-
One: Memory and Life: Hermeneutics as Convalescence
- Indiana University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
8 one Memory and Life: Hermeneutics as Convalescence Let me begin by reminding the reader of one among many possible stories about philosophy. It is the story (ἀπόλογον) of Er told by Socrates at the end of Plato’s Republic.1 This is actually a story within a story, for what Socrates recounts to Glaucon is the story told by Er. As Socrates tells it, Er had died in battle but while lying on the funeral pyre he came back to life, and having done so he told the living what he saw on his journey in the afterworld. In telling his story Er is in fact not just a storyteller for he is at the same time a messenger (ἄγγελος), who, in delivering the message, preserves for the living the vision of what he had seen there.2 Quite fittingly Er the messenger has a resemblance to Hermes— the god who, bestowed with the power of speech, is the message bearer and thus an interpreter for the gods. In the main, the content of the report describes the drama of the comings and goings of the souls of humans with respect to a just life. At the center of this drama there is an elaborate account of the soul’s vision of cosmic Necessity (Άvάγκη). The souls, having journeyed to the farthest reaches of the afterworld, arrive at a place where they could see a column oflight—“thespindleofNecessity”—thatholdstogetherthecosmicmovementsurroundingher .Itisinrelationtothismovementthatthejustlife— the proper order of the living—is to be understood, for after beholding the spectacle each soul is called upon to choose a new life for itself. At this point in the story Socrates reminds Glaucon of the importance of being able to learn to distinguish the good and the bad life so as to be able to choose with care the better from among those that are possible. After each memory and life · 9 soul chooses a life, the souls are led to the barren plain of forgetfulness (Λήθη)andcampbytheriverofneglectandcarelessness(Άμέλητα),whose water no vessel can contain because it flows forever.3 Here all the souls had to drink a certain measure (μέτρov), and those not saved by thoughtfulness (φρόvησις)drankmorethanthemeasure.Withthisdrinkeverything was forgotten, but Er was not allowed to drink, and thus according to Socrates the story was saved and not lost.4 Leaving aside for now the motifs of journeying and movement which run throughout the story, the story is of interest for several reasons. As the counterpart to the story of the turn to philosophy in the middle books of the Republic, we see here that for Plato the theoretical enactment of philosophy does not stand by itself but is taken up in relation to a practical demand. The enactment of philosophy is dramatically joined to accomplishment in life, to living well, for which one cannot be without care. Equally important, the story reminds us that for Plato the acquiring of insight transpires within the dynamics of memory. The enactment of philosophy , tied as it is to accomplishment in life, involves a repetition that takes the shape of a recovery from forgetting. And here we should immediately add that Plato is not alone in determining the shape of philosophy as a process of recalling and recovery. We see it also in Augustine, Hegel, and, of course, in the philosophical hermeneutics of Heidegger andGadamer.HeideggerinfactmakesuseofthisverystorybyPlatototellone versionofhisstoryofsortsof ἀλήθειαanditscounter-essence λήθη,which is at once for Heidegger the principal configuration for the question of the being of beings.5 But even before Heidegger was telling this story of sorts, hehadalreadyascribedtophilosophythetaskofrecoveryandsavingrelative to life’s falling away from itself. For the Heidegger of the early 1920s, philosophy was a matter of a hermeneutics of facticity: the interpretation of life from out of the way in which I am already in the hold of life. More to the point, philosophy is here an interpretive encounter with a life in its givenness here and now that continually confronts a resistance to its “opening up,” a resistance that he calls ruinance—a movement against itself —whereby the interpretation of life proceeds by way of a “tracing back and repeating.”6 When the later Heidegger then abandons the idea of a hermeneutics of facticity, he does not at the same time abandon the recoveryandsavingcharacterofthinkingwithrespecttotheissueofbeing .That issuebecomesoneofovercomingmetaphysics,intermsofwhichthinking 10 · The Life of Understanding is a thinking back to a site of origination in relation to an essential forgetting . The word for this thinking is said by Heidegger in many ways: Erinnerung, Andenken, Gedächtnis; its essential character, though, remains...