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INTERROGATING
THE TRADITION
Hermeneutics and the
History of Philosophy
edited by
CHARLES E. SCOTT
and
JOHN SALLIS
State University of New York Press
INTERROGATING
THE TRADITION
SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy
Dennis J. Schmidt, editor
Published by
State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2000 State University of New York
All rights reserved
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Interrogating the tradition: hermeneutics and the history of
philosophy I Charles E. Scott and John Sallis, editors.
p. cm. - (SUNY series in contemporary continental
philosophy)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7914-4401-5 (alk. paper). - ISBN 0-7914-4402-3 (pbk. :
alk. paper)
1. Tradition (Philosophy) 2. Hermeneutics. 3. Heidegger, Martin,
1889-1976. 4. Philosophy, Ancient. I. Scott, Charles E.
II. Sallis, John, 1938- . III. Series.
B105.T7157 2000
190-dc21
99-12816
CIP
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Preface vii
Introduction
PART I. ON HERMENEUTICAL THOUGHT
1. Receiving the Tradition 7
Michael Naas
2. Philosophical Henneneutics and the Question of Community 19
James Risser
3. On Thinking 37
Charles E. Scott
4. The Metaphysical Background of Hermeneutics in Dilthey 59
Ben Vedder
5. Continental or Hermeneutical Philosophy: The Tragedies of
Understanding in the Analytic and Continental Perspectives 75
Jean Grondin
PART II. HEIDEGGER AND THE GREEKS
6. Reception 87
John Sallis
7. Refraining from Dialectic:
Heidegger's Interpretation of Plato in the Sophist Lectures 95
Gunter Figal
8. Heidegger's Interpretation of Aristotle on the
Privative Character of Force and the Twofoldness of Being 111
Walter Brogan
v
VI CONTENTS
9. Heidegger's Understanding of the Aristotelian Concept of Time 131
Tina Chanter
10. Heidegger, Aristotle, and Time in Basic Problems §19 159
John Ellis
II. Heidegger on Anaximander: Being and Justice 179
Franfoise Dastur
12. Krimskrams: Hegel and the Current Controversy
about the Beginnings of Philosophy 191
Robert Bernasconi
PART III. THE QUESTION OF NATURE IN GERMAN IDEALISM
13. Of Mere Form: On Kant's" Analytic of the Beautiful" 211
Rodolphe Gasche
14. Hermeneutical Pressure and the Space of Dialectic:
What Hegel Means by "Spirit" 235
John Russon
15. Schelling and the Force of Nature 255
Jason M. Wirth
16. Contagium: Dire Forces of Nature in
Novalis, Schelling, and Hegel 275
David Farrell Krell
Contributors 297
Index 301
PREFACE
The contributions to this volume are based on work done at the Collegium
Phaenomenologicum, which for more than twenty years has convened for sev
eral weeks each summer at one of several sites near Perugia, Italy. Originat
ing as presentations given at the Collegium, they have been elaborated on the
basis of discussions following those presentations and of subsequent reflec
tions provoked by the interchanges at the Collegium. The volume constitutes
a commemoration of the Collegium's twentieth anniversary, a graphic com
plement to the actual celebration that took place in the ancient library of the
Franciscan monastery Monteripido on 29 July 1995.
Chapter 2, "Philosophical Hermeneutics and the Question of Commu
nity," by James Risser, appeared earlier in Existentia 6-7 (1996-97).
vii
INTRODUCTION
To interrogate the tradition is to bring questions to bear on it. It is to address
questions to the legacy that, in its extent and its effectiveness, determines
what is meant by the we of philosophical discourse. For the tradition-our tra
dition-predetermines and limits questioning; tradition orients and directs
questioning, thus, at once, both enabling it and limiting it, enabling it pre
cisely in limiting it, and conversely. When questioning comes into play and is
addressed to the very tradition that enables it (while limiting it), its comport
ment is such that it distances itself from the tradition, sets the tradition at the
distance opened by questioning and the suspension of covert acceptances,
even while continuing to receive from the tradition its own delimitation.
Thus, when we turn to our philosophical tradition with questions
when we interrogate it-we turn, at once, within it, from it, and toward it.
While the tradition delimits the possibilities open to questioning, questioning
turns from the tradition, takes its distance, so as to turn interrogatively back
toward the tradition. This interrogative turn within, from, and toward our tra
dition also turns that tradition itself. This complex turning-turning from out
of the tradition so as to tum toward it while thereby turning it to our time
through questioning, giving a different life to the origins-constitutes the
principal movement in which the papers in this volume, each in its own way,
take part. Through engagement in such hermeneutical thinking, the authors
not only interrogate the tradition but also give a contemporary beginning to
the very tradition that functions originarily in their thought. In this way they
renew our engagement with traditional thought in such a manner as to dispel
its aura of stability and self-evidentness and thus to reawaken the wonder and
the questioning that animate that thought.
The papers that constitute part I of this volume are devoted to delimiting
hermeneutical thought either in its global structure or in its historical actuality
and development. Michael Naas ventures a rereading of Derrida's text "Plato's
Pharmacy" in order to show how this text deals primarily with the reception of
Plato in the tradition, a reception that is itself already in a sense anticipated and
to some degree determined by the Platonic texts themselves. Thus, it turns out
that Derrida's text does not just give an interpretation of Plato but also analyzes
the conditions under which such interpretation takes place. James Risser
explores the connection between hermeneutics and community. Observing that
2 INTRODUCTION
in the very relation to tradition one participates in that which is common, he
focuses on Gadamer's thesis that understanding occurs in dialogue; as such,
understanding involves not only the other but the commonality between one
self and the other that makes dialogue possible. Charles Scott focuses on the
way in which thinking constitutes a break with our ordinary ways of knowing
and feeling: in thinking there is a recoil that lets us apprehend events and things
with a distinctive self-awareness. Scott notes, on the other hand, that the situ
ation of thinking is one that brings us to concentrate on the way things appear
and come to pass in our lives. In these connections we not only appropriate tra
ditionallanguage and concepts but also, in and through thinking, help to form
tradition, to redefine concepts, to redetermine language.
Focusing on Dilthey's hermeneutics, Ben Vedder takes as his point of
departure the opposition between metaphysics and the awareness of the his
toricity of thinking. Although this opposition would seem to prescribe that
hermeneutics simply exclude metaphysics, he shows how, on the contrary,
metaphysics comes to have a place in hermeneutics, specifically, how meta
physics supplements hermeneutics through the formation of worldviews,
which serve to interpret the mysteries of life within the all-encompassing
whole. In this connection he thus explores the dynamics of the exclusion of
metaphysics from, and of its return to, hermeneutics. In the final paper of
part I, Jean Grondin reflects on the situation of so-called Continental philos
ophy in North America and on the significance and peculiarity of this desig
nation. In this regard he focuses on the tension between phenomenology (as
return to the things themselves) and hermeneutics (as interpretive), a tension
that the designation Continental tends to conceal. Through a discussion of
hermeneutics in Heidegger and Gadamer, he comes to propose that the desig
nation henneneutics could serve as an appropriate title for what has been
called Continental philosophy, namely, an interpretation of experience that
hinges on the limits of understanding.
Part II consists of a series of papers that take up in various ways the spe
cific interrogation of the tradition that is launched in Heidegger's interpreta
tions of Greek thought. John Sallis carries out a reflection on the enigma of
reception, following its trace back through the Republic to the Timaean dis
xropa.
course on the GUnter Figal shows how Heidegger's involvement with
Plato grew out of his early concern with Lebensphilosophie and with the
hermeneutics of facticity. He identifies the way in which this concern appears
in Heidegger's reading of Plato's Sophist, namely, in the stress on the act of
discovery that would expose the self-concealing Sophist. The result, he con
cludes, is that truth appears not as a state of things but as an act of life. He
shows then how it is from such an opening that Heidegger's reading of the
dialogue proceeds.
There follow three papers devoted to Heidegger's interpretation of
Aristotle, whom Heidegger repeatedly acknowledged as having provided a
