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The Scattered Logos - Dahlstrom
The Scattered Logos - Dahlstrom
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Companion to Heidegger's "Introduction to Metaphysics"
DANIEL DAHLSTROM
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inferences ("valid conditionals," as Quine puts it) that are ultimately explained
along conventional, naturalistic, or transcendental lines.8 In the following
chapter this broadly conceived manner of construing the relation of thinking
to being is dubbed "the logical prejudice," though with a different accent it
might just as well be called the "metaphysical" (or even "humanistic") preju-
dice. By virtue of the prejudice, it bears emphasizing, metaphysics and logic are
construed by Heidegger as two sides of the same coin. If an inability to ask
what it means to be defines Western metaphysics, it is because metaphysical
thinking is logical, all-too-logical—or so Heidegger would have us believe. As
he puts it a decade later, "Metaphysics is in its essential core 'logic'" and "logic
is the metaphysics of the logos"9
This thesis obviously requires considerable elaboration. Yet even at the
general level at which it is presented here for purposes of introduction, there
are some ready responses to it. In the first place, it may be argued, the reason
logic enjoys its privileged status is precisely because, thanks to its formal char-
acter, it is metaphysically neutral—or at least as neutral as possible. From this
vantage point, the supposed symbiosis of metaphysics and logic simply does
not exist.10 In the second place, the argument may be made that to suspend the
logical prejudice is to forfeit any claim to truth or justification for thinking,
including thinking about being. A distinction between correct and incorrect
thinking is a staple of "traditional" or "classical" logic (as evidenced by, for
example, the bivalent truth-functions of propositions and rules of inference
based upon determinations of those functions). Accordingly, for classical logic,
every meaningful, unambiguous proposition (statement, assertion, judgment,
declarative sentence) is either true or false (which is also why some logicians
regard tautologies as meaningless).11 Any effort or pretension to think about
being and to do so in a way that is alogical cannot be defended from charges of
hopeless vagueness or arbitrariness. Thus, if metaphysics is prejudiced in some
sense in favor of logic, it would seem to be a logical prejudice, that is to say, one
that can scarcely be called into question.12
Nevertheless, in the Introduction to Metaphysics Heidegger endeavors to do
just that by recapitulating the history of the prejudice and thereby demonstrat-
ing why it is understandable but not inevitable. The aim of this chapter is to
clarify the nature of this endeavor and examine its efficacy. Section 1 begins
with an attempt to determine what Heidegger understands by "logic" and why
he regards it, so understood, as prejudicially foreclosing any questioning of
what it means to be. Heidegger's strategy is to demonstrate a meaning of
"logos" named and even experienced if not itself thought by early Greek
thinkers, that becomes "scattered" in a subsequent devolution into logical
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tantamount to canons of what can and cannot be the case, necessarily invoke
some sense of being (or, equivalently, truth). Thinking that toes the line of
classical formal logic is, Heidegger insists, incapable of thinking what it in-
vokes, however. (Though Heidegger makes the charge, a cognate idea is not
foreign to some prominent studies of "classical logic." Thus, according to
Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, the logical form of reality is, as it were, "shown,"
but cannot literally be "said.")24 Heidegger's complaint, then, is that thinking
that restricts itself to the structure of assertions and axiomatic principles of
noncontradiction and excluded middle is left impotent to consider the mean-
ings of "being" and "truth" that it presupposes.25 Herein lies the source of the
implausibility, from the point of view of classical formal logic, of making
assertions about being (or "logical form") as though the latter were just another
particular being.26 If genuine (legitimate, pure) thinking is in some sense
bound to its formal and apophantic character, then its very distinctiveness
consists allegedly in its distinction from any content (reference, referentiality,
being).
The fact that classical logic, by virtue of its formal (or symbolic) character,
presupposes but does not itself articulate what it means "to be," is, it might be
countered, precisely its virtue.27 Classical logic puts constraints on science but
does not overdetermine the reality of things that, in the end, it is the business
of science (or some other practice) to establish. Rules or techniques of in-
ference solely in terms of the connectives among propositions presuppose
the truth or falsity of each noncompound proposition, but a so-called truth-
functional logic can establish these rules without any pretensions to being able
to elucidate what it means to determine propositions accordingly. In the case of
so-called predicational or quantificationaJ logic, a similar sort of ontological
neutrality can be claimed.28 The establishment of techniques for making infer-
ences with quantifiers itself establishes neither what exists nor what it means to
say of anything that it exists. A cognate point is made by Quine in his rebuttal
of Carnaps injunction against metaphysical questions, that is, questions using
"category words" (for example, do numbers exist?). There are, Quine notes,
"no external constraints on styles of variables" and thus on categories, though
there is every reason to look for the quantified variables of a theory in order to
determine its "existential force."29
Heidegger, however, does not express any misgivings with logic insofar as it
goes about the business of working out valid forms and techniques of inference.
Nor is he engaged in a campaign against the interests of formal consistency,
correctness, and propriety relative to science (that is, logic s independence from
and its utility to science). His quarrel is with the sort of thinking—on the part
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is every reason to think that logic could emerge only after the distinction
between being and thinking had been drawn and, indeed, drawn in a definite
way and for a particular purpose. It seems hardly accidental, Heidegger ob-
serves, that logic as a discipline is an invention of school teachers, not philoso-
phers, coinciding with the end of Greek philosophy, an era in which philoso-
phy becomes "an affair of the school, of organization and technique" and being
appears as an "idea," becoming the object of "science."36
Heidegger's refusal to attempt to understand the distinction between being
and thinking by assuming that formal logic sets the outermost parameters or
constitutes the end of the analysis of thinking does not mean either that he
intends to outflank formal logic somehow by merely charting its history or that
he intends to make common cause with contemporary opponents of intellec-
tualism.37 He has no pretensions of opposing concepts, judgments, and infer-
ences (elements of traditional logic since Aristotle) with "mere feelings" or with
an account of the history of logic, that is to say, the history of competing
theories of forms of judgment and inference.38 Nevertheless, his examination
of the relation between being and thinking is profoundly historical (seynsge-
schichtlich) in another sense and, indeed, in the sense of the history of thinking
that precedes theoretical judgments, that is to say, judgments already circum-
scribed by a theoretical enterprise and its ontological commitments. Heideg-
ger's strategy is to persuade his students of the necessity of moving from think-
ing about thinking in terms of logic as the science of forms of judgments to
thinking about (commemorating: Andenkeri) a sort of thinking that not only is
more rigorous and original than judgmental or prepositional thinking within a
theoretical framework but also is, in some as yet unspecified sense, equivalent
to "unfolding the question of being as such."39 The move is both critical and
foundational, aimed at countering the logical prejudice by turning to the
prejudicial, that is to say, pretheoretical thinking that presumably is essentially
related to being and thus—in the unfolding of that relation—tantamount to
the history of being, including its metaphysical oblivion.40
The fact that the Greek doctrine of thinking is a doctrine of the logos, later
understood as "logic," provides Heidegger with the essential clues to the origin
of the logical prejudice. He reasons that, if there is a key to its origin, it is likely
to be found by unpacking the pre-Socratic uses of the term and their appropri-
ation by Plato and Aristotle. Heidegger undertakes to explain how thinking,
though itself obviously a manner of being and thus (a) in some sense unified
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with being, came to be (b) differentiated from being, (c) identified with this
differentiation, and (d) ultimately construed as determinant of being.41
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the fact that it is at the same time death. The superior strength of the logos
lies in a deep harmony that gathers and holds together disharmonies and is
stronger than any surface harmony. This harmonic gathering, however, is not a
predetermined order but a gathering storm (Niederlage), a battle in terms of
which beings as such first emerge. The logos is a gathering in the sense of a
polemos, a creative (better: creating) conflict of countervailing forces.45 Only
through this struggle do particular beings, as it were, "come into their own,"
and in that sense this originating polemos is the very securing and transpiring of
things, the way in which they are gathered up, that is to say, their being (Logos).
In the subsequent demise of this inceptive insight, the world turns away from
this conflict, no longer affirming entities in this way and allowing them to
maintain themselves (to be); instead they become objects, already found, fin-
ished and available, as a veritable fund (48). The nihilism of metaphysics, the
technological conquest of all that is, lies in waiting.
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the basic similarity between legein and noein declared in fragment 6, Heidegger
then extends to the logos itself this conception of apprehension as the human-
defining act of doing violence. He thereby introduces a second sense of "logos";
in addition to Logos as the "gatheredness" of being, there is also the logos as the
sort of gathering that is proper to being human.48 Hearkening back to the
parallel with the two senses of the "uncanny" (deinon) in the Antigone choral,
Heidegger characterizes the human logos as the happening of what is most
uncanny (to deinotaton) "in which, through doing violence, the overwhelming
comes to appearance and is brought to stand" (131).
This human logos, Heidegger emphasizes, must be understood above all in
relation to the primary Logos ("Logos" as a name for being), but this very
relation demands of the human logos that it assume a certain posture (and thus
a specific techne, a kind of violence) towards itself and its world. By gathering
or bringing into the open the original gatheredness of being (as coming-into-
concealment) and thereby bringing beings, including itself, into their own, the
human logos is involved in an uncanny struggle with itself.49 It has to gather
itself together in the midst of the booming and buzzing confusion of things.
This human logos or "gathering" is thus a turning away in one sense, but only
by virtue of turning toward in another sense, "pulling beings together into the
gatheredness (Gesammeltheit) of their being."50 Bringing together the logos and
the uncanniness of being human, the historical inception of determinations of
humanity by the thinker (Parmenides) and the poet (Sophocles) respectively,
Heidegger concludes: "Logos as gathering, as human self-gathering to fitting-
ness [as a human beings way of gathering himself together for—or on the plane
of—being as fittingness], first transposes being-human into its essence and thus
sets it into the uncanny, inasmuch as at-homeness is ruled by the seeming of
the customary, the usual and the trite."51
Heidegger s account of the human logos, the logos as definitive of being
human, is as broadly conceived as his account of Dasein in Sein undZeit. That
is to say, his thesis is not the anthropological claim that primitive humans were
gatherers; nor is his account of the relation between the two senses of "logos" as
"gathering" (based on his readings of the pre-Socratics) merely a replay of the
realist claim that any act of gathering requires a gathering or, better, gathered-
ness of things in advance. Rather, his point is that the human logos, precisely as
an act of violence, is the way in which "being is gathered in its gatheredness"
(129). In other words, the human logos is marked by taking up (apprehending:
noein) and gathering (Ugein), not just any gathering of beings, but rather the
gathering by virtue of which they are; in other words, "being . . . in its
gatheredness." Accordingly, Heidegger advises, the techne or violence done by
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the human logos does not turn away from things but instead "pulls them
together into the gatheredness of being" (129).
Heidegger is rehearsing and deepening his earlier treatment of being and
Dasein. Although being is ontologically different from every entity (and thus
inaccessible to any ontic science), being is neither the general characteristics of
beings as such (Seiendheit, entitas, beingness) nor something separate from
them but precisely the very way that entities or beings are. In other words,
being is distinct but not separate from entities. This basic insight of Heidegger s
early writings is echoed in the EiM interpretation of "being" as the "originary
gatheredness" of beings in the sense of their "coming-into-unconcealment"
(130). At the same time, in Sein undZeit, Dasein is construed as precisely the
"being-here" or "world" in which beings are uncovered and their being dis-
closed. Similarly, in EiM Heidegger argues that legrin of the human logos has
the specific character it does, namely, to set forth entities in their unconceal-
ment, precisely because the human logos (Dasein) is essentially related or re-
ferred to the Logos (Sein) as the original gatheredness of beings, their coming-
into-unconcealment. What it means to be human is precisely to be the relation
or "place" (in the language of Sein undZeit: the In-der-Welt-sein, the Da-sein)
for this coming-into-concealment. "The human essence shows itself here as the
relation that first opens up being to humanity."52
According to Heidegger, the Greek inception of human history begins
precisely with this determination of being human in terms of the human logos
as the "revealing gathering" of being. This same conception of the human logos
explains why language should itself be construed in terms of logos, something
that, if Heidegger s etymologies are correct, is by no means self-evident.53 In
this way Heidegger briefly introduces an account of the essence of language—
the way in which language unfolds (west)—that rests on a consideration of a
distinctive sort of naming and saying.54
What does naming do? It is customary to think of naming as a way of
designating some entity that is already at hand or has otherwise made itself
apparent. So construed, the name or word can serve as a placeholder for the
object named, typically in the latter s absence. Whatever merit and propriety
this way of construing naming may have, it is not the sort of naming that
Heidegger has in mind. Instead, an "act of violence" is Heidegger's favored
description for the naming that accounts for the (genuine, paradigmatic) hu-
man logos of language (131). This act of violence is the sort of originary poetic
or productive naming and saying that opens up an entity in its being. "In
originary saying, the being of beings is opened up in the structure of its
gatheredness. This opening-up is gathered in the second sense, according to
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which the word preserves what is originally gathered, and thus the word gov-
erns what holds sway, phusis. Human beings, as those who stand and act in
logos, in gathering, are the gatherers."55
Only where the Logos (being) opens itself does the sound of a word become
a word, and only where it is apprehended does merely "keeping one s ears open
become hearing" (101). Here Heidegger shows his phenomenological ped-
igree. For the phenomenologist the first condition of all cognition is the fact
that what is known makes itself present to the knower (the Logos as "coming-
into-unconcealment"); the second condition is the way in which the knower
attends to how what is known makes itself present. Since most people do not
attend to being but rather to beings, it is left to only a few—thinkers and
poets—to address being, provided, of course, that it opens itself to them.56
Language supposes the unconcealment of things—the Logos of their being—
but not (or at least not primarily) in the sense of a semiotic system of signs and
things signified, both already at hand. Instead, language supposes the uncon-
cealment of things in the sense that it is itself part of the process of bringing
entities into the open, gathering them together, uncovering them, and rescuing
them from oblivion. In other words, language, so construed, is part of the Logos
as the overwhelming gathering of entities into unconcealment. The human
logos is itself fundamentally and thoroughly "linguistic" in this sense, gathering
things up in their being (their logos as unconcealment).
Of course, the human logos as language in this paradigmatic sense is pre-
cisely poetic, inceptive language—but it also defines itself by the contrast with
language that is not poetic. The uncanniness of language is such that, precisely
in opening up being, it also makes possible a descent into palaver (Gerede) and
a subordination of beings to the words that designate them. Instructive in this
connection is Heidegger's observation that "the word, naming, puts the entity
that opens itself. . . back into its being and preserves it in this openness,
delimitation, and constancy"; the entity needs to be "put back" from some
"immediately overwhelming assault."57 As this observation suggests, the "orig-
inary" character of naming suggests that the entity has not come into its own
or, in other words, that it requires the violence of the human logos, specifically,
as language, in order to be gathered into the logos of being.58 "Because the
essence of language is found in the gathering (Sammlung) of the gatheredness
(Gesammeltheit) of being, language in the sense of everyday talk comes to its
truth only if the saying and hearing are related to logos as gatheredness, in the
sense of being."59
Heidegger claims, as already noted, that in Parmenides' saying "the decisive
determination of the essence of the human being is first fulfilled" (133). At this
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what is true. The struggle for the truth becomes a struggle against distortion
and—since, as in any struggle, one becomes dependent on the opponent—the
struggle for truth becomes a struggle for the undistorted. The human logos thus
comes to define itself by this struggle instead of defining itself by the Logos as
the original gathering (or the truth as the unfolding) of things. Here the transi-
tion from the gathering Logos— "the happening of unconcealment, grounded
in it and beholden to it"—to the logos of the assertion as "the locus of truth in
the sense of correctness" is complete.65 As an assertion, a logos says something
about something else (legein ti kata tinos) as something that "already" underlies
the former (the hupokeimenon or subjectum). Whereas the Logos at the incep-
tion of Greek thinking, as intimated by Heraclitus, is a name for being as an
entity's historical struggle to come to unconcealment, so logos tt the beginning
of the end of Greek thinking is equivalent to "logos apophantikos" an assertion
or judgment as something at hand standing over against the presence of what is
asserted or judged. The Platonic idea and the Aristotelian ousia, for all their
alleged differences, conspire in forging the logical prejudice by construing the
being of beings as their constant presence.66 The logos no longer merely di-
verges from—albeit within and for—being (as it does for Parmenides) but
emerges over against it—think of Aristotelian or Kantian "categories"—as "the
standard-setting domain that becomes the place of origin for the determina-
tions of being."67
The history of the logical prejudice according to Heidegger can be summed
up in three stages (including the present as the "slow end" of the third stage),
each corresponding to a conception of logos. As indicated chiefly by the Her-
aclitean fragments, Logos as the "gathering of beings" and being in the sense of
phusis are construed at the inception of Greek thinking as one. Parmenidean
and Sophoclean texts then point to the disjoining of the Logos, so conceived,
and the human logos as the uncanniest way of gathering, including the violence
of naming and saying (the human logos as language). Finally, logos is identified
with logos apophantikos, the assertion as the place of truth, now understood in
the sense of correctness, a transformation elaborated by Aristotle and made
possible by the Platonic reduction of phusisto idea. The stage is presumably set
for the subsequent translation of logos into the ratio of a logic, not merely
standing over against phusis but taking over and regulating the determination
of the being of beings.68
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on the question of being and the claim that every "saying" must be true or false
are in need of justification. Indeed, by some accounts, these dimensions of
formal logic can only be "shown" and not "said."74
Precisely at this juncture, Heidegger's history of the uses of "logos"recounts a
way of thinking and saying what logic cannot. Both Heraclitus and Parmeni-
des, on his reading, name being as the Logos in a way that reflects an experience
of being as the "gathering of things," their coming-to-light, to presence. What
they say is not incidental or after the fact but part of the gathering itself (even if
not expressly so "thought" by them). The very possibility of thinking and
saying (the human logos) answers first to the unfolding passage from absence to
presence (das Wesen der Wahrhcit). As an original manner of gathering and
unveiling, this saying is hardly neutral on what it means to be. Nor is it true or
false in the sense of a bivalent assertion about something that may or may not
be present. What Heraclitus and Parmenides say is, rather, the inception of
thinking as a way of being, in which the emergence into presence is disclosed.
Could they have been wrong? Could Heidegger's interpretation be false?
The answer, it seems to me, has to be an unequivocal "Yes!" but with the
understanding that it will not do to argue for the impropriety of his interpreta-
tion by simply insisting on the prerogatives of formal apophantics. For then
the pre-Socratic sayings and Heidegger's commemoration of them are con-
strued as at-hand assertions or judgments about something present (in the
sense of being on hand), and it is by no means obvious how thatconstmal is
to be not only meaningfully asserted but justified. If the pre-Socratic frag-
ments and Heidegger's interpretation are true, it is not as theoretical or quasi-
theoretical assertions about something other than themselves. Instead, like the
existentials of Heidegger's earlier thought, their truth would consist precisely
in disclosing what it means "to be" as modes of self-disclosiveness.
Still, Heidegger's criticism of the logical prejudice does not mean that his
own account is not supposed to be subject to bivalence in some respect. His
commitment to bivalence is evident in at least two respects. In the first place, it
is no accident that one is hard pressed to find in Heidegger's writings and
lectures, even as he rails against the pitfalls of thinking overdetermined by logi-
cal considerations, anything that amounts, formally, to an inconsistency or
contradiction. He takes care to avoid the sort of affirmation of contradiction
that Hegel and other dialectical thinkers explicitly—and seemingly quite con-
fusedly—countenance.75 Similarly, when Heidegger interprets the Parmeni-
dean saying that thinking and being are the same, he immediately makes it
clear that something other than strict logical identity is meant (on his reading,
they are said to be the same in the sense of belonging to the same).
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