Presocratic Reflexivity: The Construction of Philosophical Discourse c. 600-450 B.C. by Barry Sandywell

Author:Barry Sandywell [Sandywell, Barry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9780415101707
Google: sP_oTAQ5LkYC
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1996-01-15T04:39:23+00:00

The essence of being is physis. Appearing is the power that emerges. Appearing makes manifest. Already we know then that being, appearing, causes to emerge from concealment… Truth as un-concealment is not an appendage to being. Truth is inherent to the essence of being.

(Heidegger, 1973a: 102)

For Heidegger, the words physis and logos articulate the same process of disclosure Physis consists in the event of unconcealment (which the Greeks also expressed by the word for ‘truth’, aletheia); and logos, in one of its senses, is the articulation of what is offered to view, a grasp of the intelligibility of beings. It is these older meanings of the words physis, logos, and aletheia that have been occluded by the later terminology of ‘physics’, ‘logic’, and ‘truth’. This is why the stress should be placed on the Archaic sense of legein as ‘to gather’. This, Heidegger claims, is the basic meaning of logos, collecting, to collect, to gather (1973a: 125). And the theme of ‘gathering’ represents the ‘inner bond’ between logos and physis (1973a: 126). Physis is also an expression of the emergence of being, a view homologous to the idea of logos as ‘the original collecting collectedness which is in itself permanently dominant’ (1973a: 128). Physical things, entitles, beings can ‘come to be’ only as the Logos is always-already at work. Logos is ‘steady gathering, the intrinsic togetherness of the essent, i.e. being’ (1973a: 130). This is the sense in which being and thinking belong together. Heidegger’s reading foregrounds the central role of human being in the ‘gathering process’; human reality as the site of reflexivity is the ‘place’ where the disclosure of beings comes into view. Being reveals itself only through those who are open to the event of disclosure; and attending to the gatheredness of Being is both the exclusive vocation and the most difficult and interminable task for human beings:

There can be true speaking and hearing only if they are directed in advance toward being, the logos. Only where the logos discloses itself does the phonetic sound become a word… Being is not tangible, it cannot be heard with the ears or smelled… Because being is logos, harmonia, aletheia, phusis, phainesthai, it does not show itself as one pleases.

In Heidegger’s gloss, European metaphysics begins when the great unity of Logos and Phusis falls apart to create the modern bifurcated world which speaks of being and thinking, object and subject, world and self. The diremption of the Logos makes way for a conception of language in terms of the phone semantike—a phonocentrism dominated by vocalization, the voice and ‘expression’ as the externalization of thought through a system of signs and significations. The modern conception of the exteriorization of ‘thought’ by ‘means of communication’ and the whole apparatus of ‘data and information processing’ presupposes this reduced understanding of the Logos as a condition of its possibility. By thinking within a matrix antedating these metaphysical distinctions, Heraclitus is unconcerned with the question of reflection as a relation between subject and object, but

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.