Heráclito. Seminario del semestre de invierno 1966-1967

by Martin Heidegger, Eugen Fink, Raúl Torres Martínez (Traductor)

Ya sea por la distancia de tiempo o los problemas filológicos que esto acarrea, penetrar en la filosofía griega es algo que no se da por terminado y que se mantiene sujeta a nuevas interpretaciones. En el último seminario que impartió el autor de Ser y tiempo, Martin Heidegger, junto con su discípulo Eugen Fink, se propusieron realizar un ejercicio reflexivo sobre el pensamiento de Heráclito a través de un reordenamiento de los fragmento del de Éfeso. De esta forma adquiere sentido la prolija reinterpretación de ciertos pasajes del filósofo griego que se circunscriben en un proyecto filosófico heideggeriano más amplio: la pregunta por el sentido del ser y el estudio de los orígenes de la metafísica.

It could be because of the distance in time or the philological problems it leads to, but when entering into the Greek philosophy there is no end to it, it remains subject to new interpretations. In the last seminar given by the author of Being and Time, Martin Heidegger, together with his disciple Eugen Fink, he proposed a reflective exercise on the thought of Heraclitus through a reordering of the fragment of Ephesus. This way the neat reinterpretation of certain passages of the Greek philosopher that are circumscribed in a broader Heideggerian philosophical project acquires meaning: the question of the sense of being and the study of the origins of metaphysics.

Genres: Philosophy, Ebooks, Biography, Metaphysics

216 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) was a German philosopher whose work is perhaps most readily associated with phenomenology and existentialism, although his thinking should be identified as part of such philosophical movements only with extreme care and qualification. His ideas have exerted a seminal influence on the development of contemporary European philosophy. They have also had an impact far beyond philosophy, for example in architectural theory (see e.g., Sharr 2007), literary criticism (see e.g., Ziarek 1989), theology (see e.g., Caputo 1993), psychotherapy (see e.g., Binswanger 1943/1964, Guignon 1993) and cognitive science (see e.g., Dreyfus 1992, 2008; Wheeler 2005; Kiverstein and Wheeler forthcoming).

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hegel said that his entire philosophy is indebted and a continuation of Heraclitus thinking; while at the same time Hegel understood the early Greeks as the first and immediate phase of his dialectical and then speculative understanding of the Absolute Spirit in History. But what if Hegel just understood Heraclitus and the Greeks only metaphysically; and what if this kind of metaphysical thinking should be brought to an end in a no-longer-metaphysical thinking by tracing its origin in the not-yet-metaphysical thinking of Heraclitus? In a way, this is what Heidegger and Fink are attempting here. Their main goal in this seminar is to distinguish and bring to light the ontological difference between Being and beings in Heraclitus's fragments. Fink is doing so by pointing out references to lightning, sun, seasons, and eternal fire in the fragments – as hints of Being. Heidegger is going along, but preferred that the seminar started and focused on Logos instead. The task is formidable because the issue is as fundamental as it can be; as the Greeks made possible the Western thinking and Heraclitus made possible Hegel. Then there is the issue of translation; as the fragments should be understood in the original Greek context and definitely not from our modern and metaphysical one. For Heidegger there is something still unthought and inaccessible to us in the Greek and Heraclitus thinking; that is Aletheia understood as unconcealment and not metaphysically as truth.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heraclitus is either dismissed as “The Obscure” or translated and interpreted from within the modern and metaphysical thinking. For Heidegger, there is more - far more - to Heraclitus understood as the main inceptional thinker along with Parmenides.
Metaphysics translates and understands Ἀλήθεια as truth, Φύσις as nature/physics, and – quite relevant to this book and Heraclitus – Λόγος as logic/reason/word. For Heidegger however, “Ἀλήθεια, Φύσις, Λόγος are the same: not, however, in the empty conformity of a collapsing together into the undifferentiated, but rather as the originary self-forgathering into the differentiated One: τὸ Ἕν.” In other words, Ἀλήθεια, Φύσις, and Λόγος stand for Being; and they all represent something quite near, simple, and concrete; and not something transcendental, abstract, theoretical, or rational. The human λόγος draws out toward and listens to the fundamental and all too near Λόγος; and when it does - authentic knowledge is. The Λόγος constantly presences. Human's sole dignity is to become the safe-keeper of the truth of Being. Philosophy itself is not a discipline like all the others, but a joint between Λόγος and human thinking. The basic problem is that we do not know how to think Being, but only beings - as all the relationships from the realm of Being are completely different from those in the region of beings.
This book is difficult to read for several reasons. First, it is full of Ancient Greek words - and one needs to keep track of them and to do so on Heidegger's own terms. Then, there is the inceptional aspect of it - reading it backwards and from subsequent perspectives is taking one nowhere; in fact it makes the book and Heraclitus incomprehensible or trivial. Since Heidegger died right before editing this book, raw and long sentences abound in it.
Heidegger's project that started with “Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event)” is quite similar with Heraclitus's: the inceptual aspect, the unrelatedness to any other thinking or thinker, the words and phrases used, the disdain for logic and abstract thinking, the contradictions that point to rich and untapped origins (and not to “flaws” in logic or to the need for some dialectic to “fix” them), the return to the simple and near, the rejection of all beings and their domains in favor of an orientation towards Being, and so on.

[Dimitris Passas (TapTheLine) · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book contains the proceedings of the 1966/67 seminar on Heraclitus, which was held at the University of Freiburg. Initially, the plan was for the seminar to expand over a series of semesters but this was never actualized. The reader has the opportunity to witness a live dialogue, conducted mainly by Martin Heidegger and Eugen Fink, one of the most distinguished representatives of Phenomenology, as well as the questions and observations made by the participants of the lectures. The chapters of the book are categorized under a specific title, e.g.''Πυρ και Πάντα'' or ''The Problem of a Speculative Explication'', and a number of fragments corresponds to each one. Thus, the reader is allowed to be more focused on individual themes of the Heraclitean Cosmology and is not confused in any part of the book. I think that this book is mainly addressed to Heraclitus scholars and it is far from being easy, the reader must have an extensive knowledge of the Heraclitean Fragments and their main interpretations as well as being familiar with the characteristic Heideggerian language. Nevertheless, it is a vital reading for those who have a special interest in the thought of the Presocratic Philosophers and contemporary speculative philosophy.

[Shawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is very difficult, and I wouldn't recommend it unless you're familar with Heidegger's other accounts of the presocratic philosophers and also have a good knowledge of Heraclitus. Without the latter it would probably be tough to follow the twists and turns of Heidegger and Fink's analysis, since a lot of it uses the Greek.

But Heraclitus Seminar is a really rewarding text if you can make your way through it. I've read this book twice and would benefit from going through it again.

I think Fink's proposed reading, of which this book primarily consists, successfully poses a very serious critique of Heidegger's approach to Heraclitus and the presocratics in general. A principal difference Fink maintains in his reading is the suggestion that we have no means of understanding Heraclitus with any measure of certainty, not only due to the separation of nearly 3,000 years but also because we are too far removed from the intellectual framework in which Heraclitus thought. He wonders whether it makes sense to try and determine what 'the matter of thought' is in Heraclitus, going against the Heideggerian grain of the notion that the matter of thought is in fact present for us even now, and is to be found in what is 'unspoken' by Heraclitus. Fink opts to follow the phenomena named in the extant Heraclitean fragments and see what they yield by virtue of their own content.

This text definitely is Fink much more than Heidegger, although I would say that Heidegger's compliance with Fink in many places suggests he doesn't find the majority of Fink's interpretations to be intrinsically problematic. But as described at the beginning of the book and in places throughout, you are getting Fink's Heraclitus; his interpretation is driven largely by 'hen-panta' idea, with emphasis on the fragments concerned with fire and light - whereas Heidegger openly says he reads Heraclitus via logos and aletheia. These latter concepts are also the principal topics in Heidegger's 1943/44 Heidegger lectures (a completely different text composed long before Heraclitus Seminar).

So with these things in mind, this text is quite illuminating if you want an inside look at the nuts and bolts of how Heidegger reads the presocratics - in terms of methodology - but I'm not sure that much of its content is well-representative of Heidegger. It's unfortunate that his own Heraclitus text from twenty years earlier is still unavailable in English - but his short essays which contain the highlights from that text can be found in the Early Greek Thinking volume edited by Krell and Capuzzi.

[Ecoute Sauvage · Rating 5 out of 5]

I liked the fact that Fink starts with 64 and not with 10, Heidegger gets much too abstract at times.

The translation isn't the best possible, but originals usually read better, so that's no criticism of Mr Seibert who did a creditable job.

Perhaps a link to the actual Fragments would have helped >>

http://philoctetes.free.fr/heraclitef...

>> the only typo I ever found in that text is in Frag. 10, correct would be συνάψεις.

A masterpiece, in brief. Very highly recommended.

[Doctor Moss · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a set of two courses of lectures given by Heidegger in 1943 and 1944, focusing on a selection of fragments from Heraclitus that Heidegger considers critical to understanding the pre-Socratic Greek experience of Being. We’ll get to what that means later.

The text is from Heidegger’s own manuscripts for the lectures. Since he died before actually preparing or consulting on the published edition (as a volume of his complete works), the editors had some leeway in how to assemble the manuscripts into book form. Regardless, I think we can trust the text to be Heidegger’s own (as opposed, for example, to student notes).

The first set of lectures is titled, “The Inception of Occidental Thinking: Heraclitus.”

“Inceptual” here refers to the beginning of what Heidegger calls “thinking Being.” “Inceptual” in the sense of how it was birthed, in the thought of the three Greek thinkers he credits with this original experience of Being, of how the world comes to be in (western) human experience. The three are Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Anaximander. Heidegger, as is familiar from many of his “later” writings, harkened back to such an early Greek experience that was unspoiled by the later development of philosophy, in which a metaphysics of conscious subjects observing, categorizing, and theorizing about an objective reality takes hold of thinking.

Although Heidegger’s style here is a bit more conversational than in most of his writings, it is still tortuous, with his usual complex syntax and etymological plays. By the way, I’m adopting the capitalization of “Being” when using it in Heidegger’s sense of “the Being of beings” (i.e., how beings, or things, are or come to be in the first place). The translators do not adopt that capitalization themselves, but I find it easier to do so in order to emphasize the distinction between “beings” as the things that make up our world and “Being”as how those things are or come to be.

Here is what I think is at the center of these lectures. What he is attempting to do is to find our way back to what he calls “essential thinking.” Essential thinking is opposed to both “metaphysical thinking” and “conventional thinking.” Metaphysics and conventional thinking “forget” what is thought by essential thinking, namely the experience of Being itself.

Conventional thinking is caught up in the everyday world of concerns and things, looking past the way in which any of those concerns and things come to be in the first place.

Metaphysics likewise appears as a way of thinking about ourselves as conscious subjects and the world as an object to be discovered and accounted for, in terms of assertions and categorizations. Such a conception of world and subject again miss the event in which we first experience a world at all.

To help explain what Heidegger is getting at, it’s helpful to look at a metaphor he offers (pp. 98-101) involving “boxes.” Heidegger is discussing Heraclitus’s fragment 123 (“Emerging to self-concealing gives favor,” in Heidegger’s translation). The fragment appears to contain contradictory elements — emerging and self-concealing seem contrary concepts. But only to a way of thinking in which everything belongs in its “box,” separate from other “boxes.” If Heraclitus is renowned for anything, it’s in his insistence that everything is in “flux,” that the boxes in Heidegger’s metaphor, are not mutually excluding, that one thing flows into and becomes another.

And this way of thinking (for lack of a better way of referring to it) is very much in line with Heidegger’s “thinking being.” Being is not something that simply “is” as the collection of objects (and subjects) in the world, belonging each to its appropriate category or box. Being is something that happens, not something that simply “is.” And the “forgetting of being” in conventional thinking and in metaphysics is the forgetting of something that happens when we say “is.” In conventional and metaphysical thinking, we look transparently past the “is” to the objects, the concerns, the categories of things and “forget” that primordial “is” in which anything comes to be at all.

This way in which we both move forward on the basis of what “is” and at the same time give no attention to that experience of “is” in the first place is at the root of Heidegger’s talk of “concealment” and “unconcealment.” Saying “is” both brings Being to the fore and conceals it, in the sense that saying “is” invokes that coming to being of what we say “is,” but in functioning in that way, the “is” withdraws into the background so that what we are invoking, rather than how we invoke it, may come to the foreground. We then talk about and attend to the things we are talking about rather than how the things we are talking about come to be. That attention to the things we are talking about is normal everyday life — our involvement with things.

What then would be non-forgetfulness of being, which apparently is what Heidegger would like to lead us to experience? That is the experience of Being, or “thinking Being,” that he believes is present in the thought of Heraclitus.

This experience is not something that Heidegger can simply present. It is something we need to experience. Our thinking, conventional and metaphysical thinking, are opposed to that experience. Every way we have in which to make sense of anything conspires against that experience of Being. As he says on page 90, “The domains of conventional and essential thinking lie as two distinct worlds, separated by a chasm, either next to each other or one atop the other. Or so it seems. This perspective is adopted above all by philosophy itself, and especially by philosophy in the form in which it has presented itself for more than two thousand years (namely, metaphysics).”

The attempt to re-experience the thought of Heraclitus is Heidegger’s attempt to bring us back to that experience, in a way that we can go forward again in a contemporary world that has recaptured the experience.

I don’t think we can say that this first set of lectures regains that experience. I think that Heidegger himself would characterize what he has done as something more like “pointing a way.”

The second set of lectures, given the following year in 1944, is titled “Heraclitus’s Doctrine of the Logos.”

Heidegger goes to some etymological pain to work his way through the interpretations of “Logos.” I may have understood his etymological method more clearly here than I have in other works.

Heidegger traces key terms, like “Being,” or, in this case, “Logos,” to its origin in order to discover, or even re-experience the original act in which what the word means or what the word first “brings to light” happens, something he believes is always lost in the history of the word since the original experience in which it happened. See page 185 — “It [preparation for “the thinking through of the thing in question”]consists of experiencing the essential realm from out of which the word, now being taken on its own, is spoken.”

This etymological investigation, in keeping with his investigation of “Being” altogether, is aimed at an experience — the experience of the word being spoken as if for the first time, without subsequent conceptualizations and interpretations.

It’s clear that his understanding of “Logos” is not equivalent to the modern understanding of “logic” as a formal system of reasoning. The conception of human beings as reasoning beings (“rational animals” in Aristotle or as “res cogitans” in Descrates) is complementary to an understanding of Logos itself as concept, idea, or meaning — an object of thought.

This pairing of thinking subject and thought object is again core to what Heidegger regards as “metaphysical thinking,” the organization of thinking that has “forgotten Being” by going past it — it fails to hold onto or attend to the experience in which its own categories (subjects, objects, ideas, meanings) came to be.

What then is the pre-metaphysical (“originary” or “inceptual”) Logos? And the human that complements it?

In Heidegger’s thinking here, Logos emerges as Being itself, in that sense of the coming to be of beings. And the human comes to be in the Logos as well. In this way it is never that the human, as it does in metaphysical thinking, “gives meaning” or “finds meaning” in the world. The human emerges for the first time within Being, and in that experience of Being, everything that we call meaning is already there.

Repeating the point to emphasize Heidegger’s distinction between metaphysical and “originary” thinking, the human first emerges as something that is in a world, thus is already in Being. Human beings don’t confront a world and learn to relate to it (that would be the metaphysics of subject and object) — they aren’t what they are without already being in a world. In non-Heidegger terms, it is essential to human beings that they are always already in a world. It is not something they accomplish, like a relationship they acquire.

Heidegger then turns toward a by-now familiar theme — that in attending to and busying ourselves with beings (i.e., with the everyday world of everyday things and concerns) we forget in the sense of passing through without attending to Being itself (the “is”). What is interesting this time is that he is saying that this forgetting is expressed by Heraclitus himself — it’s not some malady of the modern, metaphysical age, but constitutive of human attending to beings and Being altogether, i.e., of living in a world.

The relationship between human beings and the world is not really a relationship in the ordinary sense. It is essential to human beings not just that they are in the world, but that they “unconceal” the world, in the sense that they first make it manifest as a world at all. Likewise on the other side, it is essential to the world that it is unconcealed by human beings, in the sense that the world first makes human beings what they are. The relationship, if we call it that at all, is a matter of reciprocity. But the reciprocity is not between two separate things, but between two things that only become what they are through the reciprocity.

The strained language (including mine) is required if we want to avoid any temptation to fall into what Heidegger calls “metaphysics.” The categories, properties, and even the syntax of post-Greek metaphysics carry us back to that more metaphysical understanding, in which the human subject in one way or another constructs a theoretical description of the world as its object. What Heidegger is after is the event itself in which a world happens between it, the world, and human beings. That event is what, I think, lies behind Heidegger’s use of such painful words as “originary” and “inceptual” to indicate that he is talking about the event in which the world comes to be (repeated each time we say “is”) rather than the after-the-fact world described in our theoretical understanding of it.

There is more to the lectures, but I’m concentrating on what I think is the central point in both lectures — the experience of Being, and the forgetting of Being. These are essential themes throughout all of Heidegger’s later thought. I think these lectures catch Heidegger in action, so to speak, in trying to recreate the experience of Being, recapturing it in Heraclitus’s thought and bringing it back to our modern context.

I wouldn’t say that these lectures are more critical to understanding Heidegger’s “later” thought than works that come before it (e.g., On the Essence of Truth from 1930) or after it (e.g., The Question Concerning Technology from 1954). But, at least for me, it helped connect those post-Being and Time works into a bit of a continuum. True to Heidegger, what we are trying to do in reading his later works is to enter the experience of his thinking rather than to understand it in clear, conceptual terms.

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heidegger's dialogic lecture style at its best, with help from Eugene Fink.

[Ippolit · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lightning, fire, war, prod, steering (cybernetics), filth (enlightenment), Buddha

[Dominik Tkalčec]

Studying this for my master's degree, so no review, just marking it as a first time read.

[Mike · Rating 2 out of 5]

Given that Heidegger is often considered to be at his best in the classroom setting (not that I ever took a course from him, but this is from other 20th Century philosophers who spoke in awe of him and his unique teaching ability), I had high hopes for this book: Heidegger along with a philologist (Eugen Fink) leading a group of students in a discussion of Heraclitus. Alas, it was not to be. Fink holds the floor for much of the discussion, thereby sapping much of my interest - who cares what Fink thinks, let's listen to Heidegger excavate his way through the text. And much of Fink's explication seems not to go very far. It starts with an interesting discussion of the idea of "lightning," but then the bulb seems to peter out after a bit. Not only that, Heidegger seems to have trouble getting going. If anything, it seems like Heidegger gets in his own way. Case in point, Heidegger's pomposity "shines" or "comes into the clearing" when he refers to himself in the third person several times on p. 72 (while in conversation with a student!):
Heidegger: "Mr. Fink, who begins with the lightning, is, as it were, struck by lightning. With what does Heidegger begin?"
Participant: "With the [logos or gathering process:]."
Heidegger: "And beside that..."
Participant: "with [nonconcealment:]."
Heidegger: "But how does Heidegger come to [nonconcealment:]?"

Granted, this is a translation, but it seems unlikely that a translator would go out of her/his way to make the person they're translating look foolish via illeism, at least where philosophy is concerned: it's not like people who hate Heidegger are the ones who end up translating him; if anything, I'm inclined to believe you have to devote yourself to Heidegger (or whoever or whatever you are translating) to be able to translate. That the students and Fink cater to Heidegger's whims and illeism shows his influence and standing, but it's difficult not to laugh when you read that interaction. And again, the book never shows Heidegger's hand regarding Heraclitus, at least as far as I'm concerned. Perhaps I'll need to revisit this book in the future, but here's hoping Heidegger's Parmenides book is better than this.

(This should really be a 1.5 star book, not a 2 star book.)