References
- Martin Heidegger, Besinnung (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1997), p. 222, Engl. trans. Mindfulness, trans. by Parvis Emad and Travis Kalary (New York: Continuum, 2006).
- In Besinnung, Heidegger continues his practice from the 1936–38 manuscript Beiträge zur Philosophie of employing the archaic German spelling for ‘being’, Seyn. This is intended to indicate a more originary sense of being that has since been lost in metaphysics, and it is a practice most likely influenced by his meditations on Hölderlin and Schelling in the late 1930s/early 40s.
- See for example: Robert Gall, “Interrupting Speculation: The Thinking of Heidegger and Greek Tragedy,” Continental Philosophy Review 36 (2003), pp. 177–194; Veronique Foti, “Heidegger, Hölderlin, and Sophoclean Tragedy” in Heidegger Toward the Turn: Essays on the Work of the 1930s, ed. James Risser (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), pp. 163–186; Dennis Schmidt has a chapter on Heidegger and tragedy in Germans and Other Greeks, pp. 225–266. There are many other articles that take up the topic of tragedy with respect to some aspect of Heidegger's thought, usually the political, without attempting an analysis of his understanding of the tragic per se. Among the very best of these are the four interrelated articles published by Reiner Schürmann on the “tragic condition of being”: “A Brutal Awakening to the Tragic Condition of Being”, in Karsten Harries and Christoph Jamme, eds., Martin Heidegger: Politics, Art, and Technology (London: Holmes and Meier 1994), pp. 89–103, “Riveted to a Monstrous Site”, in The Heidegger Case: On Philosophy and Politics, ed. Joseph Margolis and Tom Rockmore (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1992), pp. 313–330, “Technicity, Topology, Tragedy: Heidegger on ‘That Which Saves’ in the Global Reach”, in Arthur Melzer, Jerry Weinberger, M. Richard Zinman, eds., Technology in the Western Political Tradition (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 190–213, “Ultimate Double Binds”, in James Risser, ed., Heidegger Toward the Turn, pp. 243–266.
- Robert Gall's article is the most straightforward attempt to make sense of Heidegger's scattered references to Greek tragedy. While offering several interesting insights, I find his overarching thesis problematic, especially in light of the statement from Besinnung § 69. Gall concludes: “What we find is that, for Heidegger, tragedy is an interruption of speculation, a refusal to philosophize, a way of showing how things are that resonates with the goal of Heidegger's own thinking”. Gall here seems to understand tragedy and philosophy in an almost Platonic opposition, insofar as tragedy marks the absence of and withdrawal from philosophizing. While it is true that, for Heidegger, tragedy has a complicated and even oppositional relationship to metaphysics, I find Gall's generalization insufficiently supported by the texts and even more difficult to resolve with Heidegger's assertion that “tragic philosophy says twice the same”. I also find bewildering his claim that tragedy is “a way of showing how things are” (Gall, 177). This is problematic because 1) it makes tragedy fundamentally mimetic, something Heidegger explicitly rejects, for example, in “The Origin of the Work of Art”; 2) the only way in which tragedy might provide insight into “how things are” is paradoxically by showing the extent to which we cannot ever have a total vision of “how things are”. Heidegger's point is precisely that concealment is the abyssal ground of any aletheic disclosure.
- The fact that references to Greek tragedy occur almost exclusively during the war years has led several commentators to interpret them as overtly or covertly political in their thrust. See for example Foti, Swazo (discussed below), and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art, and Politics, trans. Chris Turner (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990).
- Norman K. Swazo interprets this interest in tragedy during the 1930s and early 40s as directly related to Heidegger's “entanglement with National Socialism”, and in fact argues that his meditations on tragedy are the key to understanding his 1933–34 political engagement and subsequent withdrawal. “Gnothi Seauton: Heidegger's Problem Ours”, in: Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 25 (1994), 263–287. While I understand the temptation to read Heidegger's political errancy as tragic in its ignorance, if not heroic, I do not find that it accords with his thinking to approach tragedy as an allegory, particularly as an allegory for his own political mistakes. In fact, I am reluctant to endorse any reading of Heidegger's interest in tragedy that sees it primarily through an anthropological lens, that is, in terms of the human condition.
- Martin Heidegger, Basic Questions of Philosophy, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Andre Schuwer (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994), p. 186; GA 45: p. 222.
- This is a tension that is always present in Heidegger's work, particularly in his return to the Greeks, including tragic poetry. Schürmann articulates precisely this tension when he observes that “The historical is always measured in Heidegger by the scale of being as it gives itself to and at the same time withholds itself from thinking…. The historiological is measured by a different scale, one that is just the converse of epochal concealing and unconcealing. Here, facts such as inventions, revolutions, and other seizures of power—the will of leaders, the consensus of rational agents, and so on—determine the periods of history. Thus, each time Heidegger ventures in subsequent writings to date the beginning (for instance, with Parmenides) and the end (for instance, ‘in three hundred years’) of the history of being's self-withholding, there lurks a risk of succumbing to a second-order positivism, where acts, including philosophical acts, mark turning points in history”; Reiner Schürmann, “Riveted to a Monstrous Site”, p. 320.
- As Gall observes, “the characters of tragedy undergo what has already happened…. The past rises up as a given in tragedy, but a given that has unforeseen consequences, that plays itself out in unexpected ways to which the characters must submit”, op. cit., p. 179.
- Gall discusses this in his essay on Heidegger and tragedy, but he focuses too much on the relevance of this for the individual, rather than seeing how, as Heidegger makes clear in the Besinnung passage, the significance lies at the level of the history of being and its unfolding within/as metaphysics.
- As Michel Haar notes, “if it is true that, for Heidegger, Reason is not what governs History, neither is it chance or blind destiny. The series of the epochs of Being obeys an inflexible and coherent necessity which, he writes, ‘is like a law and logic’” (p. 68). Haar goes on to observe that “it is in the concept of the eschatology of Being that the Heideggerian thought of History is most in accord with Absolute knowledge and, in another sense, that from which it is most divergent” (75). Michel Haar, The Song of the Earth, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993).
- Gall, among others, makes this mistake when he over-emphasizes the degree to which Heidegger's understanding of the tragic differs from other thinkers, from Aristotle to Nietzsche.
- “The Anaximander Fragment”, in Early Greek Thinking, trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (San Francisco: Harper, 1975), p 13. Hereafter cited EGT. German edition in Holzwege. 3rd ed. (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1957).
- See Charles Scott, “A (Non-) Passing Sense of Tragedy”, in On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Ethics and Politics (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996), p. 50: “The sense of an originary being has within it the projection of a full encompassment, a completed beginning and end, a present that is essentially a completion, an eternal now.”
- Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 173.