The meaning of rationality in heidegger’s philosophy

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THE MEANING OF RATIONALITY IN HEIDEGGER'S PHILOSOPHY

N. Stasiulis

Annotation

The article traces Heideggerian thought back to its pre-conceptual origin and demonstrates how thus a transformation of the notion of rationality has been achieved in his philosophy.

The thinker focuses his investigation on the ontological basis of Western rationality. He also develops the structure of his own thought by reinterpreting this ontological basis as expressed in Aristotle and Plato, in particular, and the Greek thought of presence in general. Heidegger rediscovered the crucial link between thinking and finitude, hence, his early musings on pre-conceptual origins of logical, or conceptual, thought later, in his mature period, culminated in the thinking of pain as the ontological difference.

Keywords: Heidegger, logos, ontology, pain, rationality.

The Ontological Basis of Rationality Nerijus Stasiulis, Vilnius Gediminas Technical University (Vilnius, Lithuania).

heideggerian philosophy ontological thinker

Heideggerian pondering upon the meaning of rationality revolves around a phenomenological interpretation of ancient Greek thought. The phenomenologist uncovers the intuition of presence as the gist of ancient Greek philosophies and uses the phenomenological method of formal indication (formale Anzeige) to get to their pre-conceptual source in this intuition. The method originates in Husserl's distinction between two types of universalization - generalization and formalization-which implies a distinction between two meanings of “rational” (or “formal”). The first one indicates formal logic and the scientific method that deal with logical classes (genera and species) and processes of analysis and synthesis; the second one deals with a formal unity of oneness and multiplicity. Accordingly, in generalization one moves from individual phenomena up to their genus or type, while in formalization one does not move from a phenomenon to a higher genus but rather brings out its structure and meaning and the way it is present. The structure is not limited to a logical or mathematical order but rather points to a fuller structure which Dasein and the world appear to have in the course of concrete hermeneutic and phenomenological interpretation [see: 1. P. 11].

Hence, this method is akin to the Platonic one-over-many principle. Even though the Platonic form is usually described as timeless, Heidegger emphasizes that, based on authentic ontological tradition, this “form” consists precisely in the ability to gather the many - thus, time - into the one [1. P. 26]. For Plato, as well as for Aristotle, the concrete, from the outset, has always taken part in the form. Analogically, formal indication means that the concreteness of factual experience refers back to more universal structures that underlie it in the structurally articulated Dasein [1. P. 11]. Heidegger articulates the structure of Dasein by phenomenologically retrieving the structure of Greek thought which he to a great extent finds exemplified in Aristotle's texts [2-4].

In fact, Heideggerian thinking of Being as presence was likely spurred by a key issue in Aristotle's metaphysics - that of the relation between the oneness and multiplicity of Being [e.g., 5. 4.1003a]. Although Aristotle opposes the Eleatic thesis of the mere-oneness of Being [2. P. 152], his emphasis on the multiplicity does by no means amount to a rejection of Parmenides because the pollachos is what positively makes the hen appear as the question-worthy [6. 27]. To explicate this notion, Heidegger introduces a distinction between oneness (the einhaft) and simplicity (the einfach) [2. P. 153]. For instance, in the Physics [7. 187a 1-3], the arche is described as simple but not as one: it is both simple and multiple (mannigfaltig). The German thinker characteristically stresses the essence of all Greek polemics to rest on a common intuition of presence; hence, both Plato's reverent polemics with Parmenides in the Sophist and his pupil Aristotle's subsequent criticism of the Eleatics is but an explication or development of the same intuition [4. P. 17-18]. The development took place in the mutual influence of Plato and Aristotle and consisted in the introduction of negativity into the essence of Being as now one admitted that the being-not (das Nichtseiende)-the wrong, the bad, the temporary-that is, the not-being (das Unseiende), also is and is the reason why the oneness unfolds as multiplicity [6. P. 27-28]. It is also precisely in negativity that Heidegger discovered the pre-conceptual source of theory and the original meaning of presence as the unity of Being and time.

The notion of the unity of Being and time in the context of the history of philosophy, especially of ancient Greek philosophy, is the constant motive of Heidegger's thought linking his early work on logic, his middle-period work on existential analysis and his eventual musings on nihilism, language, and technology [8. P. 235]. Formal indication is supposed to express and describe this unity. What is formally indicated is always concrete but also points away from this finite concreteness to Being which simultaneously both births time and gathers it back into itself. A formal indicator becomes concrete as situated and thus as a linking boundary between Being (as the gatheredness of time) and the specific temporal situation. In Being and Time it is named the moment of insight, the Augenblick (kairos), which Heidegger understands to capture the genuine meaning of both Aristotelian fronesis and nous. Heidegger reinterprets Aristotelian teleological thought-the notion of entelecheia-as the temporal thinking of Being. This reinterpretation has been of paramount significance for the rethought meaning of rationality.

The existentiality of Dasein consists in unconcealing the field of entities, and there are two modes of this unconcealing: one can unconceal it “authentically” by reinterpreting the presence in the Greek philosophies of Plato and Aristotle and the tradition that sprang from them or “inauthentically” along the contour drawn by the Cartesian-Galilean-Newtonian science According to Heidegger, the possibility to explain the upward movement of smoke and the downward movement of a stone as their movement towards their places, i.e. the Aristotelian explanation, has never been refuted or even understood (6.80).. Dasein has the possibilities of authenticity and inauthenticity and the equiprimordial ability to switch between the world (spa- tiality) а la Aristotle and the world (space) а la Descartes or Newton [8. P. 237; 9. P. 137-138; 10. P. 226-227]. The transition from the lonesome “what” of post- Aristotelian essence to remembering the unity of “what” and “how”, crucial to original Aristotelian philosophy, is the motive of moving from the conceptual grasp to formal indication. Formal indication points to the what-how-Being (Was- Wie-Sein) [3. P. 23]. As it is infinitely general, contentless and expresses the very self-construal of the lifestream itself, it, as it is a principle, presupposes the multitude of situations of its possible application and shows itself only in a living concretization of any of these situations. Therefore, philosophy, too, is an interpretative activity entrenched in the thinking of one Being, which cannot be reduced to a definition as would be required by “traditional logic”, which arises from an “inauthentic” interpretation of Aristotle's philosophy.

“Traditional” - post-Aristotelian - logic was to be based on the notion of constant ousia, which, despite Aristotle, was cleansed off of movedness (Being-on-theway, Bewegtheit). This determined what was afterwards called theory. Cleansing theory off of practice (of movedness) amounted to forgetting its origin in the intuition of presence and contraposing it to practice. To the contrary, Heideggerian notion of formal indication is equiprimordial with the grasp of ousia which retains its aspect of movedness; therefore, the traditional distinction between theory and practice is not meaningful for it [see more 11]. Heidegger finds Aristotle's Ethica Ni- comachea and Metaphysica, especially its first book, important because they demonstrate the origin of grasping the principle - arche - in the pre-conceptual Being of Dasein. The theoretical principle, being one, gathers a multitude of possible practices and preserves itself as theory only by dispersing in practices that presuppose it. Heidegger's philosophy is not antiplatonic or antiaristotelian, which supposedly abandons dead theory for its contradiction in “unreflected” lived life. Quite the contrary, Heidegger attempts to show that the distinction between theory and practice as well as between constancy and movedness is unfounded and arises from a post-Aristotelian ontology gone astray. Formal indication presupposes abandoning this distinction and, according to Heidegger, allows to authentically grasp the very thinking of Plato and Aristotle. Authentic Being can be opposed to inauthentic chronological time but is in unity with time understood authentically - as the Being of time, which gathers and gives rise to it. It is for this reason that Being is the ontological difference.

Rationality and Finitude

Hence, rethinking rationality amounts to rethinking the ontological ground of thought [in accordance with the pronouncement of Parmenides on the sameness of thought and Being, cf. 10. P. 212] - ousia.

The fact that an ancient Greek understands himself a priori as “mortal” and the fact that he understands the world a priori as comprised of individualized - coming to be (coming into their limit) and perishing - entities (“subjects“) are equiprimordial. Sliogeris [cf. 12. P. 170-178] is emphatic that the prototype of “substantial individual” is the common basis of different Greek philosophical ontologies - that of the Aristotelian tode ti and morfк (eidos), of the Platonic eidos, of the Democritic eidos. All these conceptions define what the Greeks conceived as the true being: definitions of ousia arouse from an individualizing gaze which was equiprimordial with the human experience of mortality. The “objective” and “subjective” moments of Being are equiprimordial; therefore, the terms of Dasein and ousia are synonymous for Heidegger and denote the content of beingness. Also, both ousia and Dasein are immersed in the horizon of time, or temporality.

Another name for ousia is hypokeimenon which means what-lies-before, or what- lies-under. Its Latin counterpart is subjectum. It indicates what an entity has as its basic content, or its essence. For this reason the sphere of entity can be understood either as belonging to the subject, something the subject has, or as something what is given to one as belongings to be treasured and protected. The Cartesian ego is a subject in the first sense - the owner and the metaphysico-epistemological ground of beings. The Heideggerian Dasein is a subject in the second sense.

The Daseinian meaning is formed as Heidegger uses the medieval notion of primordial relation between the soul and God to heed the sense in which Dasein belongs to and is had by Being. The sense of belonging is crucial to the formation of the notion of the difference between Being and beings, and it would not be possible without discovering the pre-conceptual root of thought. Aleksandravicius [13] explains well how major medieval thought was phenomenological even before phenomenology. According to the scholar, the Christian notion of creatio ex nihilo allows to understand Man's reason, which encompasses all the sphere of entities, to (constantly) be linked to its originating act (called actus essendi by Thomas Aquinas) as, thus, linked to the originating act of any other being (which is “followed” by reason in the act of its emergence), this act of divine creation is the divine act of unifying both in the mind and in every being [13. P. 219]. This way of thinking is not characterized by the Cartesian division of subject and object. Neither is Heideggerian thought. The unity of subject and object is one of the hardest insights of philosophy but only if we keep it in mind can we grasp the meaning of Heideggerian Dasein and the Heideggerian construal of the Greek Dasein. As the meaning of Being transforms, so does the meaning of rationality.

While the formality of formal logic gravitates toward detemporalized constancy, the formality of Heideggerian phenomenology is rooted in lived and moving experience. In Being and Time, the formal structure of Dasein unfolds as a thrown project, or as manifested in the unity of the three ecstasies of temporality. In fact, Heidegger presents the description of this formal structure as a retrieval of genuine Aristotelian thought which was embedded in Greek thinking of presence. Indeed, Aristotle is a thinker of ousia. But ousia only exists as movedness (Bewegtheit), as entelecheia or energeia. Heidegger places the crucial emphasis on the fact that, for the Greeks, a true being was by no means devoid of motion, of temporality.

Though formal logic derives from Aristotle, Aristotle himself was far from the sort of a standardized logician as his modern successors. The philosophy of lan-

guage in the twentieth century began to come to grips with the fact that living speech is not “logical” and works according to its own rules which are prior to those of formal logic: but precisely this wisdom is exhibited already in Aristotle's texts [e.g., 14.1a 1-5]. Of crucial importance here is the conception of the analogy of Being which is also the prototype of Heideggerian formal indication. Logic uses concepts-genera and species, but Being is beyond definitions in terms of genera and species because it is precisely the intentionality of Being that is the precondition for grasping genera and species. According to the traditional post-Aristotelian conception, the ousia, or essense, of a being is expressed in a definition (horismos). But Heidegger takes a step further (or back) into the pre-conceptual source of the thinking of ousia and links this notion to the experience of the worldhood of the world in the Greek Dasein. Aristotle does not “create” his concepts but draws them from Greek pre-conceptual notions. To put it in Platonic terms, he learns them by “remembering” them. This is true of terms like horismos and katлgoria, and ousia, and the latter one is key. Heidegger stresses that ousia is more than just the “first category” and is synonymous¹ with his notion of Dasein. He explicates the structure of Dasein by listening attentively to the meaning of ousia which he renders as the German Anwesen which has the senses or connotations of both Being and estate, property, something one has.

Heidegger links the phenomenological notion of horizon of Being and Time to the Greek pre-conceptual experience of horos and horismos. For Aristotle, a horismos, a definition, is a logos which asserts something about and individual something. Logos fulfills itself in a definition which describes this individual something on the basis of the thing that is kath'auto, by itself. This thing existing by itself is called eidos by Plato and Aristotle. Western conceptual thought derives from the grasp of true being as eidos. Concepts which grasp the constant what uncover the being in its true Being. Now, the grasp of constant ousia can take two shapes. It can be grasped as deprived of its pre-conceptual source and of the temporal characteristic, and of the everyday sensory experience. As a consequence, it becomes the post-Cartesian subject and object. Heidegger terms this the uneigentlich uncovering of Being. However, for the Greeks, the eingentlich intuition of the constant presence was synonymous with kinлsis offysis. The clearest expression of this is in Aristotle but it is characteristic of all Greek experience [15. P. 240]. The description of the moving Dasein is a re-construal of this Aristotelian/Greek notion. The moving relation of hyle and morfл is read by Heidegger as a decription of time ecstasies [cf. 16, especially 16. P. 299]. It is crucial that Aristotle conceives the Being of a being not only in terms of its what but also of its how (the moment of movedness). Remembering the forgotten link between the what and the how in constant presence is the way of renewing traditional Western logic and ontology. The concept is brought back to its pre-conceptual source. Logic which had turned into moveless constancy was brought back to the pre-conceptual origin of Being. Logos was brought back to the primordial legein of the stream of Being, the primordial intentionality as the only possible source of any authentic logos “Synonymous” loosely in the modern sense of the word, not in the Aristotelian one. There is a definite conceptual link between Heidegger's bringing back to life of language and late Wittgenstein's Sprachspiel as derived from the living situatedness of language (here understood as intentionality)..

Heidegger derives Greek logic with its key conception of definition (horismos) from the Greek pre-theoretical experience of peras-from the experience of beings as entering their limits. In Being and Time, Dasein experiences the limit in terms of mortality (Being-towards-death). The Aristotelian Beingness of a being (its Jeweiligkeit) in its peras is analogous or identical to Dasein's Jeweiligkeit or Jemeinigkeit [15. P. 291-292). Based on the Aristotelian stance that the soul is in a sense all beings, the description of transcendental structures of subject (Dasein) is also the description of the structure of all beingness. These Heideggerian musings reach their maturity in his thinking of presence as pain.

At the beginning of Western thought, presence was revealed as logos. Heidegger relates logos to algos. Algos, the Greek word for pain, is derived from the intensive of lego - alego [17. P. 404]. It is the most intensive form of gathering. Because lego means to gather, to collect into unity. How does pain gather? At first, pain is what rips one apart. But it does not disperse one into separated fragments; it, quite the contrary, gathers them into a unity. To quote Heidegger, “Pain rends [reiЯt]. It is the rift [RiЯ]. But it does not tear apart into dispersive fragments. Pain indeed tears asunder, it separates [scheidet], yet in such a manner that at the same time it draws everything to itself, gathers it to itself...” [18. P. 204]; “Pain is the joining agent [das Fьgende] in the rending that divides and gathers. Pain is the joining of the rift [die Fuge des Risses] The joining is the threshold. It settles the between, the middle of the two that are separated in it. Pain joins the rift of the difference. Pain is the difference itself' [19. P. 24].

Pain is not in us. We are in pain. Pain is our limit which opens (has always already opened) the world and the space for us. There is not a subject but Dasein which is spatial. Dasein is space opened up by pain. Dasein's spatiality is necessarily attuned, while all fundamental attunements are related to their opposites - say, joy and sadness intermingle and turn into each other, with many moods or at- tunements in-between. Pain is the source, the arche of all attunement-and all spatiality. Therefore pain is another name for ontological difference, which separates and holds in gatheredness what it has separated. To quote Heidegger again where he describes the structure of the ontological difference analogously to the structure of pain:

Is this one Being something before all unfolding, that is, something that exists for itself, whose independence is the true essence of Being? Or is Being in its essence never not unfolded so that the manifold and its foldings constitute precisely the peculiar oneness of that which is intrinsically gathered up? Is Being imparted to the individual modes in such a way that by this imparting it in fact parts itself out, although in this parting out it is not partitioned in such a way that, as divided, it falls apart and loses its authentic essence, its unity? Might the unity of Being lie precisely in this imparting parting out? And if so, how would and could something like that happen [geschehen]? What holds sway in this event [Geschehen]? (These are questions concerning Being and Time!) [20. P. 25; 6. P. 31].

At the core of the pre-conceptual source of rationality is the painful structure of temporality as authentic presence. This is what the analysis of mortality in Being and Time is directed at. On the other hand, the subject as opposed to Dasein is defined by being the ground of axioms = laws of nature according to which reality is set in a “logical”, methodic, non-contradictory manner. Both his existential and physical space (which is not two but one and the same thing) is revealed as painless. As pain is the true source of all passions, especially joy, the space of the modern subject is joyless while his thought is substituted with rootless rationality.

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