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But where have we strayed to?
Apr. 7th, 2006 11:48 pm
High today, here: 6. Dewpoint then: 6. High dewpoint: 6.
High today in TO: 7. Dewpoint then: 5. High dewpoint: 5.
Low today on the balcony: 1.8. High: 6.7. Currently: 1.8.
And there goes Hasek #2. I couldn't resist playing Avery against Fedoruk tomorrow. With some luck, they both get game misconducts and I have 10s across the board. Except I've fallen into second place in assists, and could fall as low as fourth before it's over. (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
saintalbatross, if yer out there, and I hope you are: are we drafting tomorrow, or what?)
Seems like the thing to do now is read Heidegger's commentary on the cave allegory in The Essence of Truth, which I haven't read in its entirety before. So far, just read the preface. This pains me: "In the following interpretation, we deliberately leave unconsidered the precise placement of this allegory within the dialogue. To begin with we leave aside all discussion concerning the dialogue as a whole. What is crucial about the allegory is that it can stand entirely on its own, so we can consider it by itself without in any way minimizing its content or meaning."
This approach may or may not conflict with his stated purpose not to read Plato on our own terms: "Beginning from our present definition of truth, we looked for the way it had earlier been conceived, and we found it was the same. Is this historical reflection, or is it just an historical recording of earlier concepts and names? Have we really gone back to what happened at the beginning of Western philosophy, and to what is perhaps still happening? No. May we then wonder that we encountered the past only as the present and not as itself, which might perhaps be something quite different?" It may or may not conflict because Heidegger doesn't say, specifically, that--as Strauss would say--he wants to understand Plato as Plato understood himself; rather, he wants to understand what was happening in Plato's texts on the terms of their own time. Later in the '30s or by the early '40s (this is a text from 1931-32)--incidentally, of course, when Strauss is no longer in his sphere--you find Heidegger explicitly saying that he does not want to understand authors as they understood themselves, but rather to "think what is unthought" in what they say, namely, the way being presents itself in the epochs they represent. Something like that, I guess, may already have been his view of what he was doing in the early '30s, though he apparently hadn't yet worked out the idea that there are different epochs of being, each with its representative thinker.
Anyway, to ignore the dramatic context of the cave allegory is, most probably, to miss, somewhere from significantly to completely, how Plato understood himself, but it is perfectly in keeping with how the tradition has understood Plato--but then, for Heidegger, it's Plato as (mis)understood by the tradition who is the representative, epochal thinker, because that's the Plato who was the first to capture the presencing of being as essentia, and who launched the two-millennia-long response to that presencing, i.e., metaphysics.
Here's a nice juxtaposition, on consecutive pages, which may exemplify the strangely, wildly, opposite attitudes of Heidegger, the one I love, and the one I mostly just ignore:
1) "Whether you are to understand our interpretation does not depend on whether you have a poor or non-existent understanding of Greek, also not on whether you have much or little understanding of philosophical doctrines, but only on whether you have yourselves experienced, or are ready to experience, a necessity to be here now--whether, in this allegory, something unavoidable speaks in and to you. Without this all science remains mere outward show and all philosophy a facade."
2) "At each point I give the Greek text first, then the translation, which can only be an aid."
The second may not exemplify the hard, fascistic attitude; it is, after all, at least trivially, and often not-so-trivially, true that you can't get everything that's going on in the Greek from a translation (but then again, it's also trivially true that you can't get everything Plato wrote from modern editions of the Greek), and one ought, to be sure, not to suppose otherwise--but that's the last line before the text proper gets going, and it's just the sort of thing that you throw at students to make them dissolve into a puddle of guilt and self-doubt.
High today in TO: 7. Dewpoint then: 5. High dewpoint: 5.
Low today on the balcony: 1.8. High: 6.7. Currently: 1.8.
And there goes Hasek #2. I couldn't resist playing Avery against Fedoruk tomorrow. With some luck, they both get game misconducts and I have 10s across the board. Except I've fallen into second place in assists, and could fall as low as fourth before it's over. (
saintalbatross, if yer out there, and I hope you are: are we drafting tomorrow, or what?)Seems like the thing to do now is read Heidegger's commentary on the cave allegory in The Essence of Truth, which I haven't read in its entirety before. So far, just read the preface. This pains me: "In the following interpretation, we deliberately leave unconsidered the precise placement of this allegory within the dialogue. To begin with we leave aside all discussion concerning the dialogue as a whole. What is crucial about the allegory is that it can stand entirely on its own, so we can consider it by itself without in any way minimizing its content or meaning."
This approach may or may not conflict with his stated purpose not to read Plato on our own terms: "Beginning from our present definition of truth, we looked for the way it had earlier been conceived, and we found it was the same. Is this historical reflection, or is it just an historical recording of earlier concepts and names? Have we really gone back to what happened at the beginning of Western philosophy, and to what is perhaps still happening? No. May we then wonder that we encountered the past only as the present and not as itself, which might perhaps be something quite different?" It may or may not conflict because Heidegger doesn't say, specifically, that--as Strauss would say--he wants to understand Plato as Plato understood himself; rather, he wants to understand what was happening in Plato's texts on the terms of their own time. Later in the '30s or by the early '40s (this is a text from 1931-32)--incidentally, of course, when Strauss is no longer in his sphere--you find Heidegger explicitly saying that he does not want to understand authors as they understood themselves, but rather to "think what is unthought" in what they say, namely, the way being presents itself in the epochs they represent. Something like that, I guess, may already have been his view of what he was doing in the early '30s, though he apparently hadn't yet worked out the idea that there are different epochs of being, each with its representative thinker.
Anyway, to ignore the dramatic context of the cave allegory is, most probably, to miss, somewhere from significantly to completely, how Plato understood himself, but it is perfectly in keeping with how the tradition has understood Plato--but then, for Heidegger, it's Plato as (mis)understood by the tradition who is the representative, epochal thinker, because that's the Plato who was the first to capture the presencing of being as essentia, and who launched the two-millennia-long response to that presencing, i.e., metaphysics.
Here's a nice juxtaposition, on consecutive pages, which may exemplify the strangely, wildly, opposite attitudes of Heidegger, the one I love, and the one I mostly just ignore:
1) "Whether you are to understand our interpretation does not depend on whether you have a poor or non-existent understanding of Greek, also not on whether you have much or little understanding of philosophical doctrines, but only on whether you have yourselves experienced, or are ready to experience, a necessity to be here now--whether, in this allegory, something unavoidable speaks in and to you. Without this all science remains mere outward show and all philosophy a facade."
2) "At each point I give the Greek text first, then the translation, which can only be an aid."
The second may not exemplify the hard, fascistic attitude; it is, after all, at least trivially, and often not-so-trivially, true that you can't get everything that's going on in the Greek from a translation (but then again, it's also trivially true that you can't get everything Plato wrote from modern editions of the Greek), and one ought, to be sure, not to suppose otherwise--but that's the last line before the text proper gets going, and it's just the sort of thing that you throw at students to make them dissolve into a puddle of guilt and self-doubt.
