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MARTIN HEIDEGGER'S INTERPRETATION OF ANCIENT GREEK ALETHEIA AND THE PHILOLOGICAL RESPONSE TOIT
Ruide Sousa Deparbnent of History Classics Programme McGill University Montreal
July 2000
A thesis submitted to the Faeulty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Ph. D.
Rui de Sousa 2000
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• This thesis tries to provide a critical review of Heidegger's interpretation of ancient Greek truth in the different stages of his career and it also examines the philological response that his work on this question elicited. The publication of Sein und Zeit made Heidegger's views on ciÀri8Eul available to a wide public and
thereby launched a heated debate on the meaning of this word. The introduction tries to give an account of the general intellectual background to Heidegger's interpretation of anàent Greek truth. It also looks at the kind of interpretative approach favored by the philologists responJing to Heidegger's views on
àÀ ri 6El derives its meaning from a
different worldview (Weltansicht) in which what we normally distinguish as a verbal account and the things to which it refers are not understood as distinct realities.
The difference, then, between this interpretation of àA ri OEla and
Heidegger's is that it does not take the meaning of this word to be determined by a tadt understanding of disdosive Being-in-the-world. Rather, Luther sees it
as shaped by a view of the world in which ail that cm be said is that no
46
Wahrheil und Lüge ;m tillesten Griechenlum. p. 21.
63
64
subject/object clichotomy has been formulated. Unlike Heidegger, he does not try to think through the larger philosophical implications of the lack of such a dichotomy. He seems content to take as a matter of fact certain ideas about early Greek thought that can be traced back to the neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer (ultimately Hegel, though without his schematic history of the development of the spirit) and on this basis to work out his study of the philological facts relevant to the vocabulary for truth and lies in early Greek poetry. The fact that Luther has not clearly and consistently thought out the wider implications of the lack of a subject/object dichotomy in early Greek thought is evident in certain instances. In rus analysis of the early Greek terminology for truth, he seems at times to lose sight of his initial premisses and to lapse into the very view which he daims we should not use in interpreting early Greek thought. For example, in his analysis of the word v'1IJEprÉs, Luther ascribes to this word the sense of "correctness" or "agreement" in an assertion, a meaning which implies an understanding of the dichotomy between subject and object. Luther defines this word in the following way: In Verbindung mit verba dicendi bezeichnet das Wort zunachst allgemein die "treffende" Auskunft, Angabe, Wiedergabe usw...Das Verhaltnis zur Grundbedeutung gestaltet sich folgenderma8en: v'1IJEprÈs Ei1rEïv: etwas berichten, beschreiben so, daiS es das Rechte nicht verfehlt, oder adverbiell, ohne da8 man das Rechte dabei verfehlt..J7 The words treffende and das Rechte imply a quality of the statement whereby it is able to conform to or agree with a certain state of affairs. On the one hand,
there is the verbal account and, on the other, the thing to which it must conform. This obviously implies that sorne kind of understanding of the subject/object
dichotomy informs what Luther describes as the early Greek use of the word Vl"UJEprÉs.
There is a clear discrepancy here between the basic premisses about
early Greek thought that he establishes at the beginning of ms work and the meaning that he discerns in this word. The same can he said for bis analysis of another synonym for truth, namely the word Q:TPElCÉS.
Once again, a vaguely defined notion of
correspondence or agreement is invoked in Luther's definition of this word:
64
65 "àrp~KÉWS KaraÀEçOV
meint "genauen, vollstiindigen" Bericht. Das deutsche
Wort "genau" umfa8t sowohl das Treffende, die Treue des Berichtes wie das Eingehen auf alle Einnzelheiten."48
'ArpEKÉS (or here the adverbial form
àrpEKÉws) is said to Mean a kind of accuracy v) and Heidegger here understands 1fpaYJ,1aTa not as referring ta mere things but to the unitary field of engaged Being-in-the-world in which things come into presence or unconcealment.62 Hence, by stating that
self-concealing concealment (ÀaOas ciTÉKJ,1apTa vÉ4lOs) draws away (rrapÉÀKEl) the straight road or path of the disclosive handling of entities (1fpaYJ,Hxn,ùv op6àv oôàv), this passage from Pindar speaks of the essential opposition
between concealment and unconcealment. The interpretation of this passage is interesting and many elements of the text do make it quite plausible. As we will see, Heidegger's further handling of the word ÀriO'1 certainly lends sorne credibility to his interpretation here. The final passage concerning À ri 0'1 which Heidegger cites is drawn from the myth of Er in the tenth book of Plato's Republic. Il is the occasion for a long reflection on this myth as a whole and what it tells us about concealment as the hidden counter-essence of àÀ ri8Ela. 63
Heidegger spends much lime on this
excerpt fram Plato because he claims that it is the only time in Greek history (at what he ca1Is its apogee, Vollendung) that a direct insight into the essential cr. Parmenides, p. 130: "Das Zeichenlose Wolkenhafte der ÀrjO'1 weist auf die ihr eigene sich selbst verbergende und dabei entziehende Verbüllung. Dieses vielfache Verhüllen und EntsehwindenJassen bekundet eindeutig genug die Wesensherkunft der ÀriOl1:' 61 Parmenides, p. 111. 62 The language used in the Parmenides is quite difTerent from the tenninology from Sein und Zeit which 1 Heidegger's interpretation of have used above, but the underlying idea is nonetbeless the same. rrpaYJ,uxTwV is certainJy quite plausible in the context ofthis ode. Cr. Pannenides pp. 111-118: "Hier fliUt das Wort rrpdYIJŒ, was wir sonst mit "Ding" und "Sache'· übersetzen. npâTTW hei8t: hindun:hdringen. durcbmessen, durch Unverstelltes hindun:h eiDen Weg zurilckJegen und auf diesem Weg bei etwas anlangen und 50 das, wobei das Hindun:hgehen anJan~ ais Anwesendes beistelleu. or p. 119: "Unter uHandlung·' (1rpciYJ,la) verstehen wir den einheitlichen Wesensbereich der "vorhandenen·· Dinge und des beistellend "handelnden" Menschen.·~ 60
85
86
between À~811 and àÀr10tta is explicitly put into words.64
opposition
According to hint, this dialogue titled in Greek nOÀITtla has to do with the essence of the The
1rOÀ1S
1rOÀ1S
as the historicallocus of disclosure for the ancient Greeks.65
is for the ancient Greeks, in the language of Sein und Zeit , their
historical context of disclosive and engaged Being-in-the-world in which entities can emerge into Being. As a careful thinker, Plato heeds the essence of that into which he inquires and therefore thinks of the terms.
1r0 À lS
in these very same essential
It is for this reason that his inquiry into the nature of the
necessarily involves a consideration of the theme of
àÀ~8tta
1fOÀ1S
(disclosure) which
in tum implies reflection on the opposition between concealment and
unconcealment.66 Heidegger daims that the section of the Republic that deals with the theme of àÀri8tl