Patrick HughesPhil 323 – Text Seminar: Introduction to MetaphysicsProfessor Kate Withy

Quote Explication 6

“Nevertheless, it is still necessary to show how on the basis of the inceptive disjunction of logos and phusis, logos secedes and then begins to establish the dominance of reason.

“This secession of logos and its advance readiness to assume the position of a court of justice that presides over Being happens already within Greek philosophy. It even determines the end of Greek philosophy. We meet the challenge of Greek philosophy as the inception of Western philosophy only if we also grasp this inception in its inceptive end; for it was solely and only this end that became the “inception” for the subsequent age, in such a way that this “inception” also covered up the inceptive inception. But this inceptive end of the great inception, the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, remains great, even if we completely discount the greatness of the way it worked itself out in the West” (EM199-200).

Sophia: Patrick, I’ve been thinking about Heidegger and Plato, and I think I’ve formed a better idea of what Heidegger is getting at.

Patrick: What do you mean?

Sophia: Plato’s thought seems to map well onto Heidegger’s, which I suppose is unsurprising considering that Heidegger said that the Ancient Greeks inceptively understood Being. So I’ve been thinking about how Plato would say what Heidegger is trying to say.

Patrick: Heidegger certainly had some things to say about Plato. What do you think Plato has to say about Heidegger?

Sophia: I think that the Good for Plato is like Being for Heidegger. In the Phaedo, Plato says that the Good keeps everything together, and this seems the same as making things be and in the Republic Plato says that the Good is makes everything knowable and accounts for being of entities.1 This seems the same as the Good making things meaningfully present, so that the Good is Heidegger’s Being.

Patrick: But Plato says the Good is beyond being, doesn’t he?

Sophia: Yes he does. Maybe Heidegger would say that Plato was wrong about the Good being different than being, but that the rest is correct.

Patrick: Plato likens the Good to the sun, right?

Sophia: Yes. Just like the sun lights things up and makes them see-able, the Good makes them intelligible.

1 “…it's the good or binding, that genuinely does bind and hold things together…” (Phaedo, 99c trans. Gallop) “For the things which are known, say not only that their being known comes from the good, but also that they get their existence and their being from it as well - though the good is not being, but something for surpassing being in rank and power” (Republic, 509b trans. Griffith)

Patrick: But the sun is an entity. So this analogy relies on a conception of the Good as an entity and in our first talk we said that Being could not be an entity. So either the analogy is inappropriate in this regard or the Good cannot be like Being.

Sophia: I’m not sure Plato has a robust answer to that worry, but I think he would concede that the Good can’t be an entity itself and that the analogy is inappropriate in that regard, but that the main point of the analogy remains.

Patrick: Fair enough, so the rest of the analogy deals with how the Good makes things intelligible like the sun makes them visible. You said that making intelligible was the same as making meaningfully present, so that the Good accounted for the being of entities.

Sophia: Right.

Patrick: Some kind of entities or all entities?

Sophia: It would have to be all entities in order for the Good to be Being.

Patrick: But in the analogy of the Line, which follows the analogy of the Good to the sun, Plato makes it clear that the objects of knowledge, or understanding, are the Forms and that sensible entities are the objects of belief. It follows from this that the Good would only account for the being of a specific kind of entities, namely the Forms. Probably the Sun would account for the becoming of sensible entities.2

Sophia: Well, that does seem like a problem. I guess I was wrong about Heidegger and Plato.

Patrick: If it’s any consolation prize Heidegger thinks you were wrong in a very impressive manner.

Sophia: What do you mean?

Patrick: Last time, when we talked about the Ancient Greeks, we only talked about the pre-Socratic Greeks and not about Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. I didn’t call attention to it, so it makes sense that you would think Heidegger approved of all Greeks, but actually Heidegger thinks that only the pre-Socratic Greeks inceptively understood Being, specifically Parmenides and Heraclitus. He thinks that beginning with Plato (which always also means beginning with Socrates) and continuing through Aristotle, the Greek ‘original inception’ ended.

Sophia: Oh no, not Plato! Why does he think that?

Patrick: Heidegger thinks that Plato and Aristotle misunderstood the pre-Socratic inception of Being in a natural, if not necessary, way and that even with this misunderstanding, or perhaps because of it, Plato and Aristotle were still great philosophers. And he thinks that this misunderstanding became definitive for all of Western metaphysics afterwards.

Sophia: What a great consolation prize—Plato is the first among the last.

2 “…there are these two things. One of them is ruler of the category and realm of what can be understood. The other is ruler of what can be seen…” (Rep. 509d)

Patrick: Hah. I understand your point, and maybe Heidegger is wrong about Plato, but we saw above that Plato gets into some trouble if you think Heidegger is right about Being.

Sophia: Ok, but who’s to say that Plato didn’t have a better philosophy than the pre-Socratics and that Heidegger is wrong?

Patrick: You would have to decide for yourself on that one, but Heidegger does have a story about why Plato and Aristotle’s philosophy represents a fall from the pre-Socratic inception of Being.

Sophia: Now you have to tell me his story so I can defend Plato.

Patrick: What—do you think that Plato is right about the Forms?

Sophia: I’m not convinced that Plato actually believed in the Forms in the way that they are popularly represented. But more importantly I’m not convinced that anyone is right in philosophy. So I don’t think that to defend Plato I have to prove him right. It might be enough just to show that Heidegger’s story is unfair.

Patrick: Fair enough. The first time we talked, we characterized the happening of the being of entities, or Being, as polemos.

Sophia: I remember. In polemos Dasein struggles with Being and with entities to meaningfully presence entities as that and what they are.

Patrick: Exactly. I mentioned that Heidegger also characterizes Being as logos.

Sophia: That sounds very Platonic.

Patrick: Heidegger’s logos is not Plato’s logos. We’ll get to the latter in a minute. For Heidegger logos is the ‘gathering gatherdness’ and he thinks that Heraclitus thought of Being this way. Just like polemos is supposed to convey the violent separating character of Being, logos is supposed to convey its unifying character.

Sophia: Unity-in-plurality… Still sounds pretty Platonic to me—

Patrick –by this Heidegger is bringing attention to the fact that in order to separate entities from one another as that and what they are, you must unify them within limits. So for a table and a cup on top of a table to presence as separate entities, the table must presence within limits that, for example, prevent it from being a container for liquid, and the cup within limits that prevent it from being used to eat dinner on. This presencing within limits is the gathering into the gatherdness of an entity.

Sophia: I’m 90% sure that Socrates said that in the Philebus.

Patrick: I’m sorry Sophia. It seems like you would rather tell the story yourself.

Sophia: Fine. Sorry. I’ll limit interruptions from now on.

Patrick: Anyway. So Heraclitus, a pre-Socratic, inceptively understands Being as polemos, but also Being as logos, as gathering gatherdness. Importantly the limits that an entity gathers into in presencing are the

limits of that individual entity, though of course they are related to the limits of other entities through norms.

Sophia: What do you mean?

Patrick: When a particular table presences as a table, it doesn’t gather into the limits of table-ness, but into the limits of that particular table. But of course in order to be a particular table, its limits must be related to the limits of other tables insofar as al tables are governed by norms about what it is to be a table.

Sophia: Originally I said that these norms were like Plato’s Forms, but I have a feeling Heidegger disagrees.

Patrick: Indeed he does. Heidegger things that Plato’s first mistake is to conflate the norms for being a table with the limits of an individual table and in doing-so to hypostasize those norm-limits into beings, namely the Forms. The story goes like this: Plato sees that many entities, which all appear (presence) differently, can be correctly called tables. Since each entity is different, and yet still a table, he concludes that there must be something the same in all the tables that accounts for each being a table despite the many particular differences between them. But Plato doesn’t think that this something cannot be a material property of a table, so he calls it an idea or Form.

Sophia: I understand how that might not be terribly plausible, but why does Heidegger think that this is an error rather than a development or even just another way of thinking about the being of entities?

Patrick: Well Heidegger’s thinks that this way of thinking about the being of entities has two big problems. The first is that appearance comes to take the place of presencing, because Plato thinks that what-ness entirely accounts for the presencing of entities. So a table appears only insofar as it participates in the what-ness of a table, i.e. the Form of Table. The second is that the what-ness of an entity is no longer specific to an entity, but common across all entities of a type. Sensible entities are now thought of as imperfect approximations of a paradigm of what-ness, a Form, and therefore less real. So since the Form of table is the most-table thing there is, it must be the most real, i.e. really be, and all particular tables must be less real, i.e. must not really be. To account for this Plato says that particular entities do not have being but rather become insofar as they participate in the Forms, which have being.

Sophia: Ok I understand Heidegger’s problem, and maybe he’s right about some of it, but I think that even if Plato is wrong to denigrate the being of entities to becoming, he realizes something important insofar as when we think of a table we do think of something that all tables instantiate but that no one table completely exhausts. So what if we said that Forms and sensible particulars are different kinds of entities, but that both kinds of entities are, i.e. presence, in the same way, namely in the happening of being.

Patrick: That’s not a bad idea, but Heidegger’s main objection isn’t to Plato’s division of entities into kinds by itself, but to what this division changes about how we think about Being.

Sophia: Why does this have to change how we think about Being and not just how we think about entities?

Patrick: Remember last time how we said that norms must remain in the background in order to be norms that structure how we unconceal entities?

Sophia: Yes.

Patrick: Well by trying to think of something that all tables instantiate we are trying to bring norms into the foreground as entities, but norms can’t be unconcealed as entities. This is the rest of Heidegger’s story. As soon as we make the what-ness of entities into idea common to all entities, we are inclined to think that an entity presences as what it is insofar as it relates to that idea in some way. On this model if I ask you what something is you have to think about what characteristics it has and what it resembles and then you give it name. The presencing of entities then becomes intimately wrapped up in language as determined by that language—a thing is insofar as it relates to a name given in language.

Sophia: But before you said that logos was a way of understanding Being, and logos means, among other things, language.

Patrick: Heidegger thinks logos means language but in an originary sense. In the sense above as the gathering gatheredness of entities, which can only take place in language, but which is not merely a linguistic determination. On the first conception of logos the giving of a name in language is expresses the presencing of an entity within its limits, but after Plato the naming of an entity comes to express correct or incorrect identification of that entity as what it is. Before we might have said ‘this is a table’ but all we would have meant is ‘this entity has been unconcealed as a table’. Now when we say ‘this is a table’ we mean ‘This entity can be correctly called a table because it relates to the idea of table in certain ways’. While this second conception of logos isn’t bad in and of itself, Heidegger thinks that, in the inceptive end, and especially after the philosophy of Aristotle and the invention of logic, the latter meaning of logos comes to eclipse the former and cover up the originary understanding of Being as gathering gatheredness.

Sophia: So for Heidegger, by considering an entity as an instantiation of an idea we necessarily stop thinking about how that entity presences by coming into it’s own limits in logos, but start thinking about how it conforms to that idea either as an instance of it or not. The worst form of this is thinking about what as entity is as merely a logical determination. Either an entity is correctly identified as falling under an idea, now understood as a logical category, or else it is incorrectly identified as such. I can certainly see why the replacement of originary logos with logical logos is a worse way of approaching Being if it becomes the only way.

Patrick: Well said. There’s another problem that I won’t get into here, but it has to do with whether saying that an entity is an imperfect approximation of an idea imports normativity into Being. The problem is that we might say something like ‘in order to be a good table you should be as like the idea of table as possible’ and Plato definitely seems to say this. And just like the other problems this change affects how we think of Being and not just entities. So one might say something like ‘the Good is higher than Being.’

Sophia: God forbid!

Patrick: An appropriate thing to say. Heidegger thinks that the inceptive end became definitive for western metaphysics, and we can see this clearly in Christian philosophy where God, the omnibenevolent, is the ground of the being of entities.

Sophia: Does Heidegger think that we are still stuck in Plato’s shadow?

Patrick: Heidegger developed a history of Being, where I presume he discusses that in more detail, but I haven’t read it. I do know that Heidegger thinks that the modern age is embroiled in a new way of unconcealing entities, which he calls Technological.

Sophia: When I think of ‘technological’ I think of Daft Punk. I doubt that’s what Heidegger has in mind?

Patrick: Probably not. By saying we unconceal entities technologically he means that entities are unconcealed in terms of the elements they are made of, or the energy they store—as something useful for being transformed into other things and fueling our domination of the world. He refers to entities unconcealed in this was as the standing reserve. Ultimately he thinks we run the risk of treating even ourselves this way, reducing what it is to be a human being to being a bundle of cells useful for preforming tasks as part of the standing reserve.

Sophia: That’s quite the pessimistic vision. Plato would pretty clearly be opposed to it, I think, especially considering the beginning of the Phaedrus.

Patrick: I agree, but I suspect that Heidegger would trace the essence of technology back to Plato anyway.

Sophia: How so?

Patrick: By arguing that unconcealing entities in terms of the standing reserve is historically tied up with Plato. I think he would say that technological unconcealing of entities is dependent upon a historically prior unconcealing of entities in terms of their structure rather than their essence. And as above Heidegger thinks Plato is responsible for that.

Sophia: Maybe we should blame Aristotle rather than Plato for the unconcealing entities technologically; after all he was the first scientist.

Patrick: Well that depends on what you mean by scientist. If you mean empiricist then Aristotle was the first, but Plato was definitely a fan of technē.

Sophia: Yeah but Plato didn’t mean the sciences in the way we understand them when he said technē.

Patrick: Actually I suspect that Heidegger would say that Plato’s understanding of technē is the real root of the problem. Before I said that Heidegger thought that the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle lead to a misunderstanding of logos and I think he would argue that a similar misunderstanding of technē underlies the essence of technology. Heidegger thinks that the pre-Socratics understood the reciprocal relation between Dasein and Being on the model of a reciprocal relation between technē and dike (justice, order). Consider: Unconcealing entities in terms of the standing reserve means understanding entities in terms of their ability to be dominated and transformed. On this conception technē becomes science considered as the ability to employ entities in the service of dike, which is no longer understood in terms of logical structures—Plato’s ideas—but in terms of normative structures. But since Being is the ground of normative structures, science becomes about dominating and transforming entities as such, i.e. establishing the standing reserve.

Sophia: I suppose that Heidegger thinks he is immune to this new way of unconcealing entities?

Patrick: I think he does to a degree insofar as Heidegger also thinks that he is the first to see through the problem and go back to the originary inception of the pre-Socratics.

Sophia: How humble.

Patrick: Plato wasn’t very humble either. Speaking of which, are you ready to defend him now?

Sophia: Plato says that the true rhetorician “…has grasped the right occasions for speaking and for holding back…”3 My rhetorical prowess is telling me that right now it is seemly to stay quiet.

3 Phaedrus, 272a trans. Nehamas