Heraclitus Seminar (SPEP)

by Martin Heidegger

published

January 21st 1993 by Northwestern University Press

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binding

Paperback, 171 pages

isbn

0810110679 (isbn13: 9780810110670)

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Shawn rated it:

08/19/08

Read in August, 2008

This book is very difficult, and I wouldn't recommend it unless you're familar with Heidegger's other accounts of the presocratic philosophers and also have a good knowledge of Heraclitus. Without the latter it would probably be tough to follow the twists and turns of Heidegger and Fink's analysis, since a lot of it uses the Greek.

But Heraclitus Seminar is a really rewarding text if you can make your way through it. I've read this book twice and would benefit from going through it again....more This book is very difficult, and I wouldn't recommend it unless you're familar with Heidegger's other accounts of the presocratic philosophers and also have a good knowledge of Heraclitus. Without the latter it would probably be tough to follow the twists and turns of Heidegger and Fink's analysis, since a lot of it uses the Greek.

But Heraclitus Seminar is a really rewarding text if you can make your way through it. I've read this book twice and would benefit from going through it again.

I think Fink's proposed reading, of which this book primarily consists, successfully poses a very serious critique of Heidegger's approach to Heraclitus and the presocratics in general. A principal difference Fink maintains in his reading is the suggestion that we have no means of understanding Heraclitus with any measure of certainty, not only due to the separation of nearly 3,000 years but also because we are too far removed from the intellectual framework in which Heraclitus thought. He wonders whether it makes sense to try and determine what 'the matter of thought' is in Heraclitus, going against the Heideggerian grain of the notion that the matter of thought is in fact present for us even now, and is to be found in what is 'unspoken' by Heraclitus. Fink opts to follow the phenomena named in the extant Heraclitean fragments and see what they yield by virtue of their own content.

This text definitely is Fink much more than Heidegger, although I would say that Heidegger's compliance with Fink in many places suggests he doesn't find the majority of Fink's interpretations to be intrinsically problematic. But as described at the beginning of the book and in places throughout, you are getting Fink's Heraclitus; his interpretation is driven largely by 'hen-panta' idea, with emphasis on the fragments concerned with fire and light - whereas Heidegger openly says he reads Heraclitus via logos and aletheia. These latter concepts are also the principal topics in Heidegger's 1943/44 Heidegger lectures (a completely different text composed long before Heraclitus Seminar).

So with these things in mind, this text is quite illuminating if you want an inside look at the nuts and bolts of how Heidegger reads the presocratics - in terms of methodology - but I'm not sure that much of its content is well-representative of Heidegger. It's unfortunate that his own Heraclitus text from twenty years earlier is still unavailable in English - but his short essays which contain the highlights from that text can be found in the Early Greek Thinking volume edited by Krell and Capuzzi....less

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