The End of Instrumentality? Heidegger on Phronēsis and Calculative Thinking

ABSTRACT

The aim of Dimitris Vardoulakis’s paper, ‘Toward a Critique of the Ineffectual: Heidegger’s Reading of Aristotle and the Construction of an Action without Ends’, is to provide the foundation for a critique of aimless action by tracing its genesis to Heidegger’s putative misinterpretation of Aristotelian phronēsis (practical wisdom) in the 1920s. Inasmuch as ‘the ineffectual’—the name Vardoulakis gives to action devoid of ends—plays a crucial role in post-Heideggerian continental philosophy, he thereby seeks to diagnose and to provide an aetiology of an illness afflicting contemporary thought. In my response, I will first argue that, while Vardoulakis is right to identify an emphasis on the ineffectual in Heidegger, he is mistaken about its origin. Heidegger does not strip phronēsis of instrumentality, nor does he mistranslate Nichomachean Ethics 1139a31–32. Second, I trace an alternative source for the ineffectual, which is not simply a negative alternative to technological machination but stems from a positive experience of what Meister Eckhart, and Heidegger in his wake, called life without why. Finally, I look at a couple of texts, including one discussed by Vardoulakis, in which even the later Heidegger is not entirely dismissive of calculative instrumentality but instead assigns the latter to a secondary, restricted site of competence.

KEYWORDS:

• phronēsis
• calculation
• Aristotle
• Meister Eckhart

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Cf. the recent critique by Roberto Esposito [2021: part 1].

2 Aristotle [1957] (my translation below).

3 See also Vardoulakis [2022: 235]: ‘Aristotle asserts that the possibility of the truth of phronesis hinges on the heneka tinos or the instrumental ends of action as distinct from hou heneka or the final end of action’.

4 References to Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe [Heidegger 1975–] are shown with GA, followed by volume and page number.

5 In GA 62: 376, it appears as ‘fürsorgende Umsicht’, ‘solicitous circumspection’.

6 ‘Dasein und Wahrsein (nach Aristotleles)’, in GA 80.1: 78–79. A transcript of one of the deliveries of the lecture, located in the papers of Franz Josef Brecht, has been translated by Brian Bowles in Kisiel and Sheehan [2009]. The corresponding passage on p. 226 of the latter is markedly different:

The subject of phronēsis is the prakton. In acting—or more accurately in deciding—I anticipate the archē. I decide to de­light my friend on his birthday or to help him with something, which might not be something practical but might be of an ethical nature. In the course of deliberation, the kairos [the opportune moment] becomes clear. The circumstances of the action are discovered through practical insight guided by the agathon for which I have decided. The conclusion of the deliberation on the decision is the action itself.

7 In Heidegger [2003: 101/GA 19: 146], Heidegger does mention gift-giving as an example, not of the practical syllogism, but of one of the five characteristics of action. According to Heidegger, action includes ‘that which must be adduced and made ready as means and way [Mittel und Weg] in order to act (di’ hou). For example, in order to please another with a gift, the objects in question must be available’ (trans. mod.).

8 See, e.g., GA 19: 138–39, where Heidegger characterizes eudaimonia as the ‘hou heneka for the human’ (rendered on p. 95 of the translation [Heidegger 2003] as ‘what is in itself the best for man’).

9 In addition to the passages cited above, see Heidegger [2003: 101/GA 19: 147]: ‘The archē of the action is the hou heneka, the “for the sake of which”; this hou heneka is at the beginning of the action the proaireton, that which I anticipate in my choice. I am now supposed to make such and such happen for this or that person in such and such a way’. For Heidegger’s use of the phrase heneka tinos, see Heidegger [2003: 29/GA 19: 41] (where it characterizes the product of technē) and GA 62: 409 (where it refers to a ‘wherefore’ of nous praktikos).

10 Heidegger cites a portion of this quotation in GA 81: 187, and he paraphrased it already in 1919 (GA 56/57: 75).

11 See especially Heidegger’s first ‘Country Path Conversation’, in GA 77.

12 As Heidegger would refer to Eckhart. See GA 13: 89 and Heidegger and Jaspers [1990: 39, 181–82].

13 ‘Heidegger’s mistake is to think that the central problem was the forgetting of being, whereas the key question was about the forgetting of instrumentality’ [Vardoulakis 2022: 222].