Discourse and disclosure, Law and Gospel, and the like
(notes on The Culmination¹

a question of discovering, beneath the developments which a supple phraseology had extended and infinitely varied, the fundamental data of the myth: the scheme which generates the amplification ²

stuck inside of Absturz with the Anfang blues again ³

M. L. West tells us that especially characteristic of Indo-European poetry “is the use of polar expressions, that is, pairings of contrasted terms, as an emphatic expression of the totality that they make up.”  E.g., ‘gods and men' (θεοί τε καὶ ἀνέρες, guðanna ok manna ) or ‘immortals and mortals' ( amṛtam mártiyaṃ ) for ‘all intelligent beings.' “The biosphere as a whole,” he writes, “is covered in Vedic idiom by the merism jágatas tasthúṣaḥ . . . ‘what moves or stands still', that is, animals and plants.”  West ventures that “bipolarity (not [ contra G. Dumézil and his school] trifunctionality) is the fundamental structuring principle of Indo-European thought.” ⁴  

Bernard Williams, in the merismically titled Shame and Necessity , observes that “A set of oppositions structures much of Plato's philosophy, and they are supposed to parallel one another: soul to body, reason to desire, knowledge to belief, philosophy to politics, and (at least some of the time) argument to persuasion.”  Williams adds, “In each, of course, the first is superior to the second.” ⁵

A different set of contrasting terms structures all Heidegger's thinking (he said he had no philosophy ⁶ ); as the skeleton of, e.g., Being and Time:—Wirklichkeit and Möglichkeit, the apophantic als and the hermeneutic als, vorhanden and zuhanden , Verstehen and Befinden, Uneigentlich and Eigentlich, ⁷   Tradition and Erbe, Historie and Geschichte, existentiell and existential, ontisch and ontologisch, Seiende and Sein .  In this set the second, inapparent term contrasts with the first, and all pairs in some sense parallel one another to express the totality they make up, the ‘canonical critter' ⁸  being-in-the-world.  What sense?

Robert Pippin's new book documents the merism ‘discourse and disclosure' as expressing Heidegger's vision of the totality of Denken.   In Heidegger's view, Pippin writes, Hegel “draws exactly the wrong lesson from the unthinkability of Being as such.”  For Being's “unavailability to discourse , and by contrast its presencing in disclosure, is precisely the point.” ⁹

Tradition, Heidegger writes, “blocks our access [ verlegt den Zugang ] to those primordial ‘sources' [ den ursprünglichen »Quellen« ] from which the categories and concepts handed down to us have been in part quite genuinely drawn.” ¹⁰   So we can, as Pippin says, “in effect ‘clear the ground' for the possibility of a new ‘attunement' by the ‘destruction' of the metaphysical tradition.” ¹¹  To put this project in the imagery of an old story, ¹²  Heidegger set out Indra-like to slay the source-blocking Dragon, and thereby to ‘release the waters' for the relief of stultified humanity. ¹³   You won the cows, hero, you won the Soma, you freed the seven streams to flow. ¹⁴

What Dragon?  

“Plato and Aristotle set us in a direction we have found it impossible to free ourselves from—the metaphysics of presence, the primordial mattering of intelligibility;”  “the cardinal sin of the metaphysical tradition, culminating in Kant and Hegel,” that the meaning of being as such is to be “thought of in terms of discursivity;” “what Dahlstrom has called ‘the logical prejudice,' that only what is fit to be the content of an assertion can count as a being;” “The insistence, thanks to the philosophical tradition, that things are manifest for Dasein primarily in their cognitive intelligibility;” “the principle of cognizability as the meaning of being;” “determinately standing being [ ständige or beständige Anwesenheit ] as thinkability;” “by far the greatest ‘errancy' in the Western philosophical tradition: the priority of logos as ratio in the understanding of the meaning of Being.” ¹⁵

What source?

“In the domain of greatest importance to Heidegger, how things matter, how much they matter, why they matter, and so forth—the primary mode of availability in the everyday world—is available to us only in disclosures, not as objects of propositional attitude;” “another of Heidegger's most radical innovations is his insistence that our access to such a disclosure, the mode of being of Dasein ‘open' to such an unconcealment, is not cognitive, at least not as that notion is commonly understood;” “So we have now a series of attempts, not at all exhaustive, to pin down the distinctive way in which the question of the meaning of Being can be formulated. As:

Manifestness as such

Presencing

Availability

Meaningfulness

Pre-discursive familiarity/intelligibility

Phusis

Prevailing

Disclosedness

Openedness (Aufgeschlossenheit)

Announcing itself/appearing

Clearing (Lichtung/lighting).”¹⁶

What relief?  

Here Pippin is more circumspect.  He leaves “relatively open” the question of “what, if Heidegger is basically right, all this would mean in living out one's life, in somehow being attuned to some disclosure of some intimation of possible meaningfulness, inseparable from the unclarity and confusion (not indeterminacy) of concealment.” ¹⁷  In the context of ‘some disclosure of some intimation of possible meaningfulness' Pippin discusses the ‘think the wall'  passage from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge which Heidegger takes up in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology.   (Only bare walls of a decrepit building.  And yet . . .)  Heidegger tried his own hand in the ‘think the shoes' passage of The Origin of the Work of Art : “A pair of peasant shoes and nothing more.  Und dennoch.” ¹⁸   There again the da Vinci effect¹⁹  summons aus der dunklen Öffnung  a (briefer) variant of Rilke's wall-disclosure. ²⁰   To borrow a favorite word of Pippin's in this book, Rilke's and Heidegger's reveries are variant exfoliations.

And yet the Seinsgeschichte strikes us as the inverse operation, a de foliation of the jungle of metaphysical tradition so as to lay bare the topography.  Or, to change  the figure, to reveal  le schème générateur de l'amplification .  In the Seinsgeschichte's scheme ‘discourse and disclosure' takes form as ‘metaphysics and ἀλήθεια.'  Insofar as ἀλήθεια and Anfang—like freedom and whisky—gang thegither , ἀλήθεια appears twice in the scheme, as first and as other (new) Anfang.  Anfang/ἀλήθεια is both whence and whither, wohin and woher , of the history of Being.

Taking the first and the other Anfang as fundamental data of the myth we can gloss them, respectively, with two sentences from Williams:—“One of the most persistent fantasies, at least of the Western world, is that there was a time when things were both more beautiful and less fragmented;” ²¹  and “Philosophy, and in particular moral philosophy, is still deeply attached to giving good news.” ²²  (Why does the fantasy persist?  Why is philosophy still attached to evangelizing? ²³ )  Metaphysics, the other fundamental datum per the Seinsgeschichte , holds dominion between the first and other Anfang.

Richard Wolin is only the latest to note that “Heideggerian Seinsgeschichte embodied a . . . version of Christian Heilsgeschichte.” ²⁴   In particular, though this is not in Wolin's account, Heidegger maps Saint Paul's version of the myth into philosophy.  Most importantly, Heidegger's mapping brings ‘discourse and disclosure' within the ambit of Harnack's Law: Das Religionsprincip, welches in dem Gegensatz von Gesetz und Evangelium alle höhere Wahrheit zusammenfaßt, ist auch das Princip der Erklärung des gesamtens Seins und Geschehens. ²⁵  Leading to the question, What other pairs may manifest in parallel with discourse and disclosure, metaphysics and ἀλήθεια, Law and Gospel?

The scheme of ‘first Anfang/metaphysics/other Anfang ' has its isomorph in Paul as ‘promise of God/the Law/faith in Christ.'  Paul sets out the myth most clearly in Galatians 3:21-29 (RSV; I have modified the translation slightly as indicated):

“Is the law ²⁶  then against the promise of God (ὁ οὖν νόμος κατὰ τῶν ἐπαγγελιῶν [τοῦ θεοῦ])?  Certainly not; for if a law had been given which could make alive (ζωοποιῆσαι), then righteousness would indeed be by the law (ἐν νόμῳ ἂν ἦν ἡ δικαιοσύνη).  But the scripture (ἡ γραφὴ) consigned (συνέκλεισεν) all things to sin, that what was promised to faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who [dwell in faith] (ἡ ἐπαγγελία ἐκ πίστεως Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ δοθῇ τοῖς πιστεύουσιν).  Now before faith came, we were confined under the law, kept under restraint until faith should be revealed.  So that the law was our [master, παιδαγωγός] until Christ came, that we might be [made right] by faith (ἵνα ἐκ πίστεως δικαιωθῶμεν).  But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a [minder, παιδαγωγός]; for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith (διὰ τῆς πίστεως). . . . And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to promise (κατ᾽ ἐπαγγελίαν κληρονόμοι).”

By this light we can read the genealogy “from Abraham to the Messiah” at Matthew  1:2-17 as tracing the descent of ἡ ἐπαγγελία τοῦ θεοῦ, the jewel of the heritage, God's promise of blessing which has never changed but which came to be occluded by the law.   For the gravamen of Paul's argument in Romans, H. J. Schoeps writes,

“is that righteousness can be attained apart from the law and as a pure gift of grace, just as was promised to Abraham.   For faith was reckoned to him as righteousness when he was still in an uncircumcised state (Gen. 16:6) [i.e., unmarked to the law].  . . . The confident trust in the promise which is older than the law , was in itself already sufficient for the attainment of righteousness. [my emphasis]  Hence, deduces Paul, true righteousness springs from faith and not from the law (Rom. 5:20).  ‘For we hold that a man is justified by faith apart from works of law' (Rom. 3:28).” ²⁷

Jesus reportedly taught that he came not to destroy but to fulfill (πληρῶσαι) the law and the prophets. ²⁸    In this role of ‘Culminator' ²⁹  Jesus brought the completion, the perfection of the law;  die »Vollendung« der Gesetz ³⁰  so to speak; lex mosaica per Jesum prophetam reformata. ³¹   Paul mistakes³²  the gist of this teaching, whatever the wording by which it was transmitted to him, for τέλος γὰρ νόμου Χριστός (Rom. 10:4); Christ as the end of the law in the sense of superseding and dispensing with the law, abolishing the law.  Bye-bye Law, Hello Gentiles.

And further, however distorted Nietzsche's depiction of Paul ³³  might be it contains this truth:  “Escape to a different milieu . . . , even with imperfect adaptation, can be more advantageous than improved adaptation to a grossly hopeless or deteriorating situation.” ³⁴   Σῶθι σεαυτόν.  For Paul and Heidegger the law and metaphysics ‘been on the job too long,' with consequent lethal curse.

“Thrown,” Schoeps writes, “by the pressures of his fate into a many-sided situation in life, in many respects aggressive, in others the victim of aggression, [Paul] finally became the first and the greatest Christian theologian.  But his theology was that of a completely unique situation which will never recur.” ³⁵   No doubt the second sentence is correct in that the details will never repeat.  And yet, as Kenner observes, “history's stuff, human experience, is self-similar;” ³⁶  Existenz is eternal recurrence of family resemblance.

Wege — nicht Werke. As for Wege, Heidegger says philosophical investigation must understand daß  sie nur dazu da ist, damit eine neue Nähe nicht willkürlichen sondern sachlichen Fortgangs möglich wird ;³⁷   it exists only for the sake of possibilizing a way forward to an undiscovered intimation, eine neue Nähe.   As for Werke, don't get him started—

“The dominance [Herrschaft ] of this epistemological problem [the subject-object schema] (and corresponding ones in other disciplines) is characteristic of a widely observed kind of activity through which academic disciplines, especially philosophy, gain a foothold in life and preserve themselves [ sich am Leben erhält ].  90% of the literature is preoccupied with ensuring that such wrong-headed problems not disappear and are confounded still more and in ever new ways.  Such literature dominates the industry [ beherrscht den Betrieb ]—everyone sees and gauges the progress and vitality of academic disciplines with it.” ³⁸

The metaphysico-industrial complex dominates so as to ensure its survival, σώζειν τὸν παράδειγμα .   Thank goodness then for those stealthy slayers “who quietly put a stranglehold on such pseudo-problems (Husserl's Logical Investigations !) and see to it for those who have understood something of all this that they no longer investigate such things.” ³⁹   Too bad Husserl's phenomenology worked out to be yet another version of the subject-object schema. ⁴⁰

Werke und Wege , another merism parallel to discourse and disclosure, γράμμα and πνεῦμα, ⁴¹  εἶδος and πίστις, ἔργα νόμου and ἡ ὁδός (καὶ ἡ ἀλήθεια καὶ ἡ ζωή), and, widest track of all, exploitation and exploration:

“A central concern of adaptive intelligence within a path-dependent, meandering history is the relation between the exploration of new possibilities and the exploitation of old certainties. Exploration includes things captured by such terms as search, variation, risk taking, experimentation, play, flexibility, discovery, and innovation. Exploitation includes such things as refinement, choice, production, efficiency, selection, implementation, and execution.” ⁴²

‘Living out one's life,' Werke und Wege, is then a species of self-organizing process—in Hedegger's terms “self-interpreting, self-articulating” ⁴³ —through “exploration of different states followed by the selective stabilization of one of them.” ⁴⁴  Serial polystabilizations, that is, and ever only stable ish .  Such is the dynamical scheme which generates the amplification, ramification, exfoliation.

DCW  03/04/2024

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