Customer Reviews

Heraclitus Seminar (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I must admit from the outset that my familiarity with Heidegger's philosophy, not to mention Fink's (a philosopher I'd never heard of), is not up to par with my fellow commentators (this is a generous assessment in my favor, to say the least--and obvious). That said, this review is not intended to sway Heideggar junkies one way or the other re: purchase, nor will it aid those who know Heraclitus' Fragments backwards and forwards; I am not in a position to do either. I aim to address only those nonspecialists who--like myself--are interested in Heraclitus, and who are considering making a purchase for that reason, and that reason alone.

I ordered "The Heraclitus Seminar", perhaps naively, in order to gain a better understanding of Heraclitus and his Metaphysics--I came away from the ordeal completely dumbfounded. This is partially my own fault--I knew going in that Heidegger makes for difficult reading, and that his precipitous works are, almost without exception, extremely abstruse. As such, his books require great dedication and patience. This, I was prepared for. However, I came to an impasse with the book almost immediately. This resulted from the multitude of passages that were written, within the body of the text, in Attic Greek--with *no* translations. (no kidding)

This one is better left for the later grad students and/or their profs--that is, unless you happen to be an extremely patient novice, who can read Greek without a lexicon, and who has a penchant for Heideggarian analysis of the pre-Socratics.

Martin Heidegger's special intellectual relationship with the Presocratics is often discussed as if the German philosopher was some sort of romantic originalist or nostalgist. But Heidegger always insisted that the point about going back to Heraclitus, Parmenides and rest was not to recover the specific contents of their thought (or, worse, to wallow in their supposed primitive "purity"), but to recapture the spirit of their efforts to "think the question of Being." You won't find a better presentation of this - or a more candid glimpse of Heidegger as a working philosopher - than in this text. It presents the record of a seminar on Heraclitus conducted by Heidegger and the German scholar Eugen Fink in the late 1960s. Heidegger's discussion of specific Heraclitian texts makes for difficult reading but is, generally speaking, quite lucid. And the dialog with Fink and student participants is eye-opening. (Heidegger's pronouncements are by no means always taken as Gospel!) Most important, in spite of their rather recondite subject matter, these seminar records wonderfully illuminate Heidegger's own philosophical development in the last two decades of his life. Although this book does require familiarity with Heidegger's work and somewhat unique philosophical terminology, as well as familiarity with the history of philosophy generally, I wouldn't call it a text "for specialists only." Unless, of course, all readers of philosophy are specialists! And it does provide a welcome corrective to current "New Age" tendencies to view Heraclitus and the other Presocratics as authors of quasi-religious wisdom manuals. No dumbing-down here; just a tough confrontation with difficult material!

with T. Beers' otherwise excellent review: this book IS for specialists, and for specialists particularly interested in Heidegger, at that.

For others it's mildly interesting, as might be a reality show (without the vulgarity and banality, of course). But you have to know at least how to read Greek, as citations are not invariably translated (although the majority is), and only the first time they appear. Since the book has several misspellings in Greek (i.e., "Hesisdos" for "Hesiodos" in p. 43; unfortunately, as I didn't plan to write a review, I didn't take note of the pages where the others are located when I was reading the book, so I can't correct them here), this is a forbidding difficulty for nonspecialists.

The reality show (unfortunately deprived of its philological content, as we are informed in page 105, Note 1 to the text) consists of Fink, Heidegger and the seminar's participants reasoning aloud, as unselfconsciously as two teachers can before their pupils and viceversa (to top it, Fink had also been Heidegger's pupil a generation before), about the interpretation of "hen" (the one) and "ta panta" (all there is, the totality, the Universe, etc.), basing themselves on every surviving Heraclitean fragment where those words/concepts are explicitly or implicitly mentioned. The interpretations are, for me, sometimes too farfetched. They are tainted with Heidegger's very original and sometimes (to me) constrained views on the Greeks generally, and the Presocratics particularly (although during at least his early years H. admired Aristotle the most, see for example Brogan's "H. & Aristotle"), and also with his unsupported metaphysical belief that they had found another, more meaningful, way of looking at/understanding/intuiting reality. Always for me, the most interesting new thing I found is that H.'s "Unverborgenheit" is in the text rendered as "nonconcealment" instead of "unconcealment" as is customary. I don't think the Master would have approved.

A book for Heideggerians. One amongst very many indeed, as the totality of his written and spoken output is being slowly but surely published.

I would like to suggest that the widest stance that I have encountered reading philosophy shows up in Greek on page 18 of HERACLITUS SEMINAR: Martin Heidegger and Eugen Fink, translated by Charles H. Seibert (Northwestern University Press, 1993). The English translation was copyright 1979 by The University of Alabama Press. First published in German as HERACLIT. I have the second paperbound printing, 1994. The hermeneutical circle is correlated to fragment 7, translated in Note 4 on page 163, but the discussion of the Greek terms involving a moving relatedness of things that actually exist which elucidates an indeterminate number of things of a quintessential kind. "In smoke, to be sure, things become elusive, but it does not eliminate those distinctions which become evident . . ." (Fink, p. 18). Heidegger becomes interested in the gnosis of "grasping humans" on page 19.

This book does not have an index. The page guide on page 171 shows that every ten pages in English is 16, 15, 14, or 17 pages in the German. Heraclitus wrote a book which was familiar to many thinkers in the ancient world, but all we can do now is "cast light on an inner coherence of the fragments' meaning, but without pretending to reconstruct the original form of Heraclitus' lost writing, [On Nature]. We shall attempt to trace a thread throughout the multiplicity of his sayings in the hope that a certain track can thereby show itself. Whether our arrangement of the fragments is better than that adopted by Diels is a question that should remain unsettled." (Fink, p. 4).

I believe the Fr. 1 mentioned by Heidegger on page 7 is the beginning of Heraclitus' book. In the discussion, we have the exchange of ideas:

Heidegger: Since when do we have concepts at all?
Participant: Only since Plato and Aristotle. We even have the first philosophical dictionary with Aristotle.
Heidegger: While Plato manages to deal with concepts only with difficulty, we see that Aristotle deals with them more easily. (p. 7).

One of the problems with concepts is how they are applied:

Heidegger: Thus, you mean the transformation of things with respect to one ground.
Fink: The ground meant here is not some substance or the absolute, but light and time. (p. 10).

Fink: . . . The transformations of fire then imply that everything goes over into everything; so that nothing retains the definiteness of its character but, following an indiscernable wisdom, moves itself throughout by opposites.
Heidegger: But why does Heraclitus then speak of steering?
Fink: The transformations of fire are in some measure a circular movement that gets steered by lightning, . . . The movement, in which everything moves throughout everything through opposites, gets guided.
Heidegger: But may we speak of opposites or of dialectic here at all? Heraclitus knows neither something of opposites nor of dialectic.
Fink: True, opposites are not thematic with Heraclitus. . . . (p. 11).

The set-up is basically a dialog, and considers topics like:

Fink: The problem of constitution in Husserl's phenomenology . . . (p. 84).

Heidegger: From this it follows once again that we may not interpret Heraclitus from a later time. (p. 85).
Fink: All the concepts that arise in the dispute over idealism and realism are insufficient to characterize the shining-forth, the coming-forth-to-appearance, of what is. It seems to me more propitious to speak of shining-forth than of shining-up. . . . (p. 85).

The poem "Hyperion" mentions Heraclitus and Heidegger discusses being as beauty in Hegel along with "The one that in itself distinguishes itself." (p. 113).

Participant: "There is no sentence of Heraclitus' that I have not taken up in my LOGIC."
Heidegger: What does this sentence mean? (p. 113).

Fr. 88 of Heraclitus, as Diels translates, "And it is always one and the same, what dwells (?) within us: living and dead and waking and sleeping and young and old. For this is changed over to that and that changed back over to this." (p. 118).

Heidegger then has to correct himself on Hegel by reading some lecture:

"The true deficiency of the Greek religion as opposed to the Christian is that in it appearance constitutes the highest form, in general, the whole of the divine, while in the Christian religion appearing obtains only as a moment of the divine." (p. 122).

But he can also complain about being translated into French:

Heidegger: In French, Dasein is translated by [being there], for example by Sartre. But with this, everything that was gained as a new position in BEING AND TIME is lost. Are humans there like a chair is there? (p. 126).

Heidegger is quite interested in how well he is understood in German, but he finally comes back to the plight of what is unthought in the end.

In terms of personal experiences, Heidegger is most revealing on page 5, in the first session of a seminar in the winter semester of 1966-67, when he mentions in his third comment to the participants, "Suddenly I saw a single bolt of lightning, after which no more followed. My thought was: Zeus." This experience is a link to the antiquity also experienced in the Biblical book of Job, in the speech of Elihu, at Job 36:27-33 and Job 37:3-24, leading up to the speeches of Yahweh. By page 7 of this translation of the seminar, Heidegger is demonstrating his link with "Fr. 1" of Heraclitus by quoting more than five lines in the original ancient Greek. Those who would prefer to know the English are given the Diels version in Note 3 on page 163. I find that Note 4, the Diels translation of Fragment 7, quoted (in Greek) by Eugen Fink in the second session of these seminars, is a bit easier for me to understand. The Glossary on pages 166 to 169 is a great guide to the Greek words for the major topics in this book. There is no index, but the approach being pursued in the fashion of this book could hardly gain any clarity by an attempt to locate the ideas in this book by any system related to page numbers. My comment on this reflects Heidegger's reaction to a participant who noted that the first philosophical dictionary didn't occur until Aristotle. (p. 7) Before things were sorted out, Heraclitus was trying to communicate something in Fr. 11 about "Everything that crawls . . ." (p. 31). The excitement picks up on page 32, when Fink quotes a poem by Holderlin called "Voice of the People."