Physics and Formal Adventure: From Aristotle to Heidegger with Derrida and Hegel

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Notes

1. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1927), p.22; Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (London: Blackwell, 1962), p.44.

2. Aristotle, ‘Book II’, Nicomachean Ethics, Books II–IV, trans. C. C. W. Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon, 2006), (1103a 20–24).

3. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (1103a 19–20).

4. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (1103a 17–19).

5. The editor of the Clarendon edition, C. C. W. Taylor, notes that Aristotle takes it that a morphological dependency reflects a causal one (60). It is indeed difficult to underestimate the formal consistency and continuity between the morphological and the ethical spheres in the Ethics.

6. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (1103b 25).

7. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (1103b 6–9).

8. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (1103a 25–31).

9. Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book Θ, trans. Stephen Makin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), (51a 4).

10. Aristotle, Metaphysics (51a 4–19).

11. Aristotle, Metaphysics (50b 16–28). Aristotle's formulation here can be related to the more decisively metaphysical argument of the closing sentences of the Physics, which provides the justification for this assertion: ‘The first mover causes a motion that is eternal and causes it during an infinite time. It is clear, therefore, that it is indivisible and is without parts and without magnitude’ (267b 24–26).

12. Martin Heidegger, Aristoteles Metaphysik 1–3: Von Wesen und Wirklichkeit der Kraft (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1981), p.165; Aristotle's Metaphysics 1–3: On the Essence and Actuality of Force, trans. Walter Brogan and Peter Warnek (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p.141.

13. Martin Heidegger, Aristoteles Metaphysik, p.187; Aristotle's Metaphysics, p.160.

14. Martin Heidegger, Aristoteles Metaphysik, p.191; Aristotle's Metaphysics, p.164.

15. Martin Heidegger, Aristoteles Metaphysik, p.219; Aristotle's Metaphysics, p.188.

16. Martin Heidegger, Aristoteles Metaphysik, p.188; Aristotle's Metaphysics, p.160.

17. Heidegger's model of de‐construction (which takes several similar forms, including Destruktion, Aletheia, Lichtung, Ereignis, Abbau, etc.) only begins to resemble the notion of deconstruction associated with Derrida once it is recognized that the procedure is an attack on itself, a kind of auto‐immunity, according to which survival depends on the organism attacking itself or putting itself at risk (a structural condition that in Hegel transcends the nature‐spirit boundary to function both as an inevitable developmental feature in both inorganic and organic nature and as a principle on which the health of entire societies, or Sittlichkeit, depends).

18. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, p.65.

19. The notion of Ansich (taken over more or less faithfully from Fichte's use of it) situates Aristotle as an indispensable foundation for Hegel's concept of the development of philosophy. This is from the 1923 ‘Introduction’ to The History of Philosophy: ‘What at once meets us in a development is that there must be something which is developed, and so something hidden – the seed, the capacity, the potentiality; it is what Aristotle calls dúnamis, i.e., possibility (but real possibility, not some sort of superficial possibility), or what is called the Ansich, what is in itself, and at first only so’ (G. W. F. Hegel, Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy trans. T. M. Knox and A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), pp.71–2). The motif of the seed at length comes up against its double in the letter, the mark, the trace, etc.

20. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, II 6 paragraph 82, especially 82 b: ‘Hegel's Interpretation of the Connection between Time and spirit’.

21. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), p.41.

22. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, p.42.

23. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, p.55.

24. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, p.54.

25. Jacques Derrida, Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972), p.21; Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), p.19.

26. G. W. F Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Nature, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p.193.

27. Jacques Derrida, Marges de la philosophie, p.21.

28. See Jacques Derrida, ‘My Chances/Mes chances: A rendezvous with some Epicurean Stereophonies’, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other vol.1, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), p.360.

29. This remark signifies a turning point in Derrida's philosophical development. The discovery early in 1968 of Hegel's technical use of the Latinate Differenz, in the Jena writings and in the Naturphilosophie especially, marks a decisive step into the Hegelian text, a step that will begin to bear fruit in stages throughout the same year. The three essays published in succession in Marges, ‘Différance’, ‘Ousia and Grammé’ and ‘Le puits et la pyramide’, chart this decisive step.

30. Jacques Derrida, Marges de la philosophie, p.15; Margins of Philosophy, p.14.

31. Jacques Derrida, L'Ecriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967) p.248; Writing and Difference trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978) p.166.

32. ‘What we are analyzing here is the most rigorous philosophy of psychoanalysis today, more precisely the most rigorous Freudian philosophy, doubtless more rigorous than Freud's philosophy, and more scrupulous in its exchanges with the history of philosophy’. Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), footnote 38, p.466.