Thursday, August 16, 2007

Sources in Heidegger and negation

I'll have to make some sense of this passage in order to see the the other basis of the interpretation of Dasein in Being and Time. That is, there are two interpretations of phenomena that underly Heidegger's sketch of Dasein's Being. The first is the Greek interpretation, or rather Heidegger's interpretation of the Greek understanding of terms like nous, logos, physis, etc. The "other basis" which I am here beginning to see definitely is the interpretation of negativity, which essentially deals with identity and difference, by the traditions of Christianity and German Idealism. It should be clear that the focus of both of these traditions Heidegger uses both align in the phenomenon of alethia. The term alethia is sometimes used in Greek as a word for truth, meaning un-forgetting, or un-covering. But at the same time the interpretation of the privative prefix a- appended to lethia gives it its force, and this means that there is some hidden interpretation of negativity or lack that the Greeks did not work out explicitly in the term. Christianity and German Idealism thus supplement the Greek lack of interpretation of the a- in their own reflections on negativity. Where Heidegger uses the Greeks for his basic analysis of Being-in-the-world, then, he supplements it with an interpretation of Dasein's authenticity in the world with the reflections of Christianity and German Idealism on the "not." This is why the beginning of the second division and the interpretation of Dasein's authenticity must focus so much on death, guilt, etc., and takes its clues for interpretation from Aquinas, Paul, and, most notably, Kierkegaard. I hope to have made some of the influences of Being and Time clear: I still have to read Ted Kisiel's book on the genesis of Being and Time, which supposedly asserts that Heidegger's work on Aristotle really unifies the book. But I think that from the above it makes sense why Aristotle, culmination of the Greek tradition and father of the Christian one (not to mention the supreme source for Hegel's work in the period of German Idealism)--why Aristotle could play this role. Anyway, here is the quote on negativity:

Ontology and logic, to be sure, have exacted a great deal from the "not," and have thus made its possibilities visible in a piecemeal fashion; but it itself [Nichtheit, notness] has not been unveiled ontologically. Ontology came across the "not" and made use of it. But is it so obvious that every "not" signifies something negative in the sense of a lack? Is its positivity exhausted by the fact that it constitutes "passing over" something? ...Has anyone ever made a problem of the ontological source of notness, or, prior to that, even sought the mere conditions on the basis of which the problem of the "not" and its notness and the possibility of that notness can be raised?
-Being and Time, II.2 ¶57, 332.

You can see that he is trying to show that it is in interpreting the correct emphasis of German Idealism and Christianity on the not in a Greek way--that is, not as a lack but as something positive, as a way to be--that German Idealism and Christianity will be able to fully characterize the not. At the same time, it is in the Christian and German explication of what the Greeks passed over in characterizing truth as a negative phenomenon that will bring the Greek notion of truth to its completion. It has to be shown how precisely truth is at the same time positive in its being unconcealment as well as indeed negative. That is, truth cannot be merely a lack, an absence as it was for Christians and German Idealists, but neither can it be a presence, a non-lack as it was for the Greeks.
More profoundly, however, it is this focus on a positive form of negativity as a way to be (i.e. as truth qua alethia) that leads Heidegger to time. That is, if there is an influence of both Greek philosophy in the conception of the world in the analysis of Being-in-the-world and Christianity and Geman Idealism in the conception of of negation in Being-towards-death, it is the need to combine the two that produces the turn towards temporality and specifically historicality. The whole process of reinterpreting negation with the Greek influence gets explicitly worked out in an idea of negation that is present in the historizing of Dasein. Let's be clearer. Being-towards-death provisionally leads Heidegger towards time, and, according to what we have already said, so too does the tradition of philosophy from Christianity and German Idealism. That is, it leads him away from the Greek interpretation of things. So in a way Heidegger is moving from a reinterpretation of the idea of Being, since this is the primary way the Greeks understood things, to a reinterpretation of the idea of Becoming-as-Being, which is what negation as analyzed by the later traditions leads to--i.e. not-Being as a way of Being--and then from there to an idea of Being that is beyond both the Greek and the Christian/German Idealist tradition. This means that as he moves further and further away from Being-towards-death and towards the issue of temporality in the later chapters of Being and Time he is looking more and more at how negation can be redefined explicitly--i.e. not implicitly, as it is in the sections on Being-towards-death--by bringing in time. Thus he will have to contend with the two greatest philosophers of each tradition, Aristotle and Hegel, concerning time. For both of these understood time and--especially Hegel--history as the way that time is a way of Being. The working out of historizing in the chapter "Temporality and Historicality," then, is a reinterpretation of Hegelian negation and the a- of alethia to combine them together in the way we specified. Where Hegel went wrong was in interpreting negation precisely as Heidegger says above--as a lack of Being, as Becoming-Being. Heidegger shows more rigorously that history, and thus negation, is not a way for Dasein to be, but historizing, the possibility of bringing oneself into history, and thus the holding open of the possibility for negativity, is a way for Dasein to be, and thus is the actual way Dasein exists. That is, negativity is taken out of the German Idealist context and brought back to its Greek roots successfully in showing Dasein to be something that can hold open a possibility of definite negation or not-being or truth (as unconcealment)--as a historizing being. In doing so he is going beyond both of the traditions he reinterprets.

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