Heidegger and the Greeks: Interpretive Essays

Introduction: The Sojourn in the Light

Introduction: The Sojourn in the Light John Panteleimon Manoussakis [T]he more I ¤nd my way in my own work, the more certainly I am returned to the grand beginning which is to be found in the Greeks. M. Heidegger, “Letter to Blochmann” (December 19, 1932) “Heidegger and the Greeks”: how is it that this joining “and” in the title of this volume can bring together the German thinker, on the one hand, and “the Greeks,”1 on the other? How is this simple “and” to traverse a span of two millennia and to stretch over—incompatible it would seem— differences in geography, culture, and even philosophy? What does allow this “and” between two so disparate contexts of thought to take place? These questions are legitimate if we understand “and” as expressing merely an element of addition or alongside-ness. However, far from simply joining two terms, the “and” in “Heidegger and the Greeks” wants to indicate all the ambiguity of a complex relation (of what Heidegger himself calls Auseinandersetzung)2 that has multiple layers and levels of reading: “Heidegger with the Greeks”; “Heidegger through the Greeks” and “the Greeks through Heidegger”; but also “Heidegger against the Greeks” and even “the Greeks against Heidegger.” All these possible variations are entertained by the essays collected in the present volume. There are, of course, more reasons that substantiate a collection that exclusively discusses Heidegger’s relation to Greek philosophy. For one thing, Heidegger’s own long-lasting engagement with “the Greeks”—an engagement that dates back to Heidegger’s ¤rst encounter with Bretano’s thesis “On the Manifold Senseof Being in Aristotle”and continues through a number of Protean transformations in the subsequent years (the early seminars on Aristotle, the Destruktion of Greek ontology heralded by Being and Time, ¤nally a series of seminars and publications on Plato, Aris- totle, and the Presocratics). Apart from this evident preoccupation with Greek philosophy, one could say that Heidegger, during all the years of his intellectual production, thought of nothing else but the Greeks (even when he read Nietzsche and Hölderlin, the most “Greek” of his compatriots ). Heidegger, after all, was one of that rare breed of philosophical Cyclopes—all his life he had one single thought, Being, as it ¤rst appeared in the Greek beginning of philosophy. Light—like thinking—is most dif¤cult to be thought. And yet, it is the light that prevails as the distinctive quality of Greek landscape, but also of Greek thought. The bearing of light on thought—Giorgos Sepheris, the Nobel laureate poet, in his perplexity about the distinctiveness of Greek thinking, was bold enough to attribute to the light that which one perceives as essentially Greek.3 Heidegger, in his own way, does the same. But the light for Heidegger is not the luminous splendor of visibility, intelligibility , and the ideas.4 Light is not to be thought as a static quality. For Heidegger, light is light-ing, coming to light and withdrawing from it, in one word: aletheia. That is “the proper word of the Greek Dasein” (das eigentliche Wort des griechischen Daseins).5 The Greek beginning (in relation to which Heidegger struggles to think the “other beginning”of thinking ) is a beginning that his work has retrieved for us (one could say “rescued ”) out of centuries of canonical readings, and that he has brought in the light of aletheia. Thought as light. A metaphysics of light then? No. Rather, the (forgotten) light of metaphysics. Metaphysics thinks beings as beings. Wherever the question is asked what beings are, beings as such are in sight. Metaphysical representation owes this sight to the light of Being. The light itself, i.e., that which such thinking experiences as light, no longer comes within the range of metaphysical thinking; for metaphysics always represents beings only as beings. Within this perspective, metaphysical thinking does, of course, inquire about the being that is the source and originator of this light. But the light itself is considered suf¤ciently illuminated through its granting the transparency for every perspective upon beings.6 Metaphysics is blind to this light that is Being—metaphysics remains unable to think it as such. Heidegger’s contribution, then, comes down to this single thought: light (read Being) as aletheuein, as emerging from darkness , a darkness that it presupposes and, in its emergence, it hides as its utmost secret: mais render la lumière, suppose d’ombre une morne moitié.7 2 John Panteleimon Manoussakis * * * As more and more...