Cologne, 18 September 1996
Various sundry pieces from Chris Morrissey (and others):
"Would you say literal truth is the primary sense of truth?"
What is literal truth? The truth of a literal meaning said with letters, in a
statement. What exactly demarcates a literal (letteral) statement from a
metaphorical (carried-over) one? At what point precisely do letters starting
allowing themselves to be carried away?
For example, is a man of letters letterally a man who habitually eats alphabet
soup?
Another example (more seriously now): What is the literal meaning of space?
Where and what is space literally? What is space in a metaphorical (carried
over) sense? Wide open spaces of the Nullabor Plain? The space surrounding me in
my room? Cartesian 3-D space? The space of projective geometry defined by
axioms? My personal space? Outer space?
Chris M.:
"Whence aletheia? Doesn't this seem to be a pious question, in search of the
holy? Whence aletheia? From God? From a god?"
Not at all pious. Aletheia is not from a god. Aletheia is the propriation of
being itself in claiming human being to be open to being. The event of aletheia
is tautological, moving from itself to itself. There's nothing holy about it -
it is mundane in the literal sense: world-building.
Chris M.:
"The intellect is nous. Its essence is the grasp of first principles. Another
name for intellect is "thinking". The correspondence between intellect and being
is another way of saying "the relation between thinking and being". Yes or no?"
No. Correspondence is traditionally the translation of adaequatio, which is in
turn the translation of Aristotelian homoiosis: adequation of the statement
(logos) to the thing itself. Relation is much broader and weaker: "pros ti", the
third category. For nous to grasp beings in their being and speak it out, there
must first be an openness of being in which beings are 'sighted' by nous, i.e.
beings as such are given to nous to grasp. Nous does not first create the
openness within which beings in their being appear. Nous can only take in
(vernehmen) what is given to it, which does not contradict it being
"self-moving". (Kant located this giving power in pure reason. Heidegger took
this one step further and locates it in the event of propriation itself.) The
correspondence between thinking and being in the most fundamental (i.e.
abyssal, fundamentless) sense is the response of thinking to being's
propriation. This response provides the primordial de-lineation of beings as
such for human being.
Chris M.:
"That truth includes falsity? Or that unconcealment is truth plus falsity?"
Truth as adaequatio does not include falsity but is its opposite. But truth as
adaequatio presupposes truth as aletheia (Entbergung - which is misleadingly
translated as 'revelation'), the openness of being that opens the difference
between being and beings.
Chris M.:
"Is Heidegger right to maintain that dunamis is higher than energeia?"
Yes, because the structure of the essence of dynamis includes energeia as one of
its moments, not the other way round. Dynamis as a mode of being (as treated in
Aristotle's Metaphysics Theta) is a point of origin having dominion over a
change of state in something else, or within itself insofar as it is something
else (arche metaboles en alloi e hei allo).
Dynamis (force, potential, capacity, capability) has dominion over a change in
beings. When this change takes place, dynamis is in action, it is at work, i.e.
it is in-work-ness, which is nothing other than what energeia says: en-erg-eia.
Both physis and poiesis are dynamai, the latter being guided by logos (poiesis =
dynamis meta logou). The famous example of architecture (the very word conforms
with the essence of dynamis) as dynamis meta logou makes this clearer:
Architecture is primarily knowledge (in-sight into the telos) and as such a
force/potential for changing the state of matter from rocks, timber, sand, etc.
into the end (telos) of a house/building or what-have-you. The change of state
is guided by the logos which fore-sees the changes to be made to achieve the end
in sight. Architecture as energeia is architecture at work, in action,
in-work-ness, actualizing itself in building a building in which architecture
then has itself in its end: in-end-having-ness or en-tel-ech-eia. Dynamis
encompasses not only its energeia (in-work-ness) as a mode of being, but also
its entelecheia. Quod erat demonstrandum.
Michael
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