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June 1, 2006
Does not Heidegger hold that poetic modes of disclosure posses the capacity to to liberate us from the nihilism of a technological mode of being? Poetic revealing (poesis?) in the latter Heidegger is a way of facing the world ---understood as releasement or letting be--- that stands in opposition to the grasping technological way (Gestell ) of facing the world. Poetic revealing as Gelassenheit points to a mode of conduct or way of being-in-the-world in which action is no legislated by an instrumental reason based on mastery, and points to the possible return to poetic dwelling .
Some argue that this construction of poiesis confronting Gestell, and the rehabilitation of poiesis as a way out of Gestell, or the technological mode of being, effaces praxis understood as phronesis. So Heidegger privileges poiesis over praxis.
Maybe Heidegger reads praxis back into poiesis? Acting as making? Do we need to reject the dominance of poiesis over praxis and refuse to insist on upon praxis in contradistinction to poiesis? Instead of returning to Aristotle we engage in an overcoming of the tradition as undertaken by Nietzsche and Heidegger's critique of metaphysics.
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Gary:
I think you've hit on the tangled nub of the issue here. The later Heidegger develops an ontological conception of language, as the "dwelling" of Being, which subtends the apophantic function of truth, and turns to a notion of "Dichtung" or "poesis" as the co-responding of the thinker with the "soundless saying" of Being. There's no doubt that this receptive activity of a new kind of thinking is also intended as a kind of doing/making. The strategy and claim seems to be that only a purification/clarification of authentic Being would allow for any genuine ethical relation to others as "Mit-sein" to become possible.
However, "poesis" does mean "production", (such that "The Poetics" is a recipe book for making tragedies and belongs to the "Organon", the tool-kit), isn't that right? Heidegger's appeal to "poesis" aligns with a conception of "techne", as "craftmanship", as the enhancement of "physis", the bringing to fruition of its potentials. (There is a deep ambiguity to Heidegger's critique of technology, as at once a forgetting and a dispensation of Being, and his appeal to "poetic" thinking and the work of art in counterposition to functionalism. "Gestell", "enframing", was a term first used in "The Origin of the Artwork".) By contrast, Aristotle's conception of ethical (and political) praxis was constantly articulated through its distinction from "techne", as acting which "has its end in itself", as opposed to having its end in something else, as "doing" rather than "making", "poesis". To be sure, Aristotelian practical philosophy carries with it an implicit background of teleological/metaphysical presuppositions, (such that it is the "ergon" of the "ousia" "anthropos" that is realized in "eudaimonia".) And the notion of "intrinsic" ends is bound up with a definition of "voluntary action" as having its "arche" in the agent and hence with a metaphysical notion of interiority as autonomy. But for all Aristotelian deliberation via "phronesis" is concerned with the assessment of situational parameters and the weighing of means/ends relations, the implicit horizon of praxis is the maintenance and enhancement of social relations within the political community as the good life in common, (since, though the polis might have come together for the sake of life, it remains in being for the sake of the good life.) (And it should be remarked that the role of theoretical contemplation in the 10th book of N.E. is only to set a limit to means/end internestings, just as with the role of "Sein-zum-Tod" in "Being and Time", which was partly modelled on N.E.) Hence it's that distinctly relational orientation of praxis, cultivated through "phronesis" that needs to be highlighted and distinguished from both making and theorizing. (Ethics, the philosophical notion of which originates with Aristotle, after all, concerns acts in the context of relations to others qua other, i.e. separate, and material and symbolic exhanges with them, n'est-ce pas?) It was for something of these reasons that Arendt defined praxis as action without ends, dissociating it from considerations of means/ends relations, as well as, any metaphysical teleology, while focusing it upon "plurality".
But I didn't say that I wanted to revive Aristotelian ethics, nor its original conception of praxis, which would be anachronistic, impossible, dogmatic and uncritical. Rather, it was the Aristotelian distinction between practical and theoretical philosophy that I was interested in reviving/rethinking. That is, precisely in the wake of the critical dissolution of epistemology/critique of metaphysics, the restoration of the sense of practical reason as separate from any theoretical considerations/dependencies. In the case of the later Heidegger, it is difficult to understand just "what" gives Being to language and thinking, how the arrival of new Being is to be conceived or come about. The result seems to be a theoretical/transcendental construction of a stance of sheer receptive anticipation through recollective (re-)thinking, "Andenken", which struggles to delimit (itself from) metaphysics. But what if there is no new dispensation of Being to arrive, no causal processes, no new production, no new knowledge or invention, no pressures from social structures or new institutional arrangements, that would account for a transformation, that would not be a reproduction and augmentation of the same? What if it's the nexus of relationships that traverse a form of life that "determine" how the possibilities of a world are received and interpreted? What if it's the transformation of a form of life and not the objectivity or "truth" of the world that is needful?