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us today, which is to say that it must give rise to new thoughts and new interpretations such that reader and text are mutually transformed in the engagement. The idea, furthermore, is that commitment to the world in front of the text is the most genuine way of being faithful to the text.

While we cannot go further into this discussion, it is important to mention as the context of Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle (or any other thinker for that matter) and my own position is that the unorthodox way in which Heidegger reads Aristotle is a strength rather than a weakness in his approach. He is entitled to make the texts speak to us today in a way that does not simply impart the wisdom of the tradition but which contributes to the task of thinking which each reader faces in engaging with these texts. But this does not mean that he avoids on principle any and all charges of hermeneutical violence. For while the text must be flexible enough to allow novelty, it must also be accorded an integrity which does not allow limitless re-workings. Heidegger’s reading must therefore be judged on how well it navigates these twin injunctions.

From Ethics to Ontology

So how does Heidegger read Aristotle? He begins by insisting, correctly, that the ethics of Aristotle is misunderstood if it is read as a text in contemporary moral philosophy. He does not only mean by this that we need to be careful not to ignore the historical gulf that separates us from Aristotle. What he primarily intends to point out is that the meaning of ethics means Aristotle and the Greeks needs to be reclaimed from the concerns of later European philosophies of value. The Ethics is concerned with lived experience and is not a text about morals understood in the terms of the 19th century. It is a text with an eminently phenomenological sensibility which attempts to “think in sympathy with life” (Heidegger, 2002b, p. 92), in the sense of articulating what is disclosed in ordinary experience. As such, this is a thinking that is destroyed if we jump too quickly into normative concerns about how things should be. It is for this reason that Heidegger once insisted that the origins of phenomenology should be identified with Aristotle rather than Husserl (Heidegger, 2002a, pp. 78-79) and that this is nowhere more evident than in the Nichomachean Ethics (NE) (Aristotle, 1985).1 Aristotle did not view ethics as an aspect of human life which is isolated from the other concerns of life and even to the extent that he can be said to be concerned with good and bad, these must be understood in terms of the most fundamental characterization of ways of being in the world. Ethics is about the ethos or context in which the encounter with meaning unfolds. Now Heidegger perhaps exaggerates the superficiality of moral philosophy of the modern era, but his point about treading carefully into the normative is well-

1 Henceforth all references to the NE will be given in Bekker numbers.

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taken and is faithful to the comprehensive scope of the ethics that is sometimes belied in certain treatments of the text.

For Heidegger, Aristotle is concerned with the logic of comportment and with articulating the ways in which we encounter ourselves towards ourselves, the world and others. That is, he is concerned with the fundamental structure of human Being-in-the-world. The delineation of techne, phronesis and episteme is, in this regard, crucial to ethics and shows the comprehensive nature of the latter because it reveals the ways in which human beings disclose their surrounding world (GA 19, 89) in terms of various impulses of self-realization. Of these, the practical and the phronetic are given precedence as the primary arena in which the meaning of what it is to be human is navigated and decided. As such, the ethics is about the context of the disclosure of meaning as such rather than being a demarcated discussion of norms and values (GA 19, 48). In fact, at one point Heidegger tellingly claims that if we allow the question of value to be determinative of our discussion of Aristotle, we entirely lose sight of what is worthwhile in the text (GA 19, 85).1

Notwithstanding this claim, Heidegger is happy to accede to Aristotle’s claim that the ultimate horizon for human disclosure is the Good (agathon) itself. But again, he does so by attenuating what he takes Aristotle to mean by the agathon and by reclaiming it from any “traditional” ethical register. The agathon is not a value in the traditional sense but that for the sake of which all comportment in the world takes place (ou heneka). Or, to put it another way, it is what it is we can be said to aim at through all our actions, whether these be practical, productive or theoretical. For both Aristotle and Heidegger, we act ultimately for the sake of acting well, to realize the good life by acting in terms of the fullest realization of what a human being is. For Aristotle, as is well known, virtue is concerned with the ways in which this end is realized such that his ethics can be said to be about the context for the exercise of virtuous action (the agathon) and, importantly, how we deliberate in order to realize this end through our various encounters with each other and the world.

According to Heidegger, this removal of the NE from the context of the philosophy of value has the advantage of being both true to the text itself as well as allowing for a reconciliation of the text with Heidegger’s own project. If this is a hermeneutical re-orientation, it is a re-orienting only of the way the text has come to be read rather than the text itself. What he wants to do is to reorient the Aristotelian discourse by uprooting it from the context of moral reflection – in which it has occupied pride of place for centuries – and to place it into the context of his own ontological problematic. The NE is not about morality but about comportment and disclosure and is concerned with articulating the context of that disclosure. Like-

1 “If we take the agathon as a value,” he says, “then this is all nonsense”.

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wise, Heidegger’s fundamental ontology has a range that goes far beyond moral discussions (in fact, he generally ignores them) but is concerned with the question of the meaning of being as it comes to expression in the structures of the existing individual and her network of engagements and how this question is answered therein. This is the deeper understanding of ethics which collapses any significant difference from the question of ontology as Heidegger understands it.

But in order to consummate this equivalence, Heidegger will need to say a little more about how the agathon as the ultimate horizon of ethics is to be understood. Aristotle insists that the ultimate good – that for the sake of which we act (1097a20) – is happiness, which in turn is understood as a fitting life for a being that has reason (zoon logon echon). What most interests Heidegger here is the sub clause, “that for the sake of which we act”. He says,

Now insofar as Dasein is disclosed as the ou heneka, the “for the sake of which”, there is a predelineation of what is for its sake and what is to be procured at any time for its sake. In this way, with Dasein as the ou heneka, there is grasped with one stroke the arche of the deliberation of phronesis (GA 19, 35)

This may strike the reader as contradictory at first blush given that Heidegger has earlier said that the agathon (the good) is the horizon of phronesis and now appears to be saying that it is Dasein itself that is the horizon. But there is no contradiction for Heidegger for whom the integration of the agathon with Dasein captures exactly what he means to say. But he insists that Dasein acts well, in acting for the sake of itself, only as long as it does so on the basis of a proper understanding (agathon) of what it most essentially is. In other words, the idea that one acts in the light of a grasp of oneself as the “for the sake of which” is no endorsement of selfishness. Nothing could be farther from Heidegger’s concerns. This will be clear to anyone familiar with Division II of Sein und Zeit in which the meaning of placing Dasein itself the context of world engagement/comportment is outlined in some detail. The idea is, rather, that authentic comportment is only possible on the basis of

Dasein’s grasp of itself in terms of its ownmost possibility for being.

Heidegger’s terminology is here, as always, challenging but the point is this: authentic world engagement or wise action is only possible when the human being acts in the light of a proper understanding of what it means to be human and what it means to be human is to be finite (Being-towards-death). This finitude charges us with the resolution of the question of the meaning in a temporal unfolding. Hence the inseparability of being and time. We encounter meaning against the horizon of time no matter what but it is a condition of an authentic understanding of ourselves that this encounter with meaning unfolds on the basis of a genuine understanding of our temporality. Now authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) is not discussed explicitly in the lectures on Aristotle but it is clear that Heidegger sees Aristotelian phronesis as prefiguring what he means by the authentic. To act well (ethics) is to act for the sa-

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ke of the ultimate good which is the final horizon of human acting. That horizon is Dasein itself properly understood, an insight which further entails that we engage the world and others in the light of what it means to be Dasein (a proper understanding of Dasein’s temporality). We act well (phronetically/authentically) in the light of a finite thrownness which demands a response in the form of a resolute (Entschlossen) taking responsibility for our being.

While the terms of the discussion are very un-Aristotelian, the trajectory, according to Heidegger, perfectly matches up with Aristotle’s thinking in which the agathon as the telos of human praxis is understood as authentic being-in-the-world. Heidegger insists, as we have already noted, that this takes the discussion out of the ambit of value entirely. He says that,

He [Aristotle] achieves for the first time a properly ontological understanding of the agathon…we must hold fast to this genuine sense of the agathon as long as our concern is to understand the expression agathon as a properly philosophical term. (GA 19, 85)

This is very telling indeed, not least because of Heidegger’s claim here that the agathon and the ethics in general is only truly philosophical as long as it is ontological and only thus so long as it is grasped at the level of the fundamentally ontological.

This is a very compact statement which has enormous significance for Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle. I maintain that he can be understood as transforming Aristotle in three distinct ways through this presentation. These are: (1) that he transforms the context of ethics from a rational one to an existential one. Thus, the subject of ethics is no longer man as the animal with reason (zoon logon echon) but is finitely existing Dasein and this becomes the context for reflection about the nature of the good life; (2) secondly, Heidegger has collapsed an important relationality in the Aristotelian discourse. For Aristotle, the subject acts for the sake of herself as long as that is in accord with the Good life such that Aristotle seems to be arguing for the presence of an objective ideal against which the actions of a life are measured. By making a proper understanding of what Dasein is into the Good itself, Heidegger seems to reject any exteriority in the estimation of the Good and he replaces it with a mediated relationship of Dasein to itself; (3) finally, by making the point of the discussion of phronesis insight into the horizon of fundamental ontology, Heidegger seems to be insisting that phronetic insight must be radically enacted and cannot be the result of piecemeal deliberation. In other words, it is not how we deliberate that is important vis-à-vis phronesis but what we deliberate in the light of (i.e. a genuine understanding of the time of Dasein)

All three of these transformations are radical and are, as such, debatable. However, I would suggest that at least the first, and possibly the second, are justifiable for the following reason. The first transformation needs to be understood

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against the backdrop of Heidegger’s commitment to phenomenology and to his phenomenological reading of Aristotle. The phenomenological impulse, that is, is about articulating the context of the human relationship with meaning. Hence his insistence that philosophy needed first to proceed as fundamental ontology inasmuch as the unfolding of this question of meaningfulness is first and foremost a lived unfolding, something which takes place in our Being-in-the-world. We can only do philosophy properly if we begin at the beginning, which means with a thorough analysis of the kind of being we are. This cannot be done by metaphysically cordoning off the human being as the animal that is rational but must instead begin with the existing Dasein as the transcendental context of inquiry. This was not Aristotle’s position, of course, but in reading him in this way, Heidegger, is engaging with him in a way that allows Aristotle’s discourse to contribute within the phenomenological landscape which is the context of Heidegger’s thinking. I think this is legitimate, at least as a hermeneutical engagement. Its fruitfulness, in the long run, will need to be measured against what it can achieve.

This goes hand in hand with the second transformation in which Heidegger insists that Dasein is both the terminus a quo and the terminus ad quem (as the Good) for the ethical inquiry. As we noted, this is no statement of self-involved egotism but is rather an attempt to capture the internal logic of Aristotle’s own position. That is, the Good life for Aristotle is about the realization of the good for the human being. This is an objective ideal but its objectivity is one whose meaning is essentially subjective in the sense that eudaimonia is not something extrinsic which simply descends upon the subject but which constitutes that subjects realization of its own essential being. This is what Heidegger too means in his assimilation of Dasein itself and the Good.

However, I am not entirely convinced by the third transformation and the reason is that this one not only re-interprets the content of the Aristotelian discourse but also transforms its logic. To make phronesis an insight enacted at the level of the fundamentally ontological removes it too radically from the sphere of ordinary everyday reflection and calls for a radical enactment of this insight in a way that becomes concerned only with the final horizon of acting rather than with specific acts.

In other words, it is not just that phronesis is always related to an insight into human being as such but that this insight is the sole and exclusive content of phronesis. If this is so, then it seems that Heidegger does more than warn against moving too quickly into discussions of normativity but seems to reject them as entirely irrelevant to a proper understanding of phronesis.

Is Heidegger’s reading a hermeneutical violence?

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I want now to look at two specific ways in which this problem becomes visible which have to do with Heidegger’s (1) assessment of subordinate goods and popular wisdom and; (2) his assessment of deliberation, habituation and decision. Let us look at these one at a time.

The Good and the goods

While Aristotle was clear that the highest good of happiness and the realization of the good life must remain the context for ethics, he was very clear that this horizon be unfolded variously in the life of practical reason. In other words, the highest good is realized and intended in multiple ways which make it more or less manifest. We must not mistake subordinate goods for the highest good, which would not just be an error in itself but would also allow the esteem of goods such as self-interest, financial well-being and others to become vainglorious, selfish, meanspirited etc. But, at the same time, it is important for Aristotle that a certain degree of autonomy be apportioned to the subordinate goods in the sense that he wants to avoid the Platonic claim that subordinate goods can only be identified if we have a grasp of the highest good.

Early on in the NE, Aristotle raises the point that while the highest good (the idea of the Good) is that which is most truly good, it is not the only good. If only the idea of the Good is good, says Aristotle, then this goodness will be unable to explain the goodness of anything else (1096b20). The homonymy between the highest goods and subordinate goods must rather be the result of a participation of the lower in the higher. Aristotle further seems to understand the nature of this participation along the lines of the subordinate goods as variously and partially realizing aspects of the human good. We come to know the Good itself through subordinate goods because they are good, which is to say that understanding can emerge out of our commerce with subordinate goods of ordinary life. This commerce is not, then, dependent upon a grasp of the Good itself. For Aristotle, in short, subordinate goods are seen as both (1) contributing to the good life and (2) providing clues as to what the good life is.

These subordinate goods are present in our lives in various different ways. One way in which goods are manifest for us is through the circumstances of our situation. As is well known, the good life for Aristotle is one in which not only the virtues (intellectual and of character) are necessary, but which also depends on external factors and, one might say, a measure of good fortune. It is difficult to be happy (eudaimon) if one is “utterly repulsive or ill-born, solitary or childless [or] if our children or friends are totally bad or were good but have died” (1099b8). The good life is realized in a social context, in other words, and depends on one’s social origins, friends, family, wealth etc. Again, none of these in themselves are guarantors of the good life and an excessive preoccupation with any of them will become

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a perversion that leads us away from the realization of our telos as human but they are neither things that can be set aside as trivial or inessential to the realization of the good life.

So the good life is socially realized prior to any discursive engagement with the issue on our part. It is also encountered discursively, of course, in the ordinary reflections upon human life which capture aspects of what is at stake in the good life. In other words, he gives his assent (if a partial one with certain reservations) to ordinary understandings of virtue and the good life. This may again be an implicit critique of Plato who tended at times to suggest that only philosophical reflection could save ordinary lived understandings of the good from ignorance and confusion.1 For Aristotle, rather, it was always desirable to “save the doxa” (doxai sozein) or ordinary lived conceptions of the good by defending his account of the Good life by reference to common understandings of what this entails (1098b8f.). This does not mean that philosophy is inessential but only that its role is different. It contributes, for example, by articulating the good life that is understood practically as opposed to simply correcting the logic of practice.2

As far as ordinary appraisals of the good life go, Aristotle notes that;

Some of these views are traditional, held by many, while others are held by a few reputable men; and it is reasonable for each group to be not entirely in error, but correct on one point at least, or even on most points (1098b28-29)

This is not just a gesture of philosophical generosity on Aristotle’s part but involves a commitment to the idea that if the practical good is not already present in life, it will be difficult if not impossible for the philosopher to introduce it from scratch after the fact. The ethics is intended, as we have noted, to articulate the logic of practice that realizes the good life and this will also entail certain adjustments and corrections to the way we act and speak. But if the good life as understood and lived is entirely absent from ordinary life and ordinary conceptions of life, then there will be no soil from out of which the ethical reflection can grow.

This seems a very phenomenological insight from Aristotle,3 one which justifies Heidegger’s claim that it is firstly with the ancient Greek rather than Husserl that phenomenology is first practiced. Yet, it is precisely on this point that Heidegger takes issue. As far as the validation of ordinary conceptions of the good

1I have argued elsewhere that this was not Plato’s position either although it must be admitted that Aristotle tends to be clearer on this point. See (McGuirk, 2008).

2This point would again seem to support Heidegger’s view that the phenomenological impulse was not something initiated by Husserl but was already evidenced in the philosophy of Aristotle.

3According to Robert Sokolowski, the central distinguishing feature of phenomenological thinking is its validation of pre-scientific life and the view that the pre-scientific makes manifest the possibility of truth such that it does not need philosophy or critical reflection to save it from blindness (Sokolowski, 2000, p. 143).

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life are concerned, that is, Heidegger is more or less diametrically opposed. Far from embodying wisdom, ordinary conceptions of the good life cause Dasein to

“go wrong…as regards the genuine possibilities of its Being” (Heidegger, 1979, p. 174) and involve a flight from authenticity into the faceless disclosure of the “they”

(das Man).

On this point, Heidegger is deeply at odds with Aristotle and occupies a position much closer to Danish existentialist Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard claims too at several places in his authorship that ordinary conceptions of the good life tend not only to be mistaken but that they tend to demonstrate a lack of interest in the question. The crowd is untruth (Kierkegaard, 1998, p. 106), he says. It is an arena in which there is “no working, no living and no striving for the highest goal” (Kierkegaard, 1998, p. 108), such that “each individual who escapes into the crowd…thus cowardly avoids being the single individual” (ibid. p. 108). Like Kierkegaard, Heidegger excoriates the “wisdom” of the crowd, which misleads in the most damaging of ways because it leads us away from the very question of the essence of human existing.

This is particularly pernicious in Heidegger’s discourse, we know, because these ordinary conceptions of the good are not just the views of the crowd “out there” but designate a mode of existing of the single Dasein. That is, the single

Dasein is not in opposition to the crowd but for the most part is the crowd. As Theodore Kisiel puts it,

The life of an individual, is for the most part not lived as such, but instead in a certain averageness of the public. It is the “one” who in fact lives the life of the individual, who in the end is “no one” (Kisiel, 1993, p. 257)

Ordinary understandings of the good life comprise of the idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity (Heidegger, 1979, p. 166f.) of the “they”, which is an inauthentic mode of existing for Dasein. As with Kierkegaard, the single individual flees from itself, from what it most truly is, into the anonymity of this “they”.

The problem for Heidegger is not how it is that we come to turn our backs on the question of what is essential for our human being but how it is possible for us to wriggle free of the inauthentic grip of the “they” so as to bring the question into view. We are proximally and for the most part enmired in inauthenticity, so how is anything else possible? This bears directly on Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle because he understands phronesis entirely in terms of the insight that calls Dasein back from its anonymous existing in the they into a mode of existing that engages the world in the light of the ownmost possibility for Being. Now, even if we set aside the fact that, by Heidegger’s own admission, this authentic recuperation is not something which can be achieved once and for all but can only ever be temporary because we are constantly falling back into inauthenticity, it is clear that the phronetic insight is one that stands in essential opposition to ordinary conceptions

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of the good life for a human being. Phronesis entails the insight that cuts through the ordinary conceptions of the Good and renders them temporarily powerless. They will always reassert their hold on us and in so doing, take us away from the agathon. In other words, the highest Good (agathon) as the telos of human action, is isolated for Heidegger from ordinary conceptions of the Good and is not only independent of them but stands in radical opposition to them. Phronesis as such, involves a radically individualizing insight which demands that the single Dasein exist for the sake of herself and on the basis of herself, something which is obstructed at all turns by the sociality of Dasein.

Of course, we must repeat that it is Heidegger’s explicit intention that authentic self-relation be lived in the world with others and that it does not call for a retreat from the world. Nevertheless, it is clear that the world and others are not in any way constitutive for my realization of the Good life (as they are in both senses for Aristotle) but involve only the backdrop against which my realization of the highest good (agathon) is possible at all.1 Dasein’s sociality provides no clues to the Good life (the wisdom of the tradition) and nor does it constitute it as such (the external goods) but is first and foremost something to be overcome and, to the extent that it is possible, re-oriented such that the Good as self-relation can be even momentarily realized.

This is a problem that emerges out of what we called the third of Heidegger’s transformations of the NE but we see that it is also connected to the second transformation, which is why we withheld complete assent to this one. The second transformation was the collapse of the relationality between the subject and the ideal of the Good in Aristotle with Heidegger’s claim that the good is not something outside of Dasein but a proper understanding of Dasein. As we said earlier, this problem can partly be dissolved by attending to the fact that the Good which is the horizon of Aristotle’s account is not really to be understood as something which is extrinsic to human life, a standard that we happened to be judged against but is directly and explicitly tied to a proper understanding of the fulfillment of the movement in human life towards understanding, peacefulness and insight. To act in the light of a proper grasp of what we most truly are, as Heidegger puts it, is a transformation of the text which seemed to do justice to its meaning.

And yet, Heidegger’s excision of this relationality seems to risk losing sight of the way in which what it is external to the subject can be constitutive of the good life in a way that is clearly at stake for Aristotle. We do, to be sure, intend our own good in the ethical life but we also primarily gain access to this through others and

1 And given that the agathon is only ever grasped in flashes of insight, we might well wonder whether there really can be a good life as such for Heidegger. Certainly not in the sense of a life with any kind of stability.

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the very conditions of our contingent existence. For Heidegger, these features of human life are never other than obstacles to such insight. As such, while he may be said to be oriented towards the same destination as Aristotle, this account of the Good and the individual goods or the insights of ordinary wisdom mean that there can be no signposts to this destination for Heidegger as there are for Aristotle.

Hexis, resoluteness and repetition

We have already intimated the second important consequence of Heidegger’s insistence of placing phronesis at the level of fundamental ontology has for his reading of Aristotle. This has to do with his claim that phronesis is a “pure perceiving [which] concerns the eschaton” (Heidegger, 1997, p. 112). This kind of structure is found at several other places in his authorship, including as the kairological seeing he speaks of in the lectures on religious life and in the Augenblick of Sein und Zeit. While there are subtle differences between the “pure perceiving” of phronesis, kairological seeing and the Augenblick, they all three bespeak a commitment to the notion of a moment which cuts through ordinary mundane engagements and informs them in the light of the essential in human being. In Sein und Zeit, Heidegger speaks of the mood of anxiety through which the world loses its hold on us and the call of conscience through which Dasein is called back to itself. Nothing is different and yet everything is transformed by the electrifying encounter between Dasein and itself. Dasein must acknowledge what it most truly is and respond in the light of this. It is clear that the stripping away of the world that occurs in anxiety is not a loss of the world or Dasein’s withdrawal from the world. In fact, it is only through this moment of clarity that Dasein can enter into relation with the world authentically. That is, it enters into relation as itself and not as anonymous “they” (das Man). When the hold of the world is loosened, Dasein must choose itself and its engagements with the world in light of itself and its ownmost possibility for being. Dasein must choose itself and in turn its engagements in light of this choice.

This is significant in terms of the interpretation of Aristotle because it makes phronesis more dramatic and more univocal than it is for Aristotle, where it is explicitly tied to deliberation over means and ends. We act ultimately in the light of the ultimate good for Aristotle but phronesis is concerned with navigating the individual challenges that we encounter and deliberating about what is best in each situation. The ultimate horizon of action remains the same for both Aristotle and Heidegger, but inasmuch as Heidegger collapses the gap between the subject and the good life, he also dispenses with the need for realizing this piecemeal through deliberation in the practical sphere. Instead, phronesis becomes the radically enacted insight into our fundamental singularity as existing Dasein. Another way of putting this might be that while Aristotle is concerned with how we deliberate about

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