The early Heidegger's Aristotle: the logic of - Minerva Access

325 Pages·2014·1.27 MB·English

The Early Heidegger’s Aristotle: the Logic of Possibility

James Nicholas Garrett

Submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

May 2013
The School of Historical and Philosophical Studies,
The University of Melbourne

Produced on Archival Quality Paper

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Declaration
This is to certify that:
• the thesis comprises only my original work towards the PhD,
• due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material used,
• the thesis is fewer than 100 000 words in length, exclusive of tables, maps,
bibliographies and appendices.

Signed,

James Garrett.

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Abstract
The argument of this thesis is that Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle in the early
1920s is best understood after we have come to terms with the critique that
Heidegger develops against theoretical attitude. By understanding how Heidegger
determines the limitations of the theoretical attitude we can grasp the scope of
Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology that takes up the task of overcoming of
those limitations. In particular this thesis follows the development of an underlying
opposition in Heidegger’s work from 1919 to 1924. This opposition is staged around
competing interpretations of the structural elements at work in the actualisation of
research. Specifically these structural-logical elements are the understanding of
unity and simplicity within the contexts of vision, speech and action that underlie the
way that research takes up an object and understands its own possibilities and ends.
When read in this way Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle is a demonstration of
possibilities of research that are invisible to theoretical attitude. As we have
followed Heidegger’s reconstructions of Aristotle what emerges is a representation
of Aristotle’s work where Heidegger attempts to alter our presuppositions about the
possibility of research and thereby alter our understanding of Aristotle’s texts. The
fundamental strategy of this alteration of presuppositions is to draw out the
incompatibility of the structural-logical elements as employed by the modern
philosophical positions criticised by Heidegger and the research carried out by
Aristotle; this thesis makes this strategy explicit.
To carry out the argument we move from establishing an understanding of
Heidegger’s critique of the theoretical attitude in chapter one, to examining the
ways that alternative research projects may be carried out in chapter two, and then
finally to closely examining Heidegger’s readings of Aristotle in 1923 and 1924 in
chapters three and four. The four chapters together show how Heidegger’s
arguments about the role of formalisation in research lead directly into the
fundamental element in Heidegger’s early reading of Aristotle, which is the
conception the human being as being primarily in logos. With this new
understanding of the nature of the human being insofar as it can do research and be
the object of research comes an accompanying theory of both the nature of
language and a rejection of the division of mind and world.

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Table of Contents
Introduction 7
Review of Literature
Chapter 1: The Unity of the Opposition 55
1.1: The Unity of Conflict
1.2: Heidegger’s Critical Beginning
1.3: Formal Indication versus the Theoretical Attitude
1.4: The Conflict in Reading Aristotle
Chapter 2: The Unity of Interpretation 116
2.1: The Turn to Aristotle
2.2: Towards a New Logic
2.3: Formal Indication and Hermeneutics
2.4: The Definition of Philosophy
2.5: Category Research
Chapter 3: The Unity of the Psuchē 167
3.1: Seeing and Speaking
Chapter 4: The Unity of Aristotelian Research 202
4.1: Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy
4.2: Ousia and Logos
4.3: The Being of Being-There
4.4: The Interpretation of Concrete Being-There
Conclusion 292
Endnotes 299
Bibliography 319
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Introduction
This thesis contributes to the growing literature on the early Heidegger and the
early Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle in particular. The publication and translation
of the relevant lecture course notes and transcripts and other assorted texts from
1919 to 1926 has revealed that many of the examples, critiques, terms and
conceptual strategies of Being and Time had been reworked in several versions in
the years leading up to 1926. Heidegger’s close readings of Aristotle, carried out
especially between the years of 1921 and 1925, make up a significant portion of this
material. From 1922 to 1924 Heidegger attempted to write a book titled
Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle that was to be his first major
publication. The contents of the work as we have them from the texts during this
period clearly show that the Aristotle book was not intended as a side project but
rather as a presentation of Heidegger’s new approach to phenomenology. This
thesis sets out to understand the nature of the early Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle,
or put another way, how did Aristotle become the vehicle, for a few years at least,
for the development of Heidegger’s own philosophy.
The argument of this thesis can be summarised in three points. First, Heidegger’s
representation of Aristotle in the surviving lecture course manuscripts and
transcripts is best couched within Heidegger’s own project of developing a
hermeneutic phenomenology. We shall examine below Heidegger’s analysis of what
he calls the ‘hermeneutic situation’ to show that for Heidegger the task of
interpreting philosophy, and thus the work of Aristotle, is closely aligned with a
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phenomenological understanding of the conditions of possibility for research.
Second, Heidegger’s criticisms of his own philosophical contemporaries should also
be understood on the basis of Heidegger’s own project. It is important to recognise
that Heidegger seeks to explain the conditions of possibility of what his philosophical
contemporaries and Aristotle say rather than arguing with them directly. In order to
grasp this step we shall briefly examine how Heidegger uses the structure of
intentionality to define how these modern prejudices function within the ‘theoretical
attitude’. Third, the thesis argues that throughout his readings of Aristotle
Heidegger is focused on articulating an opposition between Aristotle and certain
modern ontological prejudices. Thus this thesis examines Heidegger’s reading of
Aristotle within the scope of the hermeneutic situation and in opposition to the
possibilities of philosophical thought within the theoretical attitude. The thesis as a
whole demonstrates that Heidegger’s readings of Aristotle in the early 1920s is best
understood in opposition to the kind of research, which, according to Heidegger’s
diagnosis, remains limited and determined by the theoretical attitude. By
understanding the stakes of the opposition, fought especially over the nature of
language, we can elucidate the reasons behind the manner in which Heidegger
reconstructs the nature of Aristotle’s philosophy.
The structure of the thesis is made up of four chapters that are roughly
chronological with respect to Heidegger’s lectures from 1919 to 1924. In the first
half of the thesis, chapters one and two, we trace Heidegger’s critiques of the
theoretical attitude back to their context in Heidegger’s underlying hermeneutical
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approach and thereby elucidate the context into which Heidegger’s reading of
Aristotle in the early 1920s begins. Here we should not think of Aristotle in terms of
simply an influence upon or an ally of Heidegger, but rather we should pay attention
to the fact that Heidegger thinks that his own project can be expressed by
articulating the difference between how Aristotle confronts the possibility of
research and the way in which the possibility of research is confronted within the
theoretical attitude. On the one hand we shall see that it is only on the basis of
Heidegger’s own understanding of the problems of research in relationship with
assumptions about the being of beings that Heidegger’s representations of Aristotle
and the theoretical attitude become clear. On the other hand we shall see that
Heidegger’s articulation of the difference between the two perspectives provides the
way that Heidegger presented his own understanding of research during the pre-
Being and Time period.
‘Research’ here means an attempt to reveal beings in themselves. The
opposition of research perspectives that Heidegger stages in the early 1920s plays
out in relation to errors that have inhibited reflection upon what research really is.
In particular, Heidegger attempts to reorient the possibility of understanding the
object of human facticity and the method suitable for its analysis. In principle
everything understood or experienced in any way belongs to human facticity.
However, the possibility of turning back upon facticity itself and interpreting it in a
way appropriate to the kind of being it is must be clarified in its scope; the historical
question of the human being as a being among other beings is different from the
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question of the human being to which all beings appear. It is the latter possibility
that makes the possibility of investigating the human being ontological in scope. It is
against this possibility, which provides a way in which beings can be gathered into a
whole, that Heidegger measures Aristotle, the theoretical attitude and
phenomenology.
What this thesis uncovers is that Heidegger’s early reading of Aristotle in 1922-24
provides an intervention into the way in which the theoretical attitude understands
the basic structures of the linguistic articulation of knowledge. While
phenomenology may begin with the recognition of other intentional stances
alongside the theoretical stance of just looking, the theoretical attitude is of special
interest to Heidegger because it is entwined with the decision to do research, i.e. to
switch from dealing with beings to trying to clarify and understand those beings. We
shall see again and again Heidegger articulating the opposition between the
Aristotelian option where a being that has become thematic can either be
considered as embedded within the scope of its relations and ultimately as
dependent upon the fact that understanding is always of being as a whole and the
option of the theoretical attitude where the manner in which a being can be
encapsulated within present intuition and have its relations determined within the
regional structure of already established scientific possibilities. Underlying this
opposition is a persistent argument by Heidegger that the manner in which the
object of research is taken up is determined by the prejudices about the basic
accessibility and form of beings.
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