Commonality and Human Being

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Notes

Notes

1. This paper draws on and develops earlier work I have done on Heraclitus. See in particular “Spacing as the Shared: Heraclitus, Pindar, Agamben,” in Work and Death. Essays on ‘Homo Sacer,’ ed. Andrew Norris (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2005); “Raving Sybils, Signifying Gods: Noise and Sense in Heraclitus fragments 92 and 93,” Culture, Theory and Society 46.1 (2005); and “Political Translations: Hölderlin's Das Höcheste,” in Translation and the Classic, ed. Alexandra Lianeri (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007).

2. The following editions of the fragments have been consulted: M. Conche, Héraclite Fragments (Paris: PUF, 1986); Charles Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987); M. Marcovich, Heraclitus (Merida: The Los Andes UP, 1967). The translation used is, for the most part, the one established by Charles Kahn. The numbering of the fragments follows H. Diels and W. Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 3 vols (Berlin: Weidmann, 1961).

3. The term “transcendental” plays an important role in the argument developed in this paper. The force of the term is that it established a condition that, while allowing for content, is not the cause of the content's identity. Hence, it can be argued, for example, that nomos is the transcendental condition of human sociality. Hence, a defence of the polis – as the space in which this is acted out – is a defence of the space that condition demands. However, it does not follow from the presence of this condition that all nomoi can be or need be either defended or supported. Indeed, the insistence of a transcendental condition and its necessitating a produced space of enactment will provide the conditions in relation to which the claim that a specific statute or norm has a generalised force can be evaluated.

4. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001) 173–74 (Kritik der Utreilskraft, Werkausgabe Band X (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974) 225).

5. Ibid.

6. It should be noted that in the Première Partie of his Discours de la méthode, Descartes begins by invoking the question of the shared. While his argument will lead to establishing the necessity of a method for establishing truth, part of the viability of such an approach is that what all humans share is “la puissance de bien juger.” See Oeuvres de Descartes, eds. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J.Vrin, 1996) Tome VI, 2.

7. The interpretation of Kant's conception of the “sensus communis” that has exerted the greatest influence on the analysis presented here is Lyotard's. See his “Sensus communis, le sujet à l’état naissant,” in Misère de la philosophie, Jean-François Lyotard (Paris: Editions Galilée, 2000) 15–41.

8. The concern with being-in-common and its relationship to the public has a lineage in Heraclitus and Aristotle. However, it also plays an important role in analyses of the conception of Mitsein developed by Heidegger in Being and Time. In addition, commonality is a central element of the philosophical project of Jean-Luc Nancy. The key text is his La communauté désoeuvrée (Paris: Christian Bourgois Editeur, 1986); see in particular 201–34. In addition, see his La communauté affrontée (Paris: Editions Galilée, 2002). What is striking about Nancy's way into the question is his insistence on a form of negativity. Hence the question – how can a community be thought without an enforced present? The answer lies in the retention of the ontological. The project of this interpretation of Heraclitus holds to a form of negativity in the precise sense that, for example, the centrality and ineliminability of nomos as the transcendental condition of human sociality can never acquire a final form. That impossibility, which has to be understood as an ontological claim, holds to the impossibility of finality and in so doing opens up the ground on which claims about both finality and the provisional can be judged.

9. The clear instance of this form of argumentation is developed by Plato in the Phaedo 100a1–c5. The position worked out is that the eidos is the cause (aitia) of the beauty of the beautiful thing. Causation works through the process of participation. Nonetheless, an entity is beautiful if and only if the “form” of beauty causes it to be beautiful.

10. While it may pre-empt the argument to advance in the pages that follow, this position can be summarized as follows. The logos named in fragments 1 and 2 needs to be set against the conception of opinion presented, for example, in 17. Starting with 17, the argument is that the failure to recognize the nature of things is because knowledge is taken as arising from the individual, and therefore self-knowledge would be the basis of knowledge. Hence, the opinions of individuals are given primacy. Counter to opinion is not logos as science but the recognition that there is a regulative principle (or principles) in relation to which things occur, and therefore there are transcendental regulative principles that form the basis both of what is known and of its being known. Within the fragments, this position is articulated in terms of propositions that involve the use of the preposition kata. Hence, in fragment 1, when Heraclitus claims that everything occurs kata ton logon, what he is arguing is that the logos is the regulative principle that accounts for what there is. The nature of these regulative principles (and it should be noted that Heraclitus uses the same formulation in relation to both eris (“conflict”) and dikê (“justice”)) will be developed in the argument to come as transcendental conditions. (In regard to the translation of these terms see n. 16 below.)

11. On the substitution, see Kahn 104 and Conche 63.

12. Aristotle, Politics 1253a37.

13. Conche 57–59.

14. chrê ton polemon eonta xunon, kai dikên erin, kai ginomena panta kat’ erin kai chreômena.

15. polemos pantôn men patêr esti, pantôn de basileus.

16. There is a genuine translation problem with dikê and nomos. To translate them as “law” and “justice” does not allow the complexity that they stage to emerge. The argument implicit here, and which is being worked out in the pages that follow, is that both terms need to be understood as differing formulations of transcendental conditions for human sociality. Hence, nomos and dikê need to be held apart from the equation of law with statute.

17. Pietro Pucci, Hesiod and the Language of Poetry (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1977) 45–60.

18. The understanding of fire as both a cosmological principle and a possible literal presence is projected back onto Heraclitus during the Renaissance. For example, in 1499, Polydore Vergil in On Discovery (De Inventorbius Rerum) suggests that while Thales thought the “initium rerum” was indeed water, Heraclitus believed it to be “fire.” See Polydore Vergil, On Discovery, ed. and trans. Brian P Copenhaver (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002) 39.

19. The distinction is drawn by Dodds in his commentary on Gorgias 448e2–449a4. See E.R. Dodds, Plato, Gorgias (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979) 198. I have discussed the centrality of this mode of questioning within Plato in relation to an interpretation of the Euthyphro in my “A Missed Encounter: Plato's Socrates and Geach's Euthyphro,” Grazer Philosophische Studien 29 (1987): 145–70.

20. The difference between the Platonic use of aei and the use found in Heraclitus is fundamental here. In the Cratylus, the nature of the ousia of a name – hence the ontological quality of the form/idea is described as always the same as itself, aei estin hoion estin (439d). In other words, the ousia or “essential being,” that which the name names, must be always the same as itself. The “always” (aei) in question is the eternal nature of the form. It is its eternal and thus unchanging quality that defines the object of philosophical research.