Heidegger and Language

THREE In Force of Language: Language and Desire in Heidegger’s Reading of Aristotle’s Metaphysics

46 three In Force of Language: Language and Desire in Heidegger’s Reading of Aristotle’s Metaphysics Θ William McNeill In the summer semester of 1931, Heidegger presented a lecture course devoted to an intensive and textually focused reading of Aristotle’s Metaphysics Θ, dealing with the essence and actuality of force, or dunamis . Not only does this course limit itself to what appears to be a restricted and localized textual question, of interest perhaps mainly to Aristotle specialists; it also appears that Heidegger’s reading did not get very far: his interpretation barely makes it to the end of chapter 3 of Metaphysics Θ, and thus does not even approach the decisive chapters 6 through 10, where dunamis and energeia are most incisively analyzed in their own right. Nevertheless, the significance of this interpretation should not be underestimated, for it marks, I would argue, the beginnings of a transition to the focus on technē—on art, poetizing, and technicity —that would dominate the work of the 1930s and beyond; it provides the resources for the critical engagement with Nietzsche’s thought of will to power in the mid-1930s, and for the analyses of power and technicity in the Beiträge; and it prepares the way both for the later thought of a destining of Being and for the question of “the way to language ,” a phrase that appears in this course perhaps for the first time. Before broaching the nexus of language and desire in Heidegger’s reading, which emerges in his interpretation of technē as a distinctive dunamis meta logou, I should first like to accompany his interpretation of Aristotleinitsinitialdelimitationoftheessenceofdunamisor“force.”The in force of language · 47 word“force,”inGermanKraft,itshouldbenoted,isdeliberatelychosenby Heideggerovera numberofotherpossiblecandidatesforthetranslationof dunamis, such as Macht (“power”); Können (“ability” or “potentiality”); Fähigkeit(“capacity”);Vermögen(“capability”);Möglichkeit(“possibility”); orGewalt(“sovereignforce”or“might”).YetKraftdoesnothaveexactlythe same semantic resonance as the English “force”: in particular, it does not have the sense of violence that is often suggested by our use of the word “force” but implies rather intrinsic or inner strength, a quiet and unobtrusiveresourcefulness :somethingthatemerges—ifindeeditemergesatall— from the concealed depths of Being. In this regard, Heidegger’s choice of the word Kraft here to translate dunamis is significant not merely with respect to his interpretation of Metaphysics Θ, for it inscribes that interpretation within the overarching project of a destructuring (Destruktion) of the history of ontology, that is, within an attempt to recover and preserve what Being and Time called “the quiet force of the possible” (die stille Kraft des Möglichen)—a phrase to which Heidegger would return in his later, 1946 essay, the “Letter on ‘Humanism.’” In Being and Time, the “quiet force of the possible” is invoked by Heidegger as that which is to be disclosed by authentic historical inquiry, and indeed in such a way that, as he expresses it there, “the ‘force’ of the possible penetrates into factical existence” (SZ 395). Philosophy itself, conceived under the auspices of a destructuring of the history of ontology, is indeed, in Being and Time, said to be motivated by nothing other than the desire to preserve “the force of the most elementary words” in which Dasein expresses itself, and to preserve such force from being leveled to incomprehensibility by the common understanding, a leveling that then gives rise to pseudo-problems (SZ 220). In Being and Time, however, the sense of Kraft, while clearly associated with possibility, was not developed in its own right, and these mentions remain suggestive at best. Furthermore, the relation between force and language likewise remained underdeveloped there.1 It is not until the 1931course that this very relation becomes thematic, occupying the center of Heidegger’s attention. On the Essence of Force In his initial delimitation of dunamis in Metaphysics Θ, Aristotle indicates that while the usual sense of dunamis as dunamis kata kinēsin (dunamis with respect to movement) has multiple meanings, all are understood 48 · william mcneill with reference to one and the same eidos, or form. All such forces are kinds of archē, kinds of origin, but all are understood with regard to one primary sense of archē: being an archē of metabolē, an origin of change, or of movement, kinēsis. Even though, as Aristotle tells us, this understanding of dunamis with respect to movement does not directly disclose the innermost essence of dunamis, it is nevertheless important to start from here in uncovering the properly...