Heidegger on Logos

A guest post by Zarina Mazitova and an extension to my article On the Origin of Logic, as well as the video lecture I gave on Strands I oppose in Western Philosophy.

Bryan’s article on Schopenhauer’s view of logic reminded me of Heidegger’s reflections about Logos† (the etymological root of logic) in his Introduction to Metaphysics, which I read last year. In this article, I’ll describe Heidegger’s view of Logos and its role in metaphysics based on this book.

Background about Heidegger and Introduction to Metaphysics

Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher (1889–1976) best known for his work Being and Time (1927), which explores the different modes of being, including Dasein, the kind of Being able to be concerned with its own existence and which is open to the world it inhabits. Heidegger’s influences include Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), who preceded him as Professor of Philosophy at the university of Freiburg, Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), and ancient Greek philosophers, especially the pre-Socratics.

Heidegger joined the Nazi party in 1933, and after the Second World War, was found guilty of supporting Nazism and banned from teaching for four years, until 1949. Introduction to Metaphysics does contains a nod to the Nazi Party in its chapter “Being and the Ought,” towards the end of the book: “In particular, what is peddled about nowadays as the philosophy of National Socialism, but which has not the least to do with the inner truth and greatness of this movement [namely, the encounter between global technology and modern humanity], is fishing in these troubled waters of ‘values’ and ‘totalities.‘”¹

Heidegger was adamant that the part between brackets, which downplays his praise for the Nazi party, featured in the text from the time he gave it as a lecture at the university of Freiburg in 1935. However, scholars showed that it was added closer to the year of publication of the book in 1953, perhaps as an attempt to make this passage less sympathetic to Nazism and to allow the publication of the book in the context of post-war Germany.²

Introduction to Metaphysics was translated into French in 1958 (this is the edition I read) and into English in 1959 (for the English version I’ve used Gregory Fried and Richard Polt’s translation from 2000). Interestingly, his magnum opus, the earlier work Being and Time (1927) was translated later than Introduction to Metaphysics: in 1962 into English, and only in 1985 into French (although a partial French translation came out in 1964).

Heidegger in translation — a word of warning

Our German friend and philosophy doctor Roman had warned us that Heidegger was virtually impossible to read in translation, due to his inventive and complex use of the German language, rich in neologisms that could only be translated as awkward expressions or paraphrases, or best left untranslated, like the word Dasein. The 1958 French translation I read by Gilbert Kahn tried to stay as close as possible to the original text, and Heidegger himself reviewed and approved some of the most difficult parts of Kahn’s translation.³

However, I found the more recent English edition by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt much easier to read: perhaps because it didn’t stay as close to Heidegger’s phrasing, what the translation may have lost in fidelity it gained in clarity and intelligibility. Like these translators, I’ll indicate the German words Heidegger used next to the English translation.

Overview of Introduction to Metaphysics

Heidegger begins this work with the fundamental question (“Grundfrage”) of metaphysics: “Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?” (in German: “Warum ist überhaupt Seiendes und nicht vielmehr Nichts?”). To explore this question, we need to understand what being really means. He posits that language, its use, and its evolution reflect our relationship with Being: “Because the fate of language is grounded in the particular relation of a people to Being, the question about Being will be most intimately intertwined with the question about language for us.”⁴

Weil das Schicksal der Sprache in dem jeweiligen Bezug eines Volkes zum Sein gegründet ist, deshalb wird sich uns die Frage nach dem Sein zuinnerst mit der Frage nach der Sprache verschlingen.⁵

As Heidegger examines the numerous uses of the word Being and its variations today, he concludes that this word (and therefore, Being itself) is now almost devoid of meaning. He blames this on centuries of misguided Western thought. One of the main reasons for the historical decline of Being, for Heidegger, is the evolution and increasing dominance of Logos in the West, from the Platonic school onwards, to the point where Hegel writes, in the 19th century: “The logical (is) the absolute form of truth and, what is more, it is also pure truth itself.”⁶

By analyzing the language of Being in its historical context, going back to the origins of Western philosophy, we can uncover the original meaning of Being before it started to wither. For Heidegger, this means we’ll return to the pre-Socratics, Heraclitus and Parmenides in particular, and, to start from first principles, we’ll examine the initial expression of Being through an exegesis of their texts. In Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger shows how originally, for the pre-Socratics, Logos meant “language” or “gathering” and as such, it was tightly linked with physis, the Greek word for Being, which today is translated as “nature.” From Socrates onwards, in Plato and Aristotle, Logos comes to mean something more like “reason” (eventually Latin ratio), and, as the science of logic becomes the sole arbiter of truth, this new sense of Logos — reason — comes to prevail over Being (physis).

Being and Logos at their origins

For Heidegger, the pre-Socratics understood Being as physis (φύσις), which he translates as “what is emerging into light, coming out of concealment and into presence, stepping forth, self-flourishing.”⁷

He often uses the German word Walten (translated as “sway” by Polt and Fried) to designate physis — this has the meaning of “prevailing” and “dominating,” as in “swaying an opinion” or “holding sway [of something].” Later in the history of ancient Greece, the meaning of physis evolved to encompass the natural world overall. It is now conventionally translated as “nature,” which seems somewhat limited now compared to the original meaning of the term. Physis and its proto-Indo-European root -bhu are the etymological stems of many of the words we use today related to being: to be in English, fui in Latin, bist in German.⁸

Physis also gave us the word “physics,” and of course, “metaphysics.” “Unconcealment” or “disclosure,” another important term used by Heidegger and intrinsically linked to physis is aletheia in Greek, which is conventionally translated as “truth.” Before it meant reason or logic, Logos and its verb declension legein originally meant collecting, harvesting, gathering (zu sammeln in German) — it was used by Homer in that sense. Legein led to the Latin ligere, and the German lesen, which means to read, i.e., to pick out words, but it can also mean to harvest, in an old-fashioned way⁹.

For Heidegger, Logos was originally tied to Being, and existed in harmony with it, and he analyses pre-Socratics texts to prove this. He starts with Heraclitus’ notoriously cryptic fragments.

Here is Heraclitus’ fragment 1 in Ancient Greek (I emphasised the terms that Heidegger will cover in more detail):

τοῦ δὲ λόγου τοῦδ ἐόντος ἀεὶ ἀξύνετοι γίνονται ἄνθρωποι καὶ πρόσθεν ἢ ἀκοῦσαι καὶ ἀκούσαντες τὸ πρῶτον· γινομένων γὰρ πάντων κατὰ τὸν λόγον τόνδε ἀπείροισιν ἐοίκασι πειρώμενοι καὶ ἐπέων καὶ ἔργων τοιούτων ὁκοίων ἐγὼ διηγεῦμαι κατὰ φύσιν διαιρέων ἕκαστον καὶ φράζων ὅκως ἔχει· τοὺς δὲ ἄλλους ἀνθρώπους λανθάνει ὁκόσα ἐγερθέντες ποιοῦσιν ὅκωσπερ ὁκόσα εὕδοντες ἐπιλανθάνονται

A conventional translation:¹⁰

Of this Word’s being forever do men prove to be uncomprehending, both before they hear and once they have heard it. For although all things happen according to this Word, they are like the unexperienced experiencing words and deeds such as I explain when I distinguish each thing according to its nature and show how it is. Other men are unaware of what they do when they are awake just as they are forgetful of what they do when they are asleep. (B1)

Heidegger’s somewhat convoluted translation of the same fragment:

But while Logos constantly remains itself, human beings behave as those who do not comprehend (axunetoi), both before they have heard and after they have first heard. For everything becomes a being (kata ton logon tonde), in accordance with and in consequence of this Logos; yet they (human beings) resemble those who have never dared anything through experience, although they attempt words and works such as I carry out, laying out each thing (kata phusin), according to Being, and explicating how it behaves. But as for the other human beings (the other human beings as they all are, hoi polloi the many), what they really do while awake is concealed from them, just as what they did in their sleep conceals itself from them again afterward.

In this fragment, what Heraclitus really meant by Logos is still a subject of debate, and in some translations Logos is still left as it is in the original Greek.¹¹

Heidegger here interpreted Logos as close in meaning to physis, i.e., Being. At first glance, we might think that Logos here means “discourse” (and Logos could already have that meaning in Heraclitus’ time), since the fragment states: “men prove to be uncomprehending, both before they hear and once they have heard it.” This phrase seems to imply that the Logos can be heard, like a speech. However, the fragment also says that the uncomprehending are trying to get to the Logos through words — epeia in ancient Greek, which gave us “epic” in English — and yet remain unexperienced, so Logos here cannot mean mere words. This fragment indicates that comprehending Logos is not the same as hearing words, and that those who talk and act but do not grasp Logos are as unaware, as absent as when they are asleep.

Fragment 2 tells us: “τοῦ λόγου δ’ ἐόντος ξυνοῦ ζώουσιν οἱ πολλοὶ ὡς ἰδίαν ἔχοντες φρόνησιν”, conventionally translated as “Though the Logos is common, the many live as if they had a wisdom of their own.”

For Heidegger, in these two fragments, Logos is used in the other sense of the term: gathering, and he interprets it as the constant gathering of beings. By beings, Heidegger means all that is. In this sense Logos is very close to Being itself.

He mentions a few other fragments that point to people’s ignorance or misunderstanding of Logos as a collection of Beings — i.e., a gathering together of what is. Here is Fragment 72, which is quite similar in meaning to fragment 1 and 2:

“ᾧ μάλιστα διηενκῶς ὁμιλοῦσι λόγῳ τῷ τὰ ὅλα διοικοῦντι, τούτῳ διαφέρονται, καὶ οἵς καθ’ ἡμέραν ἐγκυροῦσι, ταῦτα αὐτοῖς ξένα φαίνεται”

“for they turn their backs on that with which they traffic the most, Logos, and what they run into every day appears alien to them.”

and fragment 34:

“ἀξύνετοι ἀκούσαντες κωφοῖσιν ἐοίκασι· φάτις αὐτοῖσιν μαρτυρεῖ παρεόντας ἀπεῖναι”

“Hearing they do not understand, like the deaf. Of them does the saying bear witness: ‘present, they are absent.’”

One of the lessons from these fragments for Heidegger, when it comes to Logos, is that words and hearing are authentic insofar as they are related to Logos and to Being. People encounter Being all the time and use words but the majority of them (οἱ πολλοὶ, “hoi polloi”) do not understand Being and are “absent-present.” At the other end of the spectrum, for Heidegger, poets and thinkers (especially philosophers) are the masters of Logos. Indeed, Logos is not easy to apprehend, and it’s probably better that way:

Thus Being, Logos, as the gathered harmony, is not easily available for everyman at the same price, but is concealed, as opposed to that harmony which is always a mere equalizing, the elimination of tension, leveling: ἁρμονίη ἀφανὴϛ φανερῆϛ κρείττων, “the harmony that does not show itself (immediately and without further ado) is more powerful than the harmony that is (always) evident” (fragment 54).¹²

For Heidegger, poetry, and in particular, Greek tragedy, is among the greatest of manifestations of Being. So he turns to Antigone, Sophocles’ poetic tragedy to understand how Being is expressed in it. The focus of this article is Logos, so I won’t go into the detail of his commentary on Antigone. Suffice it to say, he concludes from this text and additional Heraclitus fragments that conflict (polemos/πόλεμος, sometimes translated as “war”) is an intrinsic part of Being and that Being is a gathering of extremes in opposition with each other.¹³ Being is also gewalttätig (“violent”), which means that it must use violence to leave the heimlich, the comfortable and familiar, to explore the unheimlich, the uncanny or disquieting, which is what poets and philosophers do best. If this sounds familiar, maybe you’ve read Bryan’s post on Novelty and Safety, or heard him describe this phenomenon.

Heidegger then moves on to comment on Parmenides’ fragments and uncovers more insights about the pre-Socratics’ understanding of Logos and Being. Parmenides’ fragment 5 states: “τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ νοεῖν ἐστίν τε καὶ εἶναι,” which translates literally to “but thinking and Being are the same.” Heidegger prefers to say that they belong to each other. In other words, they are mutually inclusive, but neither identical nor equivalent.¹⁴

Heidegger’s understanding of noein (νοεῖν) also diverges from convention. He translates it as “apprehending” (vernehmen), instead of “thinking”:

On the one hand, to apprehend (vernehmen) means to take in (hin-nehmen), to let something come to oneself — namely, what shows itself, what appears. On the other hand, to apprehend [in German] means to interrogate a witness, to call him to account, and thus to comprehend the state of affairs, to determine.¹⁵

After arguing for the unity between apprehension (noein) and Being in fragment 5, he points out another unity between apprehension (noein) and Logos, in relationship with Being in fragment 6: “χρὴ τὸ λέγειν τε νοεῖν τ᾽ ἐὸν ἔμμεναι.” The conventional translation is: “It is necessary both to say and to think that being is,” which Heidegger, in his tortuous way, translates as “‘Needful is the gathered setting-down as well as the apprehending of this: the being (is) Being” — which sounds slightly better in German: “Not tut das gesammelte Hinstellen sowohl als das Vernehmen von diesem: das Seiend (ist) Sein.”¹⁶

In other words, Heidegger wants to emphasize that, for the pre-Socratics, apprehension, Being, and Logos are united. They cannot exist in isolation, though later philosophers will separate them.

In Parmenides the meaning of Logos/legein has already begun to evolve: it no longer means the gatheredness of beings. Now Logos is part of the effort to apprehend Being; Logos is still united with apprehension (noein), but Being has separated from them. To illuminate this new meaning of Logos, Heidegger uses another fragment from Heraclitus (fragment 93):

“ὁ ἄναξ οὗ τὸ μαντεῖόν ἐστι τὸ ἐν Δελφοῖς οὔτε λέγει οὔτε κρύπτει ἀλλὰ σημαίνει”

“The lord whose soothsaying happens at Delphi (oute legei oute kruptei), he neither gathers nor conceals, (alla semainei) but rather he gives indications.”¹⁷

Legei is used here in contrast with concealing (kruptei, which gave us “crypto”), so it implies that legein means unconcealing (rather than gathering). This is where Logos shows a new meaning — discourse — which is not just words, but a way for human beings to uncover Being, through meaningful language. Logos as language is a way for Dasein to open to the world and bring it out of concealment, by naming things. The act of naming (“indications” in the passage above) allows a shared apprehension of the indexical world. Epic poetry represents an early use of this power; in Homer we find the initiation of the history of the Greeks.

Fragment 8 — lines 34-36 also illustrates the close link between thinking, Being, and Logos:

“ταὐτὸν δ’ ἐστὶ νοεῖν τε καὶ οὕνεκεν ἔστι νόημα. οὐ γὰρ ἄνευ τοῦ ἐόντος, ἐν ᾧ πεφατισμένον ἐστιν, εὑρήσεις τὸ νοεῖν.”

Conventionally translated as “Thinking and the thought ‘it is’ are the same. For without the being in relation to which it is uttered you cannot find thinking.”¹⁸

As before, this fragment indicates that we have apprehension and Logos only insofar as we have Being, when noein and Logos are close to Being, similarly to Parmenides’ fragment 7 and the Heraclitus’ fragments we examined earlier.

Contrary to conventional belief, Heidegger thinks that Heraclitus and Parmenides say the same thing about Being, even though they say different things. If that seems paradoxical, it’s because Heidegger wants to challenge the traditional rules of logic applied to the history of Western philosophy:

One finds nothing out of order in the occurrence of such oppositions — here Being, there becoming — because they confirm a rule that applies from the inception of philosophy onward, a rule that supposedly spans its entire history, namely that when one philosopher says A, the other says B, but when the latter says A, then the former says B. Of course, if someone asserts the opposite, that in the history of philosophy all thinkers have at bottom said the same thing, then this is taken as yet another outlandish imposition on everyday common sense. What use, then, is the multifaceted and complex history of Western philosophy, if they all say the same thing anyway? Then one philosophy would be enough. Everything has always already been said. And yet this “same” possesses, as its inner truth, the inexhaustible wealth of what is on every day as if that day were its first.¹⁹

The decline of Being and the supremacy of Logos

After his reinterpretation of the pre-Socratics to argue for an original unity between Being and Logos, Heidegger moves to Plato and Aristotle, to explain how Being began to lose its original sway, and how Logos came to dominate Being.

With Plato, the word idea begins to define Being (physis) and this leads to a division of existence from essence, with Being becoming an imperfect reflection of its own essence. The idea becomes the paradigm, the ideal to which all Being must aspire.

In this part of the book, Heidegger’s writing is uncharacteristically clear and light in technical jargon, so I will quote him directly to elaborate on this and other points:

However, as soon as the essence of Being comes to consist in whatness (idea), then whatness, as the Being of beings, is also what is most in being about beings (das Seiendste am Seienden). On the one hand, whatness is now what really is, ontōs on. Being as idea is now promoted to the status of what really is, and beings themselves, which previously held sway, sink to the level of what Plato calls mē on— that which really should not be and really is not either— because beings always deform the idea, the pure look, by actualizing it, insofar as they incorporate it into matter. On the other hand, the idea becomes the paradeigma, the model. At the same time, the idea necessarily becomes the ideal. What is produced by imitation really “is” not, but only participates in Being, (methexis) participation. The chorismos has been ripped open, the cleft between the idea as what really is, the prototype and archetype, and what really is not, the imitation and likeness.

Now, appearing takes on still another sense on the basis of the idea. That which appears, appearance, is no longer physis, the emerging sway, nor the self-showing of the look, but instead it is the likeness that rises to the surface. Inasmuch as the likeness always falls short of its prototype, what appears is mere appearance, really a seeming, which now means a defect. Now on and phainomenon (what is and what appears) are disjoined. This involves still another essential consequence. Because the idea is what really is, and the idea is the prototype, all opening up of beings must be directed toward equaling the prototype, resembling the archetype, directing itself according to the idea. The truth of physis—alētheia as the unconcealment that essentially unfolds in the emerging sway—now becomes homoiōsis and mimēsis: resemblance, directedness, the correctness of seeing, the correctness of apprehending as representing.²⁰

With Aristotle, Logos, on the other hand, becomes assertion (die Aussage) and as such the place of truth, and Being is turned into the subject of Logos. In Parmenides, logic has begun to separate from Being, though it remains in harmony with it. But by Aristotle, logic has broken away from Being, and begun to dominate it. Heidegger explains this evolution beautifully, while also restating what we uncovered earlier about the original relationship between Being and Logos:

Logos, in the sense of saying and asserting, now becomes the domain and place where decisions are made about truth—that is, originally, about the unconcealment of beings and thus about the Being of beings. In the inception, Logos as gathering is the happening of unconcealment; Logos is grounded in un-concealment and is in service to it. But now, Logos as assertion becomes the locus of truth in the sense of correctness. We arrive at Aristotle’s proposition according to which Logos as assertion is what can be true or false. Truth, which was originally, as unconcealment, a happening of the beings themselves that held sway, and was stewarded by means of gathering, now becomes a property of Logos. In becoming a property of assertion, truth does not just shift its place; it changes its essence. From the point of view of the assertion, the true is attained when saying sticks to what it makes an assertion about, when the assertion is directed by beings. Truth becomes the correctness of Logos. Thus, Logos steps out of its original inclusion in the happening of unconcealment in such a way that decisions about truth, and so about beings, are made on the basis of Logos and with reference back to it—and not only decisions about beings, but even, and in advance, about Being. Logos is now legein ti kata tinos, saying something about something. That about which something is said is in each case what lies at the basis of the assertion, what lies before it, hupokeimenon (subjectum). From the point of view of the Logos that has become independent as assertion, Being displays itself as this lying-there.

Furthermore, Being is now analyzed and placed into categories by Logos:

That which lies at the basis can be exhibited in asserting in various ways: as what is in such and such a state, as what is so and so large, as what is related in this and that way. Being-in-a-state, Being-large, Being-related are determinations of Being. Because, as ways of Being-said, they have been created from Logos—and because to assert is katēgorein—the determinations of the Being of beings are called katēgoriai, categories. On this basis, the theory of Being and of the determinations of beings as such becomes a theory that investigates the categories and their order. The goal of all ontology is the theory of categories. Today it is taken to be self-evident, as it has been for a long time, that the essential characteristics of Being are categories. But at bottom, this is strange. It becomes intelligible only when we grasp that, and how, Logos not only separates itself from physis, but at the same time comes forth over against physis as the standard-setting domain that becomes the place of origin for the determinations of Being.

From Aristotle onwards, Logos reaches a level of authority and abstraction from Being, so that whenever there is a discrepancy between Logos and Being, Logos always wins because it determines what can or cannot be: “But Logos, phasis, the saying in the sense of the assertion, decides so originally about the Being of beings that in each case where one saying stands against another, where a contra-diction occurs, antiphasis, then the contradictory cannot be. In contrast, that which does not contradict itself is at least capable of Being.”²¹

Conclusion

Heidegger references and quotes many great Western philosophers in this book, paying homage to them and challenging them at the same time: Schopenhauer, Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche. To close the loop on Schopenhauer: in On the Origin of Logic, Bryan describes how the author of The World as Will and Representation observed that some pre-Socratics, at some point, started to codify empirical observations into abstract laws of reasoning, which gave us the theory of logic. Heidegger was also interested in the history of logic and in the pre-Socratics. His finding, that in these early days Logos was closer to Being seems parallel to Schopenhauer’s argument, that the rules of logic come from present lived experience, live conversation, and from empirical observations. For Schopenhauer, although logic is not particularly useful in practice, but is a “perfectly safe branch of knowledge,” for Heidegger logic as “ratio” has become our master and restricts our Being.

There seems to be another parallel with another of Bryan’s posts: In Aristotle, Heidegger finds the Logos becoming abstracted, increasingly detached from our Being, similarly to the abstraction of the idea of “perfection” that Bryan describes in Spinoza.

Heidegger’s critique was certainly influenced by Nietzsche, and there are a few references to him in this book. In the Gay Science and “Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” Nietzsche takes down science, logic and even the concept of truth as tacit social agreements that give us a false sense of certainty, which is also a criticism of Heidegger’s. Heidegger points out that Nietzsche already noticed how vacuous the concept of Being is today, but he has a different explanation for it. For Nietzsche, Logos is a mere social convention, but for Heidegger it has become a dominant force over Being. They both praise poetry, art and (as usual) philosophy as life-affirming (or should we say Being-affirming?) pursuits.

Metaphysics seems like one of the most abstract topics there is, and yet I’ve got a lot of practical advice from this book. Some of the life lessons I’ve taken from it include: beware of what seems obvious and easy, anything that offers ready answers, reassuring certainty and consensus. Avoid hackneyed language. Being is about questioning more than it is about having answers. Striving and conflict are part of it, as is the quest for the unknown, the unfamiliar, the unheimlich. Great ways to explore the unfamiliar and strengthen your “emerging sway” are through νοεῖν (thinking), philosophizing, making art and using language in novel, poetic ways — and what better way to do this than through reading and writing about a rich philosophical view like Heidegger’s?

I'm Bryan Kam. I'm thinking about complexity and selfhood. Please sign up to my newsletter, follow me on Mastodon, or see more here.