Cologne, 4 August 1996
Tom Blancato is now, I am sure, going to get extremely suspicious about me
leaving the level on which phenomena present themselves in a prima facie way. If
thinking is to have any task at all, it is disclosing the 'second face' of
things. The supposed 'contortions' and 'abstractness' of the language of
thinking are part of its guiding phenomena to their essencing, to what they are.
I'd now like to sketch (once again briefly and inadequately) how Heidegger
situates polemos in 'Introduction to Metaphysics' (1935). The famous Heraclitean
Fragment 53 (I think I erroneously said 58 in an earlier post) on polemos occurs
in a section entitled innocuously "'The Grammar of the Word 'to be'". What on
earth does polemos have to do with grammar? Heidegger tries to disclose the
phenomena that lie behind the dry grammatical categories of noun and verb and
returns to Plato and Aristotle to do so. These authors are the founders of Greek
grammar and of all subsequent Western grammar. H. points out that the infinitive
'sein' is taken as the basic form of the verb, whereas all other forms are
enklisis or declinatio of this basic form.
This leads to the observation that the Greek understanding of language, which is
one being among others, depends on their understanding of being and goes on to
elucidate this understanding:
"The names ptosis and enklisis mean to fall, to tilt, to incline. This implies a
di-vergence from standing upright and straight. This latter, however, this
standing-there of itself in vertical erection, coming to a stand and remaining
in a _stand_ is understood by the Greeks as being. Whatever comes to stand in
this way, whatever becomes _standing_ (staendig) in itself, strikes itself of
itself free into the necessity of its limit, peras. The limit is not something
that only comes to the being from the outside as a supplement. Even less is it a
deficiency in the sense of a detracting restriction. The taming hold coming from
the limit, the having-of-itself within which the standing thing (Staendige)
holds itself, is the being of the being, and indeed first makes the being into a
being as distinct from a non-being. To come to a stand thus means: wrest a limit
for itself, de-limit." (S.46, first edition 1953)
There then follows explication of telos, entelecheia, morphe and ousia along the
lines of "emerging pos(ition)ing of itself in the limit". It should be clear
>from this that if one tries to translate "staendig" here as "constancy",
"persistence", or the like, this passage is completely incomprehensible in
English. (How does the translation in fact solve this problem?)
H.'s interpretation of the (implicit and never explicitly thought) Greek
understanding of being as coming-to-stand-in-its-own-limits then leads to
quoting Herakleitos' polemos-fragment 53. Beings come to stand in their
self-standing limits in an historical world. The coming-into-being of this world
is the polemos, the struggle (Kampf), the setting-apart (Aus-einandersetzung)
within which beings first come to be what they are by struggling, wrestling,
wresting their limits (peras, idea, morphe) within which they stand. The
struggle of polemos brings a world of self-standing beings into unconcealedness
(aletheia). Humans are used by this polemos in the revelation of this world by
their creative positing of works, principally works of art (and thinking). The
overwhelming sway of the emergence of beings into their self-standing limits is
banned into the works that stake out and erect an historical world. "This
becoming-of-world is history in the proper sense." (S.48)
To show the phenomenon of violence in its being would thus involve showing its
relation to the understanding of being as "standing presence", i.e.
"coming-to-stand-of-itself-in-limits by means of struggle". This coming-to-stand
is not identical with the Roman veritas as maintaining-a-stand, staying-on-top
defensively and averting a fall, but it is (unknowingly) the Same, i.e. derived
>from the same overwhelming sway of being itself as standing presence.
With respect to humans answering the polemical call of being, where does
(creative) struggle cease and violence start? Are they the same thing? Can the
meaning of being as standing presence itself be called into question? What kind
of creativity would answer this enclitical understanding of being? Are nouns
(substantives) at the root of Western violence? What has all
this got to do with the violence of war, murder, torture, robbery, rape? These
are enormous questions, I presume, not admitting any short answers.
Could the "nonviolence" often referred to by Tom Blancato be brought into some
relation with encliticality, to a sense of
not-standing-of-itself-in-its-own-limits? Or are we Westerners ineluctably
ex-posed to the destiny of being's call to stand? Are we thus as Westerners
ineluctably violent? (Why shouldn't we be?)
Cheers,
Michael
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