prior to the actualization or enactment of that freedom in a concrete situation. This emphasis on the concrete particularity of freedom seems to lead Heidegger away from an affirmation of a possible actualization of the purity of practical reason; there simply is no pure form of freedom over and above each concrete instance of will in relation to a given end. For Heidegger, the relation of will to the law of pure willing (its own essence) is a transcendence by which ‘genuine concrete willing’ comes into operation. Dasein must discover, indeed recover, this essential form in its own willing. It may be a formal truth that Dasein is in every case related to a possibility that exists for it, but Heidegger also tells us that Dasein is ‘thrown’ into existence in the sense that it finds itself always already among possibilities whose provenance antecedes its own. From these possibilities Dasein must choose those it will ‘take over’ as its own. While it may seem initially that the whole is constructed here out of the multiplicity of possibilities that precede it, for Heidegger this can only occur insofar as the possibility of the whole

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precedes its actualization. Dasein can take over possibilities as its own because the form of self-relation itself already exists as a formal possibility. In this way, the unity in question here remains foundational. Indeed, whatever particular instance, whatever multiplicity one may point to, from this perspective Dasein’s relation to it is grounded in its engagement in openness as such, which is described here in terms of the essence of pure reason as practical. The priority of form seems to render this essence inviolable. In other words, the exclusion of all heterogeneity and the presentation of pure reason as autonomous and unconditioned remove in principle any possibility of its meeting the exceptional or in any other way being undone by the concrete particularity of experience. We know that such authority is of a piece with Kant’s transcendental philosophy, but it is less obviously a feature of Heidegger’s ontology. In view of the inviolability that the figure of pure reason as practical enjoys even in its translation into Heidegger’s account of freedom, we might ask what it means here for the ontological inquiry to ‘return to the ontic’. Does such a return represent no more than the instantiation of the pure form (necessary in the same way as the actual existence of individuals was for Aristotle a necessary condition for the existence of the form of the species) or might it amount to the exposure of the pure form to the challenge presented by the concrete and contingent multiplicity? The need for an ongoing modification of the ontological account in the face of the challenge presented by the ontic is already implicit within the idea of the hermeneutic circle (SZ 7–8: 27–28). A more radical possibility emerges in the Appendix to §10 of The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic that was discussed in the previous chapter. In this appendix, Heidegger describes how the temporal exposition of the problem of Being must itself give way to a further stage in which the problematic is brought to a point of self-understanding and overturning or reversal (Umschlag) (GA26 196: 154). The need for ontology to turn back to its point of origin is then described in a passage that I cited earlier and which I come back to here: the possibility that being is there in the understanding presupposes the factical existence of Dasein, and this in turn presupposes the factual extantness of nature. Right within the horizon of the problem of being, when posed radically, it appears that all this is visible and can become understood as being, only if a possible totality of beings is already there. (GA26 199: 156–157) The introduction of ‘nature’ is significant, in that Heidegger, in a text dating from the same period, places nature outside of the world to which

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Dasein stands in the relation opened by freedom. Explaining the apparent absence of an account of nature in Being and Time, he writes: The decisive reason [for the absence of nature in Being and Time] lies in the fact that nature does not let itself be encountered either within the sphere of the environing world, nor in general primarily as something toward which we comport ourselves. Nature is originally manifest in Dasein through Dasein’s existing as finding itself attuned in the midst of beings. But insofar as finding oneself (Befindlichkeit) (thrownness) belongs to the essence of Dasein, and comes to be expressed in the unity of the full concept of care, it is only here that the basis for the problem of nature can first be attained. (WM 155–156, note 55; 370, note 59; italics in the original) Nature as it is familiar to us (hedgerows, the trees in the park, farmland, the sea in which we bathe, on which we sail and across which we might watch the sun rise) is always and inevitably disclosed within the world. The same is true for nature as the object of scientific inquiry. Insofar as we make a distinction between nature and ‘our’ world, nature is a category derived by abstraction from world. Yet such an abstraction must always be incomplete; nature ‘as such’ cannot be encountered within the world, yet strictly speaking Dasein cannot comport itself towards what – if anything – lies ‘outside’. This impossibility may be taken to indicate the fundamental status of world and thereby to legitimize the relegation of the sciences as themselves necessarily addressed to a secondary determination that presupposes a more original disclosure through world. However, if we accept that ‘nature does not let itself be encountered either within the sphere of the environing world, nor in general primarily as something toward which we comport ourselves’ (WM 155–156, note 55; 370, note 59; italics in the original) and that ‘a possible totality of beings is already there’ as a condition of the factual extantness of Dasein (GA26 199: 156–157, cited above) then a different avenue of interpretation presents itself. If, as Heidegger proposes, ‘the basis for the problem of nature can first be attained’ here, it is by no means clear that the ontological account of world exhausts the problem of nature. Dasein encounters nature as there before it. But this disclosure cannot be thematic, because it cannot borrow the terms in which thematic disclosure is uniquely cast: the terms in which world is disclosed through Dasein’s understanding. So when Heidegger refers in the passage from The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic quoted above to the ‘extantness’ (Vorhandensein) of nature, he is saying more than the sense of nature indicated itself permits. But if nature is encountered as other to the

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world in this fashion, as precisely not disclosed within world, then on what basis can Heidegger assert that nature is met as a totality of beings? What horizon could determine such a totality? The absence of nature within Being and Time may for this reason be seen as the trace of a more radical indeterminability. Insofar as nature is ‘outside’ world, and thereby not already within a totality, it may be taken to indicate a multiplicity that is indeterminate in that it is not bound even by the form of the relation opened in and through Dasein’s freedom. As a consequence, such a multiplicity is also contingent, in that its elements are neither related in advance to a final end, nor traceable to a single antecedent cause. It is what precedes the formation of the world; but it is also that which shadows the order of the world, an immanent principle of disruption that cannot be definitively mastered. A contingent multiplicity is that in which the event of freedom itself occurs as an opening of Dasein’s relation to the world. Freedom may then be understood as the opening of a relation not just to the whole that is Dasein’s world, but also to the contingent multiplicity that precedes that world. If freedom is engagement in the possibilities of the world, then it will at the same time be an encounter with this contingent multiplicity. On this reading, ‘concretion’ means not just the instantiation of a prior form, but also the exposure of such form to the contingent multiplicity out of which world is made.

Contingency This chapter began with a quotation in which Heidegger referred to the contingency (Zufälligkeit) of freedom. It now appears that for Heidegger this means neither that freedom is empirically determined, nor that it is self-grounding as a law unto itself. Freedom is contingent (zufällig) in that it be-falls (zu-falle) Dasein; and in befalling Dasein it opens Dasein’s relation to the world as a whole, and thereby also its relation to specific possibilities. It becomes concrete. Neither an empirically determined event, nor an unconditioned ground in the Kantian sense, the befalling of freedom is contingent in the sense that it opens the very distinction between autonomy and heteronomy, between the antecedent unity of what is Dasein’s own and the contingent concrete particular. However, if the befalling of freedom continues to be thought via Aristotle in this way, conceding priority to the structural unity of change, then the prospect of arriving at a sense of contingency that breaks with the traditional framework of autonomy and heteronomy is greatly diminished; and

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with it is also diminished the prospect of reaching, from out of Heidegger’s work, a conception of praxis, self and otherness that is not premised on the purity of reason. Ultimately, while Heidegger’s ontological radicalization of the Kantian thesis on freedom achieves something important in withdrawing that thesis from the terms of natural causality, and while Heidegger’s response to Kant also represents a significant step in the attempt to think beyond the structures of transcendental philosophy, as long as Heidegger’s response remains bound by its conceptual inheritance from Aristotle, what is potentially most radical within it will remain limited in its scope. By contrast, if the indeterminability of the situation in which Dasein finds itself is given due recognition, as I have argued the idea of contingency suggests, then it will moderate the capacity of Dasein to secure the unity of its world in advance. Where freedom in Heidegger’s sense names the dimension in which Dasein’s relation to the world is given, its contingency will then indicate the contingency of this giving, precisely insofar as it occurs within a concrete multiplicity that is not itself always already determined against the horizon of Dasein’s world as such. The form or dimension specific to the relations into which Dasein enters will not then be decisively configured in advance, prior to its concretion; and the contingency of freedom might describe a situation in which Dasein finds itself in a multiplicity that is not determined as a totality, and in which Dasein is free to make a world or worlds whose formal unity is not guaranteed in advance.

Chapter 4

Dimension and Difference: From Undifferentiatedness to Singularity

Being and movement Heidegger called Aristotle’s Physics the hidden foundational book for all of Western philosophy (WM 242: 185). The basis for this claim lies not just in the importance of the philosophical conceptuality introduced there, nor in the influential account of time given in Physics IV, but rather in the link it establishes between the question of Being and that of movement. In Physics I, Aristotle responds to the thesis advanced by Parmenides and Melissus that Being is one, whole, eternal and unchanging by noting that the physical world is evidently a world of movement and, as a corollary to this, that Being is said in many ways (PH 185a22; MET 1003a33). For Aristotle, there is a direct link between movement and the saying of Being in language: if there were no movement, there would be neither need nor scope for an ontological thinking of Being as such, for Being could only ever be said in the same way, as the same thing. That there is movement means that ontology as a domain of thinking in which Being can become a question is opened by virtue of the fact that Being is said in many ways. For Heidegger, the pursuit of a single fundamental signification of Being involves the elaboration of a single, fundamental, account of movement; but above all, it requires an understanding of movement itself, as opposed to the movement of a given thing. Introducing such an understanding of movement into ontology is the key to disclosing Being as such and thus to the articulation of what Heidegger calls the ontological difference. This may also be described as the problem of how we relate to beings as beings, over and above their signification as this or that particular kind of being. In his earlier writing, Heidegger addressed this issue by way of an account of the transcendence of Dasein that radicalized the phenomenological conception of intentionality. Since the key to transcendence was revealed

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as temporality, the success of fundamental ontology rested on the apprehension of a unified horizon of original temporality. The thesis that all events can be accommodated within the unfolding of a single temporality has been viewed with a critical eye by philosophers such as Bachelard and Foucault who lie outside the mainstream of phenomenology. Bachelard argues that the phenomenological study of time reveals several different durations overlaying one another in a form of irreducible temporal pluralism.1 Similarly, in the conclusion to The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault, apparently referring to Heidegger, describes his own attempt to suspend ‘the general, empty category of change’, rejecting ‘a uniform model of temporalization’ in order to let the different modalities and rhythms of historical events speak for themselves.2 If the designation ‘empty’ were to suggest a general account, it would be a badly misjudged criticism, insofar as Heidegger very early on rebutted the accusation ‘Being’ was the ‘emptiest’ of all concepts and therefore not worth questioning by pointing out that the charge pertains to the highest generic concepts, whereas, at least for Aristotle, Being could be characterized by an analogical unity that stood above them and required a different kind of account. Yet even when one accepts Heidegger’s stance and follows his development of a fundamental account of Being and of the ontological difference, Foucault’s criticism remains vital. It bears on thinking and its relation to what is given to thought; more precisely, it concerns the event of givenness itself and encourages us to ask whether this event can be encompassed definitively in a single account. This amounts to the question of the possibility of fundamental ontology as Heidegger conceives it. But it is also more than this. By the early 1930s, the project of fundamental ontology as characterized in Being and Time had already undergone a significant revision, primarily in response to the difficulty of securing a single complete temporal horizon for understanding the meaning of Being. Nonetheless, Heidegger’s thought continued to insist on a certain univocity in the articulation of Being, albeit one now modulated by history. In spite of this variation, Foucault’s concern pertains as much to these later stages of Heidegger’s thinking as to the earlier. This is something I shall turn to more fully in Chapter 6, via a reading of the essays on language that Heidegger wrote in the 1950s. In this chapter, I shall trace the demand for univocity in the articulation of the ontological difference back to the sense of continuity that characterizes the dimension underlying movement, change, time, and thus also relation. To outline Heidegger’s presentation of the uniqueness and singularity of the ontological difference I shall begin with his later

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work on language, but then turn to his remarks on language in the 1929/ 30 lecture course, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. There are of course many differences in Heidegger’s treatment of language in these two periods, separated as they are by more than 20 years. However, with respect to the insistence that the ontological difference is always the same and unique, little changes between them. Again, Heidegger’s debt to Aristotle is decisive. However, whereas for Aristotle time emerges with the application of number, from early on Heidegger explored the possibility that time, the condition of Dasein’s transcendence and thereby of the articulation of the ontological difference, could be opened more originally through language. Moreover, I shall argue, with language allocated the role of opening the dimension of relation a certain dissonance is introduced into the univocity of the Saying of Being. Allowing this to resonate places in question both the ‘simplicity’ of the saying of Being and the singular, unique and fundamental character of the ontological difference.

The singularity of difference In Being and Time, language appears to have an important but arguably subordinate role.3 At this time, Heidegger’s radicalization of ontology involved a transition from the conception of truth as adequatio to a more original notion of truth as the event of disclosure by virtue of which any particular propositional attitude becomes possible. The effort to shift the ontological problematic beyond its locus in judgement led to an emphasis on the preontological understanding of Being and on the ontological structure of the intentional attitudes underpinning our linguistic activity. In short, it was understood that one’s approach to language should proceed from an understanding of Dasein. This priority undergoes a reversal in his later essays on language, where the source of our understanding of language is no longer Dasein, and we are encouraged instead to arrive at an understanding of the human from a consideration of language that takes language itself as its point of departure and guide. Heidegger’s intention is that we should treat language less as something outside of us than as the medium of our existence in the signification of Being. The difficulty is that when language is treated thematically, its most significant characteristic will already have been passed over; namely, that in its speaking, things, and the world in which they are set, are brought to presence. To be open to the possibility of an experience of language as language, one must therefore forego the habitual temptation simply to talk

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about language, or even to listen to what is being said in language and must instead learn to attend to the saying of language itself; that is, one must discern what it is that happens in and through the speaking not just of this or that language, but of language as such. This speaking is conceived as a ‘naming’ that calls what is absent into presence and occasions the relation of sky and earth, mortals and divinities to one another in the fourfold that is ‘world’ (US 200: 104). Heidegger calls the relation between the regions of the fourfold ‘nearness’ and it is described as the movement ‘which makes them reach one another and holds them in the nearness of their distance’ (US 200: 104). It is, therefore, in the relation of the fourfold that things named in language occur as what they are, and conversely it is by virtue of the occurrence of these things that the fourfold itself maintains itself as a unity. The relation of nearness cannot be understood in spatial terms, or indeed in any way articulated via number and scale (a point to which we shall return later). Indeed, Heidegger invites us to reverse the usual order and to conceive the relation of nearness at play within the fourfold in its own terms, and only then to allow, where appropriate, its expression in the language of metric space and time. The key to this thinking of the relational movement of nearness is of course language: ‘nearness itself’ he writes, ‘must act in the manner of Saying’ (US 190: 95). It is not that language represents a movement, nor that it effects a movement, nor even that it carries a sense along. Rather, language itself is the event of movement understood as the ‘making of a way’ (what Heidegger calls a ‘Be-Wegung’), as the opening of a relation, between world, thing and ourselves. Heidegger’s point here is essentially simple: for any particular thing to be given in language, there must first be an event of givenness in and through which our relation to the Being of that thing is established as such. This event of givenness is attributed to language: it is what occurs in and through language, regardless of the specific content of the locution. The saying of language itself, then, does not present any particular thing to us, but rather opens the dimension within which things can take their place as possible objects of experience for us. In this respect, the saying of language is silent, quite simply because it does not say anything. It is a saying of relation: the relation, in this instance, between world, things and ourselves that Heidegger calls ‘nearness’. However, the saying will be silent only so long as it remains entirely univocal; a saying of the relation between world, things and ourselves as such whose very univocity conceals the fact that the relation is ‘thus’ and not otherwise. From within the world opened by this saying, we have no vantage point from which to experience such specificity as a question.

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Heidegger will often lead us back from the ontic or regional question ‘Why is this thing disclosed in this way rather than another?’ to the more fundamental metaphysical question ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ But let us suppose there is a further question: ‘Why are things as such disclosed this way?’ This is not merely a regional or ontic question that aims to situate a particular kind of being in the broader frame of a higher order account. It can also be understood as calling into question the whole, the very unity that underpins the as such that marks the radicality of the ontological question. Let us look more closely at how this unity arises. Language opens the relation between world, thing and ourselves, establishing a difference or dimension by virtue of which each is what it is. But this difference is not a relation in the sense that any two elements first exist and are then brought into relation. The dif-ference is, at most, dimension for world and thing. But in this case ‘dimension’ no longer means a precinct already present independently in which this or that comes to settle. The dif-ference is the dimension, insofar as it measures out, apportions, world and thing, each to its own. Its allotment of them first opens up the separateness and towardness of world and thing. Such an opening is the way in which the difference here spans the two. The difference, as the middle for world and things, metes out the measure of their presence. In the bidding that calls thing and world, what is really called is: the difference. (US 23; PLT 203; italics in the original) One of the most striking features of this passage is the way that Heidegger deliberately uses the definite article, referring to ‘the dimension’. In addition, the italicization of the definite article suggests that it is a matter of particular importance for Heidegger, an impression confirmed in a passage just prior to that quoted above: ‘The word difference is now removed from its usual and customary usage. What it now names is not a generic concept for various kinds of differences. It exists only as this single difference. It is unique’ (US 22; PLT 202). ‘Difference’ cannot be a generic concept, as it is not derived by emptying out the specific content of a given class of differences; such a procedure would yield a general ontology, which could never be fundamental in Heidegger’s terms. Yet neither is it ‘just this difference here’. Rather, as formal, the singularity of this difference or dimension carries with it the value of a certain ubiquity; it is always the difference that occurs between world and thing, whatever that thing may be and however it may occur or be named in language.

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The difference between world and thing occurs in and through the speaking of language, in that it is language that ‘gives’ the relation between thing and world by virtue of which both are what they are. The singularity of the difference between thing and world therefore implies that language itself is univocal in this respect, that is, that language always speaks in the same way, whatever the manner or idiom of the utterance in question. Provisionally, we can say that this means two things. First, that we cannot come to recognize as language something that was regarded as non-linguistic hitherto, as though it were possible to push back the borders of language, reclassifying the terrain as we move. Second, that since language speaks what is, what can be is similarly conditioned: Being is always and necessarily one, or finite. Yet given that ‘the’ difference can only occur in and through a particular occurrence of language, whose specific structure, rhythm and voice will vary and evolve, one might well ask how it is that the simplicity and purity of this original saying is not merely preserved, but deemed necessary and inevitable. Why is the dimension of the opening of language always unique? Why is it always the difference that occurs between world and thing? I shall take up these questions in relation to Heidegger’s later language essays in Chapter 6. Here, I want to return to an earlier stage of Heidegger’s work in order to see how key elements of his approach were set in place, with particular attention to the concept of continuity. This will introduce the resources required to examine the usual reading in a way that opens up the perspective outlined in the questions above.

Undifferentiatedness In the lecture course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (1929–30), Heidegger’s inquiry into the relation between a thing and world in which it appears is also focused on language, but this time with particular regard to the way that what is given appears ‘as’ this or that. While it is true that the ‘as’ is a relation, this does not characterize it adequately, since the same could be said of other terms, such as conjunctions and disjunctions. Referring to relation alone does not tell us about this relation that is the ‘as’. What I mean is this. If for example we designate something as a relation, we thereby suppress the dimension within which the relevant relation can be what it is. On account of the suppression of this dimension, the relation in question gets put on the same level as every other relation.

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We have from the outset taken the relation as something which moves between something and something else, as something which is present at hand in the broadest sense. (GA29/30 424: 293; italics in the original) To take the relation as ‘something that moves’ – like a rope cast between two existing things – is to remain within an ontical perspective, as opposed to a properly ontological view that would take relation as itself movement (GA33 53–54: 44). Once the relation is treated in this way, one is bound to ask after the dimension specific to its movement; ‘the dimension in which this “as” originarily moves and within which it arises’ (GA29/30 435: 301; italics in the original). This is to say, one cannot assume that one knows in advance the fundamental modality of such relations, or even that there will necessarily be just one fundamental modality they all share. Only phenomenological inquiry can settle this by way of a return into the originary dimension of the ‘as’. This, Heidegger suggests, will ‘open up for us the whole context within which whatever we mean by the manifestness of beings and the “as a whole” essentially prevails’ (GA29/30 435: 301). Taking Aristotle as his guide, Heidegger traces the dimension proper to the ‘as’ back to the synthetic activity of the logos. The ‘as’ thereby belongs to manifestness, and in fact to manifestness ‘as such’. However, this characterization of the ‘as’ is still only a formal indication, pointing us towards the task of ‘grasping the relation in terms of its proper dimension’ (GA29/30 425: 293), without carrying out that task for us. In fact, Heidegger insists that all philosophical concepts are formally indicative: that is, ‘they do not signify characteristic features or properties of something present at hand’ (GA29/30 428: 296; GA63 §16). They do not give any thing at all: rather, they establish the structure of relation possible in a given case. It is, therefore, by virtue of their ‘formal’ character that such indications convey a unity: the unity of all beings whose manifestness conforms to that structure, whatever may be their positive characteristics. Formal indications offer no positive content, but rather point towards the way in which a relation – and above all, the relation of manifestness itself – may occur. In this way, the indication given by fundamental moods or attunements of Dasein are said to be ‘exemplary’ possibilities of such manifestness, where this exemplarity: consists not so much in the fact that what is manifest here is richer and more various as distinct from average attunements or even lack of attunement, but rather in the fact that this fundamental attunement

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distinctively reveals something that is manifest in every attunement in a particular way. (GA29/30 411: 283) Focusing on what is exemplary within such an indication, one is brought before beings ‘as such and as a whole’. To apprehend something is thus in each case to apprehend it in advance by way of a formed unity ‘in terms of which and in which it can be determined explicitly in its character as such and such’ (GA29/30 456: 314; italics in the original). Such a unity comprises the various determinations whose relation within the logos is given in the ‘as’. However, as in the cases of ‘nearness’, the activity of synthesis is not simply a relation composed between pre-existing elements. The ‘syn’ means a together, a unity which, earlier than the parts, is a whole. Syn – whole – as a whole? The ‘as’-structure itself thereby shows an essential connection with the second structure we are asking about here: the ‘as a whole’. (GA29/30 457: 315; italics in the original) The work of synthesis here has already taken place when the separation of parts determines the precise relation that is given in the ‘as’, for it concerns the way in which the whole is given in advance. At this point, Heidegger remarks that he is going to let the problem rest because Aristotle’s own text implies that too much emphasis has been placed on the link between the ‘as’ structure and the synthetic activity of the logos. Everything that has been ascribed to synthesis could, observes Heidegger, also be attributed to diaresis, taking apart (GA29/30 457: 315). This is to say that the ‘whole’ given via the ‘as’ in advance of the separation of its elements has as much to do with diaresis, taking apart, as with synthesis. At first glance, however, it is not clear what the role of diaresis in the constitution of the whole could be. Heidegger goes on to suggest that what is at stake here is the activity of man as ‘world-forming’ (what had, in other texts of the period, been addressed as transcendence, the opening of the ontological difference). The synthetic power of the logos is not fundamental, therefore, and rests on a prior openness towards beings that it ‘makes use of’ in particular ways. The pre-logical being open for beings, out of which every logos must speak, has in advance always already completed beings in the direction of an ‘as a whole’. By this completion we are not to understand the subsequent addition of something hitherto missing, but rather the prior forming of the ‘as a whole’ already pre-vailing. (GA29/30 505–506: 348; italics in the original)

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This ‘pre-logical’ whole is a dimension given in advance ‘out of which’ the logos speaks in the sense that the ‘as’ relation places together determinations already shaped in the formal totality of possible relations (to beings) given in world-formation. This prelogical manifestness of beings is characterized by ‘wholeness’ in such a way as to embrace not only those beings with which we have a direct concern, but all beings regardless of the nature of Dasein’s relation to them. Such different relations are ways, writes Heidegger, ‘in which this “as a whole” prevails around and through us, ways that lie before the taking up of standpoints, ways, that are independent of subjective reflection or psychological experience’ (GA29/30 513: 353). These are, in effect, all the possible relations that are open to Dasein, all the possible ways that beings may become manifest. It is a ‘purely formal’ whole embracing everything that may be identified as a being, yet without conveying any positive determination. The purely formal character of this whole corresponds to what Heidegger calls the undifferentiatedness (Indifferenz) of the manifestness of beings within which we commonly move, and it is at this level that the combination of synthesis and diaresis plays its most decisive role (GA29/30 514–517: 354–355). The undifferentiatedness in the way beings manifest themselves permeates each and every possible relation that we may have towards them. It can be seen in the preontological understanding of Being as such that Dasein always already has in its dealings with the world and is the common element whereby Dasein understands that a thing is, aside from its particular significance as this or that. It is out of this undifferentiatedness that the different ways of being are separated and interwoven into the domain of the possible according to a ‘primordial lawfulness’ that both ‘oppresses and sustains us’ (GA29/30 514: 354). Above all, the purely formal character of this ‘as such’ of manifest beings is what also allows Heidegger to call the ontological difference unique and even universal (GA29/30 520: 358). There is therefore a direct link between the ‘as such’, the undifferentiatedness in the disclosure of beings and the uniqueness of the difference articulated in the univocal saying of Being. The link appears to be necessary and unavoidable, but it is worth pausing to ask why this is so. Heidegger problematizes the idea of formal ontology developed by Husserl, and I shall come to that in a moment, but nonetheless it serves as a useful point of departure. One of the basic conditions of formal ontology is that the class of objects addressed constitute a unity. This is understandable when one is dealing with a particular domain of things (though even here there may be difficulties), but it is less obvious that the same condition must necessarily apply to all possible objects. Suspending such a condition, one could ask what obliges us to treat the set of all possible objects as always

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determined in advance, or even to assume from the outset that such a set exists at all? Just as the existing categories of scientific understanding can be reshaped by experience, is it inconceivable that even our most basic ontological structures might be called into question by variations in the fine grain of our relation to things? The obvious objection to this idea is that for such a variation to occur, it must be experienced, and thus already be subject to the existing formal conditions of presentation. This means that it would at best be masquerading as a fundamental variation and any change would be merely in our grasp of the abiding true condition of the possibility of all experience. Conversely, if the specificity of each thing were somehow to bear on the manner of its givenness, difference might occur in such a variety of ways that no single form could be found. This would place the very idea of fundamental ontology in question (this is something that I discussed in the Introduction). But equally, to raise the possibility of such variation is not to assume that difference has a determinable form, as though its variations could be delineated and their range charted. It is enough that one genuinely encounter what is for Heidegger the uniqueness and singularity of the difference, and thereby experience the finitude of the disclosure of Being as a question. So I shall turn now to look more closely at how the necessity for this uniqueness arises. This will involve examining why the formal indication of givenness as a relation culminates in a uniformity that Heidegger calls ‘undifferentiatedness’. Where does this undifferentiatedness come from and is it necessary?

Number In The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger writes that the philosophical questioning in which he is engaged aims to go back into the ‘originary dimension’ in which world-forming occurs, that is, the dimension in which the whole determined by the formal characterization of the ‘as such’ is itself opened. To achieve this, he will use both the account of the logos and the fundamental attunement of boredom outlined in the earlier part of the lecture course (and to which I referred above) as ways of preparing the entry of thinking back into ‘the occurrence of the prevailing of world’ (GA29/30 510: 351; italics in the original). In accordance with the character of formal indication that we mentioned earlier: This philosophising entry and return of man into the Dasein in him can only ever be prepared, never effected. Awakening is a matter for each individual human being, not a matter of his or her good will or even

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skilfulness, but of his or her destiny, whatever falls or does not fall to him or her. (GA29/30 510: 351) The return into the dimension of the movement of world-formation – called ‘awakening’ in the passage above – can only be achieved in the concretion of the individual Dasein’s response to a formal indication.4 It is important to be clear about the potentially radical implications of this call to draw thinking back into the dimension of world-formation. In the course of his inquiry, Heidegger pauses to wonder whether the problem of the ontological difference has been ‘prematurely stifled’ by its development under the rubric of ‘ontology’ (GA29/30 522: 359). The problem of the ontological difference must be unfolded in a still more radical fashion, he suggests, even if this entails that ontology itself be rejected as inadequate. Heidegger does not make explicit the reason for this inadequacy. It is easy to suppose that it has to do with the errancy into which metaphysics falls when it forgets the ontological difference and construes Being on the model of beings. However, one can also shift the emphasis and find a different reading. Thematic philosophical ontology has eclipsed the irruption of the ontological difference within beings by obscuring its own ontic foundation within the order of beings – the point, as Heidegger tells us in Being and Time from which all philosophy arises and to which it must return. This is the message that comes through clearly in the notion that philosophical concepts by themselves are formal indications that still require concretion in the existence of the individual Dasein, and it is also the idea raised and briefly explored in the Appendix to §10 of The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic.5 What speaks through each of these formulations is the conviction on Heidegger’s part that philosophy must remain essentially a thinking of relation. Moreover, since the relation in question here is the relation of givenness as such, it cannot be represented, but only ‘entered into’ in the existence of Dasein. Formal indication, then, is a saying of relation – a giving of the structure of givenness as such – that by itself remains dead, a ‘prematurely stifled’ thinking. For formal ontology alone is fatally truncated in two respects: first, it is removed from the order of givenness in which it occurs (and if it is not we’re left with a more traditional sense of transcendental philosophy); second, by cutting it off from the given order, one turns it into a thing, represents it, and thereby fails to preserve the ontological difference. This twofold danger could only be averted if thinking were itself the site of the separation and relation of the formal and the given order. Just such a separation and relation characterizes the transcendence of Dasein. As a consequence, thinking has to follow or repeat the movement essential

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to the existence of Dasein itself. This is what Heidegger means when he says that thinking must return into the originary dimension in which worldformation occurs. By contrast to the stifled and prematurely foreclosed character of ontology, Heidegger writes that: ‘If we look closely, we see that . . . in Aristotle where the distinction irrupts – on he on – everything is still indeterminate and in flux, still open . . .’ (GA29/30 522: 359). The openness and flux of the Aristotelian problematic – as Heidegger reads it – may be linked to the necessity that the formal indication be taken up and made concrete in the existence of the individual, and the fact that this can happen in various ways. The domain in which this occurs is, as Heidegger writes in the Appendix to §10 in The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, ‘a domain of metontological-existentiell questioning’. Thinking is thus an experience (Erfahrung), an undergoing, the concretion of Being as a disclosive relation in the existence of Dasein. Suppose one asks: what is the most basic form of the occurrence by which Being is given? To answer this question phenomenologically would be to discern in the event the conditioning form that precedes its occurrence. My concern here is whether this priority is necessarily absolute. The univocity of the saying of being is premised on the priority of the dimension of the relation of givenness over the individual event of givenness, and a closer examination of the role played here by dimension reveals that this priority and univocity are themselves limited. Of course, to say this much is already to go beyond Heidegger’s reading. What I am suggesting is that Heidegger may have overstated the extent to which the relation of givenness ‘as such’ can be isolated as necessarily ‘prior’ to every individual event in which something is given, and thereby also the extent to which phenomenology itself is impervious to a form of positivism, insofar as what is given and how it is given might (against all phenomenological expectations) bear upon the relation of givenness ‘as such’, even though to accept this would be to deny the truly ‘fundamental’ status of fundamental ontology. For some, the need to go so far so quickly can be averted by a suitable interpretation of the ‘historical’ character of ontological inquiry. In this way, the hermeneutic nature of ontology could be taken to mean that one will always have to continue the ongoing practice of ontological inquiry, never reaching the definitive disclosure of Being. However, such an approach would maintain the priority of givenness as such over the individual event of givenness, while merely recognizing a finitude in our capacity ever to reach a final ‘true’ account. An interpretation closer to that which Heidegger himself developed in the 1930s and 1940s would recognize also the finitude of Being itself and the historical character of its disclosure. What I am suggesting

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here goes further than either of these two alternatives. It is to say that the dimension of givenness as such may not be susceptible to a final ‘true’ account even in principle and that the variation in the dimension of givenness as such cannot therefore be treated as an improvement achieved as we drive to a more fundamental understanding. On this reading, there would be no univocal saying of Being, no ubiquitous event of the ontological difference. Moreover, the changes undergone by the dimension of givenness would be prompted not by great shifts in epochal history, but by fine-grained alterations in what is given and how it is given. Having sketched out this perspective, I will outline in more detail at how it can be opened from within Heidegger’s own approach to the question. To do this one needs to examine the idea of undifferentiatedness more closely in connection with the continuity of the dimension underlying time. When Heidegger points to an undifferentiatedness in the way that the manifest shows itself, he is referring to an undifferentiatedness of the dimension of the relation of manifestness, or the dimension out of which the ‘as’ arises. Since this relation is movement, its undifferentiatedness is that of the dimension of such movement. Heidegger has already developed his understanding of the ‘as’ from out of Aristotle and so we can justifiably go back to Aristotle’s discussion of the dimension of movement to illuminate what is happening here; all the more so given that this discussion occurs at the heart of Aristotle’s account of time in Physics IV, which Heidegger comments on at length in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Aristotle recognizes that time is dependent on movement, and that movement itself is dependent on dimension, adding; ‘for it is because dimension is continuous that movement is also, and because movement is continuous so is time’ (219a11–13). In his commentary, Heidegger argues that the dimension underlying movement, and thus also time, is neither spatial nor temporal, but ‘purely formal’ (GA24 343: 242).6 Insofar as the relation of manifestness is a movement, it is therefore conditioned by just such a formal dimension and the continuity of this dimension is what appears as the undifferentiated character of the relation of manifestness. In short, the undifferentiatedness in the relation by which things are manifest – and thus the univocity of the saying of Being – derives from the continuity of movement, and therefore ultimately of the dimension on which movement depends. However, the relation between dimension, movement and time in Aristotle suggests that the situation may not be as straightforward as it seems. In Physics IV.xi, time is said to ‘follow’ movement, which in turn ‘follows’ dimension (219b24–27). The implication is therefore that the condition

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in each case precedes the conditioned, which would mean that movement was there before we attended to it and that it traversed a dimension that was already open. There are at least two related problems associated with such a reading from Heidegger’s point of view. First, to speak of movement traversing a dimension is to switch one’s attention back from movement to the moving thing, and thereby to revert from an ontological perspective to an ontic one. Second, it treats dimension as a separable substrate, whereas a phenomenological approach would see it as an intrinsic feature of movement; hence Heidegger’s own description of it as ‘purely formal’ and as prior to the division between space and time. Dimension must be treated as a formal characteristic of movement, and not a pre-existent condition for it. Aristotle then goes on to define time itself as the ‘calculable measure or dimension of motion with respect to before-and-afterness’ (219b1–3). That is, time arises when we count movement, dividing it up into what came before and what came after. To do this is to mark time through the application of number. However, just as there is no dimension prior to movement, so there is – for us – no movement prior to its being numbered as time; this is to say that there can be no movement prior to its being numbered as time, since we have no conception of movement that is not numbered in this way and thus already temporal (this is reflected in Aristotle’s own intuition that time is neither objective nor subjective). The formal dimension in Aristotle’s account of time thereby requires the mark we apply when dividing the before from the after in order to exist at all. The dimension does not actually pre-exist the order it structures at all. The illusion that it does is due in part to the familiar difficulty of placing condition and conditioned in an order without appealing to time. But in addition, it is also due to the way that Aristotle develops the account of time in terms of number. Aristotle proposes that time arises when we order movement according to the before and after. The mark by which we differentiate in this way is number. In order to count, however, we must assume that units are homogenous and consistent and for this reason the application of number presupposes a qualitative uniformity in what is counted. Experiencing movement – and therefore relation – via number implicitly attributes a uniformity to the dimension underlying movement that renders this dimension apparently indifferent to how or what we count. This can be viewed from two perspectives. First, the kind of dimension, and thereby relation, established depends on the nature of the mark. But, second, the kind of dimension, and thereby relation, established specifically by number is such as to give the impression that it is independent of the mark; that is, it gives the impression that dimension precedes movement and the mark by which

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it is ordered in a substantial sense and is therefore indifferent to the specific movement in question or how it is marked. But this is not so; the application of number is decisive. In terms of the relation of manifestness understood as movement, it is the marking of this movement by number that makes it appear as prior, uniform, undifferentiated. It might be objected that to diminish the uniformity of time in this way opens the door to its subjectivization, making time dependent not only on the act of counting, but also on how that counting is performed and even who performs it. If this were the case, the internal coherence of time would be profoundly compromised. But this is not so.7 What is proposed here simply amounts to the recognition, first, that time is not the uniform dimension in which events are placed in serial order and, second, that it is not underpinned by any such neutral dimension. However, suspending the use of number in the marking of time is not enough in itself to break down the undifferentiatedness of the dimension on which time depends. The use of number to mark time conceals that undifferentiatedness by lending it a spurious necessity and inevitability, without itself being responsible for this undifferentiatedness. Consequently, the suspension of number merely draws the undifferentiatedness of the formal dimension from its cover, such that one can no longer assume it as necessarily given, whereupon the priority of the relation of disclosedness over what is disclosed is also put in question. In one sense, to propose this is not as radical a move with respect to Heidegger as it might seem at first. Leibniz argued that time is a relation of succession: all I am noting is that the relation of succession determined by number is just one way in which movement can be ordered, and there may be others. Time might arise not just according to different metrics, but even perhaps as the result of marks other than number. This is entirely consistent with Heidegger, who already opened up this line of interpretation in his commentary on Aristotle’s account of time in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology when he referred the counting of time back to a more fundamental attitude of ‘reckoning’ with time, as we experience and manage the time available to us (GA24 §19b). In his later writing, Heidegger takes this marking of time away from Dasein altogether and attributes it to language, so that it is no longer by number that movement is marked and time arises, but language that introduces the measure by which we can speak of these things. First and foremost, it is language that measures the movement that is the relation by which things become manifest.8 Once it is recognized that the dimension of the relation of manifestness may be opened by language rather than by number, there is no longer any

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prima facie reason to assume that this dimension must be uniform. If relation – as movement – is spoken instead of counted, then it does not require uniform, and therefore countable, units. In this case, the continuity of the dimension need no longer entail undifferentiatedness; and insofar as there is no longer undifferentiatedness in the dimension of the relation, it will no longer appear to precede the saying or marking of relation. The form of manifestness does not precede the relation of manifestness in any given case, but is dependent on the mark by which the relation occurs as it is instantiated in language. Things do not show themselves within a predetermined and wholly formal dimension that must then be made concrete. The dimension of the relation and both related terms all arise together with the saying of relation. Accordingly, the dimension of manifestness is not necessarily undifferentiated and is therefore not necessarily uniform for all possible relations. At this point, it is worth asking what it might mean to describe a dimension as continuous and not undifferentiated. First of all, to call the dimension differentiated might seem to imply that it is already marked out in some way even before movement is numbered as time, yet it is precisely such implied independence that continuity, properly understood, reveals as inappropriate to Heidegger’s interpretation of the formal dimension. The idea of the differentiation of the continuous formal dimension has to be understood according to the way that dimension is marked. For example, in its manifestation of relations, language may mark the formal dimension in ways that do not assume a basic unit, that are not simply additives. In short, continuity may no longer be taken as necessarily the condition of unity.9 In his exploration of the articulation of a basic continuous dimension by the marks of language rather than number, Heidegger approaches a problem that occupied many mathematicians in the early twentieth century. Convinced that space and time were fundamentally continuous, mathematicians had to address the apparent impossibility of capturing such a reality in terms of the essentially discontinuous system of arithmetic, since any attempt to define continuity through number could only be a reconstruction, and as such would fall short of the reality it sought to capture. Heidegger is, in fact, trying to achieve with language what mathematicians were trying to do with number, which is to show how it can faithfully render a fundamental continuity. What becomes clear, however, is that there is no fundamental dimension waiting to be expressed in the sense of a dimension that literally precedes its articulation. Its being lies in its expression, which is to say in the actual form in which it is lived and spoken.

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For Heidegger, the continuity of space and time is not the property of a real dimension, but the fundamental simplicity of the ontological difference. Replacing number with language has a surprising effect, in that it removes the impetus to characterize the dimension on which the relation of manifestness is founded as uniform, as number seems to require. In turn, this removes the necessity to treat space and time as metric, while also lifting the constraints apparently placed on the dimension underlying the relation of manifestness by the application of number. However, number is by no means the villain of the piece. Although Heidegger’s attempt to trace the ontological conditions of space, time and movement in language rather than number is understandable, given his concern to achieve a form of disclosure capable of conveying the most original event of the disclosure of Being, he recognized that number deserved serious attention and, at least for a time, continued to explore its possibilities.10 Nonetheless, setting aside the expectation that the dimension underlying space and time be uniform allows the combination of the formal character of the dimension and its continuity to leave the priority of the form of the relation established by language in each case in doubt. The priority by virtue of which the relation of manifestness – that is, the disclosure of Being – maintains its unity and univocity is by no means wholly undermined, but it is certainly put in question. If the necessity of this priority were removed, the whole determined by the formal account of the relation of manifestness would be merely contingent; there could be cases it does not cover, and it may be given otherwise than it is at any particular time. This would no longer be merely to allow for the revision of one’s theory; it would be to recognize the extent to which any theory is articulated in and through the crowd of cases that give it sense, but from which there also arises a resistance against which thinking must work. Once the dimension of manifestness is regarded as always already be concrete and thus always already particular, there can be no ‘as such and as a whole’, except by the most extreme and provisional abstraction. I have already introduced this possibility in Chapters 2 and 3. In Chapter 6, I shall examine it in the context of Heidegger’s later essays on language.

Chapter 5

Heidegger and Weyl on the Question of Continuity

Analysis, geometry and movement In his 1924–25 lectures on Plato’s Sophist, Heidegger refers with admiration to the work of the mathematician Herman Weyl (GA19 117–118: 80–81). His remarks come part way through a reflection on arithmetic and geometry as alternative grounds for understanding connection or relation in the context of the dialogue in general, and of Plato’s interpretation of the term heteron, otherness or being-other in particular.1 Over and above their contribution to his reading of the Sophist, they also provide an indication of Heidegger’s attitude towards contemporary issues within mathematics, including those concerning analysis, number theory, and above all continuity. The idea of handling geometrical problems algebraically in what is now called analytic geometry was first introduced by Descartes and lay behind the development of calculus by Newton and Leibniz. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Cantor and Dedekind used set theory to give calculus a new expression in analysis. This involves constructing the continuum from discrete points correlated with real numbers defined by sets of infinitesimals approaching a limit. Although the analysis of problems that had once been the province of geometry proved to be extremely powerful, the appearance of infinity in mathematical operations remained a cause for concern; questions were raised regarding the capacity of analysis to define its terms adequately and there was growing unease over the rigour of its foundation. Another concern, and one shared by Weyl, arose from the apparently twofold nature of the continuum; in our experience of space, time and movement, it emerges as a pure and non-objective intuition to which the analytical reconstruction of the continuum from the discrete elements of number never seems fully adequate. Heidegger’s remarks on arithmetic and geometry in Plato and Aristotle can be read as a thinly veiled comment on these issues. As such, they may

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appear at first glance to be no more than a rehearsal of this debate; interesting as a testament to his understanding of the issues involved, without offering anything new to the consideration of the questions themselves. In fact, this is not the case; not only does Heidegger display a secure grasp of the main issues in the debate over analysis, he is also prepared to contribute to this debate, albeit in a somewhat covert fashion. Towards the end of this passage, Heidegger insists on the importance of Aristotle’s treatment of change, suggesting that mathematicians were beginning to approach the same issues as Aristotle ‘though from the opposite direction’ (GA19 118: 81). My aim here will be to set out what Heidegger means by this and to argue that it is more than just a philosopher’s defence of the tradition against the presumed radicality of science. Closer examination of the issues involved will lead us to Heidegger’s commentary on Aristotle’s account of time in his 1927 lecture course The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. It could be argued that Heidegger’s appeal to Aristotle here is primarily strategic insofar as he roots his own conception of original temporality in the philosophical tradition by finding a potential radicality inherent within Aristotle’s account that had been covered over and lost. However, set against the background of the mathematical debate over analysis and continuity, Heidegger’s examination of number, dimension and continuity in the context of the Aristotelian account of change can be read as a covert intervention in the debate over analysis and continuity, and thus as rather more than just an introduction to his own conception of original temporality. Grounding the measurement of time in an existential reckoning is part of an exploration of the ontological dimension of the act of numbering that enriches the mathematical problematic rather than rejecting it. In this chapter, I will set out the context of Heidegger’s comments on Weyl and then look briefly at analysis and Weyl’s work on continuity.2 This will lead on to a consideration of Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle’s account of time in order to clarify his remarks on the importance of Aristotle’s account of movement to the debate over analysis and continuity.

Space, time and matter Before looking at Heidegger’s discussion of arithmetic and geometry in Plato and Aristotle in detail, it is helpful to remember that he breaks off from this discussion to acknowledge that mathematicians were once again broaching the question of the continuum, adding that mathematicians were ‘learning to understand that the continuum is not resolvable

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analytically but that one has to come to understand it as something pregiven, prior to the question of an analytic penetration’ (GA19 116–117: 80). Plainly dissatisfied with analysis, he praises Weyl’s work on the continuum. This may seem odd at first, since Weyl was an advocate of analysis and Heidegger is quick to reject the idea that the continuum can be constructed in the way analysis proposes. However, Weyl had read and appreciated the work of Bergson and of Husserl, with whom he corresponded; and like Bergson and Husserl, Weyl believed that the continuum underlying our experience of time, space and movement is characterized by a kind of original connectivity that analysis, beginning with discrete elements, could never adequately describe.3 His declared sympathies with a phenomenological point of view and his openness to philosophical questions would certainly have attracted Heidegger, even if his conception of mathematics was not one that Heidegger shared. However, the work of Weyl’s to which Heidegger refers is an interpretative exposition he wrote on Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.4 What interests Heidegger is the way Einstein’s account of the gravitational field introduces a new way of addressing physical being. Rather than treating things as material objects in space and time, they become values of a field which in turn determines the nature of that space itself; its curvature and the geometry appropriate to it. Physical being enters into a dynamical relation with space and time, rather than simply occurring ‘in’ them. Acknowledging this relation means that geometry alone can no longer determine a priori the nature of space as a fixed and independent form through which matter moves, as was the case in seventeenth-century science. Gravitational field theory and General Relativity, supported by the non-Euclidean geometry of n-dimensional manifolds, brings the elements of space and physical being into a dynamical relation. As Weyl himself states in the Introduction to Space Time Matter: Space and time are commonly regarded as the forms of existence of the real world, matter as its substance. A definite portion of matter occupies a definite part of space at a definite moment of time. It is in the composite idea of motion that these three fundamental ideas enter into intimate relationship. (Space Time Matter, 1) Placing movement at the centre of things in this way would certainly have appealed to Heidegger, though it is less certain that he would have been satisfied by the description of movement as a ‘composite idea’. I shall come back to this shortly. First, it is clear that Weyl appreciates the importance of the conjunction of space and time not only for science, but also for

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philosophy, which since Kant had understood consciousness as exclusively temporal in contrast to the spatiality of the external world. Weyl is optimistic that work on the relation between time and space in mathematical physics may contribute to the resolution of this divide and thereby to the philosophical understanding of the relation between consciousness and the world.5 However, while it may bring deeper insight, the amalgamation of space and time also brings with it certain risks. To derive the form they share from either one or the other would be reductive and would obscure the specificity of each, undermining Weyl’s hope that relativity theory might contribute to the philosophical problem of consciousness and its action in the world (i.e. remarkably perhaps, to overcoming the divide between consciousness and the world handed down to us by Kant). It would also be wholly inadequate to the needs of General Relativity, which posits movement as the original form in which space and time are combined and which cannot then derive one from the other, or indeed movement from their combination. Heidegger, too, aims to reach an understanding of movement that does not depend on a prior grasp of space and time as distinct forms, though his guide in this respect is less Einstein than Aristotle. This goes some way towards explaining why Heidegger, having remarked on the significance of gravitational field theory and general relativity, immediately offers up the hope that physicists will ‘abandon the old prejudices’ and return to Aristotle’s conception of movement.6

Number, line and manifold In the sections leading up to his comments on modern mathematics in the Sophist lectures, Heidegger discusses the problem of the separation or abstraction (chorismos) of first principles (archai) from that which they ground. Following Aristotle, he argues that in order to retain its properly mathematical character, the outcome of the abstraction should be atopos, not situated in a place. Such abstraction is fine when one is dealing with mathematical entities such as ‘odd’, ‘even’, ‘curved’, ‘line’ and ‘number’, but, for Aristotle, it is inappropriate when dealing with physical beings. Heidegger underlines that this is because physical beings are essentially determined by their relation to movement (‘phusei onta are kinoumena’ (GA19 103: 71), whereas the abstraction of the archai to another place divorces them from movement and encourages us to see them as beings (as in Plato’s theory of forms); the outcome of this trend is that even kinesis is treated as a being, and thus, in Heidegger’s terms, ontically. By contrast, writes Heidegger,

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it is possible to determine the archai of the moving phusei onta in such a way that the archai are not taken as divorced from motion and, furthermore, such that kinesis itself is not taken as an idea and hence as choriston. (GA19 103: 71) The challenge is to understand the process of abstraction in such a way that the formal description of movement can be atopos and therefore mathematical, while not stepping outside of the framework of movement and placing its archai elsewhere. In itself, this means that abstraction cannot be understood in its usual sense as the subtraction of a formal element from what is given to perception. The question of abstraction is also at the heart of Heidegger’s consideration of the difference between geometry and arithmetic. For Aristotle, place (topos) belongs to beings as such in the sense that it determines their possibility of being present. However, although both geometry and arithmetic involve an abstraction from place, geometry retains a relative sense of orientation, stance or situation (thesis) and this is reflected in the determination of the basic elements of the two disciplines: the point (stigme) and the unit (monas). The unit is what remains ‘alone’ and ‘for itself’, whereas the point carries with it an additional thesis that bears on the form of connection existing between the elements of geometrical figures. As Aristotle notes, a line is not composed out of points (PH VI.1: 231a24–231b19), a surface is not composed out of lines, nor a body from a surface, since between any two points there will always be other points. However many points one begins with, they will never be enough to make a line and there will always be something ‘between’ the points that hasn’t been accounted for. Even though geometrical figures are abstracted from place, they still deal with relations such as above and below, right and left. ‘Every geometrical object is an ousia thetos’ (GA19 110: 76) and ‘a determinate kind of connection is required, a determinate kind of unity of the manifold’ (GA19 111: 76). The form of connection and unity in a geometrical manifold is that of continuity (suneches), while that which belongs to an arithmetic manifold is succession (ephexis), where elements do not touch and no linkage is required between them. Succession is therefore a simpler relation than geometry with fewer elements and arithmetic is accordingly more original. This priority of arithmetic over geometry is further reinforced by the fact that the Being of every being is determined by its being ‘one’ (GA19 117: 80) and by the way number is disclosed through logos and noeisis, whereas geometrical figures are disclosed in aisthesis. Altogether, arithmos ‘acquires for the structure of beings in general a more fundamental significance as an ontological determination’ (GA19 117: 80). However, this must

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be set against the fact that what makes number more fundamental than geometry – the absence of thesis – also separates it from continuity and thus, apparently, from movement. As long as this is the case, it is unlikely that any approach based on number could, as Heidegger proposes, ‘determine the archai of the moving phusei onta in such a way that the archai are not taken as divorced from motion’ (GA19 103: 71). In view of this, and given the importance of continuity for phenomenology in general and Heidegger in particular, it is perhaps surprising to find him so readily endorsing the priority of arithmetic. That he does so, albeit strictly following Aristotle’s lead, should make us think twice before casting him too quickly and unambiguously as an opponent of analysis. It is all the more striking, therefore, that the passages in which Heidegger acknowledges the priority of arithmetic are followed directly by the remarks addressed to Weyl and contemporary work on the continuum, where Heidegger states explicitly that the continuum cannot be resolved by analysis, thereby arguing for a fatal weakness in the analytical approach. An intriguing situation has arisen in which arithmetic is ontologically more fundamental, yet unable to deal with the continuum, which is for Heidegger an ineliminable feature of time, space and movement. Against this background, one can see how Heidegger might have regarded analysis with qualified approval; bringing the ontologically more original use of number to problems previously treated by geometry could result in the best of both worlds, but only if the tendency for abstraction to lose sight of movement as such can be overcome. It is in this context that Heidegger remarks that Aristotle ‘arrived at facts natural scientific geometry is striving for today, though from the opposite direction’ (GA19 118: 81). The most straightforward way to interpret Heidegger’s comments here is as a further endorsement of the originality of the continuum, and thus as a rebuttal of analytical attempts to construct the continuum on an arithmetical base. However, the passages before and after these brief comments on relativity theory and Weyl’s work on the continuum make it clear that Heidegger does not simply reject number and the analysis of matter, movement, time and space in favour of a phenomenological approach. On the contrary, phenomenology is enlisted to overcome an impasse reached by the mathematical treatment of space and time in dealing with what is, for Heidegger, a genuine problem. What an analytical treatment of the relation of space and time in movement requires is an account of the application of number to movement as original. Moreover, Heidegger insists that this should be done in such a way that movement does not become an abstraction, a concept divorced from the physical

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setting that gives it meaning and whose ontological structure it articulates. Since Aristotle provides just such an account in his determination of time in Physics IV.11, Heidegger can argue that the General Theory of Relativity has led modern mathematics back to an Aristotelian problematic, at the heart of which lies the relation between continuity and number.

Weyl and the continuum In this section, I shall briefly set out the mathematical framework of Weyl’s treatment of space, time and movement in order to shed light on the limitations of analysis from Heidegger’s point of view, and indeed from Weyl’s own as well. Riemann’s development of the geometry of n-dimensional manifolds provided a mathematical tool that was perfectly suited to the description of space-time in Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. As a purely formal description, it should allow for the determination of space-time without recourse to our existing intuitions regarding space and time. However, its independence may also be regarded as a weakness: certainly, Weyl was concerned at the extent to which the analytical construction of the continuum was removed from the continua of space and time as we meet them in our experience and feared that mathematics had become remote from what it purported to describe.7 Moreover, the absence of a clear foundation in intuition left the elements of analysis in need of definition in order to be well founded, but Weyl argued that many of its key concepts were caught up in vicious circles that left the whole edifice of analysis looking like a house built on sand.8 For example, each real number n is determined by a set of rational numbers that are all less than n, yet with no single greatest number. If real numbers are then placed in a direct correspondence with points, one can generate an analytical description of the continuity of a line. However, the adequacy of the definition of the continuum depends on the adequacy of the definition of real numbers using set theory and the idea of the Dedekind cut, over which Weyl had serious reservations. Poincaré had concluded that the definition of an object which assumes the existence of a totality that includes that object as a member was fine so long as the totality precedes the definition. But if the totality does not precede the definition, then the definition is called impredicative and contains a vicious circle. Unfortunately, this is precisely what Weyl saw happening in the definition of number that underpins analysis.9 Weyl then also rejected three possible alternatives to this approach. For although he was determined to avoid the

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prevailing tendency to treat mathematical axioms as stipulations with no origin in experience, and did not believe that mathematics could appeal to a fundamental intuition of its basic concepts, nor did he want to replace the dangerously circular reasoning of impredicative definitions with a rigidly stratified approach, such as one finds in logicism. The question of circularity in the definition of real numbers is also echoed in the idea of the continuum as a totality of points, insofar as each point is understood in terms of a totality that cannot itself be defined independently of the points that constitute it; thus, the point on a line is understood in terms of the line as a whole and the now in terms of time. However, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Impredicative definitions, for all their shortcomings, lend themselves easily to the idea that the continuum is essentially a set not of things but of relations, and that the individual relations cannot be treated in isolation from one another; to do so would be to reduce the point to thing and thereby also to risk the reification of the continuum as the totality of such things.10 Since we intuitively accept the relational character of the continuum, we have the curious situation in which the circularity of impredicative definitions actually brings analysis closer to our experience of space, time and movement, while at the same time undermining the rigour of its foundations. Being at once critical of the flaws in the foundations of analysis and yet also determined to set it on a path as nearly parallel to experience as possible, Weyl looked for an alternative approach that could retain some of the intuitive sense of the impredicative approach while placing it on a more secure footing. To do this, he took the more straightforward system of natural numbers as a basic given, replaced the idea of a ‘set’ with that of a ‘sequence’ and then developed an essentially genetic approach to the construction of analysis through the iteration of simple operations. Weyl’s account of analytical construction initially follows the model we have already outlined: a line is broken down into points each of which corresponds to a real number, or in the case of a line marked on a plane, a pair of numbers standing for variable coordinates x and y on perpendicular axes. The shape of the line is determined by a function describing how x varies with regard to y. Weyl argues that in order to decide whether such a function is continuous or not one has to inspect the totality of sets arising from a complex application of the principles of definition; for example, the basic axioms and the rules of combination applicable to the recursive generation of more complex functions. But if the principles of definition form an open system then the question of the continuity of the function must remain open in its turn.11 To illustrate this, Weyl takes as an example the

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function ‘position of a point of mass’, which can be represented as a continuous function of time; that is, for all real values of time, the function stating position ‘takes on values belonging to a certain region’ (CO 87). In everyday terms, for all points of time within a given period, the position will remain within a local region (things do not disappear and then reappear suddenly somewhere else). However, things are not that straightforward, as Weyl’s consideration of a pen lying on the table shows. Simple observation tells him that it remains on the table throughout a given period. If time can be taken as a series of ‘rigidly punctual nows’, each of which corresponds to a real number, the continuous presence of the pen on the table requires that the spatial position be localized for every value of time as a real number between given limits. But for this to mean that the pen really is on the table throughout the period in question the set of real numbers must account for every time point in this period; that is, there must be a direct correspondence between time points and real numbers, with no time points unmatched to a real number, and there must be a set that is the analytical equivalent to the continuum spanning the period in question. To be sure this would work, one would have to justify the analytical construction on the basis of an intuition, which Weyl regards as impossible because our intuition of time does not include ‘rigidly punctual nows’ comparable to points and the classical definition of real numbers. Indeed, insofar as our intuition of space, time and movement yields any reliable results at all, it suggests that breaking them down into discrete elements is wholly mistaken. Spatial points blur from one to the next; time flows; movement is seamless. Although we cannot easily put this continuity into words, perhaps precisely because we cannot put it into words, we strive for its exact expression in mathematics. Yet, for Weyl, this effort can never fully realize its aim, since the mathematical expression cannot be traced directly back to an original intuition of continuity. The integration of the form of space-time with the dynamical relations between material objects means that the form of space and time is no longer fixed and uniform. Above all, it cannot be determined independently from movement, and so the geometry appropriate to it must be able to map the effects of dynamical relations on the form of space-time itself. Indeed, the idea of differential geometry developed by Riemann involves determining the metric of space by the iteration of infinitesimal displacements.12 But to generate a line by a sequence of infinitesimal displacements is quite different to treating it as an ideal object in a uniform and above all independent space. Continuing his review of the analytical construction of the continuum, Weyl therefore distinguishes between a line in the orthodox

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sense and the path traced by a moving point.13 The path is ‘a onedimensional continuum of “path-points”’ and while the path-points coincide with the points of the line, they are not equivalent to them (CO 102; italics in the original). This difference comes down to the necessity of involving movement and is therefore significant when we are thinking about the analytical construction of the continuum as a means of dealing mathematically with time and space. Weyl adds: The path-points, as ‘stages’ of the movement, stand in relations of ‘earlier’ and ‘later’ to one another, just as time-points do; in the movement, the continuum of path-points spreads over the continuum of time-points in a continuous monotone manner. This conception allows the ‘path’ to be separated, in a way, from the movement which produces it. (CO 102; italics in the original) What Weyl points out here is the need to isolate movement as the key term on the basis of which it becomes possible for differential geometry to address the continuum as extended in both space and time. Now, the analytical representation of points by real numbers needs to capture the connectivity of the path, rather than just the set of points in a line. Discussing the temporal continuum, Weyl shows how analysis deals with each now as a transition (rather than as rigidly punctual) by determining each real number in terms of an infinite sequence of ever more narrowly defined neighbourhoods. Although this extends the promise of something indistinguishable from smooth continuity, and brings analysis to the point of its closest proximity to the phenomenological perspective, it is by his own admission still a ‘reduction of continuous connectedness’ (CO 106).14 Leaving aside the difficulty facing analysis in the construction of continuity, it is worth noting that the introduction of the concept of ‘path’ does not mean that the continuum is being treated spatially first of all and only then transposed to the problem of time. If this were the case, serious doubts would arise over whether the account could ever avoid imposing spatial figure onto time and thereby failing to grasp it in its specificity. This is of course the concern that motivated Bergson to develop the idea of the durée, which Weyl repeatedly commends for its fidelity to our intuitive experience (CO 90). However, for Bergson, the price of securing the specificity of time is the impossibility of treating it mathematically, since the application of number apparently replaces pure continuity with its reconstruction from discrete elements. Similarly, Bergson is often credited with breaking away from the Aristotelian tendency to make time dependent on movement.

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Yet the theory of General Relativity regards movement as the original element in relation to which one understands space, time and matter. For both Weyl and Heidegger, then, there is every reason to not to separate time from movement and indeed to preserve the Aristotelian order of dependency. Weyl’s difficulty, which is the direct counterpart to Bergson’s, is that the price of treating the space-time continuum mathematically is to cut it off from anything we can find in our experience. Heidegger’s intervention can be read as an attempt to go beyond the respective positions of Bergson and Weyl, and is characterized by two basic features. In spite of the undeniable importance of time for his understanding of ontology and the originality of is own analyses, Heidegger is in fact happy to concede a certain priority to movement – or rather, to a certain conception of movement that he finds in Aristotle. This makes it possible in principle to develop an account of space and time as integrated in a single continuum, as relativity requires, but only if it is possible to demonstrate two basic and related points: first, that it is possible to apply number to continuity without thereby spatializing the account to the detriment of time; second that the application of number does not necessarily involve the sacrifice of connectivity essential to the continuity of both space and time. We can now turn to Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle’s account of time to see how these conditions are met.

Heidegger on number and movement Aristotle prefaces his account of time by dismissing the idea that it can be understood as literally composed from ‘bits’ of time such as now points.15 Time, he concludes, does not exist in the way that things exist but neither does it belong in the soul alone, and the drama of his account is played out in the tension between these two positions. Examining the conditions under which we are aware of time then leads him to consider its relation to movement and to the magnitude or dimension (megethos) that underlies all movement in the broadest sense, including qualitative change. The continuity of time (which Aristotle accepts without question) is said to be grounded in the continuity of movement or change, which is in turn dependent on the continuity of the underlying dimension. Time itself is famously declared to be ‘the calculable measure or dimension (arithmos) of motion with respect to before-and-afterness’ (219b1–3). Time arises when movement is numbered; that is, when change is marked by the observation that things ‘now’ are otherwise than they were a moment ago. Everything depends

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on the relation between number and movement, and in particular, on how we interpret the relation between number, the now by which we mark change, and the act of numbering by which we do so. In a passage apparently directed against a crude conception of analysis, Heidegger writes that the juxtaposition of nows to form a manifold is wholly inadequate to the problem of time and misunderstands the essential characteristics of the now. Like time itself, the now refers to the no-longer and the not-yet and occurs as an open dimension. Just as Weyl recognized that continuity had to be embodied in the now itself, so Heidegger goes on to describe the now as intrinsically transition (GA24 352: 249). He goes on to note that if the now is itself time (rather than that from which time is composed), then Aristotle’s definition of time entails that the now is number. This brings Heidegger to what he regards as the most crucial and difficult aspect of Aristotle’s account. Time is number and not limit, but as number it is at the same time able to measure that with reference to which it is number. Not only is time counted, but as counted it can itself be something that counts in the sense of a measure. Only because time is number in the sense of the counted now can it become a mensural number, so that it itself can count in the sense of measuring. This distinction between the now as number in general or what is counted and as the counting counted, is the essential content of the difficult place in Aristotle’s essay on time, into which we shall enter only briefly. (GA24 354: 250; italics in the original) Treating number as what is counted, rather than as the scale of measurement we apply (219b1–3) to what is counted, is unproblematic when we are dealing with its application to discrete entities; we can simply say that number is how many apples there are, rather than how many we count in the bowl. The situation is hardly so straightforward when dealing with number and continuous magnitudes, such as movement, as there is no predetermined unit of measurement. Nonetheless, there is an important sense in which the two cases are analogous. In the case of movement, to say that there is no ready-made unit prior to counting is to reject the idea of number both as a scale and as the objective existence of units. Instead, numbering is the original disclosure of what is numbered as numerable; it is the original disclosure of movement as susceptible to temporal determination. Yet insofar as movement is numbered it becomes, in Heidegger’s terms, ontic, a thing to handle in calculations. The same can in fact be said

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about the apples in the bowl. To number them is not to perceive their number (in a realist sense), but to enter into the disclosure of each apple as an apple, and therefore first of all as a single thing that exists. By acknowledging the idea of number as what is counted, Heidegger (following Aristotle) excludes any interpretation of time as a subjective phenomenon or as a feature of consciousness distinct from the external world. However, number, as it numbers movement, is not already demarcated prior to the numbering that occurs as time. Time is number as the condition for the application of number in measurement; but first one has to understand how time reveals movement as numerable at all. What is the relation between time as the disclosure of movement and its demarcation into a dimension to which a scale of measurement can be applied? For Heidegger, this problem is concentrated on the act of counting, in which temporal markers first disclose movement prior to the application of a determinate scale of measurement. It is this dimension of the problem that Heidegger tackles when he describes the way we reckon with time, taking account of time as we guide ourselves towards the accomplishment of activity (GA24 362–370: 256–261); as we orient ourselves within the series of overlapping involvements that make up the fabric of our world, judge that we are near or far, that we have too much time or too little. But these judgements are not originally directed towards established magnitudes of space and time. Their condition lies in movement, which is neither spatial nor temporal in itself.16 Opening up the problem in this way goes some way to overcoming the crude opposition between an external or objective time and an inner or subjective time, although it arguably leaves the balance tilted towards the subjective, or in Heidegger’s terms towards the perception and practical comportment of Dasein. In effect, Heidegger’s discussion of time-reckoning brings us closer to the original disclosure of movement through number, without quite describing this event itself. However, if we are still approaching the event from the side of Dasein, we can at least say that the temporal constitution of Dasein as care (Sorge) provides the structures through which Being is disclosed.17 Therefore movement, as what acquires temporal form through numbering, is more than just the transition of a thing from one state to another; it is also the ontological condition for the disclosure of beings in and through Dasein’s Being-in-the-world. This brings Heidegger’s account closer to Aristotle’s fundamental intuition that movement is the original framework in terms of which beings are disclosed; or in simple terms, that movement is essential to the Being of the physical world.

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As Heidegger writes, time, and in particular the now as transition, ‘is capable of making motion accessible as motion’ (GA24 354: 251; italics in the original). Insofar as the movement disclosed in this way is characterized by an original continuity, we seem to be little further forward. The key to resolving this difficulty, too, lies in the relation between number and what is numbered. As Heidegger has described it, to number is to give temporal form to movement before we apply predetermined units of measurement. It is to disclose movement by marking difference, where this difference itself depends on the mark – which is to say that there would be no movement, and therefore no dimension underlying movement, without its being numbered as time. Since the continuity of time is underpinned by the continuity of movement, and of the dimension underlying movement, we can therefore say that continuity itself would not exist without the application of number. We need only recall that the now, like time itself, is characterized by Aristotle in terms of both synthesis and diaresis, taking together and setting apart (220a5). There should be no question, therefore, of seeing the application of number to movement as the division of a pre-existent continuity. It is only through the numbering of movement which occurs when time is marked by the now that the very continuity of movement itself is established. Providing that one accepts the basic orientation of his reading, Heidegger arrives at a more original understanding of number and continuity than does analysis and highlights what is, at least from his point of view, its single biggest mistake. When it declines the support of an original intuition of the continuum, analysis leaves itself committed to the definition of the concept of number on which it is based. In spite of the sophistication of Weyl’s definition of number, analysis therefore applies a predetermined conception of number to movement, rather than disclosing their relation to one another as an original event. In the light of this, it is tempting to suppose that we can read Heidegger as providing a resolution to problems within analysis, but this would in the end be too one-sided an account. Phenomenology delves into the structures of conscious experience, whereas analysis proceeds by developing a numerical treatment of problems and then translating this treatment to geometry via a system of coordinates. To appreciate the incompatibility of the two methods we need only recall Weyl’s remark that the coordinate system is what is left when consciousness has been set aside: each method demands that the essential tools and milieu of the other be excluded. In spite of Weyl’s enthusiasm for a reconciliation, the discrepancy is probably

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too great for it to be overcome. Moreover, mathematicians would by no means all welcome the reinterpretation of mathematical formalism that fitting it to a phenomenological basis would entail. Weyl himself, though happy to applaud the progress that phenomenology had made towards a genuine philosophy of the continuum, came eventually to believe that it could not provide a foundation for analysis, above all because intuition remained too restricted a source from which to develop the extraordinarily rich diversity of mathematical formalism.18

Chapter 6

Continuity and the Experience of Language as Such

I The unity of language as such Heidegger introduces the lectures collected under the title ‘The Nature of Language’ by announcing that they are intended to bring us ‘face to face with the possibility of undergoing an experience with language’ (US 149: 57). In this sense, the lectures themselves are only preparatory, like an indication that will carry us beyond the text towards an experience that we are intended to undergo for ourselves. We are to open our ears to the saying of Being in language, which is the condition of all everyday language, and in every case exceeds the specific form of disclosure characteristic of it. For Heidegger, this means that we are to be brought to the point where it is possible for us to endure language as such, to submit to it, and through this experience to transform our relation to language, setting the practice of communication and expression in a new and more fundamental ontological dimension. In very similar terms, the introductory passages to the essay ‘The Way to Language’ declare that if we can experience this way in its own terms then ‘an intimation may come to us in virtue of which language will henceforth strike us as strange’ (US 229: 111), drawing us away from the familiarity of language as the currency of our everyday interests and involvements. These passages are themselves striking in several respects. First of all, we must appreciate the radicality of what Heidegger suggests is possible: a transformation of our relation to language through the experience of language as such, which amounts to an experience of the mode of disclosure of our everyday world, and thus to an experience of what philosophical thought seeks to capture in ontology. This radical possibility is presented with an unusual blend of reticence and confidence; as the possibility of an intimation that we can nonetheless firmly anticipate. Yet it is by

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no means the first time that Heidegger has described a confrontation with a possibility by virtue of which an ontological dimension to existence is revealed, transforming our everyday attitude into one appropriate to the thinking of Being. The account is strongly reminiscent of the analyses of the uncanny, anxiety and Being-towards-death in Being and Time, and this similarity will inform my reading of the essays on language. In each case, there is a clear methodological need to establish how the ‘natural attitude’ of our everyday relation to the world can be surpassed to reveal the ontological condition that sustains it. This involves disclosing the ontological condition of our experience of the world without treating it as a thing, yet while still attributing to it a degree of unity sufficient for it to be disclosed at all; language must be disclosed simply as language without thereby becoming the object of a ‘scientific’ account. At the same time, of course, one has to trace in the later essays the nature and extent of their departure from these themes in Heidegger’s earlier writing. In order to determine more precisely how the experience of language as language arises, I shall look at the conditions that make this experience possible; above all, the idea of time-space (Zeit-Raum, or Zeit-Spiel-Raum) to which Heidegger refers towards the end of the essay ‘The Nature of Language’. Charting a series of shifts in emphasis from Heidegger’s earlier work, I will argue that this idea of time-space is characterized by an ontological interpretation of continuity, and that this plays a decisive role in shaping both the possibility of experience as such, and the distinctively finite character of this experience. Moreover, we shall see that Heidegger radicalizes the idea of continuity that belongs to time-space, dispensing with a conceptuality indebted to the classic conception of the limit as what confers ‘wholeness’ and thereby unity on the dimension through which Being is disclosed. This radicalization, I shall argue, takes the form of a critique of the theme of temporality in Being and Time and other works of the period, and in particular of its reliance on the idea of the unity of the horizonal schemata of ecstatic temporality. Although an original and perhaps necessary step in Heidegger’s opening up of the question of Being in relation to the finitude of Dasein, from the perspective of the later work it can be regarded, perhaps surprisingly, as compromising the break with the metaphysics of substance that Heidegger intended to accomplish. The radicalization of continuity remedies this situation by placing greater emphasis on the constitutive role of the internal relations between the elements said to be continuous. However, I want to suggest that there are also two further consequences of this radicalization. First, with the continuity of the movement that characterizes the essential unfolding of language no longer conceived in

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relation to a limit, the idea of language as a ‘whole’ becomes problematic; the possibility of an experience with language as such is therefore no longer necessarily linked to an experience of language as a whole. This change is significant and I shall suggest that it is reflected in the nature of the experience of language as such that one is to undergo. Second, Heidegger, in the course of his work, draws temporality and spatiality back into a single common dimension of continuous time-space, which characterizes the ontological opening of language that he calls saying. However, this same sense of continuous time-space also characterizes the relation of the saying of language to actual speaking and hearing; and so any change in the conception of continuity will also bear on the priority of the saying of language over such speaking and hearing. Heidegger makes it perfectly clear that the experience of language as such can only be had from within language, yet an emphasis on these two consequences points to a sense in which the saying of language may be more radically immanent to human speaking and listening than Heidegger intended. Exploring this possibility through a reading of the book On the Way to Language, I shall argue that the experience of language as such can be characterized as an experience of going astray in language.

The experience of language Let us begin by looking at the idea of an experience of language as strange. There are three essential elements to Heidegger’s thinking on language: human speaking, language as extant in spoken form and the saying of language as language. Together, they form what he calls a web (Geflecht) of relations in which we are ourselves always already caught up, and which we cannot stand outside. Therefore, belonging to language does not simply confine us within a plane of relations between forms of human speech and the said, since it is made possible by our relation to a givenness as such which exceeds that plane. The various modes of speaking and the said are a manifold given out of a prior unity that Heidegger names as ‘the saying’, and our relation to this saying is at once a turn out of or beyond language (its spoken plane) and into language (its source, its unity).1 The consistency of language itself, therefore, is not established by lateral links between spoken forms, but by the common relation of such forms to saying – a relation that can none the less only be sustained by those who speak, write, listen and read.2 By virtue of this, we can only listen and speak insofar as we already have a relation to this fundamental event of language, but equally

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our passage towards language as saying must at the same time be a passage through language as written and spoken, by ourselves or by others. When we put something into words, we can only do so by engaging with language at the level of communication and expression, which implies leaving the essence of language itself unspoken. Yet it is also true that we cannot participate in language without somehow being in relation to this essence. For Heidegger, then, we speak from out of language in such a way that we have already heard language speaking. It is impossible, however, to say what it is that language has said, for language speaks by drawing us into a relation to the essence of language, and this cannot be represented without taking up a metaphysical stance towards it, and thereby distorting its ontological dimension into an ontic determination. ‘Essence’ has to be understood here not in its traditional metaphysical sense, but as an ‘unfolding’ through which Being is disclosed. Heidegger calls the unity of the essence of language the ‘design’ (Aufriβ) (US 240: 121), explaining that this indicates ‘the whole of the traits (die Ganze der Züge) of that drawing which structures and prevails throughout the open, unlocked freedom of language’ (US 240: 121).3 In this way, admittedly still unclear at this stage, language is unified by a limit that runs through it rather than around it, a limit by virtue of which it is first able to name beings and to disclose Being. Having said this, the term ‘limit’ is in fact misleading here for two reasons: first, as we have just noted, the idea of a peripheral limit is problematic and must be counterbalanced, if not superseded, by that of an immanent limit (this will be explored further shortly); second, ‘limit’ denotes that upon which the unity of a given whole depends, whereas Heidegger writes that the Aufriβ itself indicates a ‘whole of traits’. Therefore, given that the experience of language as language is an experience of language in its finitude, not only should we avoid assuming that this involves an encounter with a peripheral limit of some kind, we need also to consider the Aufriβ itself as a whole that we can take as unproblematically ‘original’ and ‘simple’ only on certain conditions: first, that we accept the Ancient Greek distinction between holon (whole) and pan (sum), and its modern counterpart of dependent and independent parts;4 second, that we allow, with Heidegger, that the Aufriβ as a whole precedes its articulation in language itself. With regard to the first condition, the Aufriβ is an event, and for this reason at least we must be wary of taking over the usual sense of parts and wholes, which would at the very least require a fresh interpretation if it were not to lead us back to the idea of a peripheral limit most directly suited to the constitution of a thing. In the case of language, setting aside the familiar tendency to look for a determined whole, Heidegger approaches the question of the essence of

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language ontologically, implying that we can encounter the Aufriβ through which language is opened up, and that we can do so by moving towards language as language itself essentially unfolds as a movement, or more precisely as a ‘way-making’ (Be-wëgung) (US 249: 130). While the Aufriβ comprises a plurality of elements, through this way-making we can catch sight of ‘the simplicity’ of the essence of language; which itself must articulate the whole of the traits found within the Aufriβ. For Heidegger, then, to experience language as language will be to experience language in its essential finitude, and this will mean experiencing the finitude of the movement by which the essence of language unfolds, and through which Being is disclosed.5 We shall see that this finitude is associated with its simplicity; that is, the traits within the Aufriβ cannot be assembled ‘after the fact’ and must already be related to one another by virtue of the dimension within which the movement of the essence of language unfolds. It is here, in the dimension that opens the range of possible relations between elements, that the simplicity of language has its condition. It is also here that it becomes possible to ask how it is that the simplicity of the essence of language necessarily precedes its articulation in and through language, and how this precedence itself is expressed. However, to bring this dimension to light, one cannot begin with the assumption that it conforms to our expectations of space and time, and the forms of relation embodied within them. Language speaks in the language that I hear and speak. Yet it also speaks from beyond the ordinary range of my own hearing and speech, with a remoteness that belongs to the difference between the ontic occurrence of spoken language and the ontological character of language as such. Because saying, in which our relation to language is first opened, is of a different order to the occurrence of everyday spoken language, the difference between them cannot be measured in units of distance and time; that is, the ontological difference opened by the Aufriβ cannot be given in space and time. Rather, as we shall see, Heidegger will propose that space and time themselves must be thought on the basis of the ontological difference as it occurs in and through language, and thereby in a manner appropriate to the unfolding of the essence of language in its finitude. To see more clearly how Heidegger addresses the essence of language, therefore, and what the implications may be of his approach for the idea of an experience of language as such, we need to consider what Heidegger has to say about the dimensions of space and time appropriate to language as such and their relation to movement as the ‘way-making’ of the essence of language. Although it will be important to work through these themes as they occur in the essays on language and poetry, the relation between movement, disclosure, space and time has

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a long history in Heidegger’s thought and it will be helpful to chart some of the earlier stages of his thinking on these matters. Before returning to the essays on language and poetry, therefore, I shall go back first of all to Being and Time and then briefly to the Beiträge.

Anxiety and the question of limits In the later essays, the movement of the essence of language is such that for the most part language ‘holds back’, coming to the fore most of all when we are lost for words and our familiarity with language is disrupted. In the main, moments such as these are lost as we regain the power of speech as an expressive medium. Yet this is not inevitable; poets are, perhaps, distinguished by their capacity to speak and write in proximity to this loss, by their sensitivity to this experience, and by their readiness to allow their relation to language to remain marked by it without being robbed of words altogether. This capacity to speak and write from close by what we can provisionally say is the limit from which speaking and writing first become possible recalls the way, in Being and Time, Dasein transforms its own existence by achieving an authentic relation to its own mortality, and thereby a new understanding of beings and everyday existence. Dasein understands itself for the most part in terms of possibilities that are taken more or less uncritically from the world around it. This tendency to find oneself doing whatever custom and expectation suggest, which Heidegger calls fallenness (Verfallenheit), reveals a deep-seated inclination on the part of Dasein to flee ‘in the face of itself’ (SZ 184: 229): that is, to avoid the recognition that its existence is originally a whole, rather than a haphazard assembly of interests, acts, dispositions, and so forth. The fact that it can flee at all means, for Heidegger, that Dasein must already have ‘been brought before itself in an ontologically essential manner’ (SZ 184: 229). The disclosure of Dasein’s existence to itself occurs in the experience of anxiety, and on its basis the phenomenological disclosure of its own ontological structure becomes possible. This is borne out by the description of anxiety as lacking a natural object, which is in turn explained by the fact that one is anxious not in the face of this or that particular prospect, threat or possibility, but rather in the face of Being-in-the-world as such. Formally speaking, anxiety is characterized by a coincidence between disclosure and disclosed, as Dasein’s Being-in-the-world is individualized and brought before itself without the distractive mediation of particular involvements, fears, interests or projects: ‘That about which anxiety is anxious reveals itself

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as the selfsame as that in the face of which it is anxious – namely, Beingin-the-world’ (SZ 188: 233; italics in the original). Anxiety is the experience of Being-in-the-world becoming aware of itself as the condition for each particular involvement and concern of Dasein. What appears to be happening here is that in anxiety, what is disclosed folds back onto the structure of disclosure itself, their coincidence amounting to an auto-disclosure of the very possibility of disclosure as such. This coincidence, moreover, seems only to be possible insofar as there are determinate limits to the existence of Dasein that can coincide in this way. By virtue of its giving a determinate contour to the structure of Dasein’s existence, death plays a vital role in the disclosure of Dasein’s Being-as-a-whole. Once this awareness has been achieved, the analysis in Being and Time begins to recover the ontological structure of Dasein as a whole, as revealed by anxiety. To this end, after a discussion of truth that closes division one of the book, division two sets out to delineate the temporal structure of Dasein’s existence as a whole, which in turn leads Heidegger to address the relation of Dasein to its death as that which marks its essential finitude. However, I want to explore the possibility that, even though these two strands of Heidegger’s thought on the finitude of Dasein are closely intertwined with one another, a tension exists between the temporal articulation of Dasein’s existence as a whole and the account of death as possibility. If this were indeed so, it would mean that there are different conditions for the simplicity – that is, the continuity – of the dimension in and through which Being is disclosed, and that they are not fully consistent with one another. Given the implication of the analysis of Being-towards-death in the account of Dasein’s temporality, this would already be surprising. It would be all the more so if we broaden our considerations to include the importance of the idea of an original simplicity for Heidegger’s thought as a whole, and in particular for the motif of the ‘as such’ that runs through so much of it. First, then, let us take a look at the temporal structure of Dasein’s existence as a whole. In terms of Heidegger’s strategy in Being and Time, reaching a temporal determination of Dasein otherwise than according to the usual reliance on the present is crucial to Heidegger’s destruction of the history of ontology, which aims to recover a possibility of the understanding of Being that was covered over with the inception of metaphysics and has remained so ever since. As such an understanding must be articulated via Dasein, this in turn requires a fresh interpretation of the temporal structure of Dasein as Being-in-the-world. The ontological structure of Dasein’s existence as care (Sorge) is defined as Dasein’s being ‘ahead-of-itself-Being-already-in (the world) as Being-alongside entities which we encounter (within the

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world)’ (SZ 249: 293). Embedded within this definition are the three temporal dimensions of the future, past and present, in the form of Dasein’s being ahead of itself already in the world alongside entities, and by virtue of these three interlocking ecstases Dasein is said to be temporally ‘outside’ itself. This account of the basic temporality of Dasein’s existence is then brought to bear on the character of Dasein’s Being-in-the-world as a whole. In this way, beginning with the condition of authentic resoluteness, Heidegger sets out to ‘lay bare the ontological meaning of Dasein’s Being’ (SZ 323: 370), where ‘meaning’ itself is said to signify the ‘upon-which’ (das Woraufhin) of a primary projection ‘in terms of which something can be conceived in its possibility as that which it is’ (SZ 324: 371). The formal character of the ‘upon which’ is the horizon for each temporal ecstasis. The future, as anticipation or ‘Being-ahead-of-itself’, projects ultimately on a ‘for-the-sake-of-oneself’; the past, as having-been and thrownness, is disclosed against that ‘in the face of which’ and ‘to which’ Dasein is abandoned; and finally the present is disclosed against the ‘in-order-to’ (SZ 365: 416). Heidegger is very clear that the horizons cannot be treated as in any way extrinsic to the respective ecstases. As he writes in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology: Each ecstasis, as removal to . . . has at the same time within itself and belonging to it a pre-delineation of the formal structure of the whereto of the removal. We call this whither of the ecstasis the horizon, or, more precisely, the horizonal schema of the ecstasis. (GA24 429: 302; italics in the original) Heidegger’s terminology here leaves us in little doubt that he is reworking Kant; however, as is often the case when Heidegger reworks Kant, he is also thinking of Aristotle. Just as the schematism in the Critique of Pure Reason is the temporal condition for the unity of the object of experience, so here the horizonal schemata serve as the condition for the possibility of the world; and since the world is precisely that which is given as a unity (SZ 365: 416), the horizonal schemata are therefore also conditions for the unity of the world, and therefore in turn of Dasein as Being-in-the-world. The possibility of Dasein’s Being-a-whole, therefore, ultimately rests on the unity of ecstatic temporality, which is itself secured by its horizonal structure. However, if the problem of how Dasein exists as a whole is not to be merely displaced to the constitution of temporality as a whole, Heidegger has to demonstrate how the horizonal structure of ecstatic temporality forms a unity, and there are two aspects to this: the unity of the ecstasis with

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its own horizon, and the unity of the horizons of each ecstasis. I shall focus here on the first of these. In the passage quoted above, Heidegger notes that the relation of the ecstasis to its horizon is neither that of a movement to the point at which it is brought to a halt, nor that of a projection upon a screen. Rather, the horizon belongs intrinsically to the projection itself. To understand what Heidegger intends here, we need to recall that Being and Time can be read as an ontological interpretation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and in particular that the account of Dasein is heavily influenced by the idea of human existence as a praxis, an activity that is an end in itself, as opposed to poiesis, productive activity that leads to a free standing end.6 The dynamic correlate of this praxis is given in Metaphysics Θ 6, where Aristotle characterizes energeia, as an activity that is an end in itself, that is, is always already at an end that belongs to it. Reading ecstatic temporality in these terms, each ecstasis can be understood as a movement that already ‘has’ its end.7 In The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger points out that this essential belonging of the horizon to the ecstasis heads off the necessity to ask upon what basis the horizon itself is disclosed, as though its closure were accidental. Of course, one could still ask how the horizon belongs to the ecstasis (just as one might ask of Aristotle in what sense the activity of energeia or entelecheia ‘has’ its end), but, nearing the end of the lecture course that forms The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger declines to do this and merely remarks that to enquire further would mean addressing ‘the finiteness of time’ (GA24 437: 308). One might object that Heidegger is stating the obvious here, since it is with the finiteness of time that this whole analysis is concerned. Moreover, this is also what makes the remark somewhat unsatisfactory. For the formal structure of the horizonal schemata is supposed to account for the finiteness of time, yet a full explanation of how the formal structure of the horizonal schemata work is itself referred back to the finiteness of time, which implies that the account in terms of the unity of the horizonal schemata may not in itself be adequate and that a more fundamental condition does indeed remain to be found.

Closure and Being-in A clue to the direction in which the account might be developed is given back in Being and Time, where Heidegger writes that the ecstatical character of the future ‘lies precisely in the fact that the future closes one’s potentiality-for-Being’ (SZ 330: 379). The most obvious way to understand this idea

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of closure is in terms of a limit. I have already noted that this may be an inappropriate term on which to rely for an ontological account of the existence of Dasein, but let us now consider why this is the case. The significance of the term ‘limit’ lies in its association with Heidegger’s debt to Aristotle’. More specifically, it is related to the idea of being ‘in’ that as well as characterizing Dasein’s existence as Being-in-the-world also shapes the idea of wholeness associated with a continuous dimension. Aristotle discusses the relation of being ‘in’ explicitly at two points. In Metaphysics V.xxiii, he refers the meaning of being ‘in’ back to that of ‘having’ discussed in the preceding paragraphs. To be ‘in’ something is to be ‘had’ or ‘held’ by it, and Aristotle distinguishes four possible senses in which this may be understood: (1) To ‘have’ is to direct or exercise power over (to have at one’s disposal). (2) Matter ‘has’ form; and the body may ‘have’ a disease. (3) A vessel ‘has’ that which it contains; for example, a vessel holds a liquid, and a city holds its citizens. (4) Pillars ‘hold’ the building they support (they stop it from moving). The first sense corresponds to the relation between potentiality (dunamis) and the enactment constitutive of its own full realization, and we shall come back to it shortly when we look at the idea of Beingtowards-death. However, it is the third sense that is most familiar to us, and moreover we are also encouraged to give it priority by Aristotle himself. In the second of the discussions of being ‘in’, part way through an account of place (PH 210a15–210b32), Aristotle introduces seven senses in which the relation of being ‘in’ obtains (including that of the arche of change being ‘in’ the final cause), before again announcing that the primary sense from which all these are derived is that in which we say that a thing is ‘in’ a vessel, or more generally, ‘in a place’ (210a25–26). That the relation to an encompassing vessel or place is said to be the primary sense of ‘in’ suggests that this usage may indeed also have priority when the senses of ‘in’ are referred to those of ‘having’ in the first of the discussions mentioned above. What is crucial here is that in each case the sense attributed to the expression ‘being in’ is derived from a physical relation: and above all from the spatial relation of being ‘in’, or indeed ‘having’, a place. Yet this is surely odd. Why should the respective senses of, for example, the half being in the double, the part being in the whole, health being in the balance of hot and cold and my fate being in my hands be understood in what is at bottom a physical or spatial sense? Since a literally spatial sense seems so inappropriate to so many forms of ‘abstract’ relation, we need to ask how the further senses of being ‘in’ follow from the primary one. In what respect, and with what consequences, do the various possible senses of ‘in’ remain indebted to the ‘primary’ sense? The mathematician, he writes, deals with lines, figures and

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surfaces, but not as the boundaries of natural bodies (PH 193b32–33). Like numbers, planes and lines have no separate existence of their own, and by implication no place (since this would commit one to the existence of a surface of surface etc. (MET 1076b12–13)). However, although mathematical entities are abstracted from physical bodies moving in space, they retain the characteristics of relation – indeed, it is their most potent feature as the coinage of thinking – and these characteristics of relation seem still to involve at least some elements that belong to place and space, such as the exteriority of the relata to one another. Can one abstract a relation whose dimensionality is no longer spatial? One can certainly describe a relation that is not explicitly spatial: for example, that which obtains between a substance and its properties, or between two conditions such as temperature. But that is not what is at stake here. It is more problematic to propose the abstraction from a physical context of a relation not determined by the exteriority of one element to the other in the sense that we have already described above; one that does not feature in the series of alternatives mentioned by Aristotle, of which being in a place is primary. Such features of relationality are difficult to eliminate. Yet we have already seen in Chapter 5 that Heidegger believes it to be both possible and necessary, arguing that abstraction should yield a set of relations that are atopos, yet still in relation to motion. The issue here is that the idea of horizonality on which the account of ecstatic temporality relies appears to deploy a notion of limit that belongs to place – topos – and moreover one that leaves the account of dimension that underpins the relations in question still bearing the residual traces of the spatiality from which the sense was originally drawn. Insofar as this is the case, not only will the account of the ontological structure of Dasein have taken over a sense of spatial dimension for which it was intended to provide a ground, but it will thereby have allowed ontic determinations to shape and, and thereby compromise, the ontological account. Crucially here, it will mean that the continuity of the dimension of Dasein’s existence as Being in the world will be shaped by an insufficiently ontological sense of limit.

II Potentiality and Being-towards-death One way to clarify Heidegger’s appeal to the notion of closure leads back to the analysis of Being-towards-death, and the way death stands as the closure

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of Dasein’s future possibilities. This suggests two possible readings, which are at least in part at odds with one another. According to the first, the finitude of Dasein arises in ecstatic temporality from the unity of the schemata understood as a peripheral limit. In the second, the finitude of Dasein arises from a relation to death that cannot be understood in terms of a peripheral limit at all. Our understanding of the dimension characteristic of the disclosure of Being through Dasein will depend on which reading is given most emphasis. In the analysis of Being-towards-death, Heidegger is clear from the outset that death cannot be treated merely as the cessation of life, since this would be to treat existence itself as something present-at-hand that merely passes over into non-existence (SZ 245: 289). Rather, Dasein is distinguished by its concern for its own Being, and this way of existing in and through a relation to one’s existence results here in death itself being approached as a possibility, albeit in a unique sense. For although my own death is always possible, it is a possibility that can never be actualized because my death is not something that I can accomplish. Insofar as it exists for me, it therefore exists as a possibility, that is, as the possibility of the impossibility of my existence. For this reason, Death as possibility is intrinsic to the existence of Dasein and not something that merely interrupts it or draws it to a close (as would death as an actuality). On this basis, one can draw out two readings, that remain in tension with one another. First, as Dasein’s end as possibility belongs to its existence, it stands as a limit precisely in the sense intended by Aristotle, who defined ‘limit’ as ‘the furthest part of each thing, and the first point outside which no part of a thing can be found, and the first point within which all parts are contained’ (MET 1022a4–5). Death as limit is a part of what it limits rather than simply a dividing line between two regions or things, and as such a possibility it enables Dasein to grasp its Being-inthe-world as a whole. Against this reading, one can also see that Heidegger’s account departs from the Aristotelian format insofar as death as possibility is always present within Dasein’s existence and therefore cannot be treated as a peripheral limit. Bearing in mind that Dasein exists as potentialityfor-Being, the full reason why death as possibility is irreducible to such an interpretation of limit becomes clear if the account of Being-towards-death is approached via Heidegger’s interpretation of potentiality in Aristotle. His most sustained reading of potentiality in Aristotle is given in the 1931 lectures on Aristotle’s Metaphysics Θ 1–3, and I’ll turn to this course briefly here.8 Aristotle defines dunamis in Metaphysics Θ 1 as an origin (arche) of change (metaboles) in another thing or in itself qua other (1046a10).9 This definition

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has come to be seen almost as a commonplace requiring little or no further investigation. Not so, objects Heidegger. If arche and metabole are understood directly as cause and effect in the usual way, the expression ‘in another’ is taken as referring to metabole (i.e. as indicating that the event of change is in another), while the dunamis that is the arche is thought to lie in the active element or cause. Heidegger, by contrast, understands the phrase to mean that it is the arche that lies in what is other with respect to that which undergoes the change. While the significance of this difference may not be immediately obvious, its value lies in the space it opens up to allow the progressive dissociation of the ‘primary’ sense of dunamis from any one particular element. Having noted that there are two senses of the potentiality or force of being acted upon (dunamis tou paschein) – the potentiality for undergoing change (dunamis tou pathein) and that for resisting change (hexis apatheis) – Aristotle does not immediately refer to the active sense. In Heidegger’s view this marks ‘the conceptual acuity of Aristotle’s thinking’ (GA33 90: 75), insofar as it allows the potentiality to be the origin of change (dunamis tou poiein) to be present (by virtue of its necessary implication with the senses named), while discouraging the view that it is the primary form of dunamis and the key to understanding what dunamis really is: as if the forces to undergo or to resist change could be understood as modifications or specific instances of that fundamental sense. Instead, the trajectory of the interpretation is such that the force to undergo or to resist change is referred back to the ‘first’ dunamis ‘in such a way that precisely this reference also gives back to the guiding meaning its very sense and content’.10 The priority here lies not with the active force, but with the relation or difference between the forces producing change and those undergoing or resisting it. The primary sense is finally determined in lines 1046a19–29, the first part of which is translated by Heidegger as follows. Evident now is the following: A force for doing and for tolerating is at one time (in one respect) such that one single force (as one and the same) is both, . . . but at another time it is such that each of the two is another (such that it is both, in each case as other in another). (1046a19–21, GA33 101: 87)11 Heidegger underlines that we are being invited to consider the question of whether in speaking of a force for doing and for tolerating, we are referring to two forces, two modes of dunamis, or just one: and ‘If only one, then in what sense is dunamis understood? If two, then how is dunamis to be grasped

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in its unity?’ (GA33 104: 88; italics mine). On the one hand, there are clearly two different dunameis present: that to initiate change and that to undergo change. Yet to initiate change is itself to change. Moreover, identifying each dunamis as the specific modality of its appearance amounts to treating it as thing-like, and represents what Heidegger calls an ‘ontic’ determination of dunamis. On the other hand, we can also see that force only has any meaning whatsoever in virtue of the relation between the ‘active’ and ‘passive’ elements, a relation that for Heidegger necessarily points towards a deeper essential sense on the basis of which it becomes possible. The essence of force in itself, in terms of its own essence and in relation to this essence, diverges into two forces in an originary way. This of course does not mean that a definite individual force directly at hand consists of two forces, but rather that this force in its essence, that is, being a force as such, is this relation of the poiein to a paschein: being a force is both as one – os mia. (GA33 105: 89) Heidegger goes on to describe the dynamic relation between acting and undergoing as a metabole. Hence metabole in the fully understood guiding meaning no longer means one-sidedly only the active transforming; neither is it passive bearing simply appended on to this. Instead it means the reciprocal relation of both as such . . . so little has it fallen by the wayside that pointing out these references – dunamis tou poiein kai paschein os mia – brings it into view. (GA33 115: 97–98) Looking back at the definition of dunamis as an origin of change in another thing or in itself qua other, we can see that metabole, the movement in terms of which dunamis and energeia are interpreted and that must be articulated through them, has less to do with the transition of one thing into another than with the play between active and passive senses of dunamis by which they are at once differentiated and linked as one. However, there remains a fundamental step to be taken. In the final passage of Metaphysics Θ 1, Aristotle carries the investigation to a new level with the introduction of steresis, the contrary to dunamis.12 And unforce (forcelessness) and consequently also the ‘forceless’ is a withdrawal (steresis) as what lies over and against dunamis in the sense

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developed; hence every force, if it becomes unforce, that is, as unforce is in each case in relation to and in accordance with the same (with respect to that by which a force is a force, every force is unforce). (1046a28–29, GA33 108: 91–92) Heidegger translates steresis as Entzug.13 In general, steresis signifies the condition of being without something, which may of course take several forms, and Aristotle lists them both here and in Book V (1046a32–33, 1022b22–1023a7). However, these are ontic examples. In the context of the sentence preceding these illustrations (that quoted above) an ‘essential’ sense of steresis is required. Insofar as the dunamis tou poiein does not meet insuperable resistance, it may be said to have a domain of efficacity (cf. the discussion of ‘in’ and ‘have’ above). Heidegger describes this as the force holding sway or governing not simply what submits to it, but also itself (sich selbst beherrschen). However, such governance can fail, whereupon the force gives way to its privation. When Aristotle writes that force is intrinsically related to un-force, Heidegger therefore understands him to mean that every force, as finite, is bound from the first not only to the force of resistance against which it acts, but also to its own reversal, to the point where it is undone and can no longer hold sway over what is other to it, or even over itself. For specific active forces are related to opposing forces of resistance, but in the case of the essence of dunamis, the relation is still more intimate. Here, the relation of force to un-force is not that of an original plenitude or active force either to its exhaustion or an externally imposed limit; that is, it does not consist in the transition from one phase to another. The change from force to un-force is not a movement in the usual sense of a transition at all; as Heidegger concludes, ‘the proper possessive character of force is . . . inwardly bound up with loss and withdrawal’ (GA33 113: 96). Each instance of dunamis comprises – literally possesses – its own reversal. Heidegger picks out what he regards as the key phrase from 1046a28–29: ‘Every force is un-force with reference to and in accordance with the same thing’ (‘Jede Kraft ist Unkraft in Bezug auf dasselbe und gemäß desselben’) (GA33 111: 94). Moreover, this is true not only of specific forces, but of the essence of force itself. Therefore dunamis is essentially a play of possession and privation, having and loss – and it is this play of ‘finite appropriation’ that emerges as the leitmotiv of Heidegger’s reading at the ontological level as well. The ‘limit’ between force and unforce, between being-able and no-longer being able, is therefore far removed from the idea of spatial relations.

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Neither does force meet its ‘limit’ in a countervailing force, but rather in an immanent relation to its own dwindling capacity: a failure of self-governance. Moreover, insofar as this is what force is, the possibility of its coming to nothing in this way is ever present within it, held in an internal relation rather than resisted as extrinsic threat. It is therefore the dynamism of metabole that most accurately describes the relation of potentiality to its reversal, that is, ‘limit’ has the character of metabole. If we return to the account of Being-towards-death in Being and Time, we can see that this interpretation of dunamis is an excellent fit. Having given a preliminary outline of the structure of Being-towards-death as Dasein’s anticipation of its ownmost potentiality-for-Being, Heidegger provides a fuller account of the ‘concrete structure of anticipation of death’ and thereby of the ontological constitution of Dasein (SZ 263: 397). This analysis of Being-towards-death is introduced as the way of pursuing the problem of Dasein’s relation to its end, which has to be resolved in order to secure phenomenological access to Dasein’s Being-a-whole. Having set aside Dasein’s inauthentic relation to death as ‘still outstanding’, Heidegger goes on to outline its authentic relation to death as a possibility that is its ownmost, is non-relational, and is not to be outstripped (SZ 250–251: 294). That death is Dasein’s ‘ownmost’ possibility means that Dasein’s own Being is at issue, and that this is not just one possibility among others. Insofar as Dasein exists at all, in whatever form or condition, the possibility of its death can only be forgotten, but not fundamentally avoided. Moreover, precisely because it concerns the bare existence of Dasein, its existence as such, death is ‘non-relational’, in the sense that it does not lead on to, or belong within, further possibilities that might themselves be held in common with others; in the way I might participate in a project for which others are jointly responsible and which they might continue without me. As non-relational, death therefore individualizes Dasein, but not primarily because its existence is made whole by its limit. Rather, my death ‘lays claim’ to me as an individual in the sense that I and I alone can meet the threat that arises to my existence from the possibility of my death. Finally, as already noted, Dasein’s death is ‘not to be outstripped’ insofar as there is no way that it can be actualized for the sake of some further possibility, since its actualization is coterminous with surrendering existence itself. This is the closest element of the formulation of death as possibility to the orthodox idea of a limit to Dasein’s existence. However, in the context of the other elements, it is not enough to impose the idea of Dasein’s existence being a whole by virtue of its relation to a limit, at least as long as one does not go on to ask

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how this limit ‘belongs’ to Dasein’s existence. To respect the ontological distinction between the existence of Dasein and the Being of things, death as a limit cannot belong to Dasein in the same way as a surface belongs to an extended body or an extreme point belongs to a line. The telling phrase is that in which Heidegger describes how the possibility of death exposes Dasein to a threat ‘arising from Dasein’s own most individualized Being’ (SZ 265: 310). Insofar as Dasein does not avoid this threat, but rather affirms its own existence as potentiality-for-Being continually at risk of losing its capacity to project, to act, to feel and to be involved in the world – that is, to lose the very dimension of its existence through which Being is disclosed, the Da of Dasein – then Dasein maintains itself in relation to its own end.14 Moreover, Heidegger explicitly identifies the stateof-mind that can hold open the threat arising from its ownmost individualized Being as anxiety (SZ 266: 310). Anxiety, then, reveals not a coincidence of limits as the structure of disclosure folds back upon itself, but rather a relation to the death as the possibility of no-longer being-able-to-be-there (Nicht-mehr-dasein-könnens) (SZ 250: 294). From this it becomes clear that the condition of Dasein’s being a whole is not simply that it is bounded by death as a temporal limit. The account of authentic Being-towards-death presents Dasein’s Being-a-whole as the finitude of a potentiality to exist that exists as potentiality precisely insofar as it holds sway over the powerlessness that threatens to rise up and overwhelm it and with which it wages a continual struggle. As such, it can be regarded as a reinterpretation of the Aristotelian account of potentiality, and in particular of the relation between dunamis and steresis. The closure that death brings to Dasein’s existence is thereby not primarily the imposition of a temporal limit as we might usually understand this, but rather the essential finitude of potentiality itself; and if the analysis of Being-towards-death is to guide a reading of the finitude of Dasein’s temporality in terms of the horizonal schemata of the temporal ecstases, then this account of finitude has to be kept clearly in view. Yet the reading of temporal finitude in terms of Being-towards-death opens up a tension with the account of temporality established around the unity of the horizonal schemata, precisely insofar as the latter still promotes a sense temporality as bound by peripheral limits. As the relative rarity of the experience of anxiety shows, Dasein generally avoids an honest and direct confrontation with its own finitude and this is reflected here in the way it maintains itself (sich hält) in an inauthentic Being-towards-death by refusing to recognize the ontological significance of death for its own existence. However, Dasein can also adopt an authentic Being-towards-death, by virtue of which it will stand before its ‘ownmost potentiality-for-Being’ (SZ 249: 251), reveal its own death as a possibility

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and take this possibility over as its own. In authentic Being-towards-death, Dasein endures the anxiety triggered by the confrontation with its own potentiality-for-Being and affirms its existence in such a way that a phenomenological analysis to establish the horizons of that totality becomes possible and thereby also a thematization of the ontological structure through which Being is disclosed. All this apparently depends on Dasein’s undergoing the experience of anxiety as a disclosure of its own Being-in-the-world as a whole, and then projecting upon the limit of its own existence. Initially, we observed that it seems as though the coincidence between Beingin-the-world as the structure of disclosure and Being-in-the-world as what is disclosed can occur only if there are determinate limits to fold back, one upon the other. As we have seen, however, a simple model of formal coincidence between disclosure and disclosed (which follows almost directly in a metaphysical tradition from Plato and Aristotle to Descartes and Husserl) is never dominant even at this early stage of Heidegger’s writing. The way that Dasein’s death runs through its existence as possibility, and the basis of this reading in an interpretation of potentiality in Aristotle, makes it impossible to describe the coincidence between disclosure and disclosed in terms of a folding back of one bounded form on another. This, in turn, means that the idea of the whole cannot be expressed in terms of a relation to a single peripheral limit, because such a reading does not give adequate weight to the way the whole is constituted by the internal relations of its elements to one another, rather than merely by their collective relation to what binds them together. Giving priority to the idea of the whole over the sum is intended to do just this, yet it seems that insofar as the unity of the whole depends on the idea of a limit, it does not go far enough.

The remainder of space in ecstatic temporality Having recognized this, we need to look briefly at what it means for the existential structure of Dasein as it is lived. So far, we have established that closure is not established by a peripheral limit, and have seen that the sense of a whole associated with potentiality is derived from the way potentiality ‘holds sway’ over itself. However, we still need to say more about the form of the relations that sustain the existential dimension opened by Dasein’s Being-towards-death: that is, the ‘there’ of its existence. In doing so, we need also to be sensitive to any implications arising from the divergence between the two accounts for how we think this space. Writing about the nature of our involvements in the world, Heidegger describes interrelated – and nested – series of acts that are each carried out

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‘in-order-to’ reach some end, and which are directed ultimately to some further end for-the-sake-of-which each act and series of acts are undertaken. Thus, for example, the hammer is swung in-order-to build the house and the house is built in-order-to provide shelter, all of which is ultimately ‘for-the-sake-of’ Dasein itself as a being that is concerned with its own Being. Together, the in-order-to and the for-the-sake-of form a ‘primordial unity’ that Heidegger calls a ‘relational totality’ of significance and it is within, or indeed as, this totality that Dasein exists (SZ 87: 120). The relation between one possibility and the next that makes up this network of significance is modelled on the relation between acts in Aristotle’s ethics, where, for example, bridle-making is practised towards the end of horsemanship, which is for the end of military action, which is for the sake of the well-being of the state (NE 1094a10–15). Certainly for Aristotle, the possibility of the subordinate actions is dependent on the higher order actions, since bridle-making would not be undertaken for its own sake, but only towards the end of horsemanship. In this way, possibilities and actions – including actions that are ends in themselves– are grouped together beneath the final end to whose accomplishment they all lead or contribute.15 All action is thereby made whole by the structure of the ‘end in itself’, which is that of living well (eudaimonia, eupraxia, or simply human existence as praxis). From this point of view, the wholeness of Dasein’s existence derives from the continuity that characterizes the relation between the activity (praxis or energeia) and the end that it ‘has’ within it. What I can do falls always within this totality. So much is this the case that, for Heidegger, it is only when Dasein projects itself upon the horizon of its own mortality and the totality of Dasein’s potentiality-for-Being is disclosed as a whole (e.g. in anxiety), that Dasein can come back to itself in such a way as to disclose the possibilities within the totality of its existence precisely as possibilities that belong essentially to its own existence. ‘Only by the anticipation of death is every accidental and “provisional” possibility driven out’ (SZ 384: 435). This is to say, by affirming its own finitude Dasein draws a line between possibilities that have merely been handed down to it through everyday existence, and those which it takes as its own. There is therefore a kind of twofold distinction here. First, there is the totality of the possible, beyond which lies impossibility. Then there is an internal distinction drawn between what is accidental, which lies within this overall horizon but outside the set of possibilities that Dasein takes as its own. As we have seen, in neither case should we understand this ‘line’ in any common spatial sense. In other words, it is not a ‘limit’ in the sense outlined above. Rather, the division between Dasein’s own possibilities and those that are accidental to

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it should be read in terms of the dynamic relation between the sphere in which Dasein holds sway over itself (through its possibilities) and those possibilities that may present themselves to Dasein but over which Dasein exercises no real measure of control. To be able to exercise such control requires that Dasein have the capacity to transform the possibility into the actuality of which it is a possibility, and thereby that Dasein have the potentiality to accomplish a given act. As we know from Heidegger’s lectures on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, he followed Aristotle in thinking that to have a potentiality is a way of existing characterized by holding sway over oneself and the powers that resist one’s action; and so we are ultimately brought back to the interpretation of Dasein’s relation to death in terms of dunamis and steresis. But what is particularly important here is to see how the dimension that Dasein calls its own, the ‘there’ within which Being is disclosed, is constituted as a whole in terms of the interrelation of the possibilities within it. While temporality plays a central role in this, there is a sense of relation that is not reducible to temporality, since the possibility of horsemanship, for example, may lie ahead of the possibility of bridle-making, but their relation is far from being merely chronological. Similarly, although it is true that there is a spatiality to the relation between such possibilities by virtue of their worldly character, they cannot simply be ordered in this way either. They are relations that make up the fabric of Dasein’s existence, including its desires, its concerns, its actions and its rational engagement with the world. For Heidegger, all of this is to be captured in the movement unique to Dasein, and in the period of Being and Time, that movement was to be captured formally above all in the structure of temporality. We have seen where the shortcomings may lie, shortcomings of which Heidegger himself was of course perfectly well aware. According to the structure of care, a possibility that lies ahead of Dasein is at the same time its having-beenness, to which Dasein relates itself as being-alongside things in the world; that is, the structure of possibilities is akin to the structure of temporality. The wholeness of one is the wholeness of the other, and the totality of possibilities is anything but a loose assemblage. However, what has emerged here is the extent to which the account of temporality only succeeds in going so far as its appointed task of dismantling the structural tendency of metaphysics to think ontologically using ontic modes of thought, and thereby to conceal the ontological difference. Although the account of ecstatic temporality succeeds in most of what it seeks to achieve, it does so while still relying on a sense of limit drawn with little precaution from the Aristotelian understanding of place and being ‘in’. As a result, the dimension of Dasein’s existence remains indebted

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to an orthodox interpretation of the continuity of what is ‘whole’ as its being bounded, or held, by a single peripheral limit. Countering this tendency, there is within Heidegger’s account another quite different articulation of temporality, also drawn ultimately from Aristotle, based on Being-towards-death and the relation between potentiality and its reversal. In both cases, time and space have not been thought through radically enough in their unity. As a consequence, the conception of wholeness that Dasein seeks (methodologically as well as existentially) is only partially detached from the metaphysical prejudices that Heidegger is trying to set aside. Reflecting on these questions later, in the Beiträge, Heidegger writes that thinking through what is ownmost to ecstatic temporality ‘brings time, in its relatedness to the t/here [Da] of Da-sein, into an essential relationship with the spatiality of Da-sein, and thus with space’ (B 189: 132). Time itself is experienced as a ‘removal-unto’ (Entrückung ) and an opening that is at once a provision of space: ‘What is ownmost to space is not the same as what is ownmost to time but space belongs to time – as time belongs to space’ (B 192: 134). Understood in this sense, space and time are not wholly independent dimensions, but neither are they simply coupled together – which in Heidegger’s view is what has for the most part occurred in modern science, and in relativisitic physics in particular. Here, space and time are ‘merely strung together, after both have been levelled off in advance unto the same of what is countable and what makes counting possible’, which is of course number (B 377: 263). By contrast, time-space is the original ‘onefold’ that makes it possible for time and space to acquire their independence (B 379: 264). As the dimension of Da-sein, time-space is the condition of the disclosure of Being. Still in the Beiträge, Heidegger then describes the occurrence of Da-sein as an Erkluftung (encleavage), in which nearness (Nähe) and remoteness (Ferne) break away from one another to provide a more familiar spatial and temporal arrangement (B 372: 260). It is this sense of time-space, insufficiently worked out in Being and Time, that I shall look at now in the language essays.

III Nearness and language Let us return to the essays on language, and first of all to the essay ‘The Nature of Language’, written in 1957, roughly 20 years later than the Beiträge. Continuing almost seamlessly, Heidegger dismisses the conceptions of

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space and time as ‘parameters for the measurement of nearness and remoteness’ (US 197: 102). As before, the advances of modern science are said to have done nothing to change the dominant experience of space and time as empty categories that close off the ontological dimension of existence from questioning in the main because they treat space and time as dimensions opened by the application of number. By contrast, Heidegger aims to show how language reveals space and time in a way that remains closer to the condition of their being a onefold that underlies the possibility of their measurement. Time discloses to us not only what is in time, but also the very openness of time itself as the has-been, presence and the future (US 201–202: 106). Similarly, space ‘throws open locality and places, vacates them and at the same time gives them free for all things and receives what is simultaneous as space-time’ (US 202: 106). Together, time and space, in the ‘wholeness’ of their nature, and thereby in their continuity, belong to the ‘Same’, ‘which holds space and time gathered up in their nature’ (US 202: 106). Time and space themselves bring together the earth and sky, god and man in a relation of nearness; and whatever experience we may have of language as such, it will be conditioned by this relation. Stepping back for a moment, if nearness is characterized by continuity, then we might expect nearness to be the modality in which we experience language as such and as a whole. In fact, we shall see that this is not the case and that language as a whole is not given. However, the relation to language that we have as speakers and listeners depends on the construal of this ‘not’ being given. I shall argue that it brings us to the question of the priority of saying and its immanence in language as it is spoken and written, and thereby to a sense of the radical openness to language consistent with the idea of language as a Geflecht, a weave of speaking, language as extant and the saying of language. The theme of nearness is pursued in terms of the idea of neighbourhood, which, as Heidegger observes, is irreducible to the measurement of space and time. To be neighbours is to stand face-to-face with one another, a relation that does not exist only for human beings; things, too, can be faceto-face. For Heidegger, the relation has its origin ‘in that distance where earth and sky, the god and man reach one another’ (US 199: 104). This reaching, by which the elements of the world face each other is described by Heidegger as a movement in which the saying of language occurs as nearness, and in this nearness the earth and sky, god and man are held together: ‘The movement at the core of the world’s four regions, which makes them reach one another and holds them in the nearness of their distance, is nearness itself’ (US 199: 104).16 The relation between earth and sky, god and man – the region of time-space – is a movement, not as a

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passage or transition, but in the sense that Aristotle understood movement to be the fundamental disclosure of Being.17 Moreover, by writing the usual German term Bewegung as Be-wëgung, Heidegger emphasizes the sense of movement as a ‘way-making’ that reminds us that at the heart of language is the Aufriß through which the region of time-space opens. As it is described here, this opening is at once a gathering, a breaking open that gives relation: saying, as the way-making movement of the world’s fourfold, gathers all things up into the nearness of face-to-face encounter, and does so soundlessly, as quietly as time times, space spaces, as quietly as the play of time-space is enacted. (US 203: 108) That a single movement brings all that is disclosed together within the timespace of language, holding the world’s four regions together should leave no doubt that the dimension of this movement, and thereby the dimension of time-space, is continuous. However, there is nonetheless an important difference between Aristotle’s determination of continuity and Heidegger’s apparent use of the idea here; for the time-space of the four regions is clearly not bounded by a single limit, and nor is the movement that holds them together ‘one’ in the same way as the movement around the perimeter of a circle is ‘one’ (whereas movement back and forth along a track is not) (PH 261b27–263a3). It is therefore not clear that the ‘belonging together’ of earth, sky, god and man constitutes their being a whole. What Heidegger has done is to deploy an ontological reinterpretation of the Aristotelian conception of continuity as the ground of movement. We know, not least from the account of time in the Physics IV.10–14, that movement is grounded in a continuous dimension. However, Heidegger’s concern is not with movement as the transition that this or that thing may undergo, but with movement as a condition of Being. We can therefore trace a set of correspondences. As movement in the ordinary sense brings together time and space, so movement as Heidegger conceives it is the belonging together of time-space; and as continuity in the ordinary sense grounds movement as change and transition, so continuity interpreted in terms of nearness is the ground of the ontological conception of movement as a way of Being, and thus also as what lies at the core of the relation between earth and sky, god and man. In its orthodox sense, continuity refers to the condition of a whole whose parts remain dependent on it, and inseparable from it: to be a whole is to have a single limit that binds all parts together. Yet the sense of relatedness introduced in the fourfold does not depend on the existence of parts.

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When Heidegger thinks ontologically, he is concerned with relations, not the things or elements related. Continuity characterizes the condition of being in relation, rather than the actual relation between elements, and if one were to speak of earth and sky, god and man forming a whole, it would be in terms of a wholeness characterized by the continuity of the ontological sense of movement that is their relation to one another. The ‘reaching to one another’ and ‘holding’ that Heidegger describes constitute a ‘wholeness’ that does not depend on the actual existence of a limit and which is quite distinct from the usual ‘ontic’ interpretation of this term. As a result, language as a whole is not given, not even in the non-thematic way that earlier Dasein’s Being-in-the-world was given as a whole through the fundamental mood of anxiety. To experience language as such is therefore not to experience language as a whole. This raises the question of how we are to characterize the experience of language as such, that is, how the ontological event of the opening of language through the Aufriß is related to the practice of speaking and listening. In the reading set out in this chapter, I have suggested that in his earlier writing, Heidegger, albeit equivocally, advances the idea that wholeness arises through the relation to a dynamic limit, understood as metabole, where potentiality gives way to its reversal. In terms of Dasein’s Being-in-the-world, the relation occurs in Being-towards-death, and the dimension opened by this movement is the ‘there’ of Dasein. At the same time, it is only on the basis of such a sense of dimension that the existence of Dasein can be opened in this way at all. It is the dimension of Being-in, where Dasein experiences its finitude without relating to a limit derived directly from space. As we see far more clearly in the later essays on language, the idea of being ‘in’ remains important and finitude is concerned with this experience of being bound: bound to what is other, to what stands over against each element, and to which each element is related within language as the opening of world. To enter into an experience of language as such will be to enter into language as the occurrence of this bond with what is other, and it seems that the relation is always already given in any actual moment of speaking, writing or listening. But is this really so? Heidegger has integrated time and space through movement, now articulated in terms of an ontological sense of the dimension of time-space on which movement is grounded. But what effect does this articulation have on the order of grounding itself? That is, if the ontological event of the saying of language ‘first’ opens the dimension in which the apparently ontic elements of speaking and listening take place, what form does this priority take?

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Time-space and the way to language I’ll address this question through a reading of sections II and III of ‘The Way to Language’, which aim to bring us to an experience of language as language, or language as such. Heidegger recalls that language shows itself first of all ‘as our way of speaking’ and that what is spoken ‘remains manysided’ (US 239: 120). In looking for what lends unity to this manifold, Heidegger notes that everything spoken stems in some fashion from what remains unspoken, and then discreetly introduces a critical reflection on the number-based conception of time as a basis on which to elucidate the unifying element within language. The ‘multiplicity of elements and relations’ within language, he writes, have been ‘enumerated’ (or counted, aufgezählt) but not strung together ‘in a series’ (nicht aneinandergereiht) (US 240: 121). Harking back all the way to the accounts in Being and Time and The Basic Problems of Phenomenology of Dasein’s reckoning with time as the original practice underlying the impersonal form of clock time, Heidegger adds that the ‘original counting’ (ursprünglichen Zählen) is not itself a ‘reckoning in numbers’. Echoing the terms of repetition and anticipation in analysis of the original temporality of Dasein, Heidegger concludes: The count is a recounting that previewed [vorblickt] the unifying element [das Einigende] in the belonging together [das Einigende in Zusammengehören], yet cannot bring it out and make it appear. (US 240: 121, translation modified) It is through counting as repetition that what holds together is previewed or foreseen, without being brought to light. So counting as recounting comes after an original counting; the repetition foresees, bringing the past and the future together without being able to show what it is that holds them in relation. In the lines that follow directly after those cited above, Heidegger identifies this ‘holding’ element as the Aufriß, that is, as the ‘whole of traits’ that coexist as the structure of the opening in which speakers and their speaking are brought together within the saying of language. Multiform, the Aufriß is permeated (durchzogen) by various modes (Weisen) of saying and of what is said, ‘modes in which what is present or absent says something about itself, affirms or denies itself – shows itself of withdraws’ (US 242: 122). Yet in what respect can Heidegger describe the multiform movement of the Aufriß as a totality, and thereby as a unity? The answer to this question will depend on how one conceives the movement that is the Aufriß of the essence of language in its relation to continuity; and, as we shall see,

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with continuity come also the themes of being-in and belonging, as well as those of unity and wholeness – themes that can only be articulated through speech and the experience of those who enter into language in this way. Speaking, writes Heidegger, ‘belongs’ (gehört) to the Aufriß as saying (US 242: 122; BW 409). But speaking is also a listening/hearing (Hören). In fact, speaking ‘is a listening not while but before we are speaking’ (US 243: 123). In this way, speaking is brought into what appears to be a temporal relation to the saying of language: it is only because we have already heard language that we can speak at all; to speak is first of all to engage in a repetition of the saying of language itself. Moreover, hearing language, as an act of repetition, already contains the apprehending (Vernehmen) and representing (Vorstellen) by which the practice of language maintains its relation to things for the most part. The priority of the saying of language over speech is therefore not that of a series in which each element is distinct from the next. Our hearing language has priority by virtue of the way it contains apprehending and representing, and thereby establishes their bounds. Guided by the German language, Heidegger now draws the sense of ‘to hear’ close to that of ‘belonging’. If speaking, as the listening [Hören] to language, lets saying be said to it, this letting can obtain only in so far – and so near – as our own nature has been admitted and entered into saying [insonah unser eigenes Wesen in die Sage eingelassen ist]. We hear saying only because we belong within it [Wir hören sie nur, weil sir in sie gehören]. (US 244: 124) To speak is to listen, and to listen is to belong within language; moreover, the prefix ‘ge’ by which one moves from listening to belonging is also the prefix used to form the present perfect tense from the infinitive; in this case einlassen becomes eingelassen. Bearing this temporal sense of the prefix in mind when reading the other key terms, we find that ‘to belong’ (gehören) is not only to ‘have been admitted’ into language but is also by association to ‘have listened’. Speaking and listening come after the original unity of language articulated in the Aufriß – and belonging is precisely this being related ‘back’ to language in such a way that, being in language, we are bound by whatever limits language carries with it. Yet, as we have already noted, the saying of language does not precede our speech in the way one element in a series precedes another. Heidegger now addresses this explicitly, asking whether saying is really separated from our own speaking at all. Is a bridge from one to the other necessary, ‘Or is saying the stream of stillness which in forming them joins its own

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two banks – the saying and our saying after it? (Oder ist die Sage der Strom der Stille, der selbst seiner Ufer, das Sagen and unser Nachsagen, verbindet, indem er sie bildet? )’ (US 244: 124–125). To treat saying and human speaking as two quite distinct elements between which one has to establish a link would be to approach the essence of language in an ontic manner, as though saying and speaking were things; it would also be to endorse a particular sense of the priority of one thing to another, as the priority of one element to another in a series, and we know this would be mistaken. But it still leaves open the question of how to conceive of the relation between them: a question that amounts to asking how to conceive of, or experience, continuity beyond the constructed relations between elements (such as numbers). So far, we have seen clear indications that the relation is temporal: saying precedes speaking, and we speak only insofar as we listen, which means to belong, to be in. However, it would be odd if, having radicalized the conception of continuity to underpin the movement that articulates the saying of language, this radicalized conception of continuity were not also to inform the very relation between saying and speaking. In fact, it does indeed inform this relation, for Heidegger makes it clear that the dimension of this relation is time-space, which is to be understood on the basis of the radicalized sense of continuity. This insight into the relation that is saying then bears on the form of the reflection into language undertaken in the essay, and thereby also on the experience of language that the reflection is intended to introduce. Heidegger draws our attention to this when, shortly after noting that saying is not merely that to which speaking maintains a relation, but is the relation itself, he reminds the reader that ‘the more clearly language comes to light as language itself, the more radically the way to it will change’ (US 244–245: 125). So far, the way to language has been a passage, but from now on the motif of a transition is no longer appropriate. The movement is, as Heidegger has already suggested, to be understood as a way-making based on the continuity of time-space. However, when Heidegger, in the lines quoted above, describes the saying of language as the stream of stillness that forms and joins its own two banks, these two banks are named as das Sagen and unser Nachsagen – the saying and our reiterating or saying after. Once again, it seems that there remains an apparent temporal priority of saying over human speaking, which can therefore only repeat in a secondary fashion what has already been given to it. Such a reading sits awkwardly with the decision to recast the dimension of the relation to language in terms of time-space: what could such priority mean here? Heidegger’s choice of terms expresses a certain ambiguity that indicates a way ahead. The German Nachsagen generally denotes

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a somewhat mechanical repetition. In this respect it is perhaps a surprising term for Heidegger to use just at the point where he is drawing our attention to a more complex ontological relation to language and discouraging us from thinking in terms of the saying as one side of the relation and human speech as the other. The prefix nach commonly signifies a coming after, but also a directedness towards, a being ‘bound for’ what lies ahead. It therefore introduces a spatial sense into the term Nachsagen that is not conveyed by ‘reiteration’ or ‘coming after’, and which modifies the temporal relation: human speech is a repetition of the saying of language, but at the same time a ‘speaking towards’ language. In line with the description we met earlier of the Aufriß as permeated by modes of what is said, the stream of stillness that is the saying of language is a confluence in which the practice of human speaking also runs. So the impression of a purely temporal priority of saying over human speaking has been dispelled, but what has taken its place? What has the determination of time-space added to our understanding of the experience of language? First of all, it demands that we allow the relation to language to present itself on the basis of the radicalized conception of continuity, according to which there are no peripheral limits that establish wholeness. This is to say, the temporal aspect of the relation is no longer informed by an idea of space that remains insufficiently thought through. Purging the account of temporality of the ontic traces of spatiality entailed bringing time and space together into the more ontologically radical time-space, and it is this that now structures the relation of the saying of language to human speaking. Our relation to the saying of language is that of a listening, and thereby also a belonging, which is itself associated with the sense of antecedence conveyed by the present perfect tense. Yet if our relation to language is shaped by time-space, then this sense of belonging has to be rethought in these terms. As Heidegger asks: ‘in what manner does saying unfold essentially, that it can let us listen and belong?’ (US 245: 126, translation modified). In other words, we have to ask how we are ‘held’ by timespace in such a way that we experience the finitude of language. As I noted a few moments ago, human speaking is both a repetition and a speaking towards what lies ahead of it, and to describe it in this way recalls the play of past and future in the structure of ecstatic temporality that Heidegger sets out in Being and Time. However, insofar as the presentation of this structure in the language essays in terms of time-space is freed from the ontic sense of limit that continued to inform the account of ecstatic temporality, the way is cleared for the other root of finitude that we have described in this chapter to come to the fore, namely, Being-towards-death.

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It is no surprise, therefore, to find that the theme of mortality is central to part III of ‘The Way to Language’. To reach a clearer understanding of the experience of language as language, it will be helpful to examine the finitude of the movement or way-making that is the Aufriß in terms of the idea of limit that first came to light in the account of Being-towards-death, and which I outlined earlier in this chapter in terms of the play between potentiality (dunamis) and privation or withdrawal (steresis). Heidegger writes that the way to the speaking of language unfolds (west) in language itself (US 245: 126), and so it is through language that one must move in order to reach the experience of language as such. To be open to this experience, one must be attentive to language in a way that is only possible insofar as we already belong to the saying of language. As Heidegger asks, ‘how does the saying unfold essentially, so that it is capable of letting someone listen and belong?’ (US 245, 126, translation modified).18 In other words, what is the movement of the Aufriß such that we participate in it through speaking? It is, of course, what Heidegger terms Ereignis, appropriation, the originary event opening the givenness of Being in language. Appropriation assembles the design [Aufriß] of Saying and unfolds it into the structure of manifold showing. It is itself the most inconspicuous of inconspicuous phenomena, the simplest of simplicities, the nearest of the near, and the farthest of the far in which we mortals spend our lives. (US 247: 128) With Ereignis we reach a limit to our capacity to disclose and describe directly, and attend instead to its significance for language, our experience of language as such, and the way we belong to it as speakers and listeners. Heidegger’s superlative language places Ereignis beyond our range, at once near and far, the very dimension of nearness, and as such beyond measure in the usual sense. As that which lies all around and yet without assignable position, it recalls the notion of horizonality in terms of which Heidegger articulated the idea of ecstatic temporality in his early work, only without recourse to the terms of a more familiar spatiality. However, the link with mortality remains, as it is only as finite beings existing in a relation to death that we can live among things disclosed to us as near, as remote, as implicated in our existence before we express that implication through number by counting. By virtue of mortality, we are finite in a way that exposes us to the saying of language, towards which we speak. We have seen that language binds us, while needing our belonging to it. Now we can understand this relation to language as an articulation of mortality, where Being-towards-death

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is the relation of potentiality to its reversal described earlier. In the present context, therefore, it is only mortals – those who experience finitude as a reversal, a falling back, rather than as a spatial limit – who can enter into language in this way. One way to describe this reversal is as the withdrawal of language itself, which is never given directly. The saying of language ‘pervades and structures (fügt)’ (US 246: 126) the dimension in which things are disclosed without presenting itself. We are turned back by language, if we press to determine its limits and disclose it as such and as a whole. For Heidegger, to attempt to bring language to light in this way would be to demand that the very event of disclosure shows itself, revealing its provenance and ground. Such a question asks too much, and too quickly, he warns (US 246, 126). In contrast to earlier, when the possibility of disclosure could disclose itself through the mood of anxiety, we now see that there can be no such simple coincidence. Language as a whole is not given, but it is important to understand the ‘not’ here in the right way. Heidegger is not saying that there is language as a whole somehow, and perhaps necessarily, beyond our reach. This would be akin to treating Being metaphysically as a transcendent being. But setting this alternative aside does not mean that he is committed to the idea of language as an endless field of possibilities. There is no doubt that Heidegger is profoundly sensitive to the way that, as those who speak and listen, we are ‘held’ by language, and that language thereby exhibits a distinctive finitude. Yet this being ‘held’ has to be thought along with an incompleteness or openness that belongs language and that remains essential to its dynamic character. Language is not given as a whole, and our habitual desire to grasp it in that way is frustrated, yet precisely this frustration is our experience of the limit of language by which we are held. Our movement towards the essence of language as finite is this reversal. Moreover, this reversal is implicated in the way-making movement of the Aufriß itself, because, thanks to the dimension of time-space, the saying of language and human speech are not separate moments divided from one another like elements in a series. Another way to put this is to describe the way-making movement towards language that Heidegger introduces here as a later form of the turn towards essence described in ‘On the Essence of Truth’. What we see in the essay on language is that this turn is necessarily incomplete; not a turn from one level to another, but a perpetual turning that is also a turning back, the two necessarily together, while never reducible to one another. The structure of mortality is that of a limit that runs through existence, but also through language itself. While it may be true, therefore, that we experience the

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finitude of language, language as such, where language fails, we do not meet this failure at the outermost limits of language, at the point where it simply breaks down. The reversal is within every act of speaking. One could not begin to take up a relation to language were it not for this dynamic moment from which arises at once our capacity to speak and the possibility of our speaking going astray. This is more than just a matter of achieving semantic precision. Our very relation to language is conditioned by the possibility that we lose our way, that we are no longer in a position of mastery over language. In saying this, our focus remains on the significance for us of the limit that we, as speakers, meet within language. Yet the limit is also significant as a mark of the finitude of language, and the fragility of our grip on language is also consistent with an ineliminable contingency within language itself. Bound to the practice of speech by the continuity of the dimension of timespace, and run through by the ways in which we actually speak, there is nothing within the essence of language that can define in advance the whole set of possible forms of speech. Heidegger concedes that language may change, but he insists that this change will come to us as a destiny from language itself, as a truly epoch-making event in which language as such is transformed. Such an event is rare and one can only be attentive to language and wait. The reading that I have set out here explores a different possibility. If language cannot separate itself from speaking, and if the dimension of the Aufriß complicates the simple priority of the saying of language, then the fragility of our grip on language and the contingency of language itself truly belong together; in speaking we risk going astray, and as we stray we may find language itself speaking otherwise. Thinking is a practice that cultivates this risk.

Notes

Chapter 1: Continuity and Difference in Heidegger’s Sophist 1

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This view has been espoused most forcefully by J Taminiaux, ‘Poiesis et praxis dans l’articulation de l’ontologie fondamentale’ in F Volpi (ed.) Heidegger et l’idée de la phénomenologie (1988), Dordrecht, Kluwer; and Lectures de l’ontologie fondamentale: essais sur Heidegger (1989), Grenoble, Jérôme Millon; Heidegger and the Project of Fundamental Ontology (1991), Albany, SUNY Press. The argument that Heidegger neglects the dramatic character of Plato’s dialogical style to the detriment of his own reading is made by Francisco Gonzalez, ‘On the way to Sophia: Heidegger on Plato’s Dialectic, Ethics, and Sophist’ (1997), Research in Phenomenology, vol. 27, 16–60. Cf. also F Gonzalez, ‘Dialectic as “Philosophical Embarrassment”: Heidegger’s Critique of Plato’s Method’ (July 2002), Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 40, no. 3, 361–389; and Dialectic and Dialogue (1998), Evanston, Northwestern University Press. The different but related charge that Heidegger’s reading of Plato is foreclosed by his interpretation of Aristotle has a prima facie plausibility about it, given Heidegger’s tendency to read back towards the beginning of philosophy. The destruction of the history of ontology involves a gradual paring away the strata of tradition until one arrives at the ‘primordial experiences in which we achieved our first ways of determining the nature of Being – the ways that have guided us ever since’ (SZ 22: 44). However, Heidegger is not recommending that we simply reverse the chronology of our reading in an effort to get back ‘behind’ – or ‘before’ – the metaphysical tradition. Such an approach would run the twofold risk of either compounding the mistakes accumulated in our own time, or uncritically celebrating the earlier for its own sake, regardless of its merits. In fact, the reading that I shall defend in this chapter supports a view of the destruction of the history of ontology as anything but a simple unilinear interpretative strategy. Walter Brogan has written on this ambiguous convergence between phronesis and sophia; ‘A Response to Robert Bernasconi’s “Heidegger’s Destruction of Phronesis” ’ (1989), The Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol. 27 Supplement, 149–153; ‘Plato’s Dialectical Soul: Heidegger on Plato’s Ambiguous Relationship to Rhetoric’ (1997), Research in Phenomenology, vol. 27, 3–15; and Heidegger an Aristotle; the Twofoldness of Being (2005), Albany, SUNY Press, 173–178. Cf. GA19 §26 esp. section b. Cf. also Heidegger’s interpretation of truth as simple showing in the light of Aristotle’s Metaphysics Θ 10, as found in GA21, §§11–14; and GA31 §9. Cf. also reference to this possibility of truth in the course of a discussion of Antisthenes, GA19 502–503: 348.

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This is neither a deduction nor a logical inference. As Heidegger writes, we simply ‘uncover and take notice of what is still, and was already, there’ (GA19 539: 373). It is in the light of this that one should also read his observation that the subsequent clarification of the ideas of the same (tauton) and the other (heteron) in the Sophist is not the derivation of a ‘formal conclusion’: ‘On the contrary, it is again demonstrated (aufgeweisen) in single steps’ (GA19 543: 375). The point is expressed well by E Berti: ‘nous, beyond teaching, is neither an immediate intuition, like a kind of gratuitous flash, nor is it owing to the ability of the teacher. It is the fruit of a process that may be long and laborious; that is, a genuine research, even where such fruit is never guaranteed by the process itself, and is not its necessary conclusion . . .’, E Berti, Le ragioni di Aristotele (1989), Rome, Laterza, 16 (my translation). ‘The appropriate speaking of an arche cannot be carried out by logos, insofar as the latter is a diaresis. An arche is an adiaireton, something whose Being resists being taken apart’ (GA19 145: 100). ‘Logos, insofar as it possesses the structure of apophainesthai, of the “something as something”, is so little the place of truth that it is, rather, quite the reverse, the proper condition of the possibility of falsity. That is, because this logos is a showing which lets that about which it speaks be seen as something, there remains the possibility that the thing might get distorted through the “as” and that a deception would arise . . .. In simple disclosing, in aisthesis as in noein, there is no longer a legein, an addressing of something as something’ (GA19 182–183: 125). Heidegger concludes that we ‘see what one says’ (GA20 75: 56), implying a simple priority of language to sight, an encompassing of nous and aisthesis by logos. This is by no means a simple subordination, however. In lieu of a full consideration, may I just note Heidegger’s reference to the importance of the ‘figural’ character of the intuitive unity of, for example, birds perceived as a flock, or trees as a row (GA20 90–91: 66). Heidegger discusses the pros ti structure in GA18 §28 b. In fact, Heidegger will argue that Plato’s understanding of the archai as ideas (eide) leads him to conceive even of kinesis precisely as a being, that is, ontically. The eidos – ‘look’ of thing given to perception – is what a being is in its essence, even before its actualization: cf., for example, GA24 149–152: 106–108. In the Sophist lectures Heidegger criticizes Plato for using the term gene as equivalent to eidos, the ‘look’ of a being by which it may be grasped as what it is (GA19 523–534: 326). This is indicative, Heidegger thinks, of Plato’s failure to keep open the ontological difference. Heidegger makes it clear on many occasions that movement is key to the whole of Aristotle’s ontology; for example, GA22 170; GA18 §25; GA33 §7. See also Walter Bröcker, Aristoteles (1974), Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann. Bröcker was a student of Heidegger’s in the period under consideration here and makes movement the central theme of his study of Aristotle. Aristotle: ‘Now the exponents of the philosophy of “Ideas” also make abstractions, but in doing so they fall unawares into error; for they abstract physical entities, which are not really susceptible to the process as mathematical entities are. And this would become obvious if one should undertake to define, respectively, the mathematical and the “ideal”, together with their properties’ (PH 193b36–37). Cf. GA19 102–103: 69–71.

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The passage continues: ‘In the archai the kinoumenon he kinoumenon must be co-perceived and hence must basically be something else as well, namely the topos itself whereby Being and presence are determined’ (GA19 104: 71). The problem of language was signalled in Being and Time : ‘it is one thing to give a report in which we tell about entities, but another to grasp entities in their Being. For the latter task, we lack not only most of the words, but above all, the grammar’ (SZ 38–39: 63). ‘Nous gives sight, a something, a “there” in any sense whatsoever’ (PIA 257: 132). This point is made by Heidegger when he writes: ‘. . . the structure of pure understanding will become understandable on the basis of the fact that with regard to its being it is rooted in factical life and has a particular mode of genesis in it’ (PIA 262: 137). Cf. also ‘The root of an autonomous sheer onlooking upon the world already lies in primitive and everyday Dasein’ (GA19 125: 86). Heidegger adopts the idea of categorial intuition from Husserl’s sixth Logical Investigation and develops his understanding of it in GA20 §6. Cf. E Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen (1900–01), Halle, Niemeyer: Logical Investigations, trans. J N Findlay (1970), New York, Humanities Press. GA20 §23, esp. 255–256: 195. Cf. Also SZ 69: 98, 123: 159. Alongside circumspection (Umsicht), one should also place considerateness (Rücksicht) and forbearance (tolerance) (Nachsicht), which guide our solicitude (Fürsorge), in being with others. In each case, such ‘interested’ modes of disclosure are not simply preceded by a pure showing to which Dasein can then adopt a particular stance. Where Heidegger seems to imply a possible priority of the present-at-hand (e.g. ‘the possibility that being is there in the understanding presupposes the factical existence of Dasein, and this in turn presupposes the factual extantness of nature’, GA26 199: 156), what is in fact at issue is not a relative priority of different modes of disclosure, but the question of totality and thereby the uniqueness of the ontological difference as a relation between Being and beings. Cf. Gonzalez argues that Heidegger failed to encounter Plato, and that ‘the characterization of Being as agathon must either rid the agathon of all ethical content, understanding it purely ontologically, or misunderstand Being by reducing it to an ontic value. In other words, for Heidegger an ontology with ethical content is always bad ontology’, ‘On the way to sophia’, 26. Hence in GA34, agathon is seen as the condition for questioning Being and unconcealment (cf. §12, §14), but in the Beiträge the agathon is presented as responsible for the closure of questioning. There is no basic contradiction between these positions: they simply reflect the ambiguity within the idea of the Good beyond Being itself. For example, Gonzalez writes: ‘Phronesis can be a preliminary stage in this (ontological) movement, a way station on the road to a science of Being, only to the extent that its determinate ethical or practical content is taken to be accidental to it. Phronesis fulfils its innermost tendency when it leaves the ethical and the practical behind and becomes sophia’, ‘On the way to sophia’, 33. Cf. also GA18 78. This is to say, the mathematical is not recognized as having a place at all, or indeed as having an independent existence of its own at all (GA19 100–101: 69–70; MET XIV.5, 1092a17–21). In this way, the mathematical can be considered in isolation from the physical world without the inferences it makes possible in

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regard to the physical world being compromised (PH II.ii, 193b34–36) – precisely because its isolation does not imbue it with new objective properties of its own: it remains, to all intents and purposes, embedded within the physical reality from which it was drawn. See Chapter 5 for further discussion of this point in Heidegger’s interpretation of place. Heidegger: ‘The concealing of concealed beings as a whole holds sway in that disclosure of specific beings, which, as forgottenness of concealment, becomes errancy’ (WM 92: 150). Heidegger, ‘Plato’s Doctrine of Truth’, WM 109–144: 155–182. To be clear, the movement into which the Platonic dialogue draws its participants, and above all perhaps, its readers, is a movement constructed from the placing of its parts into a dynamic relation. The extent to which the dramatic structure, and textual self-relation problematizes many of the assertions made in the course of the dialogues themselves is well documented. However, while the irresolvability of the questions addressed may be sufficient to unsettle the reader and to induce the perplexity that is a condition for a philosophical engagement, it does not truly reflect the continuity at the basis of the relation between noeisis and logos, or, as a related but not equivalent relation, that between ethics and ontology. Heidegger refers to this difficulty in a discussion of the concepts ‘one’ (hen) and ‘whole’ (holon), GA19 457: 316. We do not have, he writes, the vocabulary to express clearly the coexistence of parts within a whole that is recognized as being ‘one’. There is a sense in which we should be familiar with the challenge posed by such a refusal, since it is already voiced by Aristotle himself in the conjunction of diaresis (separation) and synthesis (combination) characteristic of both time and the logos. However, the difficulty is intensified through Heidegger’s radicalization of the question of movement and his exposure of thinking to the ontological difference. As a consequence, we are brought to the point where even the phenomenological disclosure in Being and Time of temporality as the ontological structure of Dasein may not suffice as an exposition of this linkage, in as much as what remains at stake is not just an idea of the relation or movement between the horizon and that which it grounds, but the very fact of that movement or relation as it is instantiated in and through the concreteness of Dasein’s existence. Many of the most intense and problematic sections of Heidegger’s work in the period immediately before and after Being and Time were addressed to just this problem. I am thinking particularly of the Appendix to §10 of GA26, and the discussion of concretion in §§71–76 of GA29/30. Cf. Chapters 2 and 4 below.

Chapter 2: To Think as Mortals: Heidegger and the Finitude of Philosophical Existence 1

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Aristotle, NE 1177b32: Euripides, Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta (1899), A Nauck (ed.) Leipzig, fr. 1040. GA26, Appendix to §10.

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Cf. also NE 1141b18–22. The emphasis these lines are given in the German edition is missing in the English translation. Jacques Taminiaux, for example, contends that Heidegger’s insistence on the primacy of sophia undermines the pluralism of the political dimension implicit in the Aristotelian conceptions of praxis and phronesis: J Taminiaux, Heidegger and the Project of Fundamental Ontology: La fille de Thrace et le penseur professionel; Arendt et Heidegger (1992), Paris, Puyot; The Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker: Arendt and Heidegger (1998), Albany, SUNY Press and ‘The Platonic Roots of Heidegger’s Political Thought’, European Journal of Political Theory (January 2007), David Webb (ed.) vol. 6, no. 1, 11–29. Over and above the contextual, ambiguous and essentially public character of such activity, Taminiaux sees Heidegger set the private, monological world of the science of Being, in which disclosure and individuation are secured by a retreat from the polis or rather take on the taciturn anonymity characteristic of the artisan, as the Athenian polis is transformed into something a republic governed by the science of Philosophy. In Taminiaux’s view, Heidegger’s appropriation of sophia reflects a concession to the bios theoretikos at the expense of the contingency associated with praxis and the forms of practical reason associated with it. Robert Bernasconi makes this point in ‘The Fate of the Distinction between Praxis and Poiesis’ (1986), Heidegger Studies, vol. 2, 111–139. Aristotle: ‘. . . for even if the goodness predicated of various things in common really is a unity of something existing separately and absolute, it clearly will not be practicable or attainable by man; but the good we are now seeking is a good within human reach’ (1096b32). This is not to say that it can be carried on in complete isolation from the rest of one’s practical concerns. Aristotle clearly believes that one must have earned the possibility of engaging in theoria by the cultivation of one’s character (such that one is interested and able) and of one’s day-to-day affairs (such that one has the time and occasion). Nonetheless, the activity itself is characterized by leisure (schole), that is, by freedom from the exigencies of one’s practical concerns. This should not be mistaken for a proto-Christian declaration of the soul’s life on earth as a journey from this world to heaven: for one thing, the emphasis on return makes such a reading problematic. Giuseppe Nicolaci sheds valuable light on the matter as he rebuts the customary reading, arguing that to regard Aristotle’s departure from Plato as an attempt to ‘humanize’ ethics would be an unwarranted simplification. ‘. . . if the good in its highest sense as absolute were accessible in the abstract as a universal and something independent, it would not be placed in question – as it is – by man from the very beginning . . . Aristotle’s teaching in the Nicomachean Ethics is that the abstract contemplation of the agathon as a whole and as universal is impossible, because from the first between the universal and our desire for theory there is interposed the whole of man. This interposition takes the form of the ergon tou anthropou: praxis.’ G Nicolaci, ‘La lettura heideggeriana della praxis’, in N de Domenico and A Escher di Stefano (eds) Ermeneutica e Filosofia (1990), Venice, Marsilio, 237–267 (the passage, which I have translated here, comes from p. 260).

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Cf. SZ §8 for a brief outline of the overall project. Heidegger’s conception of the destruction of the history of ontology is presented in SZ §6 and in GA24 §5. Cf. the threefold movement of grounding presented in section III of ‘On the Essence of Ground’ in WM. Michel Foucault diagnosed this tendency in Les mots et les choses (1966), Paris, Gallimard: The Order of Things (1994), London, Routledge. Cf. chapter 9.VI: ‘The retreat and return of the origin’. I am reluctant to say that Foucault is mistaken about this tendency in Heidegger, but it does come down to how one understands its aim. If this aim is foundational, then Foucault is right; but I am pursuing a different reading here. Regarding the movement of thinking as a repetition of finite transcendence, cf. ‘On the Essence of Ground’: ‘Inquiry into the intrinsic possibility of this connection [between truth, understanding and Being] sees itself “compelled” to accomplish explicitly the surpassing that occurs necessarily in every Dasein as such, yet mostly in a concealed manner’ (WM 160–161: 124; italics in the original). The interpretation of the agathon in Aristotle’s ethics as a monolithic end takes life to be wholly directed towards the activity of philosophy, which represents in itself the accomplishment of a good life. By contrast, the inclusive interpretation of the end regards philosophy as just one of several constitutive ends that combine to make up the good life as a whole. Of course, the relation to Being may take other forms, such as poetry, art and even statesmanship. The question then becomes that of the relation of these forms of disclosure to philosophy (and to fundamental ontology in particular).

Chapter 3: The Contingency of Freedom: Heidegger Reading Kant 1

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One cannot begin to write on the theme of contingency in Heidegger and Aristotle without acknowledging the contribution made by Helene Weiss’s study Kausalität und Zufall in der Philosophie des Aristoteles (1942), Basel, Verlag Haus zum Falken. Although the perspective I adopt in this chapter differs considerably from that developed by Weiss, her work is extremely valuable. Cf. ‘On the Essence of Truth’, WM 177-2-2: 136–154; also GA21, GA26 §§1–3, GA31 §9 where this thesis is discussed in relation to Aristotle’s Metaphysics Θ 10. Atomism is well placed to undertake such a negotiation, as I argue later in this chapter. KRV A418, B446. The reference is made by Heidegger at GA31 21: 15. Heidegger is not proposing a generic account of causality. Rather he is intending to disclose the formal essence of causality, such that it might ground both natural causality and human freedom without eliding the difference between them. However, the pursuit of such a determination is itself a sign of Heidegger’s intention to uncover the common ground on which the distinction between the transcendental and empirical levels is based. This question had been raised by Heidegger before, in the essay ‘On the Essence of Ground’, WM 60: 126.

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This is also the basis of Heidegger’s critique of Kant in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, where he writes that Kant addressed man’s existence as if it were ontologically equivalent to the existence of things, that is, as ‘extantness’ (GA24 199: 141). The inappropriateness of this ontology is reflected in Kant’s inability to secure a presentation of the determining moment of the transcendental ego, as opposed to the determined empirical or psychological ego; an impossibility that is attributed to the limitations of the Kantian conception of time as the form of sensible intuition, that is, of all determined (i.e. empirical), phenomena. Heidegger’s own development of ‘original temporality’ is intended to remedy this, allowing for the presentation of determining and determined together in the event of determination itself. The recoil of the ‘metaphysical’ question regarding the essence of a thing back upon the concept of ‘essence’ itself characterizes what Heidegger called the ‘turn’ that thinking had to undergo in order to twist free of metaphysics. It is set out in ‘On the Essence of Truth’, WM 73–97: 136–154. The section dealing with Aristotle begins with an introduction to the question of Being in Greek philosophy. The discussion of ousia in relation to understanding and language is then developed via a consideration of movement towards an interpretation of truth. In particular, Heidegger is concerned to identify an original moment of truth in prelogical intuition. The literature on this issue is too extensive to cite even a significant part of it. Among many studies of particular interest are: Pierre Aubenque, Le problème de l’être chez Aristote (1962), Paris, Presses Universitaires de France; Walter Bröcker, Aristoteles (1974), Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann; Louis Aryeh Kosman, ‘Aristotle’s Definition of Motion’ (1969), Phronesis, vol. 14, 40–62; B Calvert, ‘Aristotle and the Megarians on the Potentiality-Actuality Distinction’ (1976), Apeiron 10, 34–41; and Franco Volpi ‘La riabilitazione della dunamis and energeia in Heidegger’ (1990), Aquinas, 3–27. Heidegger’s own account of the issue is given in GA33. Diogenes Laertius, The Lives of Eminent Philosophers (1938), trans. R D Hicks, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 45: cited in G S Kirk, J E Raven and M Schofield (eds) The Presocratic Philosophers (1993), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, fr. 566, 419, note 1. Aetius, I, 26, 2, cited in Kirk, Raven and Schofield (eds) The Presocratic Philosophers, fr. 567, 419, note 1. Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, 327, 24, cited in Kirk, Raven and Schofield (eds) The Presocratic Philosophers, fr. 571, 420, note 3. Heidegger developed the idea of world in relation to Kant in ‘On the Essence of Ground’, WM, 21–71: 97–135. Any declaration of the influence of teleology on Heidegger must be subject to careful qualification. It is quite clear that the introduction of Being-towards-death as the most fundamental relation of Dasein to its end disrupts any simple transposition of teleological figures onto the ontological structure of Dasein. Cf. esp. SZ §§46–53. Cf. also Jacques Derrida, ‘The Ends of Man’, Marges de la philosophie (1972), Paris, Éditions de Minuit; Margins of Philosophy (1982), trans. Alan Bass, Brighton, Harvester Press; ‘Apories: Mourir-s’attendre aux limites de la vérité’, in M L Mallet (ed.) Le Passages des frontières: Autour du travail de Jacques Derrida (1993),

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Paris, Éditions Galilée; Aporias (1993), trans. Thomas Dutoit, Stanford, Stanford University Press; Michel Haar, Heidegger et l’essence de l’homme (1990), Grenoble, Jérôme Millon; Heidegger and the Essence of Man (1993), trans. Will McNeill, Albany, SUNY Press. My own account of the extent to which Heidegger’s conception of Being-towards-death is indebted to Aristotle is set out in Chapter 6, where I argue that, although disengaged from the full structure of teleology, Beingtowards-death remains heavily dependent on Aristotle’s understanding of potentiality. For the purposes of the present discussion, what is important is that the persistence of a language of potentiality and the constitution of world in terms of the ‘for-the-sake-of-which’ (hou heneka) relation to a final end means that Heidegger’s negotiation with the teleological structures of Aristotle’s philosophy nonetheless conserves the emphasis on unity to which I have referred in this chapter. Dasein can bring itself back from the impersonality of the ‘they-self’ to a condition of authentic Being-one’s-Self by ‘making up for not choosing. But “making up” for not choosing signifies choosing to make this choice (Wählen dieser Wahl) – deciding for a potentiality-for-Being, and making this decision from one’s own Self. In choosing to make this choice (Im Wählen dieser Wahl ), Dasein makes possible, first and foremost, its authentic potentiality-for-Being’ (SZ 268: 313). This problem can be read as Heidegger’s engagement with the distinction in Kant between Wille and Willkür, the legislative and executive moments of will. This distinction was evident in the Critique of Practical Reason and then fully introduced in the Metaphysic of Morals. Insofar as Wille represents the autonomy of the legislative function over against the ‘determined’ – albeit by reason – function of Willkür, the whole issue of the relation between necessity and contingency could be articulated through these terms. Christopher Fynsk presents this reading in Heidegger: Thought and Historicity (1993), Ithaca, Cornell University Press. If the form of pure will is indeed derivative in this way, it could be characterized as not heterogenous will. Pure will and the figure of autonomy would thereby have their basis in negation. This would be problematic for Heidegger, who sought to avoid any such dialectical ground and to establish negation itself on the more original relation of Dasein to the Nothing. Cf. ‘What is Metaphysics?’, WM 103–122: 82–96. Conversely, the figure of pure will could be read as an originary affirmation independent of any particular content, a ‘Yes’ to the opening that is freedom. (The question of the place of original affirmation in Heidegger’s philosophy was raised by Jacques Derrida in a footnote to De l’esprit: Heidegger e la question (1987), Paris, Galilée, 147–150, note 1: Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. R Bowlby and G Bennington (1991), Chicago, University of Chicago Press. I am also indebted to Dean Summers, whose dissertation for the degree of MA in Modern Continental Philosophy at Staffordshire University addressed the issue of such an affirmation with particular regard to ‘What is Metaphysics?’). While the question of whether this ‘grounding’ moment is determined ‘from itself’ or as a modification of the form pertaining to the ‘grounded’ is important, the hypothesis under inquiry in this essay remains an issue either way: the fundamental figure of pure will as given here is exclusive of the heterogenous and this exclusion will have repercussions for character of its concretion or actualization in practice.

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In Heidegger’s The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, we find a powerful statement of the nature of freedom in its relation to the for-the-sake-of (hou heneka) structure as the final end of all willing. Speaking of freedom as the essence of will, he declares: ‘In freedom, such a for-the-sake-of has always already emerged. This self-presentation of the for-the-sake-of resides in the essence of freedom. There is not something like for-the-sake-of somewhere extant, to which then freedom is only related. Rather freedom is itself the origin of the for-the-sake-of. But, again, not in such a way that there was first freedom and then also the for-the-sake-of. Freedom is rather one with the for-the-sake-of’ (GA26 247: 191). The fact that freedom and, therefore also, will are essentially related to an end – such that that end is not encountered as external to the structure of freedom and will themselves – returns us once again to the figure of autonomy. Heidegger ontologizes the figure of pure practical reason such that it is no longer merely a possibility, but the actual structure of will itself in every case. Dasein cannot prescind from such a structure, even when it allows itself to be determined heteronomously, as in the case of inauthenticity and the surrender of responsibility to das Man.

Chapter 4: Dimension and Difference: From Undifferentiatedness to Singularity 1

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Cf. Gaston Bachelard, La dialectique de la durée (1993), Paris, Quadrige/ Presses Universitaires de France; and The Dialectic of Duration (2000), Manchester, Clinamen Press, cf. esp. Chapter 6. Michel Foucault, L’Archéologie du savoir (1969), Paris, Gallimard, 261; and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), trans. A M Sheridan Smith, London, Routledge, 200. In Being and Time, discourse is not associated with any one of the temporal ecstases, but rather spans all of them. While not itself a fundamental mode of disclosure, it is important for the unity of the temporal structure that constitutes the Being of Dasein as care. The concretion of which Heidegger speaks is more than just enlivening an otherwise formal account with a specific example. In fact it is not anything that Dasein does at all. Rather, concretion is the event whereby the formal essence (given in the formal indication) and the given order of existence itself are brought into relation. This is why Heidegger speaks of the ‘awakening’ of each human being in its return into its own Dasein as a matter of destiny. This Appendix has been discussed in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3. In saying this, he is going beyond anything Aristotle explicitly concedes. Arguably, Aristotle’s conception of relation always remains dependent on the physical relations from which it is abstracted. Cf. for example, the account of ‘in’ found in Physics IV.iii, esp. 210a25–26. Heidegger makes this point himself in the course of his discussion of Aristotle, though strictly in relation to the numbering of time: ‘If time thus becomes dependent on the counting of numbers, it does not follow that it is something mental in the soul’ (GA24 255).

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Cf. US 201–202: 106 and the discussion of the old bridge in Heidelberg in ‘Bauen Wohnen Denken, Vorträge und Aufsätze (1954), Neske, Pfullingen: ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, PLT. What it means to say that the dimension is continuous while leaving open the possibility of its differentiation will become clearer when I set out Heidegger’s ontological reading of the concept of continuity in Chapter 6. Heidegger’s aim in continuing to consider number as a means to access the dimension underlying the disclosure of Being is not to engage in the debate over the definition of number, but rather to open up the idea of numbering as a creative act. What interests him is the phenomenological question of how number occurs. Cf. in particular the passage in GA24 that I discuss in Chapter 5, pp. 94–95.

Chapter 5: Heidegger and Weyl on the Question of Continuity 1 2

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Cf. Chapter 1. Herman Weyl’s account of the problem of continuity in mathematics is presented in The Continuum: A Critical Examination of the Foundation of Analysis (1994), New York, Dover Books. This book was first published in German in 1918. Cf. CO, esp. p. 93, p. 103. Weyl’s views on the foundations of analysis changed considerably over the years. Cf. S Feferman, ‘The Significance of Herman Weyl’s Das Kontinuum’, in V F Hendricks et al. (eds) Proof Theory (2000), Dordrecht, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 179–194; J Bell, ‘Herman Weyl’s Later Philosophical Views – His Divergence from Husserl’, in R Feist (ed.) Husserl and the Sciences (2003), Ottawa, University of Ottawa Press. H Weyl, Space Time Matter (1952), trans. H L Brose, New York, Dover Publications. Weyl writes, ‘The new solution of the problem of amalgamating space and time offered by the theory of relativity brings with it a deeper insight into the harmony of action in the world’, Space Time Matter, 6. In this way, the integration of space, movement and physical being stands as a correlate in physical science to Heidegger’s deployment of ‘world’ in overcoming the Cartesian framework for treating physical phenomena in terms of matter in movement through a uniform space. Cf. Being and Time (1980), trans. J Macquarrie and E Robinson, Oxford, Blackwell, §§19–24; and Sein und Zeit (1986), Tübingen, Max Niemeyer Verlag, §§19–24. As Weyl writes, ‘the intuitive and the mathematical continuum do not coincide: a deep chasm is fixed between them’ (CO 93). For others, this separation from experience was to be welcomed. Bachelard, for example, celebrated the capacity of modern mathematics to break with the habits embedded in experience and to invent new formal objects and operations. Weyl states his intention to show that the house of analysis is built on sand in the Preface to The Continuum (CO 1). For his demonstration of the circularity it involves see pp. 28–35.

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Giuseppe Longo encapsulates the problem in the following passage. ‘Firstly, there is always an infinity of (positive) rationals smaller than whichever (positive) real: hence we need to use, when defining it, the collection N of all the integers, in its totality. And the classical definition of this totality has the following structure: N is the smallest set that contains zero and which if it contains n it contains n + 1. Said in a different way, N is the intersection of all sets that contain zero and that are closed under the successor operation. But N has also this property: to define it using the phrase “all the sets that . . .” we quantify over a collection that contains N itself. The definiens uses the definiendum.’ Giuseppe Longo, ‘The Mathematical Continuum: From Intuition to Logic’, in J Petitot et al. (eds) Naturalizing Phenomenology (1999) Stanford, Stanford University Press. The question of the ontological status of mathematical objects cannot be dealt with here, but on the reification of the continuum, see: M Panza, De le Continuité comme Concept au Continu comme Objet’, in J -M Salanskis and H Sinaceur (eds) Le Labyrinthe du Continu (1992) Paris, Springer-Verlag France, 16–30. Cf. CO 17–19, where Weyl argues against the prevailing tendency to interpret mathematical axioms as stipulations. This, he claims, means that a derived statement that ‘there is’ a given object does not refer back to any ‘cognitive reality’ and is ‘devoid of any meaning that has cognitive significance’ (CO 18). In fact, Weyl drew attention to a residue of Newtonian ‘action at a distance’ in Riemann’s acceptance that one can compare two line elements at different points of space. Weyl compares a line to a road and a path or curve to the route taken along it by a pedestrian (CO 101–102). Moreover, it creates new difficulties of its own, since the ‘neighbourhood’ introduced must have a definite shape. The fact that the shape chosen turns out to be quite arbitrary highlights once again what Weyl calls the ‘inescapable discrepancy between the genuine continuum and a set of isolated elements’ – no matter how creatively treated by mathematics (CO 106–107). The account of time is in Physics IV.10–14. This is borne out by Heidegger’s insistence that the dimension underlying movement has to be understood in ‘a completely formal sense’ (GA24 343–344: 242). For an account of care (Sorge) as the ontological structure of Dasein, see Being and Time, §§39–44 and §65. T A Ryckman, ‘Weyl’s Debt to Husserl: The Transcendental Phenomenological Roots of the Gauge Principle’. This paper was delivered to the Oxford Symmetry Workshop in 2001 and can be found on-line at: http://weylmann.com/ryckman. doc (accessed 14 Aug. 2008).

Chapter 6: Continuity and the Experience of Language as Such 1

The essay ‘The Way to Language’ has also been published in a different translation in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings. In this edition, the German die Sprache has been translated as ‘the saying’, whereas in On the Way to Language it appears as ‘the Saying’, following the example set with the use of the higher case for

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‘Being’ for ‘Sein’. However, the need for the use of the higher case in this instance is, in my view, less marked. Although I have used the translation in On the Way to Language for the most part, I have therefore used the lower case ‘saying’. On a few other occasions, I have introduced a word or phrase from the Basic Writings edition, and these are marked ‘translation modified’. See also note 3 below. This way of establishing unity among a set of elements is reminiscent of the pros hen relation that Aristotle describes in Metaphysics IV.1–2. In On the Way to Language, Aufriß is translated as ‘design’, while in Basic Writings it is given as ‘rift-design’. Although I favour the latter translation, I have kept the German Aufriß. Cf. for example: Plato, Theaetetus, 204ba–205b; and Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1023b27–1024a29. It is important to see that the recognition of an ‘essential simplicity’ at the heart of language arises from the impossibility of detaching ourselves from what might be called the ‘fact of language’; however, we may be moved by the spoken word, we have must already have entered into relation with, and been moved by, language itself. NE, 1094a7–27, 1140b4–8. Reading ecstatic temporality via Aristotle can also be carried through by aligning the account of Dasein’s Being-towards-death in terms of its ‘having/holding’ its end with the interpretation of entelecheia as literally a ‘having its end in itself’. Again, one can see Heidegger appealing to Aristotle to provide an ontological radicalization of Kant. To be consistent with the published translation, Heidegger’s translation of dunamis as ‘Kraft’ is given in this discussion as ‘force’. See also MET V.xii (1019a15). Heidegger writes: ‘The prote dunamis is the basic outline (Grundriß ) of this essence into which the full content is then to be drawn; only this extraordinary sketch puts into relief the whole essence of dunamis and thus the full content of its meaning as well’ (GA33 90: 76). The passage, in Heidegger’s translation, continues as follows: ‘The one dunamis is in that which bears for the reason that this has something like an origin, a beginning, for something else, and for the reason that the material too, is something like an origin, a beginning for something; and thus for the reason that the one that bears bears something, and this as the one by virtue of the other. The oily is namely burnable, and the yielding, whatever it may be, is breakable; and so it is in the same way with other things. The other dunamis, however, is present in what is producing, for example, the warm in what is warming, the art of building in the one who knows how to build. – Because of this, to the extent that what is producing (doing) and what is bearing (suffering) are present together as one and the same being, this being itself tolerates nothing by itself; for it is (then) one thing and not that one thing toward another’ (1046a19–29, GA33 103–104: 87–88). Aristotle also discusses steresis in Physics I, and Heidegger works through these passages in GA18 297–299. Entzug can mean ‘privation’, but also simply ‘withdrawal’. Heidegger often plays on the kinetic character of the latter, which preserves the positive significance

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of what has been withdrawn better than the more plainly negative ‘privation’. That said, Heidegger’s interpretation of steresis would not disqualify the use of ‘privation’. For a more detailed treatment of steresis by Heidegger cf. VWB-WM, esp. 294–301: 264–269. ‘To maintain [sichhalten] oneself in this truth’ (SZ 264: 309) – the truth that one’s own end is certain – is to take over the withdrawal that belongs uniquely to each Dasein, and which is bound up with the potentiality for being of each Dasein. It is questionable how an activity that is an end-in-itself can also contribute to a further end, and similarly how an activity like eudaimonia, which has the form of praxis, can be the outcome of other acts without becoming a work. This difficulty is addressed widely in the literature on Aristotle’s ethics, not always with a full recognition of the extent of the problem. One of the clearest statements of what is at stake – the determination of the structure of ethical action and human existence in terms that do not fall back into the language and patterns of production, and thereby also the sense in which human existence acquires the form of a whole – can be found in the R A Gauthier and J Y Jolif, L’Ethique Nicomaque: traduction et commentaire II, premiere partie (1959), Paris, Éditions BeatriceNauwelaerts, 7. ‘Was das Nachbarliche der vier Weltgegenden be-wëgt, zu einander gelangen läßt und in der Nähe ihrer Weite hält, ist die Nähe selber’ (US 199). The term used in the passage quoted is ‘reach’ (erreichen). Elsewhere Heidegger expresses this as ‘extending over towards’: ‘Where this prevails, all things are open to one another in their self-concealment; thus one extends itself to the other, and thus all remain themselves’; ‘Im waltenden Gegen-einander-über ist jegliches, eines für das andere, offen, offen in seinem Sichverbergen; so reicht sich eines dem anderen hinüber, eines überläßt sich dem anderen, und jegliches bleibt so es selber (US 199: 104). ‘Wie aber west die Sage, daß sie das Gehörenlassen vermag?’ Here, as elsewhere, the Basic Writings translation captures the temporal sense of unfolding associated with Heidegger’s use of the verb ‘wesen’ better than that in On the Way to Language, which uses ‘is present’(BW 413). On the Way to Language signals the ambiguity in gehören explicitly. I have combined both translations here.

Bibliography

Works by Heidegger A complete and updated bibliography of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe can be found in Heidegger Studies. The list of Abbreviations provides details of all the Heidegger texts to which I have referred here.

Other Works J -E André, Heidegger et la liberté: le project politique de ‘Sein und Zeit’ (2001) Paris, L’Harmattan. H Arendt, The Human Condition (1958) Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Aristotle, Metaphysics I–IX (1933) trans. H Trendennick, Cambridge Massachusetts and London, Harvard University Press and William Heinemann. — Nicomachean Ethics (1926) trans. H Rackham, Cambridge Massachusetts and London, Harvard University Press and William Heinemann. — Physics (1929) trans. P H Wicksteed and F M Cornford, Cambridge Massachusetts and London, Harvard University Press and William Heinemann. P Aubenque, La prudence chez Aristote (1963) Paris, Presses Universitaires de France. — Le problème de l’être chez Aristote (1962) Paris, Presses Universitaires de France. G Bachelard, La dialectique de la durée (1993) Paris, Quadrige/Presses Universitaires de France: The Dialectic of Duration (2000) Manchester, Clinamen Press. — Le Poétique de l’espace (1958) Paris, Presses Universitaires de France: The Poetics of Space (1994) Boston, Beacon Press. M de Beistegui, Heidegger and the Political (1998) London and New York, Routledge. — The New Heidegger (2005) London and New York, Continuum Press. — ‘The transformation of the sense of Dasein in Heidegger’s Beiträge zur Philosophie (vom Ereignis) (2003) Research in Phenomenology, vol. 33, 221–246. — Truth and Genesis: Philosophy as Differential Ontology (2004) Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press. J Bell, ‘Herman Weyl’s later philosophical views – His divergence from Husserl’ (2003) Husserl and the Sciences, ed. R Feist, Ottawa, University of Ottawa Press. R Bernasconi, ‘The fate of the distinction between praxis and poiesis’ (1986) Heidegger Studies, vol. 2, 111–139. — Heidegger in Question: The Art of Existing (2000) New York, Prometheus Books.

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Index

abstraction 15–16, 24, 63, 86–8 actuality (energeia) 52–3, 58–9, 109 agathon 21–4, 26–8, 31, 33, 35, 38, 44 analysis 83–5, 88–97 anxiety 29, 99, 103–4, 114–15 Aristotle 2–4, 8, 27, 47, 49–50, 73, 77, 86–9, 105–12 Metaphysics 14, 32, 106–7, 109, 111, 117 and movement 53, 66, 78–9, 120 Nicomachean Ethics 9, 35, 106 Physics 15, 53, 66, 78, 86, 89, 120 and time 78–80, 84, 93–4 see also agathon, automaton, dunamis, kinesis, metaphysics, phronesis, sophia, tuche arithmetic 15–17, 81, 83–4, 87–8 Aufriß 101–2, 120–8 authenticity 29, 44–5 automaton 53–5 autonomy 47–52, 59, 61, 64 Being 29, 32, 37–43, 45, 47, 51–3 Being-a-cause 51 Being-a-whole 37, 105, 113–14 Being as such 2, 4, 6, 41, 66 Being as a whole 3–4, 60, 104, 105 question of 1, 26, 27, 45, 46, 52, 66 saying of 2, 68, 74, 78, 98 unity of 2–3, 7 Being-in-the-world 19, 37, 95, 103–5, 107–9, 115, 121 Being-towards-death 7, 37, 99, 104, 108–9, 113–15, 121, 125–6

Being and Time 39–41, 59, 63–4, 68, 76, 99, 103–6, 113, 117–18, 122, 125 beings as a whole 22, 25–6, 42 belonging 15–17, 22, 41, 100, 105–6, 120, 122–6 Bergson, Henri 85, 92–3 Berti, Enrico 130 categorial intuition 20 causality 51–3, 56–9, 65, 134 cause 6, 51, 53, 54, 55–9, 64, 110 concealment 25–6 contingency 1, 4, 18, 47–50, 55–6, 59–61, 64–5, 128 continuity 3–5, 8–9, 16, 19, 23, 28, 71, 78, 81–2, 84, 88, 91, 99–100, 108, 116, 119–25 of a line 89–90 and number 89, 92–3 and phenomenology 88 of space and time 93, 96 of time-space 99, 124–5, 128 continuum 83–5, 88–93, 96–7 death see limit, Being-towards-death Democritus 49, 53–5 dialectic 9, 11–14, 17–18, 20, 24–5, 27 dianoein 12, 24 diaresis see synthesis dimension between world and thing 69–70 formal 74, 78–82 of givenness or manifestness 78, 80, 82

148

Index

dimension (Cont’d) and language 71–2, 80–2, 100, 102 of movement, space and time 67, 78–80, 82, 93, 95–6, 102, 118–21, 124 and number 79–82, 84, 119 originary, of world formation 75–7 see also ontological difference, nearness, time-space divine, the 30, 34, 36–7 dunamis 13–15, 107, 109–14, 117, 126, 140 see also potentiality errancy 25–7, 76 Ereignis 126 ethics 1, 23, 43 see also ontology, relation to ethics; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics eudaimonia 31, 34, 36, 141 existence 6, 8–10, 20, 22, 24, 27–8, 29–46, 76–7, 103–9, 113–17, 126 existential analytic 38–40, 43–4 existentiell 30, 42–3, 77 finitude of Being 75, 77 of Dasein 3, 22, 59, 99, 104, 109, 114, 116, 121 human 12, 21, 29–30, 36–7 of language 101–2, 125–8 of philosophy 39, 41, 45 for-the-sake-of-which (Worumwillen, hou heneka) 23, 116, 136, 137 forgottenness 25, 37 Foucault, Michel 134 freedom 47–50, 53, 56, 58, 61–5, 101, 134, 137 practical freedom 50–2, 59–60 transcendental freedom 50–2, 58–9 general theory of relativity 86 geometry 15–16, 83–5, 87–9, 91, 92, 96

Gonzalez, Francisco 129, 131 good 21, 34–6 good beyond Being 21 see also agathon hearing 100, 102, 123 hermeneutic circle 2, 4, 62 heterogeneity 58–60, 62 heteron 13–17, 54, 83, 130 heteronomy see also autonomy history 58, 78 metaphysical 41 horizonal schemata 98, 105–6, 115 horizons 2, 37, 105–6, 115 Husserl, Edmund 18–19 Impossibility 4 impredicative definition 89–90, 139 in, being 107–8 Kant, Immanuel 48–53, 56–9, 61, 65, 86, 105, 135 katholou 32 see also universal kinesis 13–16, 86–7 see also movement language 13, 18, 39–40, 68, 70, 80–2, 119, 123–7 see also saying essence of 101–3, 122, 124, 126–8 language as such 68–9, 98–102, 119, 121–2, 128 limit of 101, 125–8 listening to see belonging limit 99, 107–9, 112, 116–18, 120–1 between force and un-force 112 between human (mortal) and divine (immortal) 36–7, 39, 44 of existence 37, 113–15 of logos 26 of philosophy 45 see also language logos 8–13, 16–18, 20, 24–7, 72–4, 87

Index metabainon 19, 32 metabole 109–13, 121 metaphysics 27, 40–3, 52, 76, 99, 117 metontology 30, 42 mortality 29–30, 32, 36–7, 44, 103 mortals 30, 34, 69, 116, 126–7 movement 51–5, 58–60, 66, 76, 86, 93 and abstraction 86–8 and analysis 83–5, 88, 92 and the existence of Dasein 37, 39–41, 43, 76, 132 and language 80–2, 99–103, 118, 121, 124, 126–7 and number 16, 79–80, 93–6 and the ontological difference 3, 5 ontological perspective on 79 and relation 9, 14–18, 25, 69, 72, 78, 81, 121 and the relation between ethics and ontology 22 multiplicity 10, 46, 50, 56, 60–5, 122 see also Aufriß, continuity, errancy, kinesis, metontology, ontological difference, time-space Nachsagen 124–5 nature 41, 51, 54, 56–8, 62–4 nearness 69, 118–20, 216 necessity 29–30, 47–50, 54–5, 74 negation 13–15 Nicolaci, Giuseppe 133 noein 8, 11–12, 18, 24, 26 nous 8–12, 17–20, 24–5, 27, 31, 37 now 92–6 number 79, 80–4, 87–96, 108, 118–19, 122, 126 oblivion 40, 46 ontological difference 1–4, 41, 74–6, 102, 117 and movement 5, 8–9, 27, 41, 66

149

ontology 2, 3, 4, 18, 76 fundamental ontology 2–3, 5–6, 67, 77 ontic foundation of 20, 29–30, 38–40, 44–6 relation to ethics 1–2, 5–6, 21–2, 28 phenomenology 3, 12, 39, 77, 88, 96–7 phronesis 8–10, 18–25, 27–8, 30–6, 44 place (topos) 87, 94, 107–8, 117 Plato 8, 35–6, 83, 86 Sophist 8–24, 83, 86 potentiality 4, 53, 58, 107, 109–10, 113–18, 121, 126–7 see also dunamis potentiality-for-Being 106, 109, 113–16 praxis 9–10, 20, 24, 34–5, 39, 65, 106, 141 resoluteness (Entschlossenheit) 29, 44, 59–60 saying 2, 6, 66, 68, 76–9, 81, 98, 100–2, 119–28 univocal 69, 71, 74, 78 sophia 4, 6, 8–10, 18–23, 25, 27–8, 30, 32–6, 38, 44 space 16, 81–2, 83, 85–6, 88–93, 95, 102, 108, 110, 115, 118, 119, 120, 121, 125 space-time 89, 91, 93, 119 steresis (withdrawal, privation) 111–12, 114, 117, 126, 140–1 synthesis 73, 132 Taminiaux, Jacques 129, 133 temporality 40, 42–3, 58–9, 67, 84, 99–100, 104–9, 114, 117–18, 125–6 theoria 9–10, 20–4, 33–7

150 time 83, 85–6, 88–94, 96, 102, 118–21 time-space 99–100, 118, 120, 124–8 transcendence 22, 34, 37, 43–4, 66 truth (aletheia, unconcealment) 8–12, 17, 21, 25, 27, 47, 68 tuche 53–5

Index Umschlag 62 undifferentiatedness (Indifferenz) 74–5, 78, 80–1 Volpi, Franco 129, 135 Weyl, Herman 83–97 will 47, 49–50, 59–61, 136, 137