No More Learning

'If Beckett had been in a concentration camp'; thinking the extreme ? Action and reflection ? Against the destruction of culture
LECTURE SEVENTEEN: Dying Today
Culture and nature ? Death as an entry-gate to metaphysics; Heidegger's metaphysics of death ? Consciousness of mortality; potential unrealized ? Time; the 'wholeness of life' ? The contingency of death and hope ? Bergotte's death, Beckett's void; the idea of immortality ? Hamlet
and dying today
LECTURE EIGHTEEN: Metaphysical Experience
Mystical experience not a primal experience ? Tradition and actuality in knowledge ? Joy in names ? The fallibility of
Reification Attitude to
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and depth
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Primacy of the object Hegel: negation of the negation
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? LECTURE ONE
11 May 1965
? ? When I announced these lectures, I gave the title as 'Metaphysics' and the subtitle as 'Concept and Problems'. The subtitle was not chosen without a good deal of thought, as the concept of metaphysics already raises considerable difficulties. And I will tell you straight away that it is my intention first to discuss the concept of metaphysics, and then to talk paradigmatically about specific metaphysical prob- lems - indeed, it cannot be otherwise. And I shall present these problems in the context in which I have encountered them in my own dialectical work. ! It can undoubtedly be said that the concept of metaphysics is the vexed question of philosophy. On one hand,
philosophy owes its existence to metaphysics. That is to say that metaphysics - if I might first borrow the standard philosophical lang- uage, although I may later replace it by something else - deals with the so-called 'last things' on account of which human beings first
began to philosophize. On the other hand, however, the situation of metaphysics is such that it is extremely difficult to indicate what its subject matter is. This is not only because the existence of this subject matter is questionable and is even the cardinal problem of metaphysics, but also, even if the existence or non-existence of its subject matter is disregarded, because it is very difficult to say what metaphysics act- ually is. Today metaphysics is used in almost the entire non-German- speaking world as a term of abuse, a synonym for idle speculation, mere nonsense and heaven knows what other intellectual vices.
It is not only difficult, therefore, to give you a preliminary idea of what metaphysics is, as those of you who are studying individual
? 2 LECTURE ONE
? disciplines will no doubt already have been told; but, as I said, it is very difficult even to define its subject with any precision. I recall my own early experience as a schoolboy when I first came across Nietzsche, who, as any of you who are familiar with his work will know, is not sparing in his complaints about metaphysics; and I remember how difficult I found it to get my bearings with regard to
metaphysics. When I sought the advice of someone considerably older than myself, I was told that it was too early for me to understand metaphysics but that I would be able to do so one day. Thus, the answer to the question about the subject matter of metaphysics was postponed. That is an accident of biography, but if we look at meta- physical systems or philosophies themselves, we cannot escape the
suspicion that what happens in them is not so very different to what was expressed in that piece of advice. I mean that the whole, immeasur- able effort of philosophy, which once saw itself as preliminary work to metaphysics, a propaedeutic, has become autonomous and has replaced it. Or, when philosophy finally concerns itself with meta- physics itself, we are consoled, as in Kant,2 for example, with endless
possible answers to the metaphysical questions. And then, instead of being given an answer to these questions - if I can express it from the standpoint of metaphysics - we are given considerations on whether we have the right to pose those metaphysical questions at all. So that the naive postponement and procrastination that I experienced is not really so accidental; it seems to have something to do with the subject matter itself, and especially with the general procedure which philosophy adopts in relation to metaphysics - which still takes the Kantian form of a progressus ad infinitum, an infinite, or indefinitely continuing progression of knowledge, from which it is to be hoped that, at a time which will never arrive, the so-called basic metaphys- ical questions will finally have been resolved.
I mentioned Nietzsche. In his work the concept of metaphysics often crops up in the form of a joke, which, however, contains a first approximation of what actually is to be understood by metaphysics. He talks of the Hinterwelt - the 'back-world' - and calls those who concern themselves with metaphysics, or even practise or teach it, Hinterweltler3 - 'backworldsmen' - an allusion to the word
'backwoodsmen' (Hinterwaldler) commonly used at that time, which, of course, was shortly after the American Civil War. It referred to those living in the backwoods, that darkest province of the Midwest, from which Lincoln, a highly topical figure at that time, had emerged. This word implies that metaphysics is a doctrine which assumes the existence of a world behind the world we know and can know. Be- hind the world of phenomena there was supposed to be concealed
? LECTURE ONE
3
? ? here Nietzsche's definition becomes an ironic comment on the Platonic tradition - a truly real, permanent, unchanging world exist- ing in itself, a world of essences, to unravel and reveal which was the task of philosophy. Expressed more objectively, metaphysics was pre- sented as the quintessence of the philosophical theory of all that pertained to the Beyond or - to use the specific philosophical term for the realm beyond experience - a science of the transcendental in contradistinction to the sphere of immanence. But at the same time, Nietzsche's term 'back-world' also poured scorn - in the spirit of the nominalist Enlightenment - on the superstition and provinciality which, in his view, automatically adhered to the assumption of such
world behind the world. I think it would be useful, therefore, to reflect for a moment on this doctrine of Nietzsche's, which equated metaphysics ironically - for he well knew, of course, that it is not literally the case - with occultism. Historically, metaphysics not only has nothing to do with occultism, but it would hardly be an exag- geration to say that it has been conceived expressly in opposition to
occult thinking, as is quite manifest in one of the greatest thinkers of the modern age who is metaphysical in the specific sense, Leibniz. Admittedly, in genetic terms - with which we shall be concerned repeatedly in the course of our reflections - it is undeniable that metaphysics itself is a phenomenon of the secularization of mythical and magical thinking, so that it is not so absolutely detached from
superstitious ideas as it understands itself to be, and as it has presented itself in the history of philosophy. Moreover, it is interesting in this connection that occultist organizations - throughout the world, as far as I am aware - always have a certain tendency to call themselves 'metaphysical associations' or something of that kind. This is inter- esting in several respects: firstly, because occultism, that apocryphal and, in higher intellectual society, offensive belief in spirits, gains respectability through association with something bathed in the nimbus of Aristotle, St Thomas Aquinas and heaven knows who else;
but secondly (and this seems almost more interesting), because the
occultists, in calling themselves metaphysicians, have an inkling of
a fact profoundly rooted in occultism: that it stands in a certain
opposition to theology. They have a sense that the things with which
they are concerned, precisely through their opposition to theology,
touch on metaphysics rather than theology - which, however, they
are equally fond of enlisting as support when it suits them. All the
same, one might here quote the statement by one of the test subjects
we
_
a
questioned in our investigations for The Authoritarian Personal- ity. He declared that he believed in astrology because he did not believe in God. 4 I shall just mention this fact in passing. I believe this
4
LECTURE ONE
? line of thought will take us a very long way, but I can only offer a prelude to it here.
What can be said at once, however, is that no philosophical meta- physics has ever been concerned with spirits in the sense of existing beings, since metaphysics from the first - that is, from Plato or Aristotle - has protested against and distinguished itself from precisely the
idea of something existing in the sense of crude facticity, in the sense of the scattered individual things which Plato calls Ta OVTU. Incident- ally, I shall have something to say very soon on the question whether metaphysics began with Plato or with Aristotle. 5 It may be that there are certain metaphysical directions which are called spiritualistic - that of Berkeley, for example, or (with major qualifications) of Leibniz, although the Leibnizian monad is not so absolutely separate from
actual, physical existence as has been taught by the neo-Kantian interpretation of Leibniz. But if spiritualistic tendencies exist in philosophy, in metaphysics, and if it has been argued that the Irish Bishop Berkeley, who might be said to have been at the same time an extreme empiricist and an extreme metaphysician, really taught only the reality of spirits, these are not to be understood as 'spirits' in the ordinary sense, but as purely intellectual entities determined by mind alone, on which everything actual is founded. It is not possible to ascribe to them the kind of factual existence with which they are endowed, prior to criticism or even reflection, by occultism and spir- itualism in their various guises. I believe, therefore, that you would
do well to exclude straight away from metaphysics any such idea of actually existing entities which could be experienced beyond our empirical, spatial-temporal world - or at least to exclude them as far
as the philosophical tradition of metaphysics is concerned. Metaphysics - and this may well bring me closer to a definition of
what you may understand by that term - always deals with concepts. Metaphysics is the form of philosophy which takes concepts as its objects. And I mean concepts in a strong sense, in which they are almost always given precedence over, and are assigned to a higher order of being (Wesenhaftigkeit) than, existing things (das Seiende) or the facts subsumed under them, and from which the concepts are derived. The controversy on this point - the debate whether concepts are mere signs and abbreviations, or whether they are autonomous, having an essential, substantial being in themselves - has been regarded as one of the great themes of western metaphysics6 since Plato and Aristotle. In the form of the famous nominalist dispute, this question preoccupied the Middle Ages and, as I shall show you shortly/ is almost directly prefigured in conflicting motifs within Aristotle's Metaphysics. And because the concept is, of course, an
? LECTURE ONE 5
? ? instrument of knowledge, the question of the nature of the concept has from the first been both a metaphysical and an epistemological one. This may help you to understand why, for as long as metaphysics has existed - that is, for as long as concepts have been subjected to reflection - metaphysics has been entwined with problems of logic and epistemology in an extremely curious way, which culminated in Hegel's teaching that logic and metaphysics are really one and the
Now, by indicating to you how metaphysics stands, on one hand, in relation to the occult and, on the other, to religion, I have arrived at an historical dimension which may have a not unimportant bearing on the concept of metaphysics itself. I should remark in pass- ing that, in my view, one cannot make progress in philosophy with purely verbal definitions, by simply defining concepts. Many of you will have heard this from me ad nauseam, and I ask you to excuse me if I repeat it once more for those to whom I have not yet preached on this subject. I believe that while philosophy may well terminate
in definitions, it cannot start out from them; and that, in order to understand, to have knowledge of, the content of philosophical concepts themselves - and not si? ply from the point of view of an external history of ideas or of philosophy - it is necessary to know how concepts have come into being, and what they mean in terms of their origins, their historical dimension. 9
Turning now to this dimension, which interests me especially in this context, it is the case that, historically, the positivist school is expressly contrasted to theology. I refer here to positivism in the form in which it first appeared, as a conception of sociology as the supreme and true science, and, indeed, as the true philosophy. This opposition to religion is explicit in Auguste Comte and implicit in his teacher Saint-Simon, even if the terms are not yet used in this way. Both these thinkers develop theories involving stages, a philosophy of history which moves in three great phases. The first of these is the theological phase, the second the metaphysical and the third the
scientific or, as those thinkers liked to call it one hundred and fifty or two hundred years ago, the 'positive' phase. lO They thereby pointed to something which is essential to metaphysics according to its own concept, and which thus helps to explain what I said to you a few minutes ago, when I stated that metaphysics is essentially concerned with concepts, and with concepts in a strong sense. For according to these positivist theories of stages, both the natural divinities and the
God of the monotheists were first secularized, but were then held fast
in
same. s
their turn as something objective, existing in itself, like the old gods earlier. ll Now, it is interesting to note that the positivists were especially ill-disposed towards metaphysics, because it had to do with
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6
LECTURE ONE
? concepts and not with facts, whereas the positive theologies had
described their deities as factual, existent beings. And accordingly,
in the writings of the positivists you will find more invective against metaphysics than against theology. This applies especially to Auguste Comte who, in his late phase, had the delusive idea of turning science
itself into a kind of cult, something like a positive religion.
It must be added, nevertheless, that metaphysics is often associated
with theology in popular consciousness; and there are doubtless more than a few among you who tend to draw no very sharp distinction between the concepts of theology and metaphysics, and to lump them together under the general heading of transcendence. But now that we have to concern ourselves specifically with these concepts, I should
like to invite you, if you still approach these questions with a certain naivety, to differentiate - and of course, progress in philosophical thinking is, in general, essentially progress in differentiation. I believe it can be stated more or less as a dogma that philosophical insight is more fruitful the more it is able to differentiate within its subject matter; and that the undifferentiating approach which measures everything by the same yardstick actually embodies precisely the coarse and, if I might put it like this, the uneducated mentality which
philosophy, in its subjective, pedagogical role, is supposed to over- come or, as I'd prefer to say, to eliminate. Now it is certainly true that metaphysics has something in common with theology in its man- ner of seeking to elevate itself above immanence, above the empirical world. To put it somewhat more crudely, the widespread equating of metaphysics and theology, which comes about if one fails to reflect expressly on these concepts, can be traced back simply to something which pre-exists and predominates in the mental formation of all
of us, even if we are not directly aware of it. It is the fact that the teachings of the Catholic church are indissolubly linked to meta- physical speculation, and in particular, as you all must know, to Aristotelian speculation in the form in which it was passed down through the great Arabian philosophers to those of the High Middle Ages, and above all to St Thomas Aquinas. 12 But even that is not so simple. And you may gain an idea of the tension between metaphysics
and theology that I have referred to if you consider that at the time of the rise of Christianity in late antiquity, when Christianity was intro-
duced as the state religion even in Athens, the schools of philosophy still existing there, which we should call metaphysical schools, were closed and suppressed with great brutality. 13 And, I would remark in passing, precisely the same thing was repeated in the great theolo- gical reaction of Islam against the Aristotelian Islamic philosophers, although this happened at a time when the metaphysical heritage,
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? LECTURE ONE 7
? ? mediated through the Islamic philosophers, had already won its place in Christian Europe. In late antiquity, therefore, metaphysics was regarded as something specifically subversive with regard to Christi- anity. And the fanatical Islamic monks who drove the philosophers into exile regarded it in a very similar way. The reason why they took this attitude may well show up very clearly the differences I should like to establish between metaphysics and theology. It is quite certain that metaphysics and theology cannot simply be distinguished from each other as historical stages, as the positivists tried to do, since they have constantly overlapped historically: one appeared at the same time as the other; one was forgotten, only to re-emerge in the fore- ground. They form an extraordinarily complex structure which can- not be reduced to a simple conceptual formula. Nevertheless, there is
an element of truth in the theory of stages that I referred to, in that metaphysics in the traditional sense - and we have to start from the traditional concept if I am to make clear to you what metaphysics really means - is an attempt to determine the absolute, or the con- stitutive structures of being, on the basis of thought alone. That is, it does not derive the absolute dogmatically from revelation, or as
something positive which is simply given to me, as something directly existing, through revelation or recorded revelation, but, to repeat the
point, it determines the absolute through concepts.
And to say this is really to pose the fundamental problem of meta-
physics, which has accompanied it throughout its history, and which also confronted it in, for example, the critique of metaphysics by Kant, as it presented itself to him at that time, in the guise of the Leibniz-Wolffian school. It is the problem that thought, which in its conditionality is supposed to be sufficient to have knowledge only of the conditional, presumes to be the mouthpiece, or even the origin, of the unconditional. This problem, which manifested itself in the violent reaction of theologies against metaphysics earlier, points at the same time to one of the core problems, if not to the core problem,
of metaphysics. Thought, it might be said, has within it the tendency to disintegrate traditional, dogmatic ideas. It has that tendency even in Socrates, who taught what Kant would have called a metaphysics of morals, and who is regarded as having disintegrated the tradi- tional state religion. This explains the occasional alliances between positivism and positive religion against metaphysics - against the disintegrating force which they both detected in it. Autonomous thought is a mouthpiece of the transcendent, and is thus always in
danger - when it approaches the transcendent through metaphysics - of making common cause with it. And I believe it is a characteristic which can be ascribed, in a perhaps hasty but not unfounded
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8
LECTURE ONE
? ? generalization, at least to all the traditional metaphysical systems known to me, that while these systems have always been critically dis- posed towards anything they regarded as dogmatic or fixed ideas, they have attempted, on the other hand, to rescue, on the basis of thought alone, that to which the dogmatic or transcendent ideas re-
ferred. This tension runs through the whole of metaphysical thinking, and I shall have occasion to define it very precisely for you using the example of Aristotle. If metaphysics and theology did finally come to
an agreement, it was an alliance roughly comparable - if you will allow me the sociological language - to that between feudalism and bourgeois forces which can be observed at certain times in more recent history. Both find themselves confronted by a common foe, whether it be the radical, Enlightenment thinking of positivism, or, on occasion, materialism, as precipitated to a greater or lesser degree
in Marxian theories, for example, whether those theories were rightly or wrongly understood. It is probably characteristic only of present- day metaphysics that it has relinquished its opposition to theology, while theology only felt obliged to assimilate metaphysics at a stage when the bourgeoisie was relatively advanced, at the high point of the urban culture of the Middle Ages. It did so in order to justify itself apologetically before the mature consciousness of the urban
bourgeois, who wanted to know how the revealed wisdom stood in relation to their own developed and emancipated reason. The Thomist system is a grandiose attempt to derive this justification of revelation from metaphysics, while that of Duns Scotus is an almost desperate
one.
At any rate, the first point I would ask you to note14 is that meta-
physical systems in the precise sense are doctrines according to which concepts form a kind of objective, constitutive support on which. what is naively called 'the objective world', that is, scattered, indi- vidual, existing things, is founded and finally depends. You may recall that I pointed out earlier in today's lecture that the question whether concepts are real or are merely signs, that is, the dispute
between nominalism and realism, is itself carried on within meta- physical enquiry - just as, originally, the realists and the nominalists were not opposed schools of metaphysicians and anti-metaphysicians respectively. Rather, these two schools - both in Islam and in medi- eval philosophy - were schools which arose and fought each other within metaphysical thinking. This reveals something which is im- portant if you are to avoid confusion in thinking about the concept of metaphysics. This concept has undergone a certain formalization which can also be seen as a part of its disintegration, in that the mere treatment of metaphysical questions - regardless of the outcome - is
? LECTURE ONE 9
? ? noW treated as metaphysics, and not just positive teachings about concepts as entities existing in themselves. Both things, therefore, the doctrine of the 'back-world' and the doctrine which repudiates this
back-world, would fall equally, and dubiously, within the field of metaphysical problems, according to this formalized or generalized concept. I say dubiously because there is a temptation here to draw a false conclusion which is constantly encountered in the field of vulgar apologetics. Whether one is for metaphysics or against metaphysics, both positions are metaphysical, both depend on ultimate positions about which it is not possible to argue, whereas the nature and opera- tion of concepts lie precisely in the fact that it is entirely possible to argue about them, and that, in general, if the anti-metaphysical posi- tion is subsumed under the concept of metaphysics, it is deprived of its critical edge, its polemical or dialectical potency. Thus, one speaks formally, for example, of metaphysical materialism (in contradistinc- tion to historical materialism), in which matter is designated as the ultimate ground of being, as the truly existent, as was once the case in the thought of Leucippus and Democritus. You can observe sim- ilar things in present-day theology, where, if anything is said about the name of God and His existence or non-existence, there is much rejoicing over the fact that God is mentioned at all, regardless of whether the speaker is 'for' or 'against' God. This, I would think, is enough to indicate that the present time, to put it cautiously, is un- likely to be the most propitious for the building of cathedrals. On the other hand, it is the case - one should add for the sake of justice - that in the thought of such early so-called anti-metaphysicians and materialists as Leucippus and Democritus, the structure of the meta- physical, of the absolute and final ground of explanation, is neverthe-
less preserved within their materialistic thought. If one calls these materialists metaphysical materialists, because matter for them is the ultimate ground of being, one does not entirely miss the mark. But this designation already contains a critical moment with regard to these early philosophers, a moment which led in the course of further reflection to a critique of what they taught.
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Notes for
LECTURE TWO
13 May 19651
? ? Link: this formalization2 is expressed in the formal character of the usual definitions.
The usual definition as, for example, the ultimate ground or cause of existing things; according to this, with the 'scientification' of
philosophy, metaphysics is supposed to be the fundamental science. Metaphysics seen accordingly as the doctrine of primary being
(or primary substance), of1TPWTYJ ova{a. 3 The ambiguity ofthis: prim- ary for us, or in itself.
Yet there are also doctrines, like some Gnostic teachings (e. g. Marcion),4 or that of the late Scheler on the divinity as a becoming,5 and some speculations of Schelling,6 which, again, do not conform to this concept. 7 E. g. metaphysics as the doctrine of the abiding does not necessarily coincide with the concept ofmetaphysics. While I can mention themes ofmetaphysics, such as being, ground ofbeing, noth- ingness, God, freedom, immortality, becoming, truth, spirit . . . ':- Insertion 2 a8
[Insertion 2 a:) While most metaphysics seeks invariants, its subjects vary. E. g. the concept offorce is hardly discussed in it today (natural science! )/ likewise that of life (largely replaced by existence). One
speaks of fashions; but the so-called fashions of philosophy are indices of something deeper. Demonstrate by the example of life.
The metaphysical question which preoccupied the entire seventeenth century, psyche and physis and the problem of psycho-physical
? ? ? ? LECTURE TWO 11
? ? parallelism, and the question of their possible reciprocal influence, has receded remarkably, probably under the influence ofthe doctrine of the subjective constitution of the physical world - in both Kant
and the empiricists - whereas, if this doctrine is invalidated, the prob- lem of the so-called parallelism can emerge again, and actually did recur in Kohler's extended theory of Gestalt. 10 There is an emergence and a forgetting - hardly a resolution - of metaphysical questions;
? their re-emergence in the sense of correspondences within the philosophy ofhistory. 11 [End ofinsertion}
13. 5. 65
also
? ? ?
Notes for
LECTURE THREE
18 May 1965
? ? ? ? While I can mention subjects of metaphysics, such as being, ground of being, nothingness, God, freedom, immortality, becoming, truth, spirit, their full concept - like any strong concept - cannot be given in a verbal definition but only presented through a concrete treat- ment of the constellation of problems which forms the concept of metaphysics. In the second part of the lecture I shall give you models of these. 1
Decisive for an understanding ofphilosophical concepts - the his- tory of terminology.
The concept of metaphysics goes back to Aristotle, and specifically to the arrangement of the corpus Aristotelicum by Andronicus of Rhodes, 50-60 Be, in the first century before Christ, in which the main work of Aristotle devoted to that area, f1-ETd Td cpvatKa, was
placed after the Physics.
Insertion 2 a
[Insertion 2 a:} as early as the Neo-Platonists this name, with its tech- nical implications for editing, was interpreted in terms of content: f1-ETd Td cpvatKa = that which goes beyond nature, or, precisely, what is 'behind nature' as its cause. {End of insertion}
? ? The term therefore arose from a principle ofliterary arrangement; a name for the subject was lacking because this subject was not a thing among things.
? Ins. 3: The traditional subdivision of metaphysics.
? LECTURE THREE
13
? ? [Ins. 3] traditional subdivision of metaphysics:
(1) Ontology = theory of Being and of existing things (2) The
nature of the world (cosmology) (3) of human beings (philosophical anthropology) (4) Existence and nature of the divinity (theology). Echoes of this in Kant, whose themes were prescribed by precisely what he criticized. This is good in that he does not think indiscrim- inately, and bad through its inhomogeneity with regard to his own nominalist assumptions.
Distinction between speculative and inductive metaphysics. All these are specifically dogmatic categories, relating to a prescribed and positively teachable area ofsubject matter, i. e. they aim at a merging oftheology and metaphysics. But as the subject matter is itselfprob-
lematic and no such doctrine can be advocated, I mention these categories, the pedantry of which makes a mockery of the subject, so that you are aware of them, without going into them further.
A similarly traditional distinction is drawn between deductive and inductive metaphysics (likewise not without hints from Aristotle)
Inductive metaphysics an artificially devised auxiliary concept intended to prop up a collapsed structure by adapting it to the very thing which has disintegrated it. Like relatively increasing misery2
Inductive = empirical = scientific.
Experience is therefore to be used to justify what transcends it. Heidegger's approach ofanalysing Dasein to gain access to ontology has similarities.
Something as apparently open to experience as Dasein, i. e. essen- tially the experience of the individual subject of himself, is supposed to give insight into the nature of being, despite the limits and ran- domness of this experience. Of course, this presupposes the meta-
physical privilege of the human being, who defines himself in calling Dasein the antic which at the same time is ontological, and is there-
fore
the contradiction in the way customary in science.
There is, in fact, a concept of metaphysical experience - though
not one which can be grasped by the usual means of induction or with reference to a self-revealing ontology. Perhaps, to begin with, simply a reluctance to accept the accepted. E. g. 'Luderbach', dead animals. 4 Why is the bank called a bank? 5
In presenting some of my own reflections on metaphysics6 in the second half of the lecture series, I hope I shall be able to give you an idea ofwhat I call metaphysical experience. But I can say already that,
? ? ? ? transparent, qua consciousness, with regard to its constituents. 3 However easy it is to point out the contradictions in an inductive metaphysics - that alone is no objection, unless one simply eliminates
within the theory as a whole, it is a moment, not itself the whole, not
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? 14 LECTURE THREE
? something immediate to which one could resort, in questions ofmeta- physics, as if to something ultimate, absolute.
The entwinement of metaphysics with thought, inaugurated so emphatically by Aristotle in opposing hylozoism,7 is irrevocable.
[End of insertion]
One can indeed say now that metaphysics began with Aristotle. Bibliography here. 8 18 May 65
? ? ? LECTURE FOUR
25May 1965
? ? I closed my last lecture by putting forward the thesis that, in a precise sense, metaphysics began with Aristotle. This is a rather shocking thesis, although the shock will be somewhat less severe if one reflects that Greek speculation has a long prehistory in which it largely eman- cipated itself from hylozoism, with its rather crude reflections on nature; here I shall mention only the names of Heraclitus, Parmenides
and above all, of course, Plato. If I now attempt to substantiate this thesis somewhat further, it is not in order to indulge in witty para- doxes, but because I believe it will enable me to say something not unimportant about the concept of metaphysics itself. You will recall the definitions of metaphysics I gave earlier; they were not really
definitions in the strict sense, but a series of thematic indications and propositions intended to show you roughly what the concerns of metaphysics are. Among these indications the question of true being, of the One, the essential, played a major part. The Platonic doctrine of Ideas does indeed have to do with these concepts, and I assume you are all more or less familiar with it. The Ideas - that is, hypostatized universal concepts, as they are commonly called - are regarded by Plato, in contrast to scattered multiplicity, as the true, the One, the essential and, above all, as the cause of all appearances. This definition - really a definition of metaphysics itself, which deals
with the causes of all things - was taken over in Aristotle's Meta- physics and elevated to the definition of metaphysical questions. 1 According to Plato, only the forms of things have true and original
being; and these forms - this is the subject of the famous dispute he
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16 LECTURE FOUR
? ? had with Antisthenes2 - are not merely the abstract attributes of diverse individual things. They are themselves, both logically and genetically, what is primary in individual things. For this reason they are called El8o:; or i8Ea, as that which has being in itself and is open to 'seeing', as is implied in the parable of the cave. 3 Both words -
El8o:;, essence, and i8Ea, our word for idea - contain the stem t8, fl8, which relates to the visual, the optical, to seeing. To this extent, therefore, in terms of his themes, Plato could be regarded as the arch- metaphysician, the metaphysician per se, and perhaps he may indeed be counted as such. But in Plato - and this is the crucial point, which
brings us a good deal closer to the meaning of the term metaphysics - the world of the senses is described as that which is absolutely without being, although he was no more able than the Eleatics before him to sustain this position rigorously. For him, the world of appear-
ances really does not exist in any strong sense. And it can be said - if you will allow me to put it rather drastically, just to point out the main landmarks in this discussion - that Plato's philosophy is a syn- thesis of Eleatism - especially Parmenides - and Heraclitus. From Parmenides he took the doctrine of being as the One, the absolutely indivisible and imperishable, and from Heraclitus the doctrine of the absolute transitoriness of appearance, which exists in a state of con- stant flux and, moreover, is deceptive and unreliable, as is shown above all in Plato's relatively late dialogue Theaetetus. His funda- mental attitude, which has had a profound and lasting influence on later western philosophy and constantly re-emerges in different forms, lies in the emphasis on deception, on the illusoriness of sense data. Even in a philosopher as nominalist as John Locke, this thesis recurs in the distinction between the primary qualities which are attributes of things in themselves, and the merely subjective, secondary qualities. 4
No word is needed - although in the history of philosophy many have been used - to make one aware that this drastic separation of the idea from the world of the senses is very difficult to maintain. In Plato it implies the doctrine of the non-being of the sensible, of 11-? av. It can be convincingly demonstrated that the qualities appropriated by the Ideas, in becoming that which has being in itself, are in reality taken over more or less directly from the world of appearances, and that the absolute status of the Idea is attained, as it were, at the expense of the world of the senses from which it is derived. Plato himself was by no means consistent in this respect. For example, in describing the Idea as the cause of all being and of all existing things, and locating the Idea in a realm of absolute origins, as opposed to the realm of things which have originated in it, he implies that there must be something else, precisely that which has originated. Or take another
? ? ? LECTURE FOUR
17
? ? very famous theorem of Plato's: the doctrine of I1-E{}EgL? , of the par- ticipation of the scattered things in the Idea to which they are subordinate. s This also presupposes something different from the Idea; if there were nothing which was different from the Idea, such a 'participation' in the Idea, such a I1-E{}EgL? , would not be possible. And in fact, the late Plato did extensively revise the strict version of the doctrine of Ideas, as it appears in what are called the classical, middle dialogues. I would mention here the very curious dialogue
Plato's late period, which has given rise to innumerable diffi- culties and bears the name Parmenides. Naturally, you should not confuse this with the Eleatic Parmenides, although he is the protagon- ist and victor in this dialogue. In it Plato puts forward what might be seen as the implicitly very dialectical thesis that, however little the Many amount to without the One - the Many refers to the scattered
things, as opposed to the one Idea under which each thing in a genus
is subsumed - however little this Many may be without the One, without its Idea, just as little is the One, the Idea, without the Many. 6 There is no doubt that in Plato's late period the existent asserts itself increasingly against the Idea, although, in the chronology of Plato's works which is now generally accepted, one of the dialogues in which the doctrine of Ideas is presented most bluntly and developed most ingeniously, the Phaedrus, is dated extremely late. (I personally, despite all the authority of classical philology, am disinclined to
trust the current chronology, not for philological reasons but for philosophical ones, based on the subject matter. ) This dating does, of course, make the development of Plato that I have referred to, towards what might be called a greater acknowledgement of the
empirical, somewhat precarious. However, despite the protests of dyed-in-the-wool Platonists, I should like to assume such a develop- ment, and I would also mention that in the Anglo-Saxon countries, where there is a very strong culture in the interpretation of classical
Greek texts, one not infrequently comes across the hypothesis that Plato as an old man was influenced retrospectively by his pupil Aristotle; or that, as a result of his political disappointments in his attempts to set up the world purely on the basis of the Idea, he was forced to give greater recognition to that which is, the scattered, the merely existent. If one reviews the development of the great classical work on politics, the Politeia, through the Statesman to the last work, the Laws, there is much evidence to suggest that that is the case. But I am only mentioning this to show you how complex these relation-
ships are. Incidentally, you would all do well, before embarking on these very complex problems that I can only sketch for you here, to look at Goethe's famous descriptions of the two philosophers, whom
from
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? ? he saw as antithetical, Plato and Aristotle; he contrasted what today would be vulgarly called the idealist Plato to the realist Aristotle,
who, as Goethe put it, had his feet planted firmly on the earth. 7 After what I have just said, my assertion that metaphysics really began with Aristotle will be doubly shocking (I seem to be bent on shocking you) because the importance Plato seems to attach to the higher world, to transcendence, as against the world itself, appears to make him far more metaphysical than his pupil Aristotle. But I believe we have arrived here at the central, problematic point from which you will be best able to understand what metaphysics really means. For even if we concede that Plat08 gave much greater weight, nolens volens (or however it may be), to the world of f1-? DV, or non- being, to the world of sensible experience, than he should have done according to the strict doctrine of Ideas; and even if we concede further that this tendency in Plato grew stronger in the course of his
long life, one thing is quite definitely lacking in his work: reflection on how these two spheres - of direct experience and of the Idea, the concept, the One, or whatever you like to call it - are related to each other. It might be best to say that while the traditional problems of metaphysics present themselves in the structure of the Platonic doctrine of Ideas, they do so, as it were, objectively, without being reflected thematically in his philosophy. While it is true that the ten- sion between the sphere of transcendence and the sphere of that which is merely the case, between TO OV and Ta DVTa, is present in Plato's philosophy, because it is unavoidable, breaking through again and again, his philosophy is not constituted in such a way that this tension is central to his speculation. Now, what I should really like to make understandable to you is that the sphere of metaphysics in the
precise sense only comes into being where this tension is itself the subject of philosophy, where it comes within the purview of thought. It might be said, therefore, that metaphysics arises at the point where the empirical world is taken seriously, and where its relation to the supra-sensible world, which was hitherto taken for granted, is sub- jected to reflection.
It is possible to imagine the Platonic doctrine of Ideas, without doing it too much violence, as a secularization of theology. The Platonic Ideas have been called the gods turned into concepts, and one would scarcely disagree, just as the supreme Idea, the Idea of the Good or of Justice, TO ayat'f6v or ? oLKawavvYj, is frequently referred to in Plato as t'fE6<;, probably in direct continuation of a Socratic tradition. But the problem posed by this secularization is
that once the gods are turned into concepts, that is, entities of ap- pearance, their relationship to appearances becomes something quite
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? other than if the gods were simply located in the Beyond, on their Olympus. This problem emerges again and again in the epistemolo- gical and logical difficulties with which Plato has to contend. But, if I might put it thus, he was naively theological in failing to draw from the secularization of the gods into concepts, which he had brought about, the conclusion that the relation of the concept or the Idea to the world of appearances was thereby radically changed, and made problematic. One might define metaphysics as the product of a breach between essences - the gods secularized as ideas - and the phenom- enal world, a breach which is inevitable as soon as the gods become concepts and being becomes a relation to existing things; at the same time, however, these two moments cannot be naively related together or formulated concurrently. I believe this way of stating the matter may better define the locus of metaphysics in the history of philosophy, and thus define the essence of metaphysics as well (for I believe the essential is always historical), than would be possible in the relatively
superficial lectures one might give on the themes of metaphysics. Following from this definition one might say that metaphysics, because it attempts to regard the Ideas as something linked to the empirical world but endangered by advancing secularization, was itself threatened from the first in its own development. In this con-
nection it is certainly no accident that nominalism - the radically rationalistic view which denied any autonomous existence to ideas - based itself precisely on Aristotle, and did so twice over, both in Arabian philosophy and in scholasticism; although, as cannot be
emphasized too much, Aristotle himself, as you will find out, was anything but a nominalist. When Heidegger refers to metaphysics as a kind of rationalistic decline from the original understanding of
being in archaic philosophy,9 I cannot entirely disagree, from a strictly phenomenological viewpoint, with his characterization. On one hand metaphysics is always, if you will, rationalistic as a critique of a conception of true, essential being-in-itself which does not justify itself before reason; but, on the other, it is always also an attempt to
rescue something which the philosopher's genius feels to be fading
and vanishing. There is in fact no metaphysics, or very little, which is
not an attempt to save - and to save by means of concepts - what
appeared at the time to be threatened precisely by concepts, and was
in the process of being disintegrated, or corroded, to use the more
affective language of the ancient anti-Sophists. Metaphysics is thus,
one might say, something fundamentally modern - if you do not
restrict the concept of modernity to our world but extend it to in-
clude Greek history. And it is no accident that metaphysics re-emerges in the High Middle Ages, a period of urban bourgeois culture in
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? ? which the naive immediacy of Christian faith was already breaking down; and then a second time in the broad movement of thought which is generally embraced by terms such as the Renaissance, the Reformation and humanism.
Aristotle, in the first truly metaphysical work of literature - the one which gave that branch of philosophy its name - criticizes the Platonic attempt to oppose essence to the world of the senses, as something separate and absolutely different from it. Above all, he criticizes the Platonic hypostasis of universal concepts as a duplica- tion of the world. In this he makes a very strong and legitimate case, based on the argument that all the attributes of the Ideas are derived from the empirical world, on which they live, rather as the rulers lived on the work of their servants or slaves. At the same time, how- ever, he then seeks in his turn to extract an essential being from the sensible, empirical world, and thereby to save it; and it is precisely this twofold aim of criticism and rescue which constitutes the nature of metaphysics. The polarity between critical rationality, on the one
hand, and the pathos of rescue, on the other, points to the essence of traditional metaphysics, or at least has done so throughout its his- tory. Metaphysics can thus be defined as the exertion of thought to save what at the same time it destroys. That this formulation is ten- able, and not arbitrary, is indicated, I believe, by the fact that the very same structure which I have demonstrated to you in principle by the example of Aristotle's Metaphysics - or as a precondition of that work - is also characteristic of Kant's position with regard to
the problem of metaphysics. Although Kant, in upholding a blunt, unreconciled dualism, undoubtedly has more in common with the philosophical climate of Plato than of Aristotle - and the Critique of Pure Reason contains, in the introduction to the section on the Ideas, the finest pages ever written about Plato,10 pages I would most strongly urge all of you to read - it can be said that in this double intention of critique and rescue Kant was closer to Aristotle, whom he did not particularly like, than to Plato. ll If you will take this historical-philosophical interpretation on trust for the time being, you will perhaps understand why I consider it necessary, for a correct understanding of the concept of metaphysics, to begin with an over- view of the main theoretical motifs of Aristotle's work. This does require you, however, to take some account of his historical position, for only this will allow you to picture more concretely what I have in mind.
This task is made more difficult today - in philosophy, not in classical philology - by the influence of Heidegger and his school. Although he recognized very clearly the rationalist, Enlightenment
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? ? moment in Aristotle, Heidegger attempted to rediscover a much more 'pristine' Aristotle, to an extent which is hard to conceive. And be- fore going on to Aristotle I think I need to offer a brief critique of this approach. I'd like to do this by examining closely a very specific piece of interpretation, since I believe that such things are more clearly revealed by concrete details, rather than by remaining on the level of general assertion. I am concerned here with the first sentence of Aristotle's Metaphysics, and I shall consider only this one sentence. I shall write this sentence in Greek on the blackboard; I am aware that many of you do not know Greek, but there is no other way to proceed; and I shall explain everything you need to know in order to understand it. The sentence is as follows: lluv'TE'; av&pw7TOt 'TOU do/vat 0p/yov'Tat cpVUEt. I2 According to the generally accepted trans- lations, this means: people by nature strive after knowledge. A well- known translation renders it as: 'All men by their very nature feel the urge to know. '13 This sentence is reproduced in Heidegger's Being and Time (please keep in mind the usual translation: all people by nature strive zealously after knowledge). Heidegger's version - which, incidentally, is presented cautiously, not as a direct translation - is as follows: 'The treatise which stands first in the collection of Aristotle's treatises on ontology begins with the sentence: lluv'TE'; av&pw7TOt 'TOU
dOEvat 0p/yov'Tat cpVUEt. The care for seeing is essential to man's Being. ' It is not my purpose here to poke fun at the stiltedness of this passage, for a mannered, estranging approach to a strange text can have a very salutary function. And I'd like to say at once that Heidegger offers resistance to the flattening out of Greek texts when rendered into our language, as has traditionally been done. How- ever, his interpretation here does not produce simply the salutary alienation effect I referred to, but violates the meaning on the most literal level. When he says, for example: 'man's Being rim Sein des Menschen]',t4 the human being is already put in the singular, pre- supposing a priority of the essence of the human being, and thus a kind of anthropological ontology, which in Aristotle is still to be established. I5 Aristotle does not say 'the human being', or 'existence as such', but simply and plainly 'all people', 'the people', and not 'individual people'. For dO/vat means quite simply to know, and av&pw1TOt 'TOU dOEVat OpEyoV'Tat means: people earnestly seek or strive after knowledge. Now it is undoubtedly correct, as I had occasion to indicate to you earlier,16 that this dO/VaL contains the stem [f]to, which is also in lOEa and which characterizes the sensory relationship of seeing. But in his interpretation Heidegger simply suppresses the whole history of language which, starting from the rich, sensible
? conceptions originally associated with words, progressively sublimated
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? ? the words into concepts. This happened in Greek just as it has happened in our language. There can be no doubt that at the stage when Aristotle wrote, EtOEVat already meant to know in the sense of a consciousness emancipated from the sensible present. But because ontology, which in Aristotle is only a theme for discussion, is, as I have said, presupposed by Heidegger in an act of 're-pristination', consciousness is supposed to have a direct sensible perception of
essence, or being, or whatever it may be, as if it were something existing in itself. And so Heidegger translates this EtOEVat back to its much earlier lineage as sensible presence, although by this stage it had entirely lost that quality.
He then says that 'the care of seeing is essential to man's Being' [Im Sein des Menschen liegt wesenhaft die Sorge des Sehens]. Here it becomes blatantly clear what Heidegger is up to. Anyone even slightly acquainted with the history of ancient philosophy and having the
rudiments of Greek will know that the word CPVUEt is a philosophical term which - about a hundred years before Aristotle; I cannot give you the exact date - played a part in Socraticism and Sophism, in opposition to {fEUEt, as that which is so 'by nature', as against what is merely posited, what is {fEUEt. The term for 'essential' would be quite different, perhaps QV'TWS- or QV'TWS- QV, as it appears in Plato; but quite certainly not CPVUEt, since there is in CPVUEt an echo of cpvms- and thus a memory of physical nature from the old hylozoistic period. So the sentence means quite simply - very much in keeping with the men- tality of Aristotle, who was a peculiar mixture of an ontologist and a professor of physics - that human beings, as they are, strive by nature for knowledge. But as for the idea that this was meant in the sense17 of some definite ontological pre-structuring of existence in which being was to be revealed - no shadow of that is to be found in Aristotle. Finally, the word 0pEyw{fat means no more than to exert
? oneself, to long for, to strive after something - and has not the slight- est connection with care [Sorge], which, as we know, is one of the core categories in Heidegger. On the contrary, the straightforward
'love of wisdom,18 has had foisted on it an existential interpretation - that it harbours the care of Dasein for its being - although, as you will see in any dictionary, no philology or linguistic knowledge can produce a link between this 0pEyw{fat and the concept of care.
In examining this sentence in some depth I believe I have shown you what I wanted to develop as the main idea of this lecture: that
Aristotle starts out from an everyday, rational, sensible conscious- ness and attempts, by reflecting on what is given directly by the
senses, to attain insight into true being - instead of presupposing this essential realm, as was the case in archaic thought. If that were not
LECTURE FOUR 23
? ? the case - if this sentence were as Heidegger interprets it - then Aris- totle would not really be a metaphysician, but precisely the onto- logist which, in a different place, Heidegger says he is not. 19 But the moment of tension in metaphysics is located exactly in this seemingly straightforward, empirical sentence, in which, however, the striving for knowledge and thus, objectively, for absolute truth, is posited as
need - so that here, too, everything is finally constituted from the point of view of truth. And this really defines quite clearly the intel- lectual climate within which Aristotle's Metaphysics has its place. In the next lecture it will be time to tell you something about the con- tent of the Metaphysics.
a
? ? LECTURE FIVE
1 June 1965
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