Being Jewish/reading Heidegger: an ontological encounter 9780823223121, 9780823223114

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Acknowledgments (page xi)
Introduction (page xv)
1 Situating the Work: A Brief History of Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger (page 1)
2 Between Rhetoric and Hermeneutics: Thinking the Sacredness of Sacred Texts (page 27)
3 Hermes' Rhetorical Problem: The Dilemma of the Sacred in Hermeneutics (page 43)
4 Truth-Aspiring Discourse at the End of Philosophy: The Limits of Narrative (page 72)
5 A Rhetorical Phenomenology of Heidegger's Speech: The Philosopher as Rabbinic Sage (page 93)
6 Heidegger Reading Aristotle: The Rhetoric as Ontology (page 109)
7 Heidegger's Teaching: Philosophy as Torah (page 125)
Bibliography (page 145)
Index (page 153)

Citation preview

Being Jewish / Reading Heidegger

Series Board James Bernauer Drucilla Cornell Thomas R. Flynn

Kevin Hart Richard Kearney

Jean-Luc Marion Adriaan Peperzak Thomas Sheehan David Tracy Hent de Vries Merold Westphal Edith Wyschogrod Michael Zimmerman

John D. Caputo, series editor

=I PERSPECTIVES IN CONTINENTAL

PHILOSOPHY

ALLEN SCULT

Being Jewish / Reading Heidegger An Ontological Encounter

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York a 2004

Copyright © 2004 by Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means ~electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Perspectives in Continental Philosophy, no. 36 ISSN 1089-3938

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Scult, Allen Michael. Being Jewish/reading Heidegger : an ontological encounter / Allen Scult.— Ist ed. p. cm. — (Perspectives in continental philosophy, ISSN 1089-3938 ; no. 36) Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8232-2311-6 —ISBN 0-8232-2312-4 (pbk.) 1. Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976. 2. Hermeneutics. 3. Bible. O.T. Pentateuch — Hermeneutics. 4. Rhetoric— Philosophy. 5. Rhetoric — Religious aspects — Judaism. 6. Philosophy, Jewish. I. Title. II. Series. B3279.H49S375 2004 193 —dc22

2003024304

Printed in the United States of America

07 06050403 54321 First edition

Chapter 2 is based on “The Relationship between Rhetoric and Hermeneutics Reconsidered,” Central States Speech Journal 34 (1983): 221—28; chapter 3, on “Hermes’ Rhetorical Problem: The Dilemma of the Sacred in Philosophical Hermeneu-

tics,” in Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde, eds., Rhetoric and Hermeneutics tn Our

Time: A Reader (Yale University Press, 1997), 290-309; chapter 4, on “The Hermeneutics of Heidegger’s Speech: A Rhetorical Phenomenology,” Journal of the Brittsh Soctety for Phenomenology 29, no. 2 (1998): 162-83; chapter 5, on “The Limits of Narrative: Truth-Aspiring Discourse in the Bible,” Réeforica 10, no. 4 (Fall 1992): 367-80; and chapter 6, on “Aristotle’s Rhetoric as Ontology: A Heideggerian Reading,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 32, no. 2 (1999): 146-59, © 1999 by Pennsylvania State University, reproduced by permission. I am grateful to these journals and their sponsors for permission to reproduce this material.

In memory of my friend Jules Kirschenbaum: “him to whom it is said.”

Contents

Acknowledgments XL

Introduction xv Reading Heidegger I

1 Situating the Work: A Brief History of Being Jewish / 2 Between Rhetoric and Hermeneutics: Thinking the

Sacredness of Sacred Texts 27

3 Hermes’ Rhetorical Problem: The Dilemma of the

Sacred in Hermeneutics 43 4 Truth-Aspiring Discourse at the End of Philosophy: The Limits of Narrative /2 5 A Rhetorical Phenomenology of Heidegger’s Speech:

The Philosopher as Rabbinic Sage 95

6 Heidegger Reading Aristotle: The Rhetoric as Ontology 109

Index 155

7 Heidegger’s Teaching: Philosophy as Torah 125

Bibliography 145

Acknowledgments

Over the years, I have been privileged to share the enlightening pleasures of “Being Jewish / Reading Heidegger” with a wide assortment of colleagues, students, and friends. Without their willingness to indulge me, to listen for the philosophical possibilities, often clarifying for me, as if for the first time, what it was I was trying to say, and perhaps most important, sharing in the joyful play of putting things this way or that, this book would probably not have come to be. Though I cannot mention them all by name, I hope they will find moments of our conversational work and play reflected in the pages that follow. I thank them all deeply for their sustaining philosophical friendship. There are some, however, whom I wish to acknowledge by name, for the particular help and support they have given me, beginning with those who introduced me to, and helped me get to know Heidegger’s 1924 course on Aristotle's Rhetoric. This lit-

tle-known work, only recently published as volume 18 of the Gesamtausgabe, has come to occupy a central place in my thinking about Heidegger's relationship to Aristotle, and my understanding of the important role his way of being a teacher plays in the unfolding of his early phenomenology — themes central to this XL

book. In view of its importance to this work, I hope readers will indulge some narrative detail in my acknowledgment of those

who brought me to it. In 1995, Bill Richardson first called my attention to the course, and the possibility that a manuscript of it existed in one of the archives. I am grateful to Ted Kisiel, who graciously facilitated the connections that gave me access to the Brécker manuscript of the course housed in the Marcuse Archive

in Frankfurt; and to my colleague in Frankfurt, Hans-Jochen Schild, who not only hosted me in Frankfurt during my sabbatical in 1996, but accompanied me to the Stadt- und Universitatsbibliothek, and shared with me the excitement of the first look at the manuscript in its original venue. Even though we were far from the first to examine the Heidegger manuscript, the experience nonetheless came to resem-

ble, for us, the discovery of a long-lost text. This admittedly romantic relationship to the text, which I could not have managed alone, carried over to our daily work of deciphering and trying to comprehend the text together, and gave to our study of Heidegger’s words an immediate and lively sense —for the moment —of actually being Heidegger's students, poring over our notes after class in the great “Aula” at Marburg, trying to understand the full import of his words. In the midst of our work, we called Hans-Georg Gadamer, who had been Heidegger's student at that time, to discuss the lecture course with him. Perhaps because of his own interest in the relationship between

hermeneutics and rhetoric, he wanted to hear more about the course (which he did not remember attending), and invited us for a visit to Heidelberg. We began our visit with Schild reading the first lecture aloud. Gadamer sat back and closed his eyes, letting them be warmed by the bright sun streaming through the large round window in front of his desk. He smiled with pleasure hearing Heidegger’s words from so long ago. Working off the shared experience of the first lecture, Gadamer spoke to us of Heidegger's character as teacher in the early 1920s, made observations about the content of the course, and responded to my questions about Heidegger's relationship to rhetoric and theology at that time. My sense of Heidegger's teacherly persona in the twenties, so important to xi m Acknowledgments

the intimate connection between Being Jewish and Reading Heidegger developed in what follows, gained much from these rich experiences with the 1924 manuscript in Germany in 1995. I hope some of the philosophical vitality of those conversations comes through. Following my visit, Gadamer was also kind enough to read what became chapter 5, and to write some encouraging comments about the connections I make in that chapter between Heidegger’s view of rhetoric and rabbinic Judaism. All this by way

of adding another small item to the long list of Gadamer’s hermeneutical generosities. I want to thank Gerald Bruns for first introducing me to the

wonders of hermeneutics and Gadamer’s teachings. For early readings and reactions to some of these essays, I thank Richard Palmer, Michael Hyde, and Walter Jost. Some of my ideas along the way were first aired on the “Heidegger List,” to the accompaniment of generous responses from the named and the pseudo-

named parties who hang out there. I especially want to thank Michael Penneman, Henk Van Tuyjl, and Michael Eldred for their

sustained cyber conversations with me over the years. I thank Dan Dahlstrom for lending his well-tuned ear to my early attempts to frame the pro] ect in what became chapter l, and John Caputo,

the editor of this series, for directing me to sources I might otherwise have missed and for his generous encouragement of the

project. The errors and oversights that remain are, of course, entirely my own. I am also grateful to Sidney Robinson for his insights about rhetoric and its multifarious relations to art, philosophy, and life — part of a conversation that has now gone on nonstop for almost

thirty years; and to my brother, Mel Scult, with whom I have enjoyed the benefits of older-brother support and advice, as well as sustained intellectual colleagueship through the many phases of this project. For her faithful service, above and beyond for lo

these many years, I acknowledge my secretary, Rachel Buckles. I also wish to acknowledge the Humanities Center at Drake University for funding my trip to Germany in 1996 to study the manuscript of Heidegger’s 1924 lectures, and for supporting my released time from teaching in the fall of 2002, which facilitated my work in the final stages of the book. For their gracious Acknowledgments m xii

professionalism, I want to thank my managing editors at Fordham, Chris Mohney and his predecessor, Felicity Edge. And finally, my thanks go to my wife, Lois, and my sons, Michael and

Ben, for their persistent and loving pursuit of my increasingly elusive self, as I worked toward the completion of this book.

ai m Acknowledgments

Introduction What is man? A transition, a direction, a storm sweeping over our planet, a recurrence or a vexation for the gods? We do not

know. Yet we have seen that in the essence of this mysterious being, philosophy happens.

— Martin Heidegger

This work is an attempt to account for what I have long experienced to be a hermeneutical affinity — perhaps even an intimacy —

between Judaism as a way of life, grounded in an intense inter-

pretive relationship to a sacred text, namely, the Torah, and Heidegger's view of philosophical practice, as a similarly intense interpretive relationship to what he considered to be the founding texts of Western philosophy, especially Aristotle and the PreSocratics. In the case of both Heidegger and the Jewish tradition, the relationship of reader to text has about it the aura of the sacred, by which I mean that the words of the text lend themselves to the presumption that they embody their meaning “perfectly.” This understanding of the way sacred texts “mean” constitutes

an essential link between Heidegger and the Jewish tradition developed here. In Judaism, the idea traces back to the divine origin of the Torah and finds perhaps its most authoritative statements as one of Maimonides’ “Thirteen Foundations of Faith”: “The eighth foundation is the belief in the divine origin of the text of the Torah; that is to say: the whole of the Torah that we now possess —in its present version, given through Moses our Mas-

ter —is entirely from the mouth of the Gevurah, that is to say that it came wholly from God by a means that we call metaphorically [divine] speech (Dibbur).”! XV

Of course, | am not suggesting that Heidegger read the texts of Aristotle or the pre-Socratics as coming from the mouth of God; but the idea that such a “perfect text” is possible in turn makes possible a particular way of reading. Steven Fraade traces this essential aspect of Jewish hermeneutics through the Hellenistic imagery of Philo, which reflects an early link between

Jewish hermeneutics and the Greek philosophical tradition: “Moses alone, the supreme philosopher and lawgiver, had the divine /ogos imprinted upon his soul, which he in turn has imprinted

within the text of his Torah, which in turn can leave its imprint on the soul of the individual and the life of the community that exegetically and performatively engage it.”* The kabbalistic version of this orientation to the words of the Torah reads them as “perfect symbols, ” where the perfect form of the words in the text is directly associated with the perfection of the letters of the divine name.° But this association is merely a metaphorical enhancement of the Kabbalah’s fundamental insight regarding sacred texts: because it is presumed to embody its meaning perfectly, a sacred text takes on a singular and distinctive form

that is perfectly suited to it. To appreciate or even to understand

that form requires a special sort of deference in order for the sacred singularity of the text to become accessible. Readers must assume that what the text has to say could not be said in any other

way. This orientation “fits” the words of the text such that the “perfection of form” ascribed to it is thereby made complete.4 In what follows, I shall argue that this perfect fit is made possible by what we might call the “formally indicating rhetorical.”® By this I mean that the required orientation is inscribed in the formation of the words —in the “how” of their coming to form. The reader is thereby able to pick up on the movement of the words toward their meaning. But because language is structured in such

a way that it cannot do anything on its own, the reader must first be willing to grant the text the necessary authority to accomplish this end. The circularity of this sort of transaction is an ongoing issue in Gadamer’s hermeneutics. Gadamer makes it clear that

without such authority, tradition cannot compel the continuity necessary to its survival. He argues that authority is “based ultimately not on the subjugation and abdication of reason, but on xvi m Introduction

recognition and knowledge — knowledge, namely that the other is superior to oneself in judgment and insight.”° But how does one come to grant a text the presumption of superiority that sets this process in motion?

As suggestive as it is, what is missing from Gadamer's formulation is an erotic cathexis to a particular text —a text so knowingly intimate with the soul as to be transformative. But because

even a hint of sucha personal attachment would further open his approach to charges of romantic excess, Gadamer reserves his

considerable talent for appreciating the capacity of particular texts to evoke an intimacy with the reader for his more explicit literary pieces.’ And though he does show an interest in both rhetoric and the sacred in his later work,® he never joins these pursuits explicitly to the core of his project. Yet in the safe ambiguity of the frontispiece, we find the following verse from Rainer Maria Rilke as epigraph for Gadamer’s Truth and Method:

Catch only what you've thrown yourself, all is mere skill and little gain; but when you re suddenly the catcher of a ball thrown by an eternal partner with accurate and measured swing towards you, to your centre, in an arch from the great bridgebuilding of God; why catching then becomes a power — not yours, a world’s.

The echo of Otto's “the wholly Other [dav ganz Andere|” seems

unmistakable here, suggesting a dimension to the hermeneutical experience, which is, in Otto's words, “objective and outside the self.”? Mircea Eliade elaborates on Otto’s formulation: “Something that does not belong to this world has manifested itself apodictically and in so doing has indicated an orientation or determined a course of conduct [introducing] an absolute element and [putting] an end to relativity and confusion.”!° In the case of Jewish hermeneutics, there would seem to be more than “sufficient reason” to grant the authority for such privileged speech to the words of the Torah.!! Not only does the Torah

contain the Word of God, but what is perhaps more significant, Introduction m xvl

the manner in which God’s Word “comes to form” in the Torah embodies a movement of language which gives to the properly oriented reader an unmistakable indication of the transcendent. One finds numerous allusions to this phenomenon, but the kabbalistic version, in the concept of the Hn-Sof, is strikingly Heideg-

gerian, and therefore worthy of special attention:

Here [in the writings of the Lurianic school of Kabbalah] the coming into being of the linguistic movement which has its original source in the infinite being of God himself, pro-

ceeds from the fact that, in God, a joy, a sense of delight or self rapture held sway —in Hebrew —Shi'Shu ‘a —which

evoked a movement of the En-Sof. ... From this a movement comes into being in the En-Sof “from itself to itself,” a movement in which that joy of the Hn-Sof gives expression

to itself, but thereby at the same time expresses the mysterious potentialities of all expression.”

Now of course Heidegger did not have recourse to divine authority in the development of his hermeneutics, yet his notion of “authentic reading” has a similar ring to it: “That which is sustaining and directive in reading is gatheredness [Sammlung]. To what is it [1.e., a reading| gathered? To what is written, to what

is said in writing. Authentic reading is a gatheredness to that which, unbeknown to us, has already claimed our essence, regardless of whether we comply with it or withhold from it.”!’ Moving still closer to the horizon of the present work, we find another

very similar allusion to the “formally indicating rhetorical” in Hannah Arendt’s account of her experience of Heidegger’s words:

“The wind that blows through Heidegger’s thinking —like that which still sweeps towards us after thousands of years from the work of Plato —does not spring from the century he happens to live in. It comes from the primeval, and what it leaves behind is something perfect, something which, like everything perfect (in Rilke’s words), falls back to where it came from.”!4 The “repetition” of this profoundly implicative relationship with a text across such apparently disparate hermeneutical horizons leads me to posit an underlying formal similarity in how those relationships are constructed: in the way thought moves xeiut = Introduction

toward language and is, in turn, moved by language. In his essay “The Nature of Language,” Heidegger offers an “equation,” which

is very much to the point of these similarities: “The being of language —the language of being [Dav Wesen der Sprache: Die Sprache des Wesens).”'°

Somewhere, scattered among the traces of our most profound experiences with language, we find “formal indications” of Being.!©

Heidegger says of the formal indication that its hermeneutical force works independently of its content.!” And so under the sign

of the formal indication, I read the apparent similarity in the hermeneutical relationships formed by the words of the Torah, of classical Greek philosophy, and of Heidegger’s own texts as mutually reflective instances of the formally indicating rhetorical. And though such rhetoric is most characteristic of sacred texts, its formally indicative work does not require that the text be “sacred” in the conventional sense. In the present work, the “sacred” will be taken out of its con-

ventional theological context and theorized as “rhetorically” induced, that is, as a mode of speech that lends itself to a profoundly implicative interpretive relationship between reader and text. In such cases, the text so deeply implicates the reader within

the purview of its speaking that the reader is led to hear in the words of the text a “voice” that transcends the everyday worldliness of human speech. The rhetorical capacity of such texts to arouse in the audience the deep sense that their identity is bound up with the text, in some transcendent way, reveals what might

be called the “ontological relationship” between rhetoric and hermeneutics — between speaking and understanding. The idea that the relationship between rhetoric and hermeneutics delineates a space in which ontological thinking might find a beginning is a significant subtext in what follows. The idea will be investigated from the ground up, so to speak, following Heidegger’s suggestion that ontology can only be thought through the hermeneutical mediation of factical Dasein, which is, necessarily, in every case, one's own: “We are at every moment a Dasein [Wir sind jeweils ein Dasein).” ®

Here is where my study gets into trouble, even as it assumes its distinctive voice. Taking Heidegger too literally at his word, the Introduction m= xix

present work locates human facticity in the lifeworld of a partic-

ular being, namely, the “Being Jewish” of the title. Of course, grounding ontology in such a blatantly ontic version of facticity would seem to doom the project from the very start. But the transper-

sonal, transtemporal dimension, implied by the gerund, is meant to suggest that the being of “Being Jewish” be identified with the ongoing movement of Jewish tradition through time. Even so, the rhetorical power by which the words of the Torah are transformed into an ongoing tradition still remains an ontic event, albeit one with the capacity to repeat itself. Such an event surely merits the attention of hermeneutical scholars, and it has already received such attention in fruitful abundance.!? Steven Fraade, for example, delineates in great detail how rabbinic commentary reenacts the transformative power of God’s Word in the Torah. In a chapter entitled “Representing Revelation,” Fraade explicates rabbinic hermeneutics from a decidedly rhetorical point of view: “Through the textured fabric of [the work of commentary], biblical writ (and the event of its revelation), inherited tradition (in all its fluidity), and historical time (including its expected messianic reversals) are all made transformatively prevent in the social world of its performative study.” As a matter of fact, in its understanding of how the words of the Torah lend themselves to the formation of an ongoing, open-ended, yet authoritative interpretive tradition, the present work falls well within conventional —

even traditional — Jewish scholarship.*! For readers of the present work, Emmanuel Levinas’s characterization of the part played by the reader in the Jewish construction of the sacred will perhaps have the greatest resonance: “The relation to God at the time of writing and reading the Name admittedly depends on the intention and fervour of the reader or scribe. It depends above all on the faithfulness of this act to the commandment (mitzvah) that the reader and the exegete will have drawn out from the actual text. And this ts the characteristic method for Judaism.’** Another signifi-

cant “commonplace” in Jewish hermeneutics that will be “recast”

in the present work is the dialogical structure of the Torah. As Levinas observes: “All relation of the believer to the revealed God admittedly begins in his relation to the Scriptures.”*° The dialog-

ical structure of the biblical Word also provides the framework xx m Introduction

for Torah study culminating in the paradigmatic relationship between rabbinic sage and disciple.”4

What marks the distinctiveness of the present work, however, is that “Being Jewish” is hypostasized into a hermeneutical subject —a subject constituted solely in and through its reading of Heidegger. For the sake of its hermeneutical self-understanding, then, “Being Jewish” will have no existence outside of “Reading Heidegger.” Consequently, the considerable scholarly literature on Jewish hermeneutics, describing how Judaism as a way of life emerges out of a particular way of reading the Torah, will be deliberately elided in order for the encounter between “Being Jewish” and “Reading Heidegger” to show itself directly —unmediated. I begin the development of this phenomenology in chapter | by tracing the “coming to be” of “Being Jewish” as “hermeneutical subject” in this investigation. The story of its becoming is told through a recounting of the apparent “repetitions” of the experi-

ence of the sacred in the reading of certain central texts in the Jewish and philosophical traditions. Although the recounting will require a brief digression into my own experience of being Jew-

ish and reading Heidegger, this experience is quickly assimilated into the hermeneutical version of “Being Jewish,” hopefully with the philosophical grounding necessary to stand on its own.

In chapter 2, the hermeneutical experience of reading that opens up onto a horizon of ontology is shown to be rooted in the situatedness of the spoken word —what might be called its “rhetorical situation.”*° The relationship between the ontological structure of the rhetorical situation and the possibility of hermeneutical experience is explored through a phenomenological examination of the “hermeneutical becoming” of the paradigmatic sacred text —

namely, Scripture. Building on the relationship between rhetoric and hermeneutics as it shows itself in scriptural interpretation, chapter 3 explores the problem of “voice” in a philosophy that, like Heidegger's, intimates sacred knowledge. Although the chapter's title, “Hermes’ Rhetorical Problem,” alludes to the daunting task of the mythical divine messenger, I also examine the problem from the other side: How are we to read the later Heidegger when he assumes the role of a sort of Hermes, tracking the “call of Being” as he Introduction m= xxi

hears it in the words of the pre-Socratics, and then transmit it “downward” to his own audience, as if it were now contained in his own speech?

The limits of situated rhetoric as the mediating link in the unfolding of a sacred tradition —be it religious or philosophical —

are explored in chapter 4 by examining the main form in which biblical speech is presented —namely, narrative. Although Heidegger’s philosophical writing does not take on the conventional form of a narrative, he is forever recounting the “story of philosophy” in order to lead us to a view of what “comes next.” (Moses'’

view of the Promised Land at the end of the story of the Exodus is a striking parallel.) There seems to be something about the narrative form, at least in the hands of visionary storytellers, which conceals within itself the means of its own overcoming, and so of a “new beginning.” In chapter 5, very much inspired by Gadamer’s reflections on his experience as Heidegger's student, I offer what I call a “rhetor-

ical phenomenology” of Heidegger’s speech. This examination yields a view of the essential interconnectedness between reading, teaching, and “speaking” philosophy. Philosophy —or at least

philosophy as Heidegger practices it—is theorized as a reading relationship to a text that the philosopher holds in great authority, such that his teaching becomes a reenactment for his students of that relationship, and thereby comes to constitute the ongoing movement of a philosophical tradition. The relationship is found

to be parallel, in character and significance, to the rabbis’ relationship to the Torah as the framework within which Jewish tradition unfolds. In chapter 6, I link up “Being Jewish / Reading Heidegger” of chapter 1, as the factical ground for ontological thinking, with the analogous case of Heidegger reading Aristotle, as ontology from the ground up. The everyday preoccupations of biblical law, the teaching and study of which constitutes the being of “Being

Jewish,” finds its parallel in Heidegger's reading of Aristotle's Rhetoric as “the first systematic hermeneutic of the everydayness of Being with one another.”*° I develop this parallel through an examination of some key passages in the 1924 lecture course, recently published as Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie.’

xxi m Introduction

In the concluding chapter, which further explores the isomorphism between the relationship of reader to text and that of teacher to student, I lay out a series of “formal indications” through which Heidegger suggests what philosophical discourse beyond metaphysics might “look like.” I also offer an extended

interpretation of the formal indication as it emerges out of the present work. Once again, I find Heidegger's strongest hints in those strikingly “teacherly” texts on Aristotle from the early 1920s. I characterize Heidegger’s eminently pedagogical way of “speaking philosophy,” his performance of Aristotle for his students in these courses, as “rhetorical,” mirroring Aristotle’s own philosophical style in the R/etoric. | conclude that the essen-

tial link between Jewish and Heideggerian hermeneutics — between “Being Jewish’ and “Reading Heidegger’ —is to be found in the biblical idea of God’s words as “Torah,” perhaps best translated as “sacred instruction. ” Notes 1. Maimonides, as quoted in Ouaknin, 7e Burnt Book: Reading the Torah, 11-12. 2. Fraade, From Tradition to Commentary: Torah ano Its Interpretation in the Midrash Stfre to Deuteronomy, 12.

3. Gershom Scholem presents a fully annotated account of this kabbalistic tradition in an early essay, translated as “The Name of God and the Linguistic Theory of the Kabbalah.” In his influential work on biblical hermeneutics, Garments of Torah: Essays tn Biblical Hermeneutics, 42, Michael Fishbane develops this same kabbalistic notion through the metaphor “garments of Torah,” describing how this mystical relationship between the words of Scripture and the divine name works to direct

the response of the interpreter: “And so... the first task of the reader [of Scripture] is to be spiritually converted to the divine plenitude symbolically distilled in Scripture, and then, by means of a mystical hermeneu-

tics, to disrobe the bride in order to unite with her, behind her many veils. From the speech of God one is thus led to divinity itself: for in Scripture, the divine Logos w divinity in its various concealments.” 4. The part played by the interpreter’s response in the construction of a sacred text brings us to an even more direct connection between Jewish and contemporary hermeneutics. In her groundbreaking work The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation tn Modern

Introduction m= xxUl

Laterary Theory, 25, Susan Handelman shows how the rhetorical transformation performed by divine speech (the Dibbur of God discussed above) is theorized as the work of metaphor in modern literary theory:

“The Rabbinic way of thinking is precisely that kind of linguisticmetaphorical hermeneutic which such thinkers as Gadamer, Ricceur, Derrida and others call for in their work. At the end of The Rule of Metaphor, Ricceur speculates: ‘Interpretation is a mode of discourse that functions at the intersection of two domains, metaphorical and speculative, a composite discourse.” Reading a text in this way lends it an authoritative voice, which extends the horizon of one’s understanding back through the tradition from which one comes. As Gadamer puts it in Truth and Method, 248: “Authority ... properly understood, has nothing to do with blind obedience, but rather with knowledge.” The idea that authority in this sense contains the seeds of a profound “rationality” not limited to the sphere of religion was introduced into the philosophical circles in which Heidegger and Gadamer traveled in the 1920s by Rudolph Otto in The J0ea of the Holy (see esp. chaps. 1-6). But Otto’s work, lending a philosophical legitimacy to what we might call a “hermeneutics of the sacred,” only confirmed a strain in Heidegger’s thinking that goes all the way back to his Habditationsschrift. John Caputo gives a full account of this strain in The Mystical Element tn Hetdeggers Thought.

The philosophical force of this line of thinking and its implications for hermeneutics have been recognized and explored most notably, of course, by Gadamer. But among Heidegger's students, this “devotional orientation” (ingabe in Heidegger's nomenclature of the early 1920s) to the Word was given added significance by theologian Karl Rahner, who, in Foundations of Christian Fatth: An Introduction to the Idea of Chris-

tiantty, 50, speaks of “hearing and receiving the word God” in a way that echoes the kabbalistic sense of the divine name as indicating a way of reading the Torah. Hans Jonas, in The Gnovtic Religion, 64—65, devel-

ops another interesting link between the capacity of this orientation to disclose an existential relationship with God, on the one hand, and Heidegger’s idea of Geworfenhett (thrownness), on the other. 5. The term “formally indicating rhetorical” is “elliptically cribbed” from Heidegger’s discussion of “formally indicating the historical,” in

the 1920-21 course “Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion.” See Kisiel, The Genests of Hetdeggers “Being and Time,” 164—65. I discuss

“the formal indication [de formale Anzetge|” in the context of Heidegger's

course in chapter 1.

xxiv m Introduction

6. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 248. 7. See, for example, Gadamer, Literature and Philosophy tn Dialogue: Essays tn German Laterary Theory. 8. Gadamer’s encomiums to Heidegger in Heidegger s Ways contain some moving appreciations of Heidegger's rhetoric — his way of speak-

ing —and the effect it had on Gadamer (see esp. “The Thinker Martin Heidegger,” 61-67). Gadamer’s essays “Rhetoric and Hermeneutics,” in Jost and Hyde, Rhetoric and Hermeneutics tn Our Time: A Reader, and “On the Scope and Function of Hermeneutical Reflection,” in Phiosophweal Hermeneutics, contain his most explicit discussion of the relationship

between rhetoric and hermeneutics (see also his essays on hermeneutics and the sacred in Hermeneutics, Religion, and Ethics). 9. Otto, dea of the Holy, 11. 10. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, 27. 11. But, according to Heidegger, in An /ntroduction to Metaphysics,

6-7, “Anyone for whom the Bible is divine revelation and truth has the

answer to the question ‘Why are there essents rather than nothing?’ even before it is asked.” In Heidegger’s view, believing “In the begin-

ning God created heaven and earth” (Genesis 1:1) or perhaps even more significantly “And God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after

our likeness... ‘” (Genesis 1:26) precludes a serious encounter with the question of Being. (Unless otherwise noted, these and all subsequent translations of the Hebrew Bible are taken from the Jewish Publication Society’s Zanakh [Philadelphia, 1985]. Where the society has provided an alternate translation of a given passage, I have chosen the one I judged to be the more felicitous.) In Grundbegriffe der artstoteltschen Philosophie, 6, Heidegger also insists

straight out that thinking must proceed without any dependence on religious belief. But doth the man protest too much? The delicate balance between religious faith and the hermeneutics of facticity in Heidegger's early thought, and its bearing on the present work, will be taken up in chapter 1. 12. Scholem, “Name of God,” 181. 13. Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, 13:111, as translated in Sallis, Reading Hetoegger: Commemorationd, 2.

14. Arendt, “Heidegger at Eighty,” 303. 15. Heidegger, “Nature of Language,” in On the Way to Language, 76. 16. An excellent introduction to the concept of the formal indication

and its importance in Heidegger's thought may be found in Daniel Dahlstrom, “Heidegger’s Method: Philosophical Concepts as Formal Indications.”

Introduction = xxv

17. See Kisiel’s summary of Heidegger’s “Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion” in Genesis, 164. 18. Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 28.

19. Two of the most influential works in this regard, which reflect a strong rhetorical sensibility, are Robert Alter, Te Art of Biblical Narrative, and Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narratwe: Ideological Lat-

erature and the Drama of Reading. The rhetorical capacity of the biblical

word to spawn a powerful hermeneutical tradition is also the subject of an earlier book I coauthored with Dale Patrick: Rhetoric and Biblcal Interpretation.

20. Fraade, From Tradition, 68. In her influential book Fragments of Redemption: Jewish Thought and Literary Theory tn Benjamin, Scholem, and

Levinas, 235-45, Susan Handelman integrates concepts from the contemporary philosopher of rhetoric Chaim Perelman into her explication of Jewish hermeneutics in her chapter on Levinas, using Perelman’s ideas to show how reason and relation can be bound together in the rhetorical work of discourse. 21. Among the works already cited, I would mention again those by Gershom Scholem, Steven Fraade, Susan Handelman, Michael Fishbane, and Marc-Alain Ouaknim as rich in rabbinic sources detailing this “conventional” view of Jewish hermeneutics. Michael Fishbane’s Biblical Interpretation tn Anctent Israel traces the “Jewish way of reading” all the way back to the formation of biblical texts themselves. This early his-

tory of biblical interpretation and its relationship to contemporary hermeneutical thought is also explored by Gerald L. Bruns in his Hermeneutics, Anctent and Modern. The chapters entitled “Canon and Power in the

Hebrew Bible,” “Allegory as Radical Interpretation” (on Philo), and “The Hermeneutics of Midrash” contain an especially accessible and suggestive version of the view of evolution of Jewish hermeneutics under-

lying the present work. Bruns’s book came out of a yearlong seminar in Jerusalem on the subject that also produced an excellent volume edited by Geoffrey Hartman and Sanford Burdick, Midrash and Laterature. 22. Levinas, Beyond the Verse: Talmudte Readings and Lectures, 118. Empha-

sis added. 23. Ibid., 117. 24. See Fraade, “The Early Rabbinic Sage and His Torah in the Text of the S¢fre,” in From Tradition, 69-121. In Jewish hermeneutical scholarship, the work of Martin Jaffee has been especially instructive in its

trenchant exploration of this relationship (see his “The Oral-Cultural Matrix of the Talmud Yerushalmi: Comparative Perspectives on Rhetorical Paweta, Discipleship, and the Concept of Oral Torah,” in Elman and

xxvt m Introduction

Gershoni, Trangnutting Jewtsh Tradttions :Orality, Textuality, and Cultural Diffusion, and “A Rabbinic Ontology of the Written and Spoken Word:

On Discipleship, Transformative Knowledge, and the Living Texts of Oral Torah”). 25. See Lloyd Bitzer, “The Rhetorical Situation.” 26. Heidegger, Being and Time, 178. 27. Published as volume 18 of the Gesamtausgabe, the course devotes its last two-thirds to Aristotle's Rhetoric, which may explain why Léwith titled his course notes “Arwtoteles Rhetortk” (Kisiel, Genesis, 558).

Introduction m xxvell

Situating the Work A Brief History of Being Jewtsh / Reading Hetodegger Man speaks by being silent. — Martin Heidegger

IT am a Jew who reads Heidegger. Nothing remarkable in that. There are many who do. Of course the relationship does require a bit of maintenance work around the edges in order to preserve an appropriate emotional distance from the man as he lived, while at the same time permitting the most intense intellectual and spiritual intimacy with the man as he thought and wrote. In certain moods, the difficulty and delicacy of this maneuver loom large; and Heidegger's active and passive complicity in the horrendous adventure of National Socialism threatens to prohibit a seriously focused philosophical reading of his work. This book is not written in one of those moods. Not that thoughts of those times do not occasionally haunt, even immobilize me. But just at the point when one such episode threatened to permanently sever my relationship with Heideg-

ger, I was fortunate enough to come across Hannah Arendt’s remarkable essay “Heidegger at Eighty.” I have already quoted the passage with which she ends the essay. I quote it again by way of highlighting its role in grounding Heidegger’s thinking in a time neither his nor mine, and therefore safe from both of us: “The wind that blows through Heidegger’s thinking —like that which still sweeps towards us after thousands of years from the work of Plato —does not spring from the century he happens to live in. It comes from the primeval, and what it leaves behind is

I

something perfect, something which, like everything perfect (in Rilke’s words), falls back to where it came from.”! But even as the seemingly transcendental reach of Heidegger's

words enables an overcoming of the haunting recollection of his own historical time and place, one is still faced with his stark

silence on the Jews and Judaism, not only after 1933, but also before —from the very beginning. I speak here not of his silence on the “Jewish question” in Germany before, during, and after World War II. This again is a “personal” matter, having to do with

philosophy only insofar as it might hinder one from a direct encounter with Heidegger’s work. But Heidegger’s silence is not “personal.” Nor even political. Rather, the silence I speak of here is philosophical, and decidedly so, because it is actively constitu-

tive of Heidegger’s thought. Indeed, though we might call it a “silence,” it is more precisely a “silencing” —an aggressively uttered

“Schweigen Ste!” intended to shut out the Jews, and deny their place in the history of thinking. As one considers all the fruitful connections Heidegger might have made with the rich resources of the Jewish tradition, the severity of the exclusion seems to call

for the inevitable charges to be made once again. John Caputo responds with uncompromising directness: “The ugly truth is... that Heidegger is of a mind to make the West Judenrein, which is to reproduce on the level of ‘thinking’ what the Nazis were doing

in the streets.” As the intensity of Caputo’s remark suggests, this silencing is difficult to dismiss: as he goes on to argue, it effectively limits Hei-

degger’s philosophical horizon to the “small world [bounded by] the tiny triangle traced by Freiburg, Todtnauberg, and Messkirch, "5 and connected by a single frayed thread of the tradition to ancient

Athens. Perhaps Heidegger's view of the historical lineage of his thinking — how he traces his thought back through one tradition rather than another —need not have called attention to itself, if Heidegger himself had not placed such importance on a precise delineation of the “effective history” that phenomenologically drives thinking. So many of Heidegger's groundbreaking texts begin with a “correction of course,” consisting of a rigorously thought acknowledgment of the debt to the “first beginning,” which in turn makes possible a “new beginning.” In the light shed by this “correction,” 2 « Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

Heidegger is able to discover a heretofore undisclosed possibility, where others saw simply a historical curiosity. He emphasizes the

importance of this step as he guides students to the “correct” orientation to reading Aristotle:

It is not merely an annex for illustrating how things were earlier... not an opportunity for projection of entertaining world-historical perspectives. The destruction is rather the authentic path upon which the present must encounter itself in its own basic movements; and it must encounter itself in sucha way that through this encounter the continual question springs forth from history to face the present: to what extent is it (the present) itself worried [bekdimmert] about the appropriations of radical possibilities of basic experiences and about their interpretations.‘ The investigation of the radical possibilities of human existence

must be directed by the appropriate “preoccupations.” In this essay, Heidegger “performs” his own “apprenticeship” to Aristotle, showing how reading a classical text guides a proper focusing of philosophical “Bekdimmerung.” Establishing proper focus, amid the scattered distractions of one’s present, is an essential prerequisite for philosophical practice. Our capacity to be worried — preoccupied — provides the vehicle for such a focus on our factical experience: for our take, as it were, on the comings and goings of everyday existence. But what if the historical focus of the preoccupation Heideg-

ger so compellingly traces out is deficient, and the rigorously conceived “new beginning” fails to take account of an essential aspect of its own becoming? Heidegger's own insistence on redirecting the path of philosophy from an appropriately conceived starting point suggests that if there is such an “unthought” connection in one’s philosophy, directing its course without one’s

knowledge, then the careful reiteration of one’s path of thinking —so crucial to determining its course —would be thrown rad-

ically out of kilter. The unthought source would cast a shadow over the clarity of self-understanding so essential for a philosopher of Heidegger’s announced hermeneutical sensibility. The mirror he holds up for hermeneutical self-reflection would be Situating the Work m 3

concave where it should be convex — convex where it should be

concave. And so the work would see itself as other than it is. What are claimed to be clear-sighted indications of the relationship between facticity and ontology would become blurred by the unconscious projections onto Heidegger’s philosophy of the subjective content of his own life.° This “wrong turn,” is precisely the focus of Marléne Zarader’s remarkable book La dette impensée: Heidegger et Ubéritage hébraigue.

Zarader begins with a detailed delineation of the striking structural analogy between hermeneutical phenomenology as we find it in the later Heidegger and in the fundamental revelation texts of the Old Testament. In a recent essay, John Caputo gives us a short, straightforward summation of one of Zarader’s most striking arguments: “[Heidegger’s| discourse of call, address and response . . . is borrowed from the biblical tradition of a salvation history, from the religions of the Book, which are set in motion by the Shema, the sacred command or call —’Hear, O Israel, the Lord Thy God is One’—a command that defines and identifies a sacred people: one God, one people, one place.”® Not only does Caputo correctly

identify the central point of contact between Heideggerian and Jewish hermeneutics; he also goes on to point out its significance for contemporary philosophy. By harking back to the ancient rhetor-

ical practice of treating the words of certain texts as personally addressing the reader in a live, authoritative voice, Heidegger's hermeneutics “invents” a revolutionary way of doing philosophy: In contrast to almost anyone else who has studied what Heidegger refuses to call the ‘pre-Socratics’ or Plato or Aristotle, Heidegger reads these texts not as discourses about (pert) phystds, logos, or altheta, not as investigations of a subject mat-

ter, works of theory and thematization, of epwtm or Wissendschaft, but as texts that call to us, that call upon us and ask for our response, that constitute us Westerners as being’s

people, people who belong [gehéren] to being, who are enowned by being as being’s own.’ But of course Heidegger never acknowledges these resonances with Jewish hermeneutics. Zarader attributes this lack of acknowledgment to “other commitments [autres affirmations | "8 dominating 4 uw Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

Heidegger's attention. And so this rather mystical relationship to a text, which serves as a cornerstone of Jewish hermeneutics, is permitted to resurface in Heidegger “without ever being identified”? — with its forgotten and repressed ties to Judaism transfigured. The voice of God becomes the voice of Being; the People

of God, the recipients of the call, are relocated in the German Volk, with Heidegger himself as bearer of the message. Zarader’s intention seems clear: to expose Heidegger’s impersonation of a Hebrew prophet (she refers to his appropriation here as “en contrebande”)'® and to introduce a countervailing hermeneutic that

puts Heidegger’s way of speaking “in its place,” leaving us to think, with Richard Rorty, that at best “Heideggerese is only Heidegger’s gift to us, not Being’s gift to Heidegger. a Caputo extends Zarader’s contention into an exordium, arguing that any philosophical ethnocentrism that privileges a people or a person as having special access to the hermeneutical resources

of language is not only ethically reprehensible, but also philosophically untenable. The language of Being could not possibly be “elitist,” constituted in a way as to be heard only by certain ears and not by others, simply because of the “racial bodies” to which those ears happen to be attached. As a condition of language, Caputoss “fairness doctrine’ knows no exceptions. Judaism, Caputo seems to suggest, must also forgo the elitist dimension of

its hermeneutic: “We need to break with the deeply hierarchical logic of original and derivative, with the myth of the originary

language, the originary people, the original land by means of which Heidegger reproduces the myth of God’s chosen people, of God’s promised land, which is no less a problem for religion and the root of its violence.”!* One can easily agree with the sentiments expressed here. The sort of ethnocentrism that lends entitlement to the oppression, displacement, and genocide of those it sees as congenitally inferior is equally contemptible, whether that ethnocentrism be Jewish, German, or Muslim. But I believe this sentiment misses the point. As a hermeneutical principle, the presumption of an “originary language” exists solely for the purpose of constructing a relation-

ship with a text in order to understand that text at the deepest levels of possible meaning. In order to pursue that goal with the Situating the Work m 5

single-mindedness required, this approach cannot be pluralistic. It must operate under the conditions of language as we have it — insistently and stubbornly singular. As Derrida puts the matter: “Tam monolingual. My monolingualism dwells and I call it my dwelling; it feels like one to me, and | remain in it and inhabit it. It inhabits me... an absolute habitat.”!9 The democratization of this primordially exclusivist relationship with language would require the extradition of language from its natural habitat —a fatal mistake for a hermeneutical phenomenology. And so the Hebrew in which the Torah comes to the Jews cannot be “Just another language.” It is the language of languages: Ladhon Hakodesh, the “Holy Language.” In order to be heard —to be the “bearer of message and tidings” —sucha language must be loved exclusively, above all others. One is gifted with the possibility of this love, and can only choose to respond or not to respond. The textual object of one’s hermeneutical love is not of one’s own

choosing. Rather, one is chosen by it. And so we must set aside our judgments of whatever other satisfactions Heidegger may have derived from being able to declare: “The [Greek] word philosophia appears, as it were, on the birth certificate of our own history,”!4 and examine where it leads him, and where he leads us.

Augustine had given Heidegger the hermeneutical dispensation he needed: “Love and do what you will [Dilige et quod vis fac].” And so Heidegger came to unconditionally value early Greek thought, convinced that those texts alone represent the dawn of thinking in western civilization. The intensity of this valuing led Heidegger to read these texts with an extraordinarily careful attention to the words. What makes Heidegger worth following is the diligence (Augustine's “dilige”) with which he follows the direction given by those words. The diligence of his reading so brightly illuminates his path that, by following him as he followed the texts, we, too, may find our way with him back to the beginning. Such a hermeneutic requires that the imagination be prepared to follow the words of the text however and wherever those words might lead. The faithfulness of purpose here must proceed with the will fully engaged. Paul Ricceur calls this moment of unquestioned commitment to understanding, the “hermeneutics of affirmation.” 6 m Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

It is a way of loving for the sake of the relationship to the beloved. The yield is understanding as such — for itself, of itself. Good for

nothing else. And aside from understanding the language of the text as a thing in itself, such hermeneutic faithfulness is not only useless, but downright dangerous.

Trusting the Words: Forming the Hermeneutical Relationship This devotional commitment to the words of a particular text — what Heidegger calls “Hingabe” > —is, as Caputo observes, also

the message of the prayer that hermeneutically anchors every Jewish service, the Shema: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord thy God, the Lord is One.” This basic principle of Judaism is followed in Deuteronomy by an exhortation on the hermeneutical singularity of the love God requires: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.

And these words which I command you on this day shall be in your heart. And you shall teach them diligently to your chil-

dren...” (Deuteronomy 6:5—7).!° Although Caputo sees the Shema as being at the core of Heidegger’s “borrowing,” I will argue that the apparent similarity arises out of the exigencies encountered by Heidegger’s own hermeneutical phenomenology.

Had Heidegger chosen to build his ontology on two pillars rather than one, as Caputo and Zarader seem to suggest he should

have —if he acknowledged his putative debt to Judaism — he would have had to “think it” as a competing preoccupation. In Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology, the narrow intentionality of focus on the “formally indicating historical”!” serves to forge a bond between the words of the text and the thinker who thinks in those words. At this level of hermeneutical intensity, to acknowledge the bond is to incur an obligation, as Heidegger did in relation to Aristotle. The performance of this obli-

gation serves to ground a number of Heidegger's courses on Aristotle in the 1920s.!® But the rendering of Heidegger’s hermeneutical obligation had

to be directed solely at the text that inspired it. Heidegger’s primary philosophical preoccupations were aroused by Aristotle, and Situating the Work m 7

so it is to Aristotle that Heidegger's thinking rightfully “belongs.”

It is through the carefully worked out acknowledgment of this relationship —and this relationship exclusively —that Heidegger develops the basic hermeneutical structure of his ontology. Thus I find myself in a relationship to Heidegger similar to the one he bore to Aristotle. “Being Jewish” serves a mediating func-

tion, enabling a more thorough thinking through, with Heidegger, of the basic structure of the hermeneutical relationship. !? It is to that dimension of “Being Jewish” that Heidegger communicates an already existing set of preoccupations: Communication accordingly means the enabling of the appro-

priation of that about which the discourse is, that is making it possible to come into a relationship of preoccupation and being to that which the discourse is. Discourse as communication brings about an appropriation of the world in which one always already is with one another. .. . Speaking with one another about something is not an exchange of expe-

riences back and forth between subjects, but a situation where the being-with-one-another is intimately involved in the subject matter under discussion. And it is only by way

of this subject matter, in the particular context of always already being-with in the world, that mutual understanding [Sichverstehen] develops.”°

This is Heidegger's “gift” to me —a communication that brings me, in my being-in-the-world as Being Jewish, to a “Sichverstehen,” evoked by his words and enabled by the space he leaves. And thus I do not begrudge him his unacknowledged debt — his apparently unthought connection to Jewish tradition. He would not have gotten it right anyway. And I am left to read the hermeneutical structure of Heidegger’s relationship to Aristotle as a mutually understood preoccu-

pation —not as the trace of an unacknowledged debt, but asa thinking through on its own of a possibility of existence. The basis

of this shared preoccupation is the “formally indicating historical” as it is communicated in Aristotle’s words to Heidegger and in Heidegger’s words to me. My understanding of how Heidegger employs the formal indication, in his reading of Aristotle, is & m Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

crucial to what follows, and so requires some words of introduction. One of Heidegger’s clearest and most useful explications of this elusive concept is in the introductory section of the Phenomenology of Religion: “We shall call the methodic use of a sense which

is conducive to phenomenological explication the ‘formal indica-

tion.’ Its task is to prefigure the direction of this explication. It points the way and guides the deliberation. The phenomena are viewed on the basis of the bearing of the formally indicating sense.

But even though it guides the phenomenological deliberation, contentwise, it has nothing to say.”*! The formal indication is read, not for its content, but as a “formal” prolegomenon to the succeeding argument, guiding and setting a direction, through the communication of a preoccupation that extends to the reader the “appropriation” experienced by the author. The formal indication communicates an orientation toward the Sache. But to properly fulfill its function, the formal indication must be read av a formal indication — given its due, so to

speak. It must be permitted to function as a relational event in and of itself —an invitation to the reader to enter into an intimate collaboration with the author in investigating a universal possibility of existence. If one chooses instead to keep one’s distance — to judge the author from afar as simply reflecting and justifying his or her subjective experience in all its biased concreteness — the hermeneutical bond essential for this sort of collaboration is critically weakened. The words guiding this collaborative project must be entered into in good faith, with respect for their complete adequacy in preserving the formal givenness of a universal possibility of existence. One must assume that the form of this possibility could only have been indicated in these words as spoken. With this assumption in

place, the words are freed to “light up” the possibility with an incandescence unclouded by the author’s factical particularity. Only with a willingness to share this vision can the possibility of existence borne by the words be fully comprehended. Such an intimate collaborative effort between author and reader, absent any intervening suspicions, is always risky. But here I assert my own peculiar “ethos.” The biases and prejudices which give to Being Jewish its hermeneutical warrant for reading Heidegger Situating the Work ma 9

bring with them, especially at this point in history, a built-in “crit-

ical paranoia.” Using Ricceur’s terms again, Being Jewish has internalized a “hermeneutics of suspicion” that accompanies any “questionable” text it chooses to affirm. Thus the risk of the reading performed herein is absorbed in full by the author. All I ask of the reader is to give me what I begrudgingly give to Heidegger —a hermeneutical orientation we both learned from Augustine: “But charity believes all things —that is, all things spoken

by those to whom it binds to itself and makes one —I, O Lord, confess to You that men may hear, for though I cannot prove to them that my confession is true, yet those will believe me whose ears charity had opened to me.””” Augustine asks that we take his text at its word, trusting it to be purely and simply what it purports to be, without any ulterior motive consciously or unconsciously undermining the seriousness of its intention. The more that readers are able to join Augustine in his presumption that his words are in fact a “confession, ” the more closely they will be able to follow the author’s words as an indication of the understanding (Sichverstehen) the author means to communicate.

This same hermeneutical charity is what the biblical author, standing in for God, asks of the Jew in the words of the Shema —

to take a hermeneutical stand of loving diligence in relation to His words: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words which I command you on this day shall be in your heart. And you shall teach them diligently to your children . . .” (Deuteronomy

6:5-7).*° Having already incorporated this orientation into my hermeneutical being-in-the-world, I am able to take Heidegger at his word to see where it takes me (us). The present work, then, is a response to Heidegger's offering of a Sichverstehen. It stems from a strongly felt hermeneutical affin-

ity between Judaism as a way of life, grounded in an intensely committed interpretive relationship to a sacred text, namely, the Torah, and Heidegger’s view of philosophical practice, as a similarly intimate interpretive relationship to the classical texts of western philosophy, especially those of the Greeks. I will argue that

Heidegger's relationship to the founding words of philosophy 10 aw Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

parallels the relationship of the rabbis to the words of the Torah. This same relationship also provides the framework for my own reading of Heidegger, thus suggesting a sort of “primordial” reading relationship to texts taken as “sacred.” The attempt to account for the apparent “repetition” of this relationship serves as the basis for the ontological inquiry promised in the book’s title.

Being Jewish Applied to Reading Heidegger: Preliminary Considerations To keep the conversation properly focused, I will explore the relationship between “Being Jewish” and “Reading Heidegger” solely at the naive level of a concrete phenomenology. As already suggested, this naiveté entails a bracketing of the pain Heidegger’s silence and silencing might have caused this work. This bracketing clears the way for the concrete phenomenology I have in mind,

which might best be clarified by reframing the title according to the syntactical structure of the simple declarative sentence. In what follows, “Being Jewish” is the subject and “Reading Heidegger” is the predicate. That is to say, the subject which reads Heidegger in this work is “Being Jewish.” The awkwardness of the foregoing suggests that “Being Jewish” does not quite fit as the subject of a simple declarative sentence. Perhaps that is because such a sentence requires that the subject sit still long enough for us to conceive of it an agent, performing, or being performed upon by the predicate. “Being Jewish” simply will not sit still. It is always already on its way toward becoming what it is. Its movement begins long before any sentence’s attempt to catch up with it, and continues long after the period that brings the attempt to arbitrary closure. In its refusal

to be limited by the syntax of the sentence, we might say that “Being Jewish” is simply acting as a Dasein ~a being-in-the-world

that is always already on the way to becoming what it is. In the textual moment you have happened upon here, the being-in-theworld of “Being Jewish” is “Reading Heidegger.” But, bearing the

pretense of a work of philosophy, this textual moment means to raise “Being Jewish / Reading Heidegger” beyond a mere circumstantial encounter between subject and predicate, to the level of Situating the Work ma J//

a comprehensive concept. In the Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger makes explicit the objective I have in mind: In each case they [philosophical concepts | comprehend the whole within themselves, they are comprehensive concepts [/nbegriffe|. Yet they are also comprehensive in a second sense which is equally essential and which ties in with the first: they also in each case comprehend within themselves the comprehending human being and his or her Dasein — not as an addition, but in sucha way that these concepts are not comprehensive without there being a comprehending in this second sense and vice versa. No concept of the whole without the comprehending of philosophical existence. Metaphysical thinking is comprehensive thinking in this double sense. It deals with the whole and it grips existence through

and through.” The comprehensiveness of the concept is thus achieved by the subject being joined to the object of investigation so tightly and fully as to render a whole and complete phenomenological representation of philosophy as a possibility of existence. To accom-

plish this, the subject and the predicate at work in philosophical conceptualizing must be “thought” as inseparable from one another. As Heidegger declares a few pages earlier, “Philosophy is philosophizing.””° If the business of philosophy is to conceptualize, the philosopher must be “enconcepted [ergriffen]” in the concept being conceptualized. Being thus “enconcepted” the philosophical subject is in movement toward an almost consubstantial intimacy with “the thing itself [de Sache velbst],” the object

of phenomenological research. Heidegger's insistence on the implicative depth required of the subject in the conceptual work of philosophy goes all the way back to the early 1920s and his ongoing project of reading Aristotle. In a central passage of the “Aristotle Introduction” of 1922, Heidegger defines the object of philosophical research as “factical human Dasein ad such,” then goes on to say: “The concrete specification of the philosophical problematic is to be derived from this, its object. "26

A dozen pages later, Heidegger gives us a more exact characterization of the philosophical problematic so derived, which he reads 12 « Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

out of Aristotle’s Physics: “The central phenomenon, whose explication is the theme of the Physics, becomes the being in the How of its Being-moved.”*” In the present case, the being “being moved” is ‘ Being Jewish,” considered as a philosophical subject. The “predicate” by which the philosophical subject is moved (“enpredicated,” we might say) in this case is “Reading Heidegger.” Thus the question before us is, How is “Being Jewish,” as philosophical subject, moved by “Reading Heidegger’? Now any serious reading of a great philosophical text is necessarily performed by an interpreting subject moved by that text.”® But how much of the reading subject's character —one’s own particular experience of being moved —need be displayed as part of a meaningful performance of the reading? In philosophy, I would say none —that is, none explicitly.*? The subjectivity of the reader is indeed present, but remains something between the reader and the text. The ways in which a reader is moved as a particular subject are seamlessly woven into the fabric of the reader’s interpretation as it unfolds in relation to the text and the shared Sache within. Otherwise, the work becomes an “intellectual memoir” —something along the lines of Hans-Georg Gadamer's Philosophical Apprenticedhips —interesting in its own way, to be sure, but not philosophy.

So why do I insist on featuring my subjectivity, in all its blatant particularity, in the book’s title, and then take it up first thing?

Mainly, because I do mean to indicate very definitely that this book is, in fact, an exploration of the relationship between Being Jewish and Reading Heidegger. But after we have done with the explanatory preliminaries, there will be no further reference to your author as subject, Jewish or otherwise. That is because the relationship between Being Jewish and Reading Heidegger being investigated here is “too close” to permit subjectivity, as such, to insert itself. The closeness pursued in what follows might be characterized as a hermeneutical closeness —an intimacy between

a being and a reading, in which the reading is so thoroughly grounded in the being as a being that the being shows itself as what it is only in and through the reading. If this showing is sufficiently comprehensive, the purview of the subject-predicate rela-

tionship (its “thedrein,” we might say) will extend beyond the merely factical to the ontological. Situating the Work ma 13

Let me further detail the underlying perspective of the project by describing how it is grounded in a rather conventional principle of Jewish hermeneutics, but then brings that principle to the point of a quite radical heresy. To phenomenologically character-

ize Being Jewish as a way of reading rather closely follows the contours of the Jewish tradition’s view of its own unfolding: Being Jewish comes about in each generation — indeed, in each individual Jew in each generation — through a devoted commitment to a certain way of reading the Torah. That is, the way in which each individual Jew becomes who he or she already is —most fully realizes his or her own-most potential of Being Jewish —is through a lifelong commitment to the careful reading of the Torah. Now the heretical character of the present work does not quite

reach the level of claiming that Being Jewish may be satisfied through a careful reading of Heidegger in place of the Torah. I also readily grant that there are other forms of being-in-the-world which may find themselves strongly implicated in a careful reading of Heidegger. But I do claim to elaborate a Being Jewish that

finds itself so deeply attuned to Heidegger's textual voice that “Being Jewish / Reading Heidegger” as a factical subject-predicate is transformed into a comprehensive ontological concept. The character of the work as a phenomenological ontology may

be further clarified by a brief excursus into an earlier version of the title. This earlier title, Being Jewish: Reading Hetdegger, Factictty:

Ontology, was meant to suggest one of those word analogies we all

hated so much (“Being Jewish is to Reading Heidegger, as Facticity is to Ontology”). By formatting the book’s project in this way, I meant to suggest a mirroring dance between the two sets of terms, such that the relationship I elaborate between Being Jewish and Reading Heidegger would mirror the relationship between facticity and ontology. I meant also to suggest that the mirroring dance itself mirrors the thematic development we find in certain of Heidegger’s lecture courses in the early 1920s, where he grounds the formation of his ontology in his own rather idiosyncratic reading of key passages in Aristotle. I will argue, in other

words, that Heidegger's ontology grows out of the factical relationship of Heidegger as reader-thinker to Aristotle as thinker-

writer, and that “Being Jewish / Reading Heidegger” may be 14 « Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

understood as an enactment of that same sort of ontologically linked relationship between thinker-reader and thinker-writer. To round out my overview of the project, I will abuse the priv-

ilege of explicit subjectivity I have allowed myself in this first chapter a bit further, in order to tailor the terms in the version of the title, just elaborated, to my purposes, while at the same time leaving them enough freedom to linger under their own sway in the chapters to follow.

Facticity as the Ground of Ontology Early on, in a well-known letter to his student, Karl Léwith, Heidegger announces the factical ground of his thinking: “To this facticity belongs .. . the fact that I am a ‘Christian theologian.””*” The significance of this announcement is deepened by Heidegger’s insistence, around this same time, that facticity —the lived experience of being a self —is the only valid basis for ontology. Ontology which is not grounded in the pretheoretical “originating domain [Ursprungsgebiet|”>! of lived experience condemns itself to lifeless abstraction (Ent-leben).°” But, of course, facticity, in its persistent concreteness, necessarily correlates with the beingin-the-world of a particular being. Thus the factical particularity Heidegger predicates of himself as a philosophical subject embodies the basic problematic of his ontology: How to square the very particularistic, even idiosyncratic facticity of being a Christian theologian with the ontological claims of his project? The fact that Dasein’s understanding (especially self-understand-

ing) must be spoken as interpretation indicates the necessity for a “persona’ to be constructed through which the speaking is performed. Thus Heidegger's factical “I am a Christian theologian” is more precisely a factical “I ypeak as a Christian theologian.” It is Dasein enacted as an “I speak .. .” This enactment I read as the formal indication of the relationship (“rhetorical relationship,” if you will) between Dasein and its particular spoken interpretations. The “Hidden King,” whose approach to thinking so moved Arendt in the mid-1920s, was, at that time, still under the linger-

ing sway of the theological spirit of his youth. Not Jewish of course, but nonetheless explicitly religious. This was a time when Situating the Work m 15

Heidegger willingly “read” his phenomenology explicitly off of the religious dimension of his facticity: “Philosophy and Religion are historical phenomena in the same way as the Feldberg and Kandel are mountains in the Black Forest, or the university, the

cathedral, and the train station are buildings in the heart of Freiburg.”°° Recognizing this formal equivalence is the key “to discover[ing] the historical itself in factic life.” Of course, such an essential line of thinking does not just break off. The thread continues as a component of Heidegger's phenomenology. However, the autobiographical “content” of the formally indicating phenomenon of religion is jettisoned without any loss to the philosophical force of the indication itself; for remember, it is not the content of the formal indication that is key, but the form of the thinking that guides the way. Thus, already in the 1922 “Aristotle Introduction,” the indication of factical essentiality is read off Heidegger’s relationship to Aristotle rather than off

any religious text. But despite the shift in content, the formal structure of the hermeneutical relation remains unchanged. The presumption of a productive formal similarity between our two facticities —my being Jewish and Heidegger's being a Christian theologian — constitutes a moving force behind this book. Inevitably, of course, growing out of such an exploration of similarities will be the discovery of significant differences — differences that will likewise bear on our understanding of the problematical relationship between the seemingly bounded particularity of “facticities,” and the all-encompassing comprehensiveness of ontological concepts. But here, in what serves as an autobiographical prologue, it is the similarities that provoke the focusing question: What did Heidegger mean to say to Léwith? (And what do I mean to say to you?) Heidegger himself clarifies: “I work concretely and factically out of my ‘I am,’ out of my intellectual and wholly factical origin, milieu, life-contexts, and whatever is available to me from these as a vital experience in which I live. ... To this facticity of mine belongs what I would in brief

call the fact that I am a ‘Christian theologian.” Heidegger had no choice but to “read” his ontology off his factical “I am.” “I am no philosopher,” Heidegger goes on to say in

another part of the letter, “and have no illusions of even doing 16 w= Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

anything at all comparable.”°° The announcement has the tone of a definitive —one might almost say self-righteous — affirmation

of who he is, as a basis for philosophizing. This affirmation of who he is also excludes, in no uncertain terms, who he is not. He will not think ontology as Hegel did; he will not speak from those lofty heights (at least not yet). Rather, he will speak from his own

factical ground. This factical ground is what is given to him to philosophize — his philosophical “gift.” Affirming it, as he does, constitutes perhaps the first “new beginning” of his thinking. He will begin from where he already is —“always already has been” — but now with a full recognition of its value. One is reminded here of Nietzsche’s admonitions to “become what one is,” “to love one’s

fate.” Heidegger himself eloquently restates this fundamental principle of Nietzschean hermeneutics in What 1s Called Thinking?: “We receive many gifts of many kinds. But the highest and really most lasting gift given to us is always our essential nature, with which we are gifted in such a way that we are what we are only through it. That is why we owe thanks for this endowment, first and unceasingly.”°*”

Thus the “Being Jewish” in my title means to suggest an affirmation that plays a role in the ontological inquiry to follow similar to Heidegger's “Being a Christian theologian.” But why not just put it in a letter? The only real interest it would seem to have here would be to foreshadow a kind of philosophical autobiography: a report and analysis of one person's experience as a Jew reading Heidegger. But, of course, that is not the point here, any more than a better understanding of Heidegger’s view of himself as a Christian theologian was the “point” of grounding his ontology in his Christian experience. Thinking ontology this way did not make him —nor would it make his reader —a better Christian, nor did he use his ontological thinking to do Christian the-

ology. Rather, it simply was —always had been, and would remain —the factical ground of his ontology. In his August 19, 1921, letter to Léwith, he merely “owned” this facticity, perhaps to “indicate” it to himself as the essential factical ground of his thinking. I make my own parallel indication explicit in this work

in order to say that Being Jewish serves here as the factical ground of the ontological inquiry that follows, a factical ground Situating the Work um 17

that will itself be phenomenologically explored in and through the unfolding of the ontology. By identifying myself with Heidegger's affirmation as an explicit

focus of the book, I mean to point out what one might call the “factical essentiality” of my Being Jewish. That is to say, Being Jewish is and always has been of the utmost significance to the hermeneutical unfolding of my factical “I am.” I name its significance “hermeneutical” to indicate the primary modality in which Being Jewish shows itself: namely, as a way of reading. I also mean to emphasize that, in the present context, my affirmation of Being Jewish is in no way a confession of faith. But, on the other hand, as I think was also the case with Heidegger's factically essential Christianity, the factical essentiality of my Being Jewish has a history —“is historical” —and, as such, has played a number of roles in my life, perhaps the most significant, prior

to the philosophical, being an opening to the path of religious experience. It is this religious experience, undergone primarily in an earlier time, but lingering longingly in the present, which marks Being Jewish as a being-in-the-world amenable to philosophical investigation. Indeed, I would argue that any serlous ontological undertaking requires a particularly intense factical experience in which and through which the ontology will be thought.*® But one must take care that the thinking does not emerge directly out of that facticity. If that were to occur, the ontology would always remain

in the service of the facticity from which it was derived. And so it must go through a kind of “temporal filter,” which involves more than just the passage of time. I would say (at least on the

basis of the two cases at hand) that as the factical ground of thinking, religious experience must be “abandoned,” at least momentarily, as the essential ground of one’s faith. Or perhaps more accurately, one's thinking must have been “abandoned” by the experience —cut off from it —as a call to faith. But whichever way one conceives of the occurrence, for the purposes of thinking, one’s factical essentiality is no longer in thrall to religion.°” Dasein must have had the experience of having been “let go” — we might say “set free” —by religion as its primary preoccupation (Bekiimmerung).*° 18 wu Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

It should be emphasized that this “letting go” is not at all complete. Though I cannot specify the degree of its “incompleteness, ” I can say that the “letting go” is sufficiently incomplete as to leave

one with the lingering sense of still being fundamentally connected to the originary experience, such that one is preoccupied with a longing to somehow return to it. In the Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger likens this condition to “home-

sickness.” But, as the ground of philosophy, the longing to be home directs one, not to a particular place, but toward “being as a whole”: “The philosophical subject longs to be at home everywhere at once, and at all times within the whole.”4! This “within the whole” is named by Heidegger “World.” The longing to be at home everywhere might be characterized as the unrequited ontological promise that philosophy carries with it from the originary factical experience of religion.

Though still decidedly unrequited, the promise of “being at home everywhere at the same time” shows itself differently in philosophy than it did as a religious experience. Originally, the promise seemed contained within the factical particularity of

religious experience as a call to faith. However, before one has had the chance to fully “compose oneself” to respond to the call, its “content” —what it seems to be calling one to— becomes other than a call to faith, at least to a particular religious faith.

Nevertheless, the personal force with which it “knowingly” addresses each individual Dasein is just as compelling, even though the home Dasein 1s called to is no longer identifiable as any place local. But whether the promise of homecoming is conceived of as local, universal, or somehow both, “one can’t go home again,” probably because there is no such place. Indeed,

there probably never was. “Being at home everywhere at the same time’ must be philosophically “created,” but at the same time still must also be grounded in the originary factical experience of “home,” localized within a particular religion. Heideg-

ger explains this phenomenon as part and parcel of Dasein’s “being historical”: “Dasein . . . is in itself historical in so far as it is its possibility. In being futural Dasein is its past. It comes back to it in the ‘how.’ The manner of its coming back is among

other things, conscience. Only the ‘how’ can be repeated. The Situating the Work ma 19

past, experienced as authentic historicity, is anything but what is past. It is something to which one can return again and again.”4” This repeatable “how” of authentic historicity I identify with Heidegger’s reference, in the 1922 “Aristotle Introduction,” to the cen-

tral thematic of philosophy as “the being in the how of its being moved.” The possibility of return to the “how” provides a certain —

though uncertain —indication of the authenticity of the historical moment, now philosophically affirmed as one’s essential “I am.” Even though this indication of authenticity is merely provisional, put in place to mark the factical ground from which the work of ontology might proceed, it is sufficient to maintain the original factical experience as philosophically available in its “how” ~as still somehow “there” as Hetmat, the place to which one belongs. But now, in philosophy, the call to Heimat is made more difficult to hear and interpret because of its refusal to be localized —its insistence on calling to philosophical Dasein to be at home everywhere at once.

Heidegger further distinguishes the call as it appears in religion from the “call” in philosophy this way: “[In philosophy] Dasein is at once the caller and the one called.”45 Philosophy forces upon the thinker the realization that the originary experience of the call as coming from some “foreign power invading Dasein” is merely a necessary prelude to the terribly sobering discovery that Dasein stands alone. Heretofore, the soul-invading power of the call seemed as though it could only have come from God. Indeed, one might have even heard the call as, in some way, spoken in God's voice. But that celestial voice, heard paradoxically as compellingly local, but at the same time resoundingly universal, was always Dasein-with-itself —the binding together

of the particular with the universal. When one returns through philosophy to the “how” of the originary call, “[t]he manner of its coming back, is, among other things conscience.” What philosophical Dasein is called to through the call of conscience is (and always has been) care. Yet the way to understand care — to think it ontologically —is to ground it in the facticity of the originary call, in the “fact” of the call being what it was. Thinking the call

as the call to care links its present showing as the call of conscience to its originary factical showing as the call of faith, thus making a factically grounded ontology possible. 20 « Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

Being Jewish as Care For Being Jewish, the locus classicus of the originary factical call of care is in Joshua 1:8: “The Book of the Instruction [the Torah] shall not depart from your mouth; but you shall meditate therein

day and night .. 45 The conscientious care of the Jew is summoned by and directed to the words of the Torah. Being Jewish, in the how of its being moved, is thus profoundly hermeneutical —a dwelling with the words of a sacred text. The true Heimat of the Jew is not so much the land of Israel as it is the text of the Torah ~—a text that has the power to transform a desert wilderness into a “Promised Land, flowing with milk and honey.” Even without the land, the promissory power of the word remains —arguably even strengthened by exile from the localized physical place. Being Jewish turns out to be an ongoing responsibility, carried along on one’s wanderings from place to place, to interpret and reinterpret the Word in order to continue to heed its call. In another biblical text, central to rabbinic Judaism, this ongoing responsibility to interpret is itself interpreted as teaching the Word “diligently to your children.” The constancy of one’s relationship to the Word is how Judaism is transmitted from generation to generation. The “how” of this originary experience of connection to the Word, always available to repetition through teaching, is perhaps most poignantly indicated in the rabbinic pronouncement that all Jews are responsible to feel as though they themselves stood at Sinai and heard the words of the Law. This originary experience of having been there and “heard” the Word is what drives the teaching of it. The transmission of the Word as lived experience is part and parcel of the response one is called upon to make. This experience of somehow “having been there” accompanies one's ongoing sense of Being Jewish. And so one’s capacity to hear the words with the originary force of their utterance remains palpably real, such that even if one is no longer observant, one nonethe-

less can find oneself occasionally “taken” with the words of the Torah in somewhat the same way. This time, however, the implications one draws from the experience are different. Still, finding that the words of the Torah can draw one into a powerful and personal relationship with them, but now without Situating the Work um 2/

the familiar, conventional warrant for such experiences, frees one to experience that same relationship to other words in other texts until finally one finds oneself in philosophy —committed to an ongoing inquiry (Versuch) into one’s relationship with words themselves —a relationship which gives texts the power, not only to

speak, but to speak what seems like the truth. Though the relationship, as it is factically available for philosophical study, is never

entirely separate from its original content or context as Torah, it is never again reducible to it. Once its philosophical value is foregrounded, the originary relationship to the words of the Torah becomes a “formal indication” of a possibility of philosophical existence. The hermeneutical work of phenomenology begins with the discovery of such possibilities which remain available in one’s facticity, but now as formal indications of ontology.

The particularity of “Being Jewish” thus becomes a resource to draw on~—a pattern of historical connections indicating an ontological possibility. This indication can be relied upon because it is grounded in the particular factical forms through which his-

tory continually unfolds. These forms comprise the set of hermeneutical connections indicated by the word tradition. The words in certain texts seem capable of binding successive generations of interpreters together in a “community of understanders. ” The authority that informs this interpretive tradition, as it unfolds,

provides the community with an ongoing warrant to believe that truth —or at least a version of it appropriate to the community’s being-in-the-world — lies somehow within its hermeneutical ken. Not at one time and in one place, but in all times and in all places. This is the phenomenon which gives rise to what Gadamer calls “the universal scope of hermeneutical reflection.”4° How do we account for the fact that the movement of tradition in history — that is, particular facticities in the how of their being moved — appears everywhere to be basically the same? It is this most basic question, giving hermeneutical reflection its universal (ontological) scope, which opens Being Jewish to Reading Heidegger. Though historically grounded in religious autobiography, “Being Jewish” is factically gifted with a relationship to the Word, which throws philosophical Dasein into a lifelong investigation of the relationship. Of course, this relationship 22 w Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

to the Word is not at all confined to factically “Being Jewish” any more than Heidegger's factically “Being a Christian theologian”

limited the range of the ontological thinking that it grounded. Rather, Heidegger simply found his factical essentiality “suitable” as the ground for his ontology. The importance of the announcement in the August 19, 1921, letter to Léwith is Heidegger's recog-

nition of this suitability as an essential always-already-havingbeen of the hermeneutical makeup of his facticity. But what makes “Being a Christian theologian” a suitable factical ground for Heidegger’s ontology? Heidegger, of course, never explicitly says. But the fact that Dasein’s understanding (especially self-understanding) must be spoken as interpretation indicates the necessity for the interpreter to construct a “voice” through which the speaking is performed. Thus Heidegger's factical “Being a Christian theologian” is more precisely his factical “Speaking as a Christian theologian,” especially when “performing’ Aristotle for his students. But can we attribute to religion such a “fundamentality” —even as a way of speaking —without foreshortening the reach of the ontology it gives rise to? I will argue that the basis of Heidegger's ontology —that is, the way he is given to “speak” it —is, in fact, “fundamentally” religious, even though it is not identified as such. “Religion”

here represents a possibility of existence enacted through a deep commitment to a text. When enacted concretely, that commitment yields a formal understanding of the primary hermeneutical relationship. When one allows oneself to be unconditionally intimate with the words of the text, one’s relationship with those words

is then open to being fully determined by Dasein’s orientation to the world. This orientation reflects a way of being-with which reveals the “discoveredness [Hntdeckkeif|” of the world as we have it together: “It is rather a matter of being-with-one-another becoming manifest

in the world, specifically by way of the discovered world, which itself becomes manifest in speaking with one another.”4”

I read Heidegger’s hermeneutics as elaborating a version of the hermeneutical relationship in which Dasein discovers itself —

understands itself —in and through the articulation of a shared commitment to a text. That shared commitment manifests an essential dimension of the self as a being-with-others —a beingSituating the Work m 23

with-others that is articulated through a speaking with others about something, namely, a text held in common. The intimate bond between a religious community and the text that defines it is but the primary instance of the more universal configuration that accompanies the phenomenon of “discoveredness.” As I read Heidegger reading the Greeks, I see the “discovered-

ness” of his path of thinking articulated in a way which strikes a familiar chord with Being Jewish. In what follows, I attempt

to “think” that familiarity as the repeated (and repeatable) hermeneutical configuration that informs the movement of tradition through time. The experience of reading Heidegger I am trying to account for here has been for me a series of returns to the authentic “how” of Being Jewish. This “how,” I will argue represents a way of reading the grounding texts of one's tradition —texts whose words seem to connect one to the place from which one comes, thus revealing the primordial always-alreadyhaving-been of the relationship between Dasein and the Word. But what is the appropriate “site” for the examination of that relationship? Should the focus of our inquiry be the Word as spo-

ken, or the Word as heard and understood —as rhetoric or as hermeneutics? Our task in chapter 2 is to find a method —a way of proceeding — which takes us to that critical space of ambiguity between philosophy and rhetoric where we might find a suitable starting point for ontological inquiry.

Notes 1. Arendt, “Heidegger at Eighty,” 303. 2. Caputo, “People of God, People of Being: The Theological Presuppositions of Heidegger's Path of Thought,” 91. 3. Ibid., 96. 4. Heidegger, Phainomenologtsche Interpretationen zu Arwtoteles: Anzetge

der hermeneutischen Sttuation, 249. Though written in 1922, the manuscript was “lost” for a number of years. Its interesting history is recounted by translator Michael Baur, in “Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle: Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation,” 371. 5. For readers unfamiliar with the term “facticity [Fakuzitdt],” here

is how Heidegger defines it in his 1923 lecture course, published as Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Factietty, 5: “Facticity’ is the designation we

24 w Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

will use for the character of the being of ‘our’ ‘own’ Davein. More precisely, this expression means: in each case ‘this’ Dasein in its being-there for a while at the particular time... .”

6. Caputo, “People of God,” 88. 7. Ibid. 8. Zarader, Dette tmpensée, 92. Unless otherwise noted, translations of foreign-language quotations are my own. 9. Ibid., 213. 10. Ibid.

11. Rorty, “Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and the Reification of Language, in Lwsayd on HewWegger and Others, 2:65.

12. Caputo, “People of God,” 98. 13. Derrida, Monolingualtsm of the Other; or, The Prosthests of Origin, \. 14. Heidegger, What ls Philosophy?, 35. 15. Kisiel, Genests, 35. Kisiel’s translation of Hingabe as “categorical

immersion” is particularly felicitous. 16. I have adapted the translation of this crucial passage to reflect the more familiar version found in Jewish prayer books. 17. Kisiel, Genesws,, 164.

18. See esp. Heidegger’s introductory lecture in Grundbegrtffe, discussed at some length in chapter 6. 19. In this and similar cases where “Being Jewish” indicates a “character’ in the narrative with an identity of its own (separate from, though of course related “by tradition” to, mine), I decided to capitalize it, and, where necessary for clarity or emphasis, to set it off in quotation marks, hoping to keep the idiosyncrasies of “Being Jewish” clearly in view. 20. Heidegger, Hustory of the Concept of Time, 263. 21. From Heidegger's Phenomenology of Religion, as translated by Kisiel, in Genests, 164. 22. Augustine, Confessions, 174.

25. See note 16. 24. Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts, 9. 25. Ibid., 4. 26. Heidegger, “Phenomenological Interpretations,” 360. 27. Ibid., 373. 28. Heidegger emphasizes the importance of “being moved” in a number of places as the impetus for philosophizing (see esp. What ls Philosophy?, 79-85). 29. Heidegger’s account of his own being moved as a philosophical subject is likewise presented, not as autobiography, but rather as a kind

of “etiology” in works such as What ls Philosophy?, where he traces Situating the Work m 25

philosophy back to the originary “being moved” contained in the Greek word philosophia. But it is important to note that, in these texts, Heidegger presents himself as speaking for philosophy, out of his own sense of what it means to Je philosophical, which for him can only be achieved by means of a full-bodied engagement in philosophical practice. 30. Heidegger to Léwith, August 19, 1921, as translated by Kisiel, in Genes, 78. 31. Kisiel, Genesis, 117.

52. Ibid., 46. 33. Ibid., 159. 34. Ibid., 164. 35. Heidegger to Léwith, August 19, 1921, as translated by Kisiel, in Genests,78.

36. Heidegger to Léwith, August 19, 1921, as translated by Dahlstrom, in “Heidegger’s Method,” 794. 37. Heidegger, What ls Called Thinking?, 142. 38. Heidegger, in Being and Time, 72, n. 1, emphasizes the significance of this “through which” by using the word Erlebniwe to characterize the deep impact made by such factical experiences.

39. The importance Heidegger attached to Dasein’s being “in thrall to Dasein-with and to itself” in Being and Time, 206, would receive particular emphasis in the introduction to his 1924 summer semester course:

“Human life has in itself the possibility to depend only upon itself, to manage without faith, religion, and the like [Das menschliche Leben hat tn sich Ove Miglichkett, sich etnztg auf sich selbst zu stellen, auszukommen ohne Glauben, ohne Reltgton undderg.|.” Heidegger, Grundbegriffe, 2. Because of the recent publication and limited availability of Grundbegriffe, | have

included the original text after my translations, placing longer originaltext passages in the chapter endnotes. 40. Heidegger uses Bekiimmerung to characterize the unique and distinctive focus for philosophical investigation in “Phenomenological Inter-

pretations,’ 359. 41. Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts, 5. 42. Heidegger, Concept of Time, 19. 43. Heidegger, Being and Time, 323. 44. Heidegger, Concept of Time, 19.

45. I have adapted the translation to reflect its form in the traditional Jewish liturgy.

46. See Gadamer, “On the Scope and Function of Hermeneutical Reflection,” in Philosophical Hermeneutics, 18-43. 47. Heidegger, Hustory of the Concept, 263. Emphasis added.

26 w= Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

Between Rhetoric and Hermeneutics Thinking the Sacrednevs of Sacred Texts Convincing and persuading, without being able to prove — these are obviously as much the aim and measure of understanding and interpretation as they are the aim and measure of the art of oration and persuasion. — Hans-Georg Gadamer

The ambiguities in the relationship between rhetoric and hermeneutics have provoked questioning by philosophers from Plato through Heidegger and Gadamer. In Plato, the relationship is explored throughout the dialogues, though “dialectic,” rather than “hermeneutics,” is the operative term. A number of moments in this exploration will be examined in the forthcoming chapters. Aristotle picks up on Plato’s investigation most explicitly in the first sentence of the Rhetoric, which will be a pri-

mary focus in chapters 6 and 7. The relationship between rhetoric and hermeneutics, a long-standing interest of Gadamer’s, | becomes an explicit preoccupation for Heidegger in 1924-25, especially in his 1924 summer semester course (Grundbegrtffe) and his two 1925 courses, published as Platoy “Sophist” and History of the Concept of Time, which will be examined in juxtaposition with Aristotle's Rhetoric in chapter 6. Only recently, however, have scholars in rhetorical studies taken an interest in this line of questioning, an interest first sparked by Michael Hyde and Craig Smith’s 1979 essay, “Hermeneutics and Rhetoric: A Seen, but Unobserved Relationship.” One would have

expected the authors, as students of rhetoric, to be especially attuned to the ontological primacy of speaking in the development 27

of understanding. Yet, after noting the ubiquitous function of rhetoric in all hermeneutical activity, they place hermeneutics rather than rhetoric in the position of ontological priority, arguing that hermeneutics and rhetoric are both grounded in the “hermeneutical situation.” Of course, it is a basic assumption of any phenomenological approach to ontology that human beings are situated. But what is the nature of their situation? How is it structured? Whether we characterize human situatedness as primarily rhetorical or hermeneutical —that is whether we say that speaking is derived from understanding or understanding, from speaking —1s crucial to our analysis of Dasein as Being-in-the-world. These two “situations’ are differently structured and so provide different starting points for developing an ontology. The hermeneutical situation, as Heidegger defines it, is marked by its three constituent elements: “fore-having,” “fore-sight,” and

“fore-conception.”* This forestructure grounds the interpretive activity through which Dasein develops its understanding. The grounding forestructure of interpretation shows itself in the “as,” which “makes up the structure of explicitness of something that is understood. [Thus 1]t constitutes the interpretation.” In other

words, “what” Dasein understands is understood through an interpretation of the “what” as something. And as already noted, this “as” shows itself in the making-explicit, the making-known

dimension of interpretation. Heidegger emphasizes that this making-explicit of interpretation is a nondetachable component of interpretation itself. As he puts it in Te Huwtory of the Concept of Time: “The cultivation of understanding is accomplished in expository interpretation.”®

Heidegger's use of “expository” here points to the inevitable “rhetoricity’ of interpretation: in the course of interpreting something av something, the interpretation necessarily takes on the form of an incipient persuasive argument. When Dasein interprets, it interprets persuasively in order that the interpretation may be shared by others. In this way, as Aristotle suggests, Dasein’s hermeneutical activity comes to entail a sort of community build-

ing.° Heidegger characterizes Dasein’s community of interpretation as composed of “those from whom, for the most part, one 28 wu Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

does not distinguish oneself —those among whom one is too.”” He further explains that “by reason of this with-like [muthaften] Being-in-the-world is always the one that I share with Others.”® But how should Dasein’s basic interpretive stand — just exphicated as a rhetorical-orientation-toward-others — affect our characterization of its situatedness? In this chapter, I argue that the fundamental structure of Dasein as being-with is best captured not by the concept of the hermeneutical situation, with rhetoric as a derivative dimension, but rather by conceiving of the rhetorical situation as the fundamental ground of hermeneutical activity. I will make this argument with reference to the paradigmatic

case of interpretation as we find it in classical hermeneutics, namely, the interpretation of Scripture. As a backdrop for this argument, we return first to the case for the ontological priority of the hermeneutical situation as Hyde and Smith derive it from Heidegger, followed by an examination of this position as we find it in Gadamer’s hermeneutics. Based on their reading of Heidegger, Hyde and Smith grant that rhetoric has the function of “making known” the meaning which is the substance of interpretive understanding.’ They rec-

ognize that, without rhetoric, the meaning interpretation creates would remain inert, never actualized. But, at the same time,

they strongly emphasize that the function of rhetoric in the hermeneutical act exists first and foremost in the :ntrapersonal realm —essentially in the mind of the interpreter: “The articulation of understanding by interpretation is prior to any ontic performance of this articulation through speaking and/or writing,” 10 They presumably follow Heidegger in maintaining that what one communicates to others of one’s hermeneutical insight “shows itself as ‘a derivative mode’ of the person’s primordial interpretive understanding.”!! There are a number of problems with this ontological, as well as implicitly temporal, ordering of hermeneutical activity, at least

in the interpretation of a sacred text. At the same time it denies that the hermeneutical act is a process, it neglects to posit any motive for interpretation to begin. These two criticisms are connected. The process of interpretation cannot be divided neatly into intrapersonal and interpersonal steps, with the intrapersonal Between Rhetoric and Hermeneutics = 29

step remaining somehow untainted by considerations of adaptation to an audience. Furthermore, if the motive for interpretation in the first place is to make a text relevant to an audience, then

the interpretation will be audience conditioned from the very start. As we will see, classical biblical interpretation is clearly motivated by the interpreter’s desire to make a sacred text “speak”

to a contemporary audience. It is inevitable that such a motivation would affect the interpreter’s thinking about the interpretation as much as it would the communicating of it. Interpreters, to be sure, are guided in the making-known of their interpretation by interests, according to Hyde and Smith, but they insist that these guiding interests are the interests of the interpreter, a product of the interpreter's hermeneutical situation. /”

The interests and predispositions of the audience, while perhaps assumed by Hyde and Smith as being part of that situation, are not explicitly discussed in this formulation of interpretive understanding. We are left to conclude that the epistemic value of the making known function of rhetoric is affected only by the predispositions of the interpreter, not those of an intended audience. Audience predispositions, of course, are precisely what guide the rhetor in response to a rhetorical situation, and the epistemic value of the response is then in part determined by the status one ascribes to the audience conditioning that response.!° If an audience, distant in time and place from the original text, is somehow “intended” by the text to be included in the purview of its meaning, then that audience's predisposition to understanding indeed would be a legitimate and necessary framework for ascertaining the text’s meaning. As we will see, this is precisely the case with Scripture. In contrast to Hyde and Smith, Gadamer appears to recognize the inextricable connection between interpretive understanding and the communication of that understanding to others. Discussing

the relationship between hermeneutics and rhetoric in his essay,

“On the Scope and Function of Hermeneutical Reflection,” Gadamer states that the defense of the probable through convinc-

ing and persuading is “as much the aim and measure of under-

standing and interpretation, as [it is] the aim and measure of

50 « Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

the art of oration and persuasion.” !4 In another essay, “On the Problem of Self-Understanding,” Gadamer observes that the sermon, not the explanatory commentary of the exegete, IS the most

complete hermeneutical act because “the actual completion of understanding does not take place in the sermon as such, but rather in its reception as an appeal that is directed to each person who hears it.”!° But Gadamer then fails to apply this observation to his understanding of the contingencies of the hermeneutical act. To be sure, he emphasizes that the interpreter’s audience participates in the creation of understanding when it receives the interpretation, but he does not take account of how the audience initially affects the interpreters construction of the interpretation it receives. We see here the same artificial bifurcation of the hermeneutical process

we found in Hyde and Smith; with them, Gadamer recognizes only the present hermeneutical situation of the interpreter as “the productive ground” of understanding, but grants no place in the hermeneutical act to the interpreter’s audience. The primary motivational precondition for interpretation according to Gadamer is the interpreter’s alienation from a text: “[S]ome-

thing distant has to be brought close, a certain strangeness overcome, a bridge between the once and the now. "16 But why bridge

the gap? How can we account for the fact that certain obscure texts are permitted to lie dormant except for the technical analyses of scholars, while others are brought alive for contemporary audiences by rhetorician-interpreters? Alienation from the text, as conceived by Gadamer, is not sufficient to account for the interpretation of a sacred text, nor is it the primary motive for interpretation. Rather, as I will show, the impulse to interpret a sacred

text is rhetorical. The interpreter sees the text, properly interpreted, as a fitting response to an exigency, something that needs doing, in the rhetorical situation of the interpreter’s audience. In this formulation, interpretation is a species of “rhetorical invention” chosen by the rhetorician-interpreter when there is warrant to extend in time and space the meaning of a sacred text. To expli-

cate and support this thesis, I now turn toa phenomenological description of the process of scriptural interpretation.

Between Rhetoric and Hermeneutics a 3/

The Interpretation of Scripture An understanding of the choice to use interpretation as one’s method of invention must begin with a characterization of sacred texts, for it is my contention that sacred texts provide a unique warrant to the interpreter for their rhetorical application. Inter-

pretation as an inventional process is not chosen anytime one engages in rhetorical activity, but only under certain conditions — conditions that make the text to be interpreted the source of a fit-

ting response to a rhetorical situation. Those conditions are satisfied at least partially by the very nature of a sacred text. The most distinctive aspect of sacredness is the attribution to the text of the capacity to speak beyond the immediate situation of its original author. All texts are not granted this capacity, and the knowledge they might embody for future audiences varies accordingly. Gadamer, however, apparently does not differentiate between the status of different texts in the elaboration of his hermeneutical epistemology. He conceives of knowledge as unfold-

ing dialectically between past and present. '7 An interpretation of a text does not simply present a subjective variant of the mean-

ing of the text, but rather the interpretation is an essential part of the text's “being,” belonging to its “ontological possibility.”!®

Hyde and Smith share this somewhat mystical epistemology, which seems to permeate philosophical hermeneutics.’ The notion of an epistemic search through time is made possible by language,

the repository of all that human beings may know: “Language is not only an object in our hands, it is the reservoir of tradition and the medium in and through which we see ourselves.””” But of our knowledge ts mediated through language, language ts medt-

ated through texts. While language might have an ontological place

of its own, it does not exist experientially for us outside of particular texts. Language is always spoken by someone, and the status of that someone must affect the power of the language to reach

beyond itself through the interpretive act and thereby to extend its meaning. Language exercises different degrees of power over interpreters,

depending on the text in which the language is found. At one end of the continuum is a text whose language we simply try to 52 w Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

comprehend. Here the burden of proof is on the text to make itself clear and meaningful. The text is put easily aside if it does not. Texts that have greater status In our eyes move us to delve more deeply into the language, to trust it as a means of enlightening our own thought. We might find ourselves making extensive notes in the margins as we merge the author's thinking with our own. Much early biblical interpretation consists of just this

kind of invention in the margins of a text. Here we are getting closer to Gadamer’s dialectic. But in order to engage a text dialec-

tically as part of one’s own process of invention, one needs to ascribe a very special status to the text indeed: to trust it as an understanding interlocutor in the development of one’s own ideas. The presumption here is that interpreters can discover what they know by investigating the language of the text. The text’s author

1s presumed to understand not only what the text itself Says, but also what the interpreter might know and say. This presumption is associated with texts that are held to be sacred.7! Once a text achieves sacred status, it assumes the power to speak beyond itself. Authors, interpreters, and audiences at different times and in different places then become united in a common epistemological medium that we might call their “textuality.” Textuality draws rhetorician-interpreters to the text as the source for what might be known or said. The interpreter’s audi-

ence shares in this textuality and helps direct the inventional process toward the text. The shared textuality is what gives the text the “force of testimony,” to use Paul Ricceur’s phrase.~” The events and experiences described in the text might remain within the bounds of a spatiotemporal moment, but their meaning reaches

beyond that moment. It becomes the task (even the obligation one might say) of the interpreter to enable the text to speak to future audiences — audiences that are just as significant to the meaning of the text as was the “original audience.” The rhetorical situation as perceived by the interpreter calls out for a response

from the text. Interpretation becomes the inventional means through which the text is transformed into a fitting response. The interpretation is thus rhetorically motivated and directed.

There is an intended resonance here between textuality and Gadamer’s concept of linguisticality as the medium through which Between Rhetoric and Hermeneutics m 33

human beings reach backward and forward in time in their quest for knowledge. What his two essays say of linguisticality, I am asserting, requires textuality. Of linguisticality Hyde and Smith

say, The development of understanding is a function of how human beings ‘work out’ the linguistic possibilities that constitute and are projected in understanding.”*° In contrast, I would argue that for human beings who together “possess” a sacred text, the development of understanding is a function of how they work out the linguistic possibilities that constitute and are projected in

understanding their text. The sacred status of the text is what gives the language in the text the rhetorical power to disclose knowledge to new audiences, to encompass new rhetorical situations in its epistemological range. The Torah directs future audiences to practice precisely what

Gadamer's two essays describe as the process through which knowledge unfolds: “And these words which I command you on this day shall be in your heart. And you shall teach them diligently to your children. Recite them when you stay at home and when

you are away, when you lie down and when you get up’ (Deuteronomy 6:6—7).74 Words assume the power to disclose knowledge continually when one treats the words as sacred. This is what the Torah requires in order to ensure that future audiences will be encompassed within the text. The purview of rabbinic interpretation follows this command with a vengeance. Even a cursory perusal of any rabbinic midrash will reveal a biblical word or phrase milked for every last drop of possible meaning that might lie within it. After direct revelation ceased, interpretation continued to perform the function that revelation served. This function is a rhetorical one, whereby the interpretation enables the text (and the God behind it) to continue to show the way by responding to ever new rhetorical situations. The Torah mandates this rhetorical function of interpretation in a number of ways. The very concept of God that the text espouses is perhaps the most important one. As Ellis Rivkin puts it: “What is essential is not the idea of one God, but the idea that the one God can be called upon for innovation and for creative problem solving and that He always has power and attributes not yet revealed.”*» God’s power to continue to 54 w Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

reveal is contained in the text itself. When prophecy ceased, continuing interpretation of the prophetic text replaced it: “The old idea of inquiring of the Lord was replaced by the new midrashic idea of inquiring of the Torah.”*° God, in other words, knew more than what He explicitly said, but whatever else He knew is contained in what He said, and is actualized by the application of what He said to new situations. I think most of us would be hard put to attribute such rhetorical power to disclose knowledge to anyone's language, even God's. Yet that is precisely what Gadamer claims the interpreter must do.*’ Again, it seems to be a confusion between linguisticality and textuality. Only the latter permits the text to transcend temporal and spatial limitations and embody the force of testimony: to speak to us (at least) as powerfully as it spoke to its original audience.

“Which Rhetorical Situation?” There is a troublesome paradox, however, in this notion of textuality. For a text to be interpreted in a way that provides a fitting response to a new rhetorical situation, its meaningfulness in the original rhetorical situation must somehow be overcome. If the interpreter tries to understand the text in terms of the original rhetorical situation that gave rise to it, to which it was a fitting response, then the more adequate the interpretation becomes, the more circumscribed the epistemological range of the text also becomes. If the direction of the interpretation is backward in time,

toward the original rhetorical situation in which the text was uttered, its original meaning might become clear; but its capacity to transcend the original rhetorical situation and speak toa contemporary audience is muted. This, of course, is quite contrary to how the text, according to tradition, means to be taken, and so has presented modern religious interpreters of the Bible with a serious dilemma.*® The first appears in Spinoza. In his Theologico-Political Treatuwe,

he explains the text on the basis of the historical circumstances surrounding its original composition and thus forcefully pursues his avowed purpose of denying the text its traditional power over people's minds. For example, where traditional interpretation saw Between Rhetoric and Hermeneutics m 35

obscurity as an opening provided by the text for the interpreter to discover hidden meaning, Spinoza simply ascribes it to the historical shortcomings of the authors.*? Spinoza is the archetypal

“desacralizer” of the biblical text, denying the text the sacred rhetorical function traditionally placed in the hands of interpreters.

We see the break most clearly when we compare Spinoza to Philo. In Philo’s Alexandria, Greek philosophy was a dominant influence. Philo did what the rhetorical situation required in order for the text to continue to speak. He made Moses into a Socratic philosopher and the Bible into a philosophical work.* Spinoza, on the other hand, called the kettle black. Observing the text was written for common folk, he denied it the status of philosophy it would require in order to address the enlightened of his day.*! Interpretation that treats the text as sacred “forgets” the original rhetorical situation so that the text can continue to fulfill its sacred rhetorical function. One searches traditional biblical inter-

pretation in vain for references to the rhetorical exigencies surrounding the original composition of the text as an explanation for a difficult passage, even when the passage itself seems obviously to call for such an explanation.*” The original rhetorical situation must remain dormant lest it interfere with the text's capacity to speak to the present with equal force.

We now can understand the sort of alienation that underlies the rhetorical interpretation of a sacred text. It is not alienation from the text itself, as Gadamer suggests in his ontological discussion. Indeed, it is the very connectedness between audience and text, their “textuality,” as we have called it, that enables the interpretation to extend the text’s meaningfulness to the present. The true alienation is from the original rhetorical situation to which the text was a fitting response, and which gave it its original meaning. The audience assumes to “know” through a text whose meaning has become lost as the original rhetorical situation that inspired it passes away. Paradoxically, the text can become

meaningful only if its original meaning is lost. The alienation of the audience from the original rhetorical situation is thus a prerequisite for the interpreter to be able to fulfill the sacred function of interpretation. The interpreter must maintain and reinforce this alienation in order to give the interpretation the rhetorical 56 m= Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

power it needs. One finds strategies directed toward this end throughout biblical interpretation. The most popular strategy is the insistence upon allegory as the only way to interpret the text truly. “[F]Jor the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life,” says Paul in 2 Corinthians 3:6. Literal interpretation brings us back to the original rhetorical situation of the text and thus cuts off the life of the text in time. But allegory provides a constant transfusion of life for old texts as long as the literal relationship of old texts to dead realities is denied. The rhetorical power of allegory is recognized by Philo, who, after insisting on allegory as the only true way of interpretation, warns strongly against divulging allegorical interpretations to those not qualified to understand and apply them.*° One

is reminded of other Greek and Roman rhetoricians warning that the tools of rhetoric cannot be permitted to fall into the

wrong hands. A related strategy, one that perhaps even underlies allegorical interpretation, is the denial of the text's ability to speak clearly for itself. The interpreter has a “reverence for concealment, for

he knows that in this case concealment is not deceit or blank obscurity but an enabling condition that draws us near [to the text].”°° Frank Kermode observes that every interpreter implicitly asserts that all prior interpretations are inadequate.*° This holds true especially for the interpretation that the text itself might offer of its own meaning. The text cannot be “self-interpreting,” and this is precisely what the unearthing of the original rhetori-

cal situation would allow it to do. The original rhetorical situation would become the hermeneutic whereby the text could be self-interpreting. This hermeneutic becomes concealed as the present rhetorical situation provides the driving exigency behind the interpretation. As Erich Auerbach observes of biblical language: “Thus history, with all its concrete forces, remains forever a figure, cloaked and needful of interpretation. ”°”

Augustine maintains that the obscurity of the original text is an intentional device whose purpose it is to enable later interpreters to perform their appointed task.°> He admonishes them therefore not to imitate the text’s obscurity, for that would under-

mine their function. They are given that obscurity so they can Between Rhetoric and Hermeneutics m 37

overcome it with their own clarity. In another place, Augustine projects himself into Moses’ position of authority as the writer of Scripture and speculates that if he were Moses, “I should prefer to write in sucha way that my words could convey any truth that anyone could grasp on such matters rather than to set down

one true meaning so clearly as to exclude all other meaning which not being false could not offend me.”9? What a strange rhetorician Augustine makes of Moses: aware of whatever the truth might become, he must make his language intentionally obscure in order to permit that truth to be read into his text. For the interpreter to make the text eloquent through interpretation, the eloquence of the text itself must be denied. Other interpreters familiar with classical rhetoric also characterize the text as “not eloquent.”4°

These strategies, then, function to enable the interpreter to bring the text rhetorically alive for a contemporary audience by obscuring directly or indirectly the text’s relationship with its original rhetorical situation. This, combined with the capacity of a sacred text to expand its range of meaning to other times and places, gives the interpreter the warrant needed to make of the text a fitting response to the present rhetorical situation. By way of conclusion, let me state baldly what may have been slightly less than obvious throughout this chapter. A sacred text is more than a special case of the relationship between rhetoric and hermeneutics; it is, rather, the precondition for that relationship properly conceived. To say that all interpretation is rhetor-

ical because interpretive understanding must be made known in order to be actualized is, I think, to trivialize the relationship. By this, I mean that the interpretive act remains unaffected by the relationship so conceived. I have argued that rhetoric affects interpretation when interpretation is a part of the rhetorical act, its inventional part to be

specific. And this happens only when the audience and interpreter share a perception of the text as sacred, what I have called “textuality.” It is only then that the text has the epistemic range

to include the interpreter and the interpreter’s audience in its rhetorical capacity to make known significant meaning. It seems

to me that philosophical hermeneutics has fudged the basic 58 wm Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

epistemological question by equating knowledgeability with linguisticality rather than textuality. Commitment to a text is a precondition for any significant hermeneutical or rhetorical understanding. Paradoxical as it may seem, we have to decide whom to believe before we can discover what we know. Of course, according to Plato and those who followed in his wake, it is precisely the task of philosophy to distinguish knowledge from belief, and thus hermeneutics from rhetoric. But for

better or worse (or more properly, for better and worse), Nietzsche intervenes between us and Plato; we must therefore recognize that if there ever was a way to distinguish knowledge from belief, it has been lost to us somewhere along the path to modernity. As Heidegger puts the Nietzschean axiom: “Interpretation is the basic form of all knowing.”4! And, of course, rhetoric as persuasive speech is the basic form of all interpretation. The language Heidegger uses to make this point is strongly evocative of

the Gospels: “Hermeneutics means not just interpretation, but even before it, the bearing of message and tidings.’”4? Again, Heidegger’s way of putting this is revealing. It seems

to reflect a desire to look beyond Nietzsche's perspectivism in order to distinguish some interpretations as more than “mere interpretations’ —as somehow meriting special attention, calling out to be harkened to. But how do philosophically sophisticated interpreters, concerned also with the “authenticity” of their saying, speak their interpretations in a way that indicates to their respective audiences that they should hear them — really hear them —not Just as interpretations, but as “bearing message and tidings”? Alexander Nehemas suggests that Nietzsche himself was preoccupied with this very issue: “Nietzsche's central

problem as an author, therefore, is that he wants his readers to accept his views, his judgments and his values as much as he wants them to know that these are essentially 4w views, hw values, bis judgments. ”“°

It was in the nature of Nietzsche's genius to “create” a problem that presented an almost insurmountable challenge to his philosophy. How could perspectivism, in whatever form, speak its message? Or does it have no message, other than the announcement that establishes the groundlessness of its own and all other Between Rhetoric and Hermeneutics = 39

messages, namely, that God is dead? So great is the challenge Nietzsche poses, that it is able to give new postmodern life and meaning to the age-old dilemma of how to manage the ambiguities between rhetoric and hermeneutics in the linguistic work of both religion and philosophy. In chapter 3, we turn to a historical overview of that dilemma with special attention to how it might have reached Heidegger.

Notes 1. In addition to the material discussed in the present chapter, we should note the 1997 translation of Gadamer’s “Rhetorik und Hermeneutik” by Joel Weinsheimer in Jost and Hyde, Rhetoric and Hermeneutics,

45-59. 2. Hyde and Smith, “Hermeneutics and Rhetoric,” 356. 3. Heidegger, Being and Time, 275.

4. Ibid., 189 (emphasis added). 5. Heidegger, Hustory of the Concept, 260.

6. The building of a deliberative community as the grounding principle of rhetorical activity is ubiquitous in the Rhetoric, but perhaps most evident in Aristotle’s development of the enthymeme as the “body of persuasion” (see chapter 6). In Polttical Judgment, a work that provides a compelling case for the intricate relationship between the Rhetoric and the Politics, Ronald Beiner sums up the relationship between rhetoric and community in Aristotle thus: “In taking cognizance of the particular needs and aspirations of his audience, the orator expresses his community with them.” (101) In Te Claum of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism,

Morality and Tragedy, 20, Stanley Cavell argues that this same relationship obtains in philosophy: “The philosophical appeal to what we say,

and the search for our criteria on the basis of which we say what we Say, are claims to community. ” See also chapters 3 and 6. 7. Heidegger, History of the Concept, 154.

8. Ibid., 155. 9. Hyde and Smith, “Hermeneutics and Rhetoric,” 355. 10. Ibid., 353. 11. Ibid., 355. 12. Ibid., 354. 13. Chaim Perelman’s “New Rhetoric” focuses directly on this problem, and his concept of “universal audience” can be seen as a direct attempt

40 « Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

to ensure the epistemic value of audience-conditioned discourse. See Allen Scult, “Chaim Perelman’s Universal Audience: One Perspective.”

14. Gadamer, “Scope and Function,” 24. 15. Gadamer, “On the Problem,” 58. 16. Gadamer, “Scope and Function,” 22. 17. See David Linge’s introduction to Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, XXVI1.

18. Ibid.

19. Hyde and Smith, “Hermeneutics and Rhetoric,” 356. 20. Gadamer, “Scope and Function,” 29. 21. This way of reading is being theorized in the present work as especially operative in Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle in the 1920s, though in chapter 4 we will find Heidegger still using this approach in his reading of Parmenides in his 1954 work Wav hewst Denken?. 22. Ricceur, Luvays on Biblical Interpretation, 18.

23. Hyde and Smith, “Hermeneutics and Rhetoric,” 351. 24. See note 16 in chapter 1. 25. Rivkin, The Shaping of Jewtsh History, 78.

26. Gertner, “Terms of Scriptural Interpretation: A Study in Hebrew

Semantics, 3. 27. 1am referring here to Gadamer’s notion of the transcendence of meaning. See Gadamer, “Aesthetics and Hermeneutics,” 100-101. 28. See, for example, Morton Smith’s 1969 review and critique “The Present State of Old Testament Studies.” 29. Spinoza, Theologico-Polttical Treatise, 34—35.

30. This somewhat bizarre construal of Scripture underlies much of Philo’s interpretation. See, for example, Philo, On the Creation, in Philo, 1:9.

31. Spinoza, Theologico-Polttical Treatise, 9.

32. Form criticism might be viewed as an attempt, albeit a not altogether successful one, to correct this situation. See James Muilenburg, “Form Criticism and Beyond.” 33. Wolfson, Philo: Foundations of Religious Philosophy tn Judatsm, Christiantty, and Islam, 1:55—56.

34. Augustine makes this point repeatedly in On Christian Doctrine (see esp. book 4). 35. Bruns, “Allegory and Satire: A Rhetorical Meditation,” 126. 36. Kermode, The Genests of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative, 17.

37. Auerbach, Scene from the Drama of European Literature: Six Essayd, 58.

Between Rhetoric and Hermeneutics = 4/

38. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 133. 39. Augustine, Confesstond, 314.

40. See, for example, Origen, On First Principles, 267; Philo, On the Sacrifices of Cain and Abel, in Philo, 2:103. 41. Heidegger, Hustory of the Concept, 260.

42. Heidegger, “A Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer,” in On the Way, 29. 43. Nehemas, Metzsche: Life as Laterature, 35.

42 wu Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

ye

Hermes’ Rhetorical Problem The Dilemma of the Sacred tn Hermeneutics All this makes it clear that hermeneutics means not just the inter-

pretation but, even before it, the bearing of message and tidings. — Martin Heidegger

The convergence of rhetoric and hermeneutics around what I call “Hermes’ rhetorical problem”! is evident both in the tradition of sacred hermeneutics and in philosophical hermeneutics after Heidegger. Because philosophical hermeneutics grows out of sacred hermeneutics, which is itself rooted in reflection on the complexities of interpreting Scripture, let us begin with a scriptural passage in which we find an early and influential manifestation of the problematical convergence of rhetoric and hermeneutics.

Now Moses, tending the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian, drove his flock into the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. An angel of the Lord

appeared to him in a blazing fire out of a bush. He gazed and there was a bush all aflame, yet the bush was not consumed. Moses said, “I must turn aside to look at this marvelous sight; why doesn’t the bush burn up?” When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to look, God called to him out

of the bush: “Moses, Moses!” He answered: “Here I am.”

(Exodus 3:14) Notice that this unique “face-to-face” encounter between God

and Moses begins with a fair amount of indirection. Not only does an angel of the Lord appear first, but the angel itself appears

45

indirectly, through a burning bush, though the bush burns without being consumed by the fire, surely an otherworldly occurrence. Amid these ambiguities, Moses is the first to actually “speak,”

by responding with astonishment to the sight of the bush. Only when God sees that Moses’ attention is focused on this miraculous confluence of forces does He call to him. Moses answers without hesitation, “Here I am.” Because Moses grew up as an Egyptian, this is his first experience with the god who will later make Himself known as Yahweh. Thus the “presencing” of one to the other is problematical. Yahweh's capacity to speak meaningful words to Moses, even to reveal His name, must somehow be preceded by Moses’ willingness to attend to Him as a speaking presence. This problem is solved narratively by having Yahweh begin His presencing to Moses as an undeniably concrete and material entity, but an entity

which also reflects an origin beyond itself. Only after Moses responds to the otherworldly dimension of the experience can God begin to speak. With God's call, “Moses, Moses,” and Moses’

direct and obedient response to the call, the exchange becomes more or less localized in earthly discourse. The problem of introducing a transcendent being to a being who lives within the limits of language has been “temporally” resolved. But of course when Moses is charged with communicating God's words to the people, the problem resurfaces. What should be done now? Should the people be brought to the bush and the experience repeated? (At best, a rather cumbersome way to carry a religious tradition forward.) If not, how does Moses re-present the experience in a way that is both believable and meaningful to the people, and, at the same time, faithful to the nature and import

of the original event? In hermeneutical retrospect, the problem will be further compounded by the tendency of future audiences to become less and less amenable to responding to miraculous occurrences with respectful wonder. The more common response

to such claims will be to bring them into the realm of the commonplace through scientific explanations. What is a divine messenger to do? At this stage, the problem is the classical rhetorical one of “adjust-

ing ideas to people and people to ideas.”” But in its earlier form, 44 w Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

the problem is also definitively rhetorical, and endemic to the expe-

rience of understanding from the very Start. Even before Moses gets to the point of having to relay his own hermeneutical experience in terms appropriate to a wider audience, he must himself be able to “understand” the experience of God’s presence in order to undergo it. And so his attention must somehow be aroused and made ready to be “appropriately” aftected by a strange and uncanny event —an event which will change the course of his life.

These two rhetorical moments are intertwined of course. Before Moses could convey God’s words to the Israelites, he first had to be appropriately positioned to himself undergo the experience of God speaking. This positioning involved a symbolic act intended to evoke a particular response from Moses. Though not exactly linguistic, nor precisely persuasive, this call-

to-attention had the rhetorical function of inducing in Moses a responsive readiness for the experience of being addressed by divine speech.* Having rhetorically prepared the way for Moses

to undergo the experience, the narrative must then deal with the problem Moses faces in readying the people to hear God’s Word. As with Moses’ experience at the bush, God’s Word can only be communicated meaningfully to the people if they are ready to hear. Thus what I call “Hermes’ rhetorical problem” reproduces itself ever more dauntingly as the hermeneutical task

of “bearing a message’ moves forward in time. The further the messenger gets from the original event of revelation, the more difficult and “artful” the mimetic attempt to reproduce the rhetorical force of God’s Word becomes.‘ One sees a parallel manifestation of the earlier phase of the problem in Heidegger's philosophical hermeneutics, where again a similar sort of prior understanding is a prerequisite to Dasein’s

hermeneutical task. Before Dasein is able to understand anything about Being, it must first be made capable of undergoing the sort of experience in which Being makes its appearance. Human Dasein must be “shown” the possibility of this appearance, and become engaged by this possibility, as Moses was shown

the burning bush and responded to it with rapt attention. Only then can the transcendent be “heard”; only then can the hermeneu-

tical experience proceed. Hermes’ Rhetorical Problem ms 45

This need to engage the attention in the presencing of Being as

a prerequisite to understanding might, following Heidegger, be called the “primordial relationship” between rhetoric and hermeneu-

tics.° As with the experience of the burning bush, it would seem

to be a wordless rhetoric, or at most, a rhetoric on the way to words.’ But as we will see, wordless though it may be, the phenomenon we are pointing to is given an unmistakably rhetorical cast in Heidegger. It serves to “address” the individual in a powerfully evocative way — powerful enough to induce a capacity for experience heretofore unknown. Heidegger refers to this primordial rhetorical moment as a “call [Ru/].”° The rhetorical character of the call is suggested even more pointedly by Heidegger in his essay on Parmenides: “What happens in Phas and in Logos? Could the gathering-calling saying which reigns in them be that bringing which brings forth a shining?”? Here “shining” suggests the “coming to light,” the “shining forth” of a phenomenon. And it is precisely the “hghting” of what is (ay Lichtung des Seins) that is the

Sache, or “subject matter” of Heidegger’s phenomenology.!? We might say, therefore, that it is a “primordial rhetoric” which calls one to the brink of understanding that Heidegger is attempting to somehow reproduce in his hermeneutical phenomenology, and that is in fact the “phenomenon” of phenomenology. It is this primordial rhetoric which messengers from Moses to Heidegger have sought to reiterate. But how does one reiterate the wordless call that gives understanding, without oneself somehow posing as the godlike originator of the gift, or at least as one

who understands its origin as only a god could? This is Hermes’ rhetorical problem writ large. As I will show, it is precisely this problem, conceived as rhetorical (though he does not use the word), which plagues Heidegger’s phenomenological project. But as we will also see, it is precisely Heidegger’s reluctance to explicitly face Hermes’ rhetorical problem as a self-implicating ethical question of his own rhetorical style —his public construction of himself as a philosopher —which eventually foreshortens the reach of his phenomenology. Heidegger stopped short of examining the

relationship between rhetoric and hermeneutics in his own discourse, assuming that his phenomenological method was rigorous enough to offset the self-implicature of his way of speaking. One 46 wu Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

might say that a similar methodological presumption underlies Plato's

argument for Socratic dialectic as the master hermeneutical discourse. The rigor of dialectic was such that Socrates’ rhetorical moves could be seen as a sort of “inert ingredient.”

Because Plato and Heidegger were also themselves excellent rhetoricians, we might add another reason for their reluctance to reflect on their rhetoric —it would have interfered with the effectiveness of their own discourse. As Aristotle suggests, the best rhetoricians conceal their art from the audience: “[A]uthors should compose without being noticed.”!! This concealment becomes especially important for those philosophers who come to take their “missionary’ role as Hermes seriously. Plato was committed to alter-

ing the course of philosophy, and his success in this regard is ironically reflected in Heidegger’s rhetorical zeal to call philosophy back to true “thinking,” as it was practiced even before Plato by the pre-Socratics. Heidegger makes the rhetorical mission of his hermeneutical phenomenology explicit in a number of places, perhaps none so vivid as his expressed attempt in What Ls Called Thinking? to find the language appropriate to the “call of Being” in order to reiterate the call and bring philosophy back to thinking.” Thus we see that Hermes’ rhetorical problem doubles back on itself numerous times in the multileveled convergence of rhetoric and hermeneutics as it obtains in both the scriptural and philosophical traditions. But in both contexts, explicit discussion of the convergence is avoided for some surprisingly similar, but also

significantly different strategic (rhetorical?) reasons. We continue our exploration of the convergence and its avoidance with Augustine, whose treatment of rhetoric in his scriptural hermeneu-

tics provides an instructive backdrop for our examination of a parallel move in Heidegger’s project.

The Rhetorical Problem in Augustine: The Significance of the Sacred in Hermeneutics

In a work that might well have investigated the relationship between rhetoric and hermeneutics, Augustine is at great pains to keep them separate. At the beginning of On Christian Doctrine, he observes: “There are two things necessary to the treatment of Hermes’ Rhetorical Problem sm 47

Scripture: a way of discovering those things which are to be under-

stood, and a way of teaching what we have learned.”!° He then sharply divides these two aspects of his project: “We shall speak first of discovery and second of teaching.” Before embarking on his discussion of rhetoric in Book IV, he quotes the opening pas-

sage verbatim, assuring his readers that the main body of the work on biblical hermeneutics has been safely completed and will

not be contaminated by the “few things” he will now say about rhetoric in order to bring the project to a close.!4 This passage is noteworthy not only because of Augustine’s prominence in both hermeneutical and rhetorical thought, but also because the way he articulates the separation and, more important, what remains unsaid and unthought in that articulation, is typical of the way biblical hermeneutics sets rhetoric aside whenever it takes up the question of understanding Scripture. Notice first that Augustine's bifurcation of his subject matter leaves him no space within which to reflect on his own “speaking”

about biblical hermeneutics. That he must “speak” the insights elaborated in the first three books at all remains an unspoken embarrassment, of no hermeneutical or philosophical interest. In other words, the speaking to others of what he understands has no bearing for Augustine on the nature of the hermeneutical act itself. Understanding Scripture is unaffected by the fact that understanding must be spoken in order to be “made known” to others.!° On the other hand, in Book IV, when Augustine finally comes to examine the making known of hermeneutical insight in preaching —a markedly rhetorical activity —he learns nothing from the rhetoric of Scripture, the way in which Scripture conveys its own message, except that it is sui generis and should not be imitated. 16 For Augustine, the eloquence of Scripture is unique unto itself,

especially in its penchant for obscurity. The divine matters of which Scripture speaks require this strange sort of eloquence, and the scriptural authors are the only ones with the inspired capacity to employ it. Those imitating the scriptural way of speaking are accused by Augustine of trying to appropriate the Bible's authority to themselves. !’ Of necessity, Scripture does employ some aspects of what Augus-

tine calls “our eloquence,” but this apparent commonality with 48 w Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

“pagan orators” is simply a mundane exigency of communication and does not bear on the sacred rhetoric of Scripture and its sublime detachment from earthly speech. Even so, Augustine cannot resist pointing out some of the rhetorical figures in exemplary biblical passages so that he might stand back and admire them.!® In

concluding his brief celebration of some examples of biblical eloquence, Augustine must caution his readers against making any

sort of analytical attempt to understand how the eloquence of Scripture works, for the power of scriptural rhetoric to affect the listener might seem to merit and justify such an analysis: “But a good listener warms to it [scriptural eloquence] not so much by diligently analyzing it as by pronouncing it energetically. For these words were not devised by human industry, but were poured forth from the divine mind both wisely and eloquently, not in such a way that wisdom was directed toward eloquence, but in such a way that eloquence did not abandon wisdom.”!? To try to fathom the eloquence of Scripture presumes a composition process sim-

ilar to our own —that somehow biblical wisdom is defined by the eloquence of its expression, such that we may arrive at the former by rigorously tracing the path of the latter.

But truly understanding Scripture requires that we grant its Ultimate Author not only perfect knowledge of the truth, but also a concomitantly perfect knowledge of the limits of our capacity to comprehend it.-° Augustine asks that we accept the words recorded in Scripture as giving us al/ that we are capable of understanding of a wisdom that lies beyond our own hermeneutical (and rhetorical) ken. Thus, throughout Book IV of On Christian Doctrine, the unique eloquence of biblical discourse, the way in which Scripture reveals its essential truths by obscuring them, remains necessarily unthought — off limits to a discussion of rhetoric per se.

And so we arrive at a most remarkable but essential disjunction in Augustine's thought: whatever the interpreter might under-

stand of what Scripture says does not include an understanding of the way it says it, the essential rhetorical work of its language. The message of Scripture must be understood and communicated

by the interpreter without any systematic examination of how that understanding took place, of how the scriptural message affected the interpreter as it did. However that understanding Hermes’ Rhetorical Problem a 49

came about cannot be applied to the transmission of that understanding to others. Or, to put it another way, the originary rhetoric that served to bring an interpreter to a hermeneutical expe-

rience—what I have called the “primordial rhetoric of hermeneutics’ —remains disjoined from the more explicit rhetoric by which the interpretation is made known to the audience. Now Augustine would probably be quite happy with this disjunction. He clearly believes that the discourse of understanding is different from, and superior to, the discourse that disseminates the understanding to a wider audience. But, to preserve that disjunction, the primordial rhetorical linkage between the text and the experience of the interpreter is forgotten, dropped from consideration. Here, not surprisingly, Augustine reminds one again of Plato’s management of the distinction between dialectic and rhetoric in the dialogues. To maintain the purity and perspicacity of dialectic, not only does the rhetorical dimension of Socrates’ discourse remain unexamined, but the rhetorical force by which

Socrates’ vision comes to him in the first place also remains unthought. However, because the originary rhetoric accompanying the Bible's vision of the truth (unlike the “ideas” which ground dialectic) is actually inscribed in the biblical text, Augustine must make an explicit case for the disjunction between the rhetorical and hermeneutical components of biblical discourse. For Augustine, truly understanding the scriptural text involves the realization that its rhetoric is essentially “other.” That is, the means by which Scripture makes itself understood, its manner of speaking, remains beyond the reach of our own abilities, not only to imitate, but also to articulate and comprehend. Thus the originary hermeneutical experience of understanding Scripture is not only inaccessible to the interpreter’s audience but, in some measure, also to the interpreter. The impossibility of fully comprehending and articulating the experience of understanding Scripture is what lends Scripture its hermeneutical identity. Understanding Scripture necessarily entails recognizing the limits of that understanding, and those limits are defined by the inaccessibility of the text's rhetoric. Augustine's radical separation between hermeneutics and rhetoric focuses exclusively on their functioning in the interpretation 50 w= Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

of a sacred text. One might even say that sacred texts viewed in this way are defined by the very ineffability of their most essential meanings. We can experience those meanings only through the divinely inspired discourse whose rhetorical genius it is to know precisely what to withhold and how to withhold it. An ability to comprehend how the discourse is able to do this, let alone to articulate this comprehension, would make us “‘like God, who knows good and bad” (Genesis 3:5), would make us know what only the divine consciousness that informs the discourse can know. This ineffable depth of meaning creates the very space in which sacred texts do their peculiar rhetorical work —rhetorical work that is by its very nature untheorizable, unknowable in any other discourse. The Old Testament makes this point in a rigorously explicit

way further on in the burning bush episode. Moses expresses what might be called “rhetorical anxiety” at the thought of communicating God's message to the people: “When they ask me, “What is His name?” what shall I say to them?’” (Exodus 3:15), he asks. At this point in the transaction, God withholds His name, signifying an intimate true knowledge of His nature. Instead of the name, God rhetorically inscribes His identity in the mystery of “Hhbyeh-Asher-Ehyeh.” usually rendered “I Am That I Am,” but

essentially untranslatable in any determinate way. Thus knowledge of God's nature, the sacred core of all that human beings might understand, is left hidden in a nugget of sublimely indeterminate rhetoric. Not only are “His ways not our ways,” but His discourse likewise is irretrievably removed from our own. The secrets hidden in God's speech will serve as a propaedeutic to the endless hermeneutical meditations that constitute Israel's vocation. Human understanding will be defined by the rhetorical mystery standing guard at its limits.

Augustine thus stands in a long line of those who carry on Hermes’ mission as divine messenger: to transmit the message of the gods in a way that preserves the sanctity, the heavenly oth-

erness of their discourse. The sacred may even be defined hermeneutically by the impossibility of human discourse to fully comprehend it or, more specifically, by the incapacity of human discourse to explain the rhetorical function of the sacred, its way

of making itself known. The sacred is thus left with a depth of Hermes’ Rhetorical Problem sm 5/

ineffability that humanly constructed discourse simply cannot and should not try to penetrate.

And so there is good reason why, throughout its history, hermeneutical reflection has been preoccupied with sacred texts.

And when it attempts to find a more secular metonym for the

sacred, as Gadamer does with his notion of the classical,7! hermeneutical thought begins to confound postmodern sensibilities. Why does Gadamerian hermeneutics privilege classical texts as it does? There is a link to the tradition of sacred hermeneu-

tics here that is essential to Gadamer’s argument, but which is not explicitly discussed. I would suggest that any matter or Sache worthy of hermeneutical reflection engages our attention, evokes our deepest capac-

ity to listen, by a means reminiscent of the ineffable rhetorical work of the sacred. One might say that this leads to the experience of the hermeneutical object as “sacred,” even though in secular hermeneutics, we avoid the term. The way such a text carries out the rhetorical function of making known its meaning remains a mystery that continually engages our hermeneutical desire. The originary hermeneutical experiences generated by such texts show themselves to be worthy of reflection precisely because the manner of their showing remains hidden. They are able to make themselves known to us without our understanding how, further prompting our desire to understand. But as philosophical hermeneutics after Heidegger attempts to detach the “Sache” of its reflection from sacred texts, it also cuts itself off from the ineffable rhetorical mystery in which hermeneutical reflection was rooted in the first place. Without this sense of

the ineffable, the insistence on reading certain texts as paradigmatic of the hermeneutical experience (as in Heidegger's reading of the pre-Socratics and the modern German poets, for example) seems like a clear case of “privileging.” As we will see, Heidegger may be indirectly responsible for this cutoff and the resulting confusion, due to changes, from early to late, in his own management of Hermes’ rhetorical problem and its relationship to the sacred.” But first, to recapitulate. It is the ineffable depth of certain dis-

courses, the inaccessibility of their rhetoric, that makes understanding them both worthwhile and problematic. It seems that 52 wm Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

hermeneutical activity is elicited by the mysterious rhetoric that both reveals and conceals what we wish to understand. At the same time the rhetoric makes the meaning seem powerfully true for us—so much so that we may experience ourselves as somehow “belonging” to it —its manner of speaking this “truth” keeps

us ata respectful, perhaps even frustrating, distance. The hermeneutical desire of the interpreter is deepened by the challenge to bring the discourse into closer range by removing some of the rhetorical shadows which cloud the original. But in the very act of bringing it close, that is, shedding his or her own rhetorical light on the shadows of the original, the interpreter may reduce

the originary hermeneutical experience to something less than it is. By “taming” it, to borrow from Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince,

the interpreter may dilute its endogenous, primordial rhetorical force. Perhaps the most evident loss occurring in this dilution is that of the sacred sense of mystery surrounding the primordial rhetorical force of the original. On the other hand, by trying to preserve that rhetorical force in the hermeneutical experience the interpreter gives to readers, he or she falls prey to the danger of posing as the originary giver of truth, and so shifts the burden of Hermes’ rhetorical problem onto his or her readers, who are then left to decide whether or not to read the interpreter’s text as “sacred.” As we will see, this “second generation” version of Hermes’ rhetorical problem is precisely what confronts some of the less than faithful as they read Heidegger, especially his later writings.

Heidegger’s First Encounters with “the Problem”: His Early Phenomenology In his early work Heidegger faces Hermes’ dilemma head on. Beginning with his Habilitationsschrift and continuing through the seminars of the early 1920s, Heidegger was engaged in negotiat-

ing the difficult transition between his early intellectual work as

a “Christian theologian” and his lifelong effort to construct a hermeneutical phenomenology. The transition was not an easy one. His Hadbilitationsschrift is replete with celebrations of what we might call the “rhetorical vitality” of medieval mysticism. How Hermes’ Rhetorical Problem m 53

could philosophy simply leave such powerfully evocative experiences behind —experiences that seem to ground so much of what

is worthwhile and authentic in human thought? But that seemed to be the cost of doing philosophy in the way of Husserl. Even though he had begun to revitalize philosophy through his phenomenology, Husserl still kept the sacred at arm’s length, and felt strongly that, to engage in serious philosophy, Heidegger needed to do the same.”* But as Heidegger began to move into his philosophical maturity, he found philosophy disconnected from the vivacity of experience epitomized by the sacred to be overly theoretical and lifeless. “Ent-leben,” he called it.24 In the 1920s, with his theological experience still fresh and thinkable, Heidegger set about the task of bridging the gap between the untheorized vitality of medieval mysticism and the overly theorized Ent-leben of modern philosophy, for as he put it: “Philosophy as a rationalistic system detached from life is powerless, mysticism as an irrationalistic experience is aimless.”*° As he was thinking his way from theology to philosophy, Hei-

degger began to see important resemblances between the sorts of experiences that the mystics had identified with the sacred, and the originary, life-constructing intuitive experiences that Husserl’s phenomenology had tried to uncover. This resemblance Heidegger was sure had a form that could be hinted at, indicated, but not fully articulated. There was something (dad Etwas) that gave to such experiences their powerful immediacy, their sense of “the in itself of the streaming experience of life.””© Like the revelation at Sinai, life-as-it-is befalls us, is given to us, as a “proper-

izing event (Ereignis).”*’ It “appropriates” us as we allow ourselves to be appropriated by it. The quality of “lived experience” comes to us as a result of the “givenness’ of what is. In this quality of experienced givenness,

Heidegger saw the missing link between the mysterious power of sacred revelation and the ontological force of “hermeneutical intuition.”“° Hermeneutical intuition comes to us in a way that is reminiscent of the revelation at Sinai. Both experiences descend with an overwhelming sense of truth not of our own making. Perhaps it is Heidegger’s recognition of the resemblance between the 54 = Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

untouched otherness of hermeneutical intuition and dav ganz Andere of the sacred that eventually leads him in Being and Time to Say,

with an ambiguous hint of their shared a priori otherworldliness: “Being and truth ‘are’ equiprimordially. "ao Yet Heidegger is completely unambiguous in his insistence that the primordial “es gibt’ of hermeneutical intuition that gives us lived experience is very much of this world. Indeed, the phenomenon of “givenness” accounts for the seemingly impersonal, yet irre-

sistibly forceful “worlding” of the world. In his early work, Heidegger identifies the force that induces our lived experience as the “modus edsendt’: “The modus essendt is the experienceable as such, is

in the absolute sense whatever stands over against consciousness, the ‘robust’ reality which irresistibly forces itself upon consciousness and can never nor again be put aside and eliminated.”°"

We are now ready for at least a preliminary formulation of Hermes’ rhetorical problem as it is manifested in the early Heidegger’s negotiation of the transition from theology to phenomenology. He seems to share with Augustine an awestruck sense of the otherness of originary hermeneutical experience. He also believes it to be a profound mistake for the earthly rhetoric of tra-

ditional philosophy to try to fully comprehend that experience. But he begins to diverge from Augustine in his understanding of the transcendence which characterizes that otherness. Though experienced as other, transcendence is very much of this world: “The Dasein is the transcendent being. Objects and things are never transcendent. The original nature of transcendence makes itself manifest in the basic constitution of being-in-the-world.”*! This paradoxical notion of transcendence as characteristic of Dasein’s being-in-the world opens up the space of A/itvein, the “being-with,” though “nonrelational,” frame of Dasein’s hermeneu-

tical intuition.*” This aporia, wherein Dasein experiences a con-

tradictory nonrelational being-with, Heidegger identifies with the primordial discourse that gives understanding: “Discourse [Rede] ws exidstentially eqguiprimordial with state-of-mind and understanding. The

intelligibility of something has always been articulated, even before

there is any appropriative interpretation of it.”99 The “world” that we interpret is given to us as already meaningful (but of course not meaningful enough). This giving takes Hermes’ Rhetorical Problem m 55

place through a primordial discourse that is amenable to linguis-

tic interpretation, but itself is not yet language as we know it and speak it. (The similarity to LAyeh-Avher-Ehyeh is striking.) The dialogical, language-like quality of the primordial Rede Heidegger

indicates metaphorically as a “being-with.” The metaphor is given even more distinct rhetorical contours in another passage in which Heidegger characterizes “being-with” as spoken persuasively by Dasein to itself in the voice of an understanding friend:

Indeed, hearing constitutes the primary and authentic way in which Dasein is open for its ownmost potentiality-forBeing —as in hearing the voice of the friend whom every Dasein carries with it. Dasein hears because it understands. As a Being-in-the-world with others, a Being that understands, Dasein is “in thrall” to Dasein-with and to itself; and in this thralldom it “belongs” to these.

Dasein’s being-with is thus identified as manifesting itself in a profoundly enthralling experience of hearing (Héren). The rhetorical challenge, so to speak, of Heidegger's early phenomenology is how to describe the in-the-world, but seemingly transcendent phenomenon of the originary hermeneutical experience of Héren. Augustine and the tradition of sacred hermeneutics, had, for the most part, been content with a kind of epideic-

tic celebration of the experience: the message itself could be interpreted; the manner of its coming remained a mystery. But to forge the link between the sacred and the factical, Heidegger had to reinvent, to reinscribe in language amenable to philosophy, the mysteriously ineffable rhetoric that transmits the transcendent as lived experience. The true task of phenomenology is to confront anew, in secular terms, Hermes’ rhetorical problem:

to render the impossible-to-articulate, but nonetheless “therebeing” of factical experience. How is our being-in-the-world situated with the definitive force of a Da (there)? Way wt in “es gibt”? We can immediately see the immense difficulty of communicating

the givenness of facticity without implying a divine giver. And, indeed, some critics are forever reading Heidegger's ontology as “onto-theology. ” How can one engage in what appears to be an epideictic celebration of existence and call it “philosophy”? 56 m= Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

Heidegger's attempt to build a philosophical bridge to the sacred

is founded on his insistence that the experience of the sacred is but an example of the sort of originary hermeneutical experience which lends facticity to the life of the human being. Heidegger’s association of facticity with the sacred corresponds to Schleier-

macher’s insight that the interpretation of sacred texts is an instance, albeit a paradigmatic one, of the universal human experience of understanding.» But as we have already seen, this broad-

ening of the scope of hermeneutics brings with it a distinction that smacks of privilege: some texts “mean” more powerfully then

others. As Gadamer puts it: “We all know that there are words that function merely as signals, and then there are other words ... that bear witness themselves to that which they communicate. These words are, so to speak, proximate to something that is; they

are neither replaceable nor exchangeable, a ‘Da’ that discloses itself in its own act of speaking.”°° Corresponding to the texts that bring us such words, some experiences are given to us as “more real” than others. These are the factical experiences that situate us most firmly as the individual human beings we are. Writing to Elizabeth Blochmann, an early correspondent also interested in Schleiermacher, Heidegger refers to such privileged experiences as “gifted moments’: We must be able to wait for high-pitched intensities of mean-

ingful life, and we must remain in continuity with such gifted moments, not so much to en) Oy them as to work them

into life, to take them with us in the onrush of life and to include them in the rhythms of all oncoming life. And in moments when we immediately feel ourselves and are attuned to the direction in which we vitally belong, we cannot merely establish and simply record what is clearly had as if it stood over against us like an object. The understand-

ing self-possession is genuine only ...in a vehement life becoming aware of its own directedness, which is not theoretical, but a total experience. .. .°” I am characterizing the isomorphism that Heidegger found between the force of the factical and the power of sacred to induce

the truth-giving immediacy of lived experience as “rhetorical.” Hermes’ Rhetorical Problem ms 57

By literally hearing and responding to the words contained in Scripture, religious mystics merge their own experience with that

of their forebears and thus reenact the essential unity between themselves and the divine. As Heidegger reads Meister Eckhardt,

insofar as we have being, it is anchored precisely in the “transcendent primal relationship of the soul to God.”*> The experience of facticity, which gives Dasein the opportunity for authen-

ticity, ignites the spark of essential unity between Dasein’s hermeneutical quest and Being. Dasein is situated to authentically become itself by engaging that most daunting question, implicit in the call to think: “What makes a call upon us that we should think and, by thinking, be who we are? "59 The call that situates Dasein to become itself is fraught with “motivation.” Heidegger in his early formulations of the concept of Dasein, comes to focus again and again on the interrelated concepts of situation and motivation —concepts which irresistibly pique

a rhetorician's attention. Perhaps language really w the “house of Being,” but that “isness” comes to us through a primordial rhetorical making-known of our situated being-in-the-world. Early on, Heidegger identifies Dasein with the experienced situatedness of the I, which he calls the “situation-I.’49 Individual human beings are situated, motivated to become an “I,” through their experience of a primordial situating evocation of their being. But how to describe

that evocation as the very subtle rhetoric it is —articulated just meaningfully enough to leave us stranded on a narrow ridge between

a full realization of our potentiality-for-being, on the one side, and the abyss of nothingness and despair, on the other?

The rhetorical task of Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology is to somehow show this primordial showing without bring-

ing it to inauthentic articulation. In other words, to show life as it is given to Dasein to understand, as “life in and for itself.” This means a rhetorical enactment that denies itself the sort of adaptation characteristic of rhetoric. The originary Ruf (call) must be faithfully rendered in its own Rede (discourse), a discourse that is not ours to fully have. But at the same time it cannot be left in the rarefied transcendent language of the sacred: Ehyeh-AsherEhyeh is not philosophy. Here Heidegger begins to delicately step where Augustine feared to tread. 58 m= Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

The Formal Indication as the Rhetorical Enactment of Heidegger’s Phenomenology Heidegger's early attempts to render the ur-discourse of lived experience are conceptualized in his notion of the formal indication (die formale Anzetge).4! Here is one of the earliest, yet fullest,

articulations of the concept: “It is out of this preworldly vital something that the formal objective vomething of knowability is first

motivated, a something of formal theorization. The tendency into a world [that of ev weltet] can be theoretically deflected before its demarcation and articulation as a world. Thus the universality of the formally objective appropriates its origin from the in-itself of the streaming experience of life.”42 The “in-itself of the stream-

ing experience of life” is the not-yet-differentiated primordial something through which the self-interpreting Dasein becomes an individual human being. Heidegger is meaning to point here to “the basic trait (Zug) of life to live out toward something, to ‘world out’ (auszuwelten) into particular lifeworlds.”45 The methodological task of the formal indication is to ensure a “formally objec-

tive” rendering of this phenomenon. The very possibility of a phenomenological rendering of the primordial rhetoric which “motivates” lived experience thus depends on the rigor and precision of the formal indication. Though this very

suggestive idea defines the method appropriate to Heidegger's hermeneutical phenomenology, the method itself remains incompletely articulated. To overly thematize the formal indication would simply return phenomenology to the theoretically distant Ent-leben (un-living) of philosophy. And so Heidegger speaks very little about the formal indication, perhaps leaving us to suppose that the rest of his work simply shows it. This is discussed further in chapter 7.

The need for rhetorical restraint in discussing the formal indication makes my task quite delicate at this point. How to develop the concept, how to say some meaningful, presumably new things about it, without saying too much? First, the formal indication constitutes what I have called the

“rhetorical task” of hermeneutical phenomenology. That task is to discursively render the originary Ruf of hermeneutical expe-

rience without being drawn into either somehow thematizing it Hermes’ Rhetorical Problem m 59

into the conventional, overly theoretical rhetoric of philosophy, on the one hand, or leaving it as undigested mystical gibberish, on the other.

As the passage from Heidegger suggests, perhaps the first and most important guideline in utilizing the formal indication is not to overparticularize it. The form of the originary motivating discourse must be captured — read off the original — before

it reaches particular instantiation in an individual history. The appropriate rendering of the formal indication is thus distinguished by what might be called its “rhetorical restraint.” It knows to stop itself before it falls into the particular. Once past the fail-safe point, rhetoric becomes “mere rhetoric,” an attempt to essentialize the particular as if it represented Being itself. This rhetorical overkill is characteristic of our “fallenness.” Indeed, it might be said that Heidegger's tacit disapproval of rhetoric, which he later identifies as “language under the dictatorship of the public realm [die Offentlichkeit],”*7 is due precisely

to its association with the essentializing temptations of fallenness. The almost irresistible impulse to give particular content to the universalizing, if not universal form of the hermeneutical situation, to tie Being down to a particular way of being, is the downfall of rhetoric as philosophers since Plato have despised it. But the formal indication represents the possibility of a philosophical rhetoric that captures the motivating directional force,

the decidedly rhetorical Zug, which situates Dasein to pursue its course toward the particular, before that particularity is articulated in the life of an individual person. The exercise of this rhetorical restraint is crucial to the success of Heidegger’s phenomenology. There is a kind of a derivative, third-person quality to existence as it is lived in particular lives. This is the inauthentic, everydayness of das Man, as distinguished from life as it is given to the Dasein within dav Man. Heidegger sees the task of phenomenology as returning philosophy to authenticity by refocusing its attention on the Dasein within dav Man, Dasein “before the fall.” In Heidegger's words: “Philosophy is a fundamental manner of living itself, such that philosophy, in each case authentically retrieves life, taking it back from its downfall, a taking-back which, as a radical searching, is life itself. ”5 60 m= Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

But the more one sheds the trappings of the particular, the less one is able to communicate one’s insight to a wider community.

The more Heidegger pursues the formal indication by way of authentically rendering the primal motivating ur-stream of life, the more inaccessible his own rhetoric becomes, and the further up the mountain he himself retreats. There is a kind of sublime isolation that characterizes Heidegger's later work. As Gerald Bruns has put it: “There are no people in the later Heidegger.” His readers are not so much addressed as called upon to observe the master in meditative solitude. Heidegger no longer speaks of the formal indication. He hardly speaks of method at all as his writings become more oracularly poetic. Perhaps he means for

his own words to reenact the form of the original, rather than to somehow read off of it. And so Heidegger's voice assumes an authority beyond Augustine's and perhaps even his own proscriptions. He becomes more the giver of revelation than its interpreter. The later Heidegger seems to have gone beyond the formal indication and reframed the rhetorical task of phenomenology as fully reiterating the primordial call that underlies hermeneutical experience. In the later writings, the phenomenological search for the this-worldly “call of conscience” is replaced by a more cosmically

far-reaching search for the “call of Being.”4° And the “task of thinking at the end of philosophy” becomes to “think Alétheca, unconcealment, as the opening that first grants being and thinking and their presencing to and for each other. 47 Heidegger is claiming that phenomenology must capture the rhetorical force of the primordial ur-discourse as the transcendently mysterious rhetoric it is: “Thus ‘phenomenology’ means .. . to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself.”48

Understanding always comes rhetorically packaged. To again quote Heidegger's Gospel-like formulation of this idea: “Hermeneu-

tics means not just the interpretation but, even before it, the bearing of message and tidings.’4? In other words, the experience of understanding comes to us already expressed, already interpreted, already meaningful. This already expressed quality we have designated as the primordial relationship of rhetoric to hermeneutics. It is the mysterious originary showing of Being, a showing Hermes’ Rhetorical Problem sm 6/

that carries with it a vaguely recognizable, yet unspeakable intentionality.°? But what gives existence its “intentional directionality,” and how is it given? This line of questioning seems to pur-

sue the phenomenon of hermeneutical experience beyond the mystery of rhetorical inaccessibility which has always kept the interpreter in the sacred tradition at an appropriate distance from the biblical text.o! God’s Word has always required interpretation, but the task of interpretation was merely to recover the meaning that was already there, expressed in the saying. How the saying came to mean what it did lies beyond interpretation. Like Augustine, the early Heidegger warns against attempting to fully theorize and thus fully reiterate the voice of originary meaningfulness. But the Heidegger of Being and Time and thereafter suggests it is the very task of phenomenology to bring that voice out into the open: to show it to us as it was shown to him, thus exposing the hidden dimension of its originary showing. Heidegger seems to be suggesting that his own ear is so well attuned to the voice of Being, and his phenomenological method so well

honed, that he can render the rhetorical manner of its showing beyond what is accessibly apparent in the original. Hubert Dreyfus brings this claim to a fine point: “The subject of phenomenology must be something that does not show itself but can be made to show itself.”°* Heidegger thinks he can force the nameless out of hiding.°% Not the first to commit this transgression, he is also probably not the last. Rorty’s memorable characterization of this, Heidegger's widest turn, merits repeating here: “Heideggerese is only Heidegger’s gift to us, not Being’s gift to Heidegger.” Gadamer, of course, is not so quick to judge, suggesting that, as his phenomenology unfolds, Heidegger continues to struggle with Hermes’ rhetorical problem. Although he no longer speaks of “de formale Anzeige,” his work continues to give us what might be called “formal indications” of a method, a way of comporting ourselves in relation to the originary discourse which gives understanding. That way of comporting is not so much thought, as modeled by the later Heidegger. His writing “shows the way,” as it

were. The way,’ in this case, requires a rhetoric whose force might be similar to the original, but whose task is different. Gadamer characterizes “Heideggerese” thus: “Perhaps it was not 62 m Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

to be avoided that this thinker’s language often resembles a tormented stammering, for it is a language struggling to awaken from the forgetfulness of Being, and to think only that which is worthy of thought.”°° For philosophers, the forgetfulness of being is manifested in their forgetfulness of the deficiencies of philosophical language. By presuming that its language is adequate to the task, philosophy loses sight of the rhetorical problematic that surrounds the originary givenness of human understanding. Thus the “formal indication” of Heidegger’s later rhetoric is interpreted by Gadamer to be self-reflexive.°© Heidegger means to tease himself out of his own philosophical forgetfulness as we stand by to observe and perhaps pick up on the awakening. For Gadamer, the rhetorical task of Heidegger's later phenomenology remains faithful to the mission first conceived in the Hadbittationsschrift: to bring philosophy back from its long sleep of Ent-

leben by restoring the rhetorical problematic that inheres in our linguistic situatedness.

Reading Heidegger’s Indications It seems we are left with the question of whether to read Heidegger with Gadamer or with Rorty. Is Heidegger giving us the language of Being —or merely the being of Heidegger in language?

There are some momentous choices to be made here on the side of both author and audience. Heidegger had to decide how strongly to assert his claims. We must decide how strongly to let ourselves hear them. Obviously, these choices interact with each other to create the experience of reading Heidegger, an interaction not too dissimilar from the choice Heidegger himself might

have made about how strongly to hear the original. Strongly enough to be “appropriated by it”? And if so, again, how strongly should he assert the “otherness” of this hearing experience to his audience? This rhetorical-hermeneutical circle is rather complex and delicate. Rorty, I think, oversimplifies it for us, choosing to hear Heidegger as just another philosopher. Of course, Heidegger himself asked to be heard differently. Consider the revealing statement in the same August 21, 1921, letter to Lowith discussed Hermes’ Rhetorical Problem m 63

in chapter |: “I am no philosopher, and have no illusions of even doing anything at comparable .. . I am a Christian theologian.””” Later, Heidegger would reenact this denial with a stronger assertion of what he w doing, namely, thinking; he would identify himself, not at all humbly, with the true “thinkers” who began it all: “Heraclitus and Parmenides were not yet ‘philosophers.’ Why not? Because they were the greatest thinkers.”°® Through the sheer rhetorical force of his vision, Heidegger means to return us to the this-worldly transcendence of thinking before it became sedimented as philosophy. In his later essays, Heidegger explicitly charges his readers, presumably by following his lead, to themselves “come to the experience of language.”°”

Heidegger’s rhetoric holds out for the possibility of the rebirth

that he himself underwent forty years before. In responding to Heidegger's offering, one may follow Heidegger on the path of thinking, and thus begin anew: “With the end of philosophy thinking is not also at its end, but in transition to another beginning.”©°

How might we characterize the rhetorical stance of the later Heidegger? It surely goes beyond the restraint demanded by the formal indication. It would seem that the primarily rhetorical urge

to bear the message of the original has overtaken the primarily hermeneutical urge to accurately render its phenomenological contours. Philosophy has given way to the temptations of rhetoric. Here Heidegger seems to go against the advice of Augustine by trying to reenact the eloquence of the original, rather than simply to interpret it. Heidegger’s rhetorical presumption shifts

the burden of choice to us to read his phenomenology with Gadamer or with Rorty —as ontology or onto-theology, as a rhetor-

ically framed, but nonetheless originary and authentic rendering of the universal form of hermeneutical experience or merely as

one philosopher’s rhetorical version of his own particular hermeneutical experience posing as something more. I think the question of how to read Heidegger comes down to a deeper question regarding the proper relationship between

hermeneutics and rhetoric in philosophy. Ought the philosopher to practice the humility prescribed by Augustine and the early Heidegger, and make no claims for the ontological reach 64 m= Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

of discourse? Taking this route, we would lose sight of Heidegger on the way up the mountain and would have difficulty finding our own way —even perhaps with Gadamer to guide us —to Heidegger's other beginning. Rather than philosophy in an aggran-

dized form reminiscent of its glorious beginnings, we would be left with a philosophy cut down to size as by Wittgenstein: merely a description of the language games we play, and ultimately itself just another language game. On this view, no matter what philosophers believe themselves to have captured “inside,” the “packaging” of hermeneutics must itself be laid bare as the rhetoric it is.

Heidegger's own philosophical rhetoric never reaches this level of self-reflexivity.°!

After warning us that “[i]n the realm of thinking there can be no assertions, ©” Heidegger seems to leave it to his interpreters to somehow circumvent the contradictions left unresolved in his own discourse. Perhaps no interpreter does this as gracefully as John Caputo: “Because Being and Time is itself made up of asser-

tions that are meant to have disclosive power and to be drawn from primordial sources, it is also exposed to the danger that its own assertions may simply get passed along and emptied of their originary force. The task of the reader here is not to hold himself exempt from uncovering what these assertions disclose.”°% We began with Augustine, who suggested that the disclosive power of scriptural rhetoric must be protected by the deference of interpreters in reading it —that its eloquence cannot and should not be bound by the same rules as our own. We end by finding Heidegger apparently needing similar protection. As Augustine said of the writers of Scripture: Thus there is a kind of eloquence fitting for men most wor-

thy of the highest authority ... nor does any other kind become them. Nor is that kind suitable for others. It is suited to them and the more it seems to fall below others, the more it exceeds them. Where I do not understand them, their eloquence appears to me to be less [but it is of a kind] of elo-

quence through which our understandings should be benefited not only by the discovery of what lies hidden but also

by exercise. Hermes’ Rhetorical Problem m 65

Does Heidegger merit such “hermeneutical respect”? Perhaps, at this point in our inquiry, we might reframe the question thus: Does Heidegger’s rhetoric ‘nduce the requisite respect? Insofar as rhetoric finds its end in judgment, 65 the rhetorical and the ethical inevitably must intersect. And as Hermes’ rhetorical problem is passed from Heidegger to his readers, judging the merit of Heidegger's “saying” becomes enormously complex. Of course, there were those moments, especially in the 1920s, when the call seemed to shine forth brightly and clearly in sayings appropriate to it. But not only does the rhetorical comportment of Heidegger’s phenomenological discourse change before and after Being and Time in ways this chapter has tried to trace, but, in addition, for at least some months in 1933, Heidegger overparticularized his rendering of the call. And even though the present work does not consider Heidegger's politicization in those times to be philosophically relevant, the tragic implications of some of the words he spoke (and did not speak) continue to plague our capacity to focus on the words that do matter philosophically. The virtue of studying Heidegger's sayings from the perspective of Hermes’ rhetorical problem is that, rather than quibbling

about his misguided responses to calls that never should have been made, we are given a way to maintain philosophical focus on the words through which Heidegger carried forward the vital substance of the fexty he took as “sacred.” As we consider the configuration of those texts and their capacity to philosophically focus the thinking of both writer and readers, a more “localized” version of Hermes’ rhetorical problem” comes to the fore:

What sort of discourse is most suited to preserving the living force of words one takes to be “true”? Reading Heidegger from this perspective brings Being Jewish to the recognition of a productive similarity with what we might call the “rhetoricalhermeneutical situation” of the rabbis. Heidegger and the rabbis were both seriously concerned with the enormously difficult and complex task of bringing the interpretation of their respective sacred texts to speech that would not only be understood, but understood at sucha deep level of mutuality (what Heidegger would calla “Sichverstehen”) that the message borne by their words would be capable of binding a community to the “truth” 66 m= Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

they contained. In the case of the rabbis, the interest was in binding successive generations of Jews to the truths of the Torah;

in the case of Heidegger, in returning philosophizing and its community of practitioners to the truths of philosophy’s first words. The rabbis dealt with their version of the problem by telling stories. Significantly, so did the writers of the Torah texts,

whose originary message the rabbis felt called upon to bear. Although Heidegger’s philosophical writing does not take the conventional form of a narrative, he is forever recounting the “story of philosophy” in order to lead the reader up to a view of what comes next: thinking at the end of philosophy. And that story is told with undeniable power and authenticity. There is something eminently trustworthy about narrative, at least in the hands of the most visionary storytellers, which, when taken to its limits, reveals the means of its own overcoming, and so, the way to an authentic “new beginning.” Notes 1. Despite much evidence to the contrary, and for reasons as much poetical as etymological, hermeneutics has long been held to derive from Hermes, the messenger god. See, for example, Heidegger's version of its derivation in “Dialogue on Language,” in On the Way, 29; for an especially enlightening review of both the evidence and the confusion, see Grondin, /ntroduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, 20-23. My rationale for describing the task of hermeneutics as problematically “rhetorical” will become clear as the chapter proceeds. 2. In Donald Bryant's likewise “classical” definition, from his landmark essay “Rhetoric: Its Functions and Scope,” 413. 3. This definition, somewhat broader than Bryant’s, of the basic rhetorical function, is from Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, 43: “A symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond

to symbols.” The use of more than one definition is consistent with the ongoing attempt in contemporary rhetorical theory to capture the richness of the idea of rhetoric in Greek philosophy, especially in Aristotle. 4. Heidegger's late definition of hermeneutics as “the bearing of message and tidings,” in “Dialogue on Language,” in On the Way, 29, seems likewise to reflect the centrality of the rhetorical dimension of hermeneutical work. Hermes’ Rhetorical Problem m 67

5. See, for example, Heidegger’s discussion of Dasein as onticoontologically prior in Being and Time, 36-37. 6. Heidegger's fullest discussion of the “primordiality” of the phenomenon we are identifying as “rhetorical” is in Being and Time, 261-63. 7. 1 realize that I am taking some license here in calling the event of

the burning bush “primordial,” but as the chapter proceeds, I think it will be clear that, in the biblical scheme, the burning bush is a narrative metonym for what we are discussing: the primordial rhetoric that calls human beings to their most profound moments of understanding. 8. Heidegger, Being and Time, 314. I am referring, of course, to the “call of conscience.” In his first references to the “call,” Heidegger glosses

the term with even stronger indications of its rhetorical character, calling it the “voice of conscience,” a “mode of discourse,” an “appeal,” and a “summoning” (pp. 314, 315). 9. From Heidegger's essay on Parmenides, as translated by David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi, in Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, 93.

10. Das Lichtung des Setns was Heidegger's later suggestion for what he would have called Sein und Zeit. See Caputo, Mystical Element, xiii. 11. Aristotle, Rhetoric, book 3, 1404, as translated by George Kennedy in Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Cite Discourse, 222.

12. A recollection of Gadamer’s, in Hetdeggers Ways, 175, is even more indicative of Heidegger’s rhetorical view of the call: “When [Heidegger] wrote to Léwith ‘I am a Christian theologian,’ he must have meant that he wanted to defend the true task of theology, that is “To find the word that ts capable of calling one to faith and preserving one in faith,’ against the appropriated Christian spirit of today’s theology. (1

heard him use these words in a theological discussion in 1923.) But this [finding the word that calls one to faith] was also a task for thinking.” Emphasis added. 13. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 7. 14. Ibid., 117.

15. This “oversight,” as reenacted by Gadamer, is discussed in the introduction to chapter 2. 16. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 118. 17. Ibid., 133.

18. Ibid., 125-32. 19. Ibid., 132. 20. One is again reminded of Socrates’ encomium to dialectic, in Plato’s Phaedrus, 70, where he speaks of “a discourse which is inscribed with genuine knowledge in the soul of the learner.” 68 m Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

21. See esp. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 253-58.

22. The misunderstanding resulting from this mismanagement, so deleterious to a serious engagement with this aspect of Heidegger’s philosophy, is precisely what leads Marléne Zarader to misconstrue Hei-

degger as she does. See my brief review of her main argument in the introduction to chapter I. 23. In a letter recommending the Catholic Heidegger for a position at Marburg, Husserl assures Natorp that Heidegger has “freed himself from dogmatic Catholicism,” and is now “my most valuable philosophical co-worker.” Husserl to Natorp, February 11, 1920, as translated by Kisiel, in Genesws, 75.

24. Kisiel translates Ent-leben as “un-living,” in contrast to the “living through’ (Er-leben) of experience in the full sense.” Kisiel, in Genesis, 46. 25. From Heidegger’s Habilttationsschrift, as translated by Kisiel, in Genests, 71.

26. Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, 116, as translated by Kisiel, in Genesws, 47.

27. Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung, 75, as translated by Kisiel, in GeneJtd, 46.

28. Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung, 116, as translated by Kisiel, in Genestd, 47.

29. Heidegger, Being and Time, 272.

30. From Heidegger’s Habilitationsschrift, as translated by Kisiel, in Genesis, 47.

31. Heidegger, Basic Problems, 300.

32. “The ownmost possibility is non-relational. ... Dasein is authentically itself only to the extent that, av concernful Being-alongside and solicitous Being-with, it projects itself upon its ownmost potentialityfor-Being rather than upon the possibility of the they-self.” Heidegger, Being and Time, 308.

53. Ibid., 203. 34. Ibid., 206. Kenneth Burke, in Rhetorte of Motives, 37, calls this intrapersonal dimension of rhetorical activity “rhetoric of address to the

individual soul.” Heidegger's metaphor also calls to mind Aristotle's notion of omenaia or political friendship. For an insightful examination of bomonota's relevance to rhetoric, see Beiner, Political Judgment, 20. 35. For a helpful explication of this important shift in hermeneutics, see Weinsheimer, Philosophical Hermeneutics and Literary Theory, 2. 36. Gadamer, Hetdeggers Ways, 24.

37. Heidegger to Blochmann, May 1, 1919, as translated by Kisiel, in Genesis, 112-13.

Hermes’ Rhetorical Problem m 69

38. From Heidegger’s Habilitationsschrift, as translated by Kisiel, in Genests, 71.

39. Heidegger, What ls Called Thinking?, 121. 40. Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung, 206. As Kisiel, in Genesis, 64, explains: “What is called the ‘situation-I’ [dav Sutuations-Ich| in 1919 is a clear pre-

cursor to Dasein, which can easily and accurately be translated by the phrase ‘the human situation.” 41. My understanding of the formal indication here draws heavily on Dahlstrom, “Heidegger’s Method,” 775-95. 42. Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung, 116, as translated by Kisiel, in Gene-

Jt, Ol. 43. Kisiel, Genests, 51.

44. Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” 197. 45. Heidegger, Phdénomenologtche Interpretationen zu Artstoteles, 80, as

translated by Dahlstrom, in “Heidegger’s Method,” 787. 46. See esp. Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, 89. Heidegger would later use other far-reaching terms in this vein, such as “claim of Being” and “saying of Being”; see ibid., 27, 39, 77. 47. Heidegger, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” 387. 48. Heidegger, Being and Time, 58. Notably, in this same passage, Hei-

degger makes reference to Husserl’s notion of “the things themselves,” suggesting his method of rendering the primordial discourse is able to reach back far enough to touch the “Holy Grail” of phenomenology. 49. Heidegger, “Dialogue on Language,” in On the Way, 29. 50. For an enlightening exploration of the relationship between Heidegger’s phenomenology and Husserl’s intentionality, see Kisiel, Gene-

Jt, 50-32. 51. From Heidegger’s Der Spiegel interview, as translated by Caputo, in Radical Hermeneuticy: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Proyect, 196. 52. Dreytus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heweggers “Being and Time,” Dwiston 1, 32.

53. “What is it that must be called ‘a phenomenon’ in a distinctive sense? ...it is something that lies Aiden, in contrast to that which proximally and for the most part does show itself... . And just because the phenomena are proximally and for the most part not given, there is need for phenomenology.” Heidegger, Being and Time, 59, 60. 54. Rorty, “Wittgenstein, Heidegger,” in Eusays, 63. 55. Gadamer, HewWeggers Ways, 25.

70 w Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

56. Heidegger himself suggests a similarly self-reflexive transformation as the function of the formal indication. See Dahlstrom, “Heidegger's Method,” 787, 794-95. 57. Heidegger to Léwith, August 19, 1921, as translated by Dahlstrom, in “Heidegger’s Method,” 794. 58. Heidegger, What ls Philosophy?, 52-53. 59. Heidegger, “The Way to Language,” in On the Way, 119. 60. Heidegger, “Overcoming Metaphysics,” in The End of Philovophy, 96.

61. In chapter 5, I explore the reasons why Heidegger might not have “publicly” reflected on his own rhetoric, his own way of speaking, and propose how we might read his oracular sayings as coming, not from a “divine messenger,’ but rather from a kind of “rabbinic sage.” 62. From Heidegger's Der Spiegel interview, as translated by Caputo, in Radical Hermeneutics, 196. 63. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics, 76. 64. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 123.

65. Interestingly, Aristotle begins book 2 of the Réetoric by framing his treatment of the emotions with the observation: “Since Rhetoric is concerned with making a judgment .. .” (1377b).

Hermes’ Rhetorical Problem sm 7/

Truth-Aspiring Discourse at the End of Philosophy The Limits of Narrative I can't go on. I must go on. I'll go on. — Samuel Beckett

Traditionally, rabbis gained rhetorical power through the force of their interpretive performance. The rabbis of the Talmud and those who followed them were not known for their great oratory; it was their hermeneutical skill that marked them as worth listening to. Their “eloquence” was grounded in the strength of their interpretations of the legal and narrative portions of the Torah. ! Following this heuristic cue, we might speculate as to whether the Bible itself also achieves some measure of its eloquence through the acuity of its interpretive insights. That is, might not the rhetor-

ical power of the Bible also lie, at least in some part, in the force of its hermeneutical performance as displayed in the text? This rhetorical dimension of hermeneutics is a relatively explicit,

though perhaps unthought — or, as we have seen, at least unspoken — feature of philosophical discourse. We find a philosophical

text compelling in large part because we are impressed by the thinking displayed in the struggle to bring ideas to language. But

if we take seriously Chaim Perelman’s notion that philosophy shares a “community of structure” with other discourses that seri-

ously seek understanding,” the possibility presents itself that hermeneutical acumen might be the organon of rhetorical power in both philosophical and nonphilosophical texts that achieve a certain level of authority over their readers. 7/2

Alasdair MacIntyre suggests that such discourses, with the rhetorical force to constitute communities, usually take the form of stories — stories that, as he puts it, enable us to answer the question “What am I to do?” by answering the prior question “Of what

story or stories do I find myself a part?”° He speaks of such constitutive narratives as ‘stories which aspire to truth, "4 suggesting that there is some connection between their rhetorical power to constitute communities and their hermeneutical aspirations.

To further investigate the relationship between rhetoric and hermeneutics in this regard, I will trace the hermeneutical performance of the core story of the Pentateuch — surely a rhetorical success as a community-constituting narrative. More than two thousand years after codification, despite attacks on the veracity of the text as the “history” it purports to be, Jews still essentially see themselves as the people defined by this story. Indeed, even

the rather troubling present-day claims made to disputed territories in Israel are based, in the minds of many traditional Jews, on this text being perceived as “their story,” thus moving them to continue to live out the implications of its narrative logic. I will argue that a significant element in the story’s rhetorical success is the author’s® use of the text as a vehicle of hermeneu-

tical disclosure. Through their reading of the text, readers can retrace the author's steps and thereby come to “discover” the text

as “true, in the way the author did. Thus the audience comes to share the author’s insight by participating, as it were, in the author’s hermeneutical process of creation and discovery. In what follows, we will examine the formal similarities of this process as it is performed in the Bible and in Heidegger, with Samuel Beckett “mediating” between the two.

The “Formal” Character of Discourse Which Aspires to Truth

In the Bible, we find the core of this process in the author's response to a “crisis” in narrative invention. Although, as is clear throughout the Book of Genesis, the Bible begins with unmistak-

able and deliberate narrative force, the text reflects a gradual recognition that the story is insufficient to the hermeneutical objective of a discourse which aspires to truth. This insufficiency Truth-Aspiring Discourse at The End of Philosophy m 73

may be traced to a kind of willful arbitrariness which permits the narrator too much control in the “making up” of the story. Narratives, especially world-building narratives like the Bible, would seem to be the quintessential example of art as the will to power. Stories have the capacity to create life with a fullness of presence difficult to match in any other medium. The createdness of the story represents the “willing” of the will to power —a willing into existence of that which heretofore did not exist.° The arbitrary willfulness and power mongering of narrative invention are painfully noted by the poet Paul Valéry as a reason to despise narrative —to avoid it both as reader and as writer. As a reader, he could not stop thinking the story could be this way

rather than that and this “detestable” habit “spoiled” his reading pleasure.’ As a writer, Valéry chose a medium whose charac-

ter seemed to allow for a purer mode of apprehension through language, and thus minimized arbitrary inventedness: “I can only be interested in things I cannot invent.”® In the case of biblical narrative, a different route is taken. Storytelling itself is used to undermine the very will to power that drives it. Rather than abandoning the form, the narrative tradition is turned on itself in order to reach a truth that lies beyond storytelling. The reader is induced to join the biblical author in using the story to break out of the circle of the author’s own manip-

ulations, thus arriving at a point of more authentic speaking. At those moments of authenticity, when the author appears to reach

beyond his own capacity to invent, the force of the author's hermeneutical performance becomes visible in the text and gives the text the power to ring true. Paradoxically, these moments of rhetorical power are achieved by subordinating inventional impulse to hermeneutical objective. But this preference for truth seeking over eloquence is nonetheless expressed within the form itself. Indeed, it requires that the author find a way to turn the form against itself, to invent a way not to invent. Such acrobatics appear necessary at certain points in a literary tradition, when form seems to have exhausted itself. Its contours have lost the firmness of line within which the imagination can confidently play. James Boyd White has a wonderfully suggestive phrase to describe these moments of crisis in the 74 w Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

life of a literary tradition: “when words lose their meaning.” At such moments, the search for meaning is conjoined with a ruthlessly critical investigation of the limits of form. Thus stories in which the hermeneutical objective is primary are not only stories about something; at another level, they also become stories of our life with stories. Within the story, there is a search for a perspective from which to critique the form itself, to bring the limits of the form into view and thus create an opening to see what might lie beyond. In this exploration of the limits of form, tradition serves us well, providing conventional expectations that might before have been used to guide invention, but which now can be used to renounce it. A way of representing reality through discourse has run its course, and the conventions framing that discourse can no longer be trusted.

At such crucial junctures, the authors must seize the moment to say, “No. I will not... I cannot say more.” If their renunciation is sufficiently credible, that is, if they demonstrate their mastery of the form by taking its inventional possibilities to its limits, authors might then be in a position to “unwrite” the old discourse, and thus

bring to an end a particular way of constructing reality, and perhaps even go so far as to replace it with another. Though not a narrative in the strict sense, this is also what Heidegger does with his “story” of metaphysics at “the end of philosophy. ”10 Not incidentally, at about the same time, Samuel Beckett does the same with narrative, more literally conceived, in a trilogy of novels. Beckett and Heidegger appear to share the fear that one can master a discourse so well that one’s inventive powers can get out of hand. What one desires to be true can be given such a compelling rhetorical shape that both author and reader can be deluded into mistaking the author’s rhetorically embedded desires for discovered truth. Not all philosophers or storytellers face this dilemma —only those who have the talent to reach

a point of maximum control over their discourse. To authentically pursue their hermeneutical aspirations to speak the truth, these writers must find a way to place their language beyond their own considerable rhetorical abilities to control it. Only then can

the ineluctably intertwined acts of rhetorical creation and hermeneutical discovery be jointly pursued. Truth-Aspiring Discourse at The End of Philosophy m 75

Beckett and Heidegger at the Limits of Narrative Samuel Beckett’s trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable can be read in both form and substance as the story of his ambiva-

lence about narrative.!! In Molloy, we hear the longing for the moral order that only stories can bring. Hobbled by his bad leg, Molloy still insists on chasing a man and his mangy dog down a road to catch his story: “I believe him, I know it’s my only chance to—my only chance, I believe all I’m told, I’ve disbelieved only too much in my long life, now I swallow everything, greedily. What I need now is stories, it took me a long time to know that, and I’m not sure of it.” 12 Even as he aches to be absorbed into a story, any story, he is still not sure. He has a sense that the moral and emotional frame a story imposes on life is an insidious habit, an attachment to illusion, and he harbors a strong desire to get along without it—to live life as it is, without intervening narrative support. Throughout Beckett's Molloy, one can see the dialectic of rhetoric and hermeneutics being played out through the force of his language, which vacillates between allowing itself to be ordered

into a story (Beckett as consummate narrative stylist) and running free (Beckett as a sort of innocent bystander, waiting for whatever might come of the words playing off one another in a kind of hermeneutical prompt). Elsewhere, Beckett divulges his ultimate wish (of which, of course, he is not sure): “If I could speak and yet say nothing, really nothing.” !° Things come to a climax when Moran takes over the narrator’s role and suggests that it is he who is the teller of this and all of Beckett's tales. He is suffering from what appears to be a case of terminal storyteller’s fatigue. He is tired of struggling against language in order to support his own and the reader’s narrative habit. He is tired of playing God —“the one who makes things mean, the one who makes the world, the one who evokes and structures the reader’s emotions of delight and guilt and fear. "14 And so he resolves to end his storytelling: “I'll tell you nothing. Nothing.” But in order to accomplish his task fully —to be true to his insight about storytelling —he must go further. He must bring an end to narrative altogether, or at least the desire for narrative in the old modernist style, where language and the world 76 w= Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

are brought under the illusory control of structure. And so he goes about the business of “deconstructing” narrative, in order to ensure that he will never again succumb to its wiles. By way of accomplishing this, he paradoxically must fall back on the only resource at his disposal, namely, narrative itself —the very form

he is deconstructing —in order to perhaps uncover a form of life that is not dependent on narrative. This rather acrobatic turn he performs eloquently. J/olloy ends with a compelling image of life beyond narrative —a life painfully unconstructed, but mysteriously authentic: “Does this mean I am freer now then I was? | do not know. I shall learn. Then I went back into the house and wrote. It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.” !° An end to happy endings? It sounds something like an ending, but things remain just as they were, ambiguous and unresolved, in the story as well as in the world the story creates. The illusory power to impose order through narrative is renounced. And the reader is perhaps moved to join in the renunciation. Rather than helping us to overcome our finitude, this ending helps us resist easy

narrative solutions.!” Because Beckett has shown us he can both tell a story and resist telling a story, and that he fully understands what it means to do both, we can trust him to take us through the

painful process of breaking the narrative habit, at least for the moment. His art helps us deal with the pain of realization by ennobling it. He finds a way to eloquently “speak and say nothing.” This writing at the end of writing, the confrontation of the limits of possibility in discourse, we see in another writer-thinker who

also stands at the interstices between modernism and postmodernism, namely, Heidegger in his “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking.” Even though Heidegger did his exploring in a

medium other than formal narrative, the parallels between this work and Beckett's, and finally with the biblical text itself are striking. Again, the exploration is motivated by the realization that the

attempt to write order into the world through an all-embracing grand narrative is futile and illusory. But the old habit is hard to break. Every time one writes philosophy, it seems to turn into metaphysics, just as narrative turns into grand narrative. The will to power Is relentlessly at work behind the scenes of the discourse. Truth-Aspiring Discourse at The End of Philosophy m 77

The task Heidegger sets for himself is to break this vicious circle, to “think the unthought thought of philosophy” by venturing

to the limits of philosophical discourse and remaining there in silence in order to pick up hints of what lies beyond. Heidegger describes this location as “that place in which the whole of philosophy’s history is gathered in its most extreme possibility.”!® The task of thinking is to explore that place of gathering in order to uncover the “source” that enables the most extreme possibility to be “gathered.” The source that makes possible the fullest realization of a discourse while at the same time remaining concealed within it is Heidegger’s “unthought thought.” The dialectic of concealment and unconcealment underlying this thought is truth as alétheta. Heidegger describes the “place” where truth as alétheta might come into view as lying at the outer limits of conventional philosophical discourse, namely, metaphysics. Metaphysics, says Hei-

degger, has already completed its examination of the opening in which Being is displayed, “But where does the opening come from

and how is it given?”!? Put another way, “What speaks in the ‘There is / ev gibt?” In suggesting an answer, Heidegger directs our attention to the “the thing itself, ”20 the source from which speaking about the thing emanates. The “unthought thought” at the end of philosophy is the “source” of philosophical speaking in the first place. And that source is disclosed only when one stands in a sort of hermeneutical silence —a speaking (perhaps more of a listening) that fully recognizes the limits of speaking. And so Heidegger seems to join Beckett in renouncing the urge

to “tell a story” (in Heidegger's case, a metaphysical story) in order to hear language as it is “behind” the urge to tell the story in the first place —to relinquish inventional control in order to bring the source of that control into view. The task of thinking at the end of philosophy is a paradoxical commitment to surrender, an exchange of the will to power for the pursuit of powerlessness. I would argue that the capacity of biblical narrative to be perceived as speaking the truth has likewise to do with the authenticity demonstrated in the disciplined management of its own considerable rhetorical and artistic power to speak. It very credibly reaches the point of being able to say, “Oh, the stories I could tell 78 mw Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

you if I were easy. ”21 But it resists, and so is able to move toward

a moment of revelation shared by author and audience. At the limits of narrative, the story finds itself in a new unexplored place.

Here the storyteller is ready to relinquish mastery of the form and turn language loose in order to “undergo the experience of it.” We now turn to a direct examination of the Bible’s struggle with language at the limits of narrative.”

The Biblical Text: On the Way to the Limits of Narrative As the preceding analysis would suggest, the story of the ambiguities of the power of language in biblical narrative begins with the power of the Word at full throttle. In the “priestly narrative” of Creation in Genesis 1—2:4, the Word is pure power: Logos, par excellence. God need only speak, and the world comes into exis-

tence according to His will: “God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and

there was light” (Genesis 1:3). God then names His creation: “God called the light Day and the darkness He called Night...” (Genesis 1:5). The naming serves as a confirmatory gloss on Cre-

ation by the Word. It indicates that the creative power of the Word has come full circle. From the original conception, through the act of creation, to the naming of the thing created, things turn

out precisely as the creator intended. Rather than a story with characters anda plot, the priestly account of creation reads more like a liturgy, a somber series of declarations of what God wills, the report that it was so, and the naming which certifies that things

are as they were meant to be. The author of Genesis envisions Creation as the supreme fulfillment of the poet's wish. The Word turns out exactly as the divine artist intended. And, by implication, so does the author’s retelling of that creation. In his earlier writings, Heidegger also speaks of naming as the epitome of poetic power. It is easy to imagine that he had Genesis in mind when he wrote: “The poet names the gods and names all things in that which they are. This naming does not consist in something already known being supplied with a name; it is rather that when the poet speaks the essential words, the being is by this naming nominated as what it is. So it becomes known as being. Poetry is the establishing of being by means of the word.”2 Truth-Aspiring Discourse at The End of Philosophy m 79

I would suggest that the power to bring into being by means of the Word and to certify that creation asa perfect representation of what it is, as true to its “being,” might be more characteristic of certain epic narratives than of poetry per se. This sort of “ontological naming,” narrative as the full-bodied exercise of the will to power, is very much in evidence in the earlier narratives in the Pentateuch. It constitutes the power of God to create and is echoed in the biblical narrator's story of that creation. The metaphor of naming continues to be featured in many of the important narratives that follow. When the most significant events occur, naming is almost always there on the scene to confirm the being-in-the-world of the events just narrated. But the confirmatory function of these naming narratives gradually changes

as the story evolves. Thus the metaphor provides an excellent map for examining the story's changing view of its own storymaking power. When the so-called Yahwist, the Bible’s master storyteller, takes over from the priestly narrator in Genesis 2:4, the narrative slows

down, even softens. At this point, the more laconic pace permits some wordplay to begin. “Man” is named “Adam” in the Hebrew, a play on the word for earth Cadamah), from which he is formed (Genesis 2:7). The connection between name and story

continues to emerge here, suggesting again that invented language bears a significant relationship to things as they are. This early history of the relationship between existence, narra-

tive, and naming reaches a climax of sorts with the creation of woman in Genesis 2:22. The event originates with God's observa-

tion, “It is not good for man to be alone” (Genesis 2:18). Yahweh first tries animals as “fitting helpers.” Naming is now at the center of the narrative as God brings each of the animals before Adam “to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that would be its name” (Genesis 2:9). In this extraordinary turn of events, God turns the power of nam-

ing over to Adam. Ina sense, God and the narrator “let go. of Adam, as storytellers often speak of letting go of their characters, to see what they will do, the story they will make. There is a faithfulness here to what Walter Fisher calls “narrative logic.”“4 If God is to make a “fitting helper” for Adam, it is Adam, not God, who 80 mu Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

must “name” the fitting helper as being so. This sharing by God of the power to name with Adam can be seen as an important step in the relinquishing of inventional control in narrative authorship. As Adam takes up his part as co-creator of his own story, his determination that animals are insufficient as partners leads to the creation of woman. When Adam sees the woman for the first time, he is moved to a poetic exclamation that not only names her,

but also defines her place in the world. Then the man said, “This one at last Is bone of my bones And flesh of my flesh. This one shall be called Woman [‘whvhah], For from man [‘w/] was she taken.” (Genesis 2:23)

As if moved by the power of the man’s words to name what is, the author introduces a gloss that further takes the name as an indication of things as they are: “Hence a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, so that they become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). Here we see the power of verbal invention to com-

pellingly construct meaning, shared in patriarchal harmony by God, author, and main character. It should be noted that here, as in almost all biblical etymologies, the name is not a literal rendering of meaning (Logov), but a reaching for meaning beyond what can be grasped in words used logically. These poetic interludes of wordplay might be best characterized as “Physts,” the natural play of language, rather than as “Logos.” It is as if what lies beyond narrative logic, beyond Logov, is waiting in the wings, to be discovered, or better “unconcealed,” at just the right point in the story. But before that point is reached, there are other dimensions of narrative power to be explored, and the metaphor of naming continues to frame the exploration. The naming of Cain, for example, is explicitly connected with the story of his coming into the world: “Eve ... conceived and bore Cain, saying, ‘I have gained [ganithi] a male child with the help of the Lord’” (Genesis 4:1). The same is true of Seth: “... and she bore a son and named him Seth, meaning ‘God has provided [v/ath] me with another offspring in place Truth-Aspiring Discourse at The End of Philosophy m &J/

of Abel’” (Genesis 4:25). These passages read as if the narrated occurrence is a natural outgrowth of what was already present in the language. The subsequent naming confirms that the event was “meant to be.” The name remains as a “sign” that permanently marks the occurrence of the event in time, as does a story. This function of both naming and storying as markers, confirming the “reality” of significant events, is even more explicit in rela-

tionship to holy places where important events occur. After the near sacrifice of Isaac, Abraham names the site (Genesis 22:14), thereby permanently marking the event; the passage goes on to connect the name toa “contemporary saying, ” that is, toa story still told. The name and the “saying” narratively inscribe the “productive” holiness of the place. Because holy things have happened here, so other holy things can happen here. In other words, these

places can be the sources for more sacred stories. This indeed occurs with a number of sacred sites which are so marked.”° And, of course, it happens with a number of sacred stories themselves, especially the Exodus story, which become refigured as narrative “sites” for other holy events. This connection will acquire significance later on, when we will find places that remain unmarked, and events that remain unstoried and unnamed. The connection between naming and narrative acquires another dimension at the beginning of the patriarchal narratives: the capacity of naming to project a story into the future. In recounting this aspect of narrative power, the authority to name reverts back to God alone as He changes Abram’s name to Abraham: “And you

shall no longer be called Abram, but your name shall be Abraham, for I make you the father of a multitude of nations” (Genesis 17:5). The change of Jacob's name to Israel in Genesis 35:10, in addition to marking a significant event in Jacob's life, also has

the same sort of prophetic overtone. The story of Jacob's progeny will be marked by their identity as “the Children of Israel.” Thus naming not only permanently marks a story already told as history, but also serves to presage a future happening —a story promised, but as yet untold. Even as the metaphor of naming propels the power of narrative to its limits, there is, as we saw in the etymologies, an inkling that the Bible’s most profound ideas lie beyond the ken of narrative 82 mw Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

logic. The poetic wordplay at moments of ineffably full experience

defines the character of such limits. There comes into being at such moments a desire for something more on the part of both author and audience — call it revelation, a penetration to the source

of the opening, speaking in order to hear rather than to tell, to discover rather than to invent. Heidegger uses the term “FreigniJ,” usually translated as “appropriating event” to describe this possibility —the possibility of being appropriated by something more powerful than one’s own capacity to invent. Appropriation

here is accomplished by what Heidegger calls “renunciation,” whereby “[t]he poet experiences an authority, a dignity of the word than which nothing vaster and loftier can be thought.””° Despite the implicit goading of an audience yearning for fully constructed worlds, the poet must hold his tongue. As Molloy says at this point: “I'll tell you nothing. Nothing.” But one cannot deliberately bring on a moment of revelation. One must let the story unfold so one can follow its path and perhaps encounter an opening in which language may speak for itself. The transition must be managed carefully lest the story go on too long and the moment be missed, or the “purity of the word” is sought too early resulting in a parody of poetry. In either case, the possibility of hearing the echoes of Being in language is lost. As Heidegger suggests, one must first endure the completion of the work of narrative; it must be taken to the limits of its power.

Narrative at the Limits: Moses’ Encounter with God The hermeneutical crisis in narrative authorship wherein we find the transition from the exercise of full power at the limits of narrative to the renunciation of that power is featured in a passage which, not incidentally, stands at the center of the biblical story: Yahweh's revelation to Moses in the Sinai desert. To set the scene once again, Yahweh has had no contact with

Israel through the four hundred years of their enslavement in Egypt. Then, after the story of Moses’ beginnings, we find that eloquently understated pastoral introduction to the revelation, with which we began the previous chapter: “Now Moses, tending the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian, drove Truth-Aspiring Discourse at The End of Philosophy m 8%

the flock into the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. An angel of the Lord appeared to him in a blazing fire out of a bush. He gazed and there was a bush all aflame, yet the bush was not consumed. Moses said, ‘I must turn aside to look at this marvelous sight; why doesn’t the bush burn up?” (Exodus 3:1—3). With these few light strokes, the narrator takes the story to the

limits of possibility. The scene is readied for the ultimate display of the author's narrative skill. And Moses responds by enacting the eternal longing for more story we heard from Molloy at the beginning of Beckett's trilogy: the miracle of the burning bush will not suffice to confirm God's presence. It merely pushes Moses to ask for more story, a “naming” that will explain the miracle and begin to narratively encompass the character of the God behind

it. And so Moses’ wondering “why doesn't the bush burn up?” can be seen as an expression of narrative longing, challenging God and the biblical author to satisfy that longing with more story.

God's answer to the challenge begins in an evasive, though matter-of-fact, way. It does not directly address Moses’ question, but rather narratively rehearses Yahweh's history with Israel leading up to this extraordinary moment where God meets man face

to face: “Iam... the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. ... I have marked well the plight of My people in Egypt...” and so on (Exodus 3:6—10). And then, as the limits of narrative again come into view, Moses

reiterates his plea for more narrative, and this time explicitly makes use of the metaphor of naming we have been tracing: Moses said to God, “When I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is His Name?’ what shall I say to them?” And God said to Moses, “Hhbyeh-Avher-Ehyeh.” He continued,

“Thus shall you say to the Israelites, ‘Hhyeh sent me to you.”

And God said further to Moses, “Thus shall you speak to the Israelites: ‘The Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you: This shall be My name forever, This My appellation for all eternity.” (Exodus 3:13—15) 84 m Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

The Hebrew “What is His name?” can be translated as “Who is He?” but in context, the significance is clear: Moses is asking God and, by implication, the narrator to supply him with a story of this God ~a story that will be rhetorically powerful enough to induce commitment to Yahweh and the new order. But at this point, where the opportunity to exercise the utmost in narrative power presents itself, the narrator’s response echoes Beckett's Molloy: “Tl tell you nothing. Nothing.” Rather than a story, the narrator, in God’s voice, lapses into glossolalia: “Hbyeh-Avher-Ehyeh.” Sometimes translated “I Am That

I Am,” but basically untranslatable, the phrase in the Hebrew echoes God's name Yahweh. So here, at the pivotal point of meet-

ing between man and God, the author renounces the inventive power of narrative and, as earlier, “lets language go” into wordplay. Only this time, the “letting go” is much more radical, for not only is it a response to a direct request for something more, but

it is also permitted to continue into the next phrase and further flood the text’s narrative logic. Where we would expect the narrator to come back to earth and gloss the wordplay with something like “You shall tell them, “Yahweh sent you,” we get instead

a reverberation of the wordplay: “Then you shall Say to the Israelites, ‘Hhyeh sent me to you’” (literally, ““I am” sent me to

you ). Moses is commanded to reenact the refusal to narrate. Through Moses, God and the narrator will continue to “speak and say nothing.”

At the conclusion of the passage, we get a reiteration of the author’s previous enactment of narrative at the limits: “And God said further to Moses, “Thus shall you speak to the Israelites: “The Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob has sent me to you.” ’” The narrative substance of Yahweh's previous relationship to Israel turns into a kind of epithet, something close to a name. And then, we read the following: “This shall be My name forever, / This My appellation for all eternity.” What the “this” refers to is ambiguous, but it would seem to refer to the entire passage: My name

includes that which can be told (the narrative summary of his relationship to Israel up to this point) and that which lies beyond what can be told: the wordplay on the name Yahweh. Truth-Aspiring Discourse at The End of Philosophy m 85

We should mention at this point that, even though its precise meaning is unclear, the phrase “Hhyeh-Avher-Ehyech” does not say

absolutely nothing. As is true of the wordplay in Beckett and Heidegger, the phrase carries a semantic suggestiveness drawn from the narrative logic that surrounds it, while at the same time

not allowing itself to be absorbed by that logic. More specif1cally, Hhyeh-Avher-Ehyeh evokes the idea of a presence, not yet (and perhaps never to be) actually present. Rather than a theobiographical narrative which would place God's character within the bounds of narratable time, God’s character is left as an intan-

gible, unnarratable “presencing.” Previous narrative namings, as we have seen, marked events in time and even projected events narratively into the future. But the essence of God’s name with-

draws into a future that will always remain beyond our grasp, the mysterious source of all that becomes present. In other words,

the source of the stories we tell. The lack of any tense distinctions in the Hebrew verb stem Ayh/ (to be) is partly responsible for the phrase Ehyeh-Avher-Ehyeh being suggestive in this way. The phrase cannot be tied down to any particular time. It evokes a future, but not a future that will ever become present. Given its placement at the limits of narrative power, it seems

to echo Heidegger’s meditation on the “unthought thought” of metaphysics: the mysterious source of the opening in which being is displayed. This reading (I want to say “listening”) to the “HAyeh” passage

finds an echo in another key revelation passage a bit further on. This time God and Moses are on the mountaintop, and Moses again cannot resist asking for a more tangible story. He pushes his chutzpah to the limits, asking to see Yahweh's face. [Moses] said, “Oh, let me behold Your Presence!” And He answered, “I will make all My goodness pass before you,

and I will proclaim the name Lord [Yahweh] before you and grace that I grant and the compassion that I show [literally, “and I will grant the grace I will grant and show the compassion I will show”]. But,” He said, “you cannot see My face, for man may not see Me and live.” And the Lord said, “See there is a place near Me. Station yourself 86 m Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

on the rock and, as My Presence passes by, I will put you in a cleft of the rock and shield you with My hand until I have passed by. Then I will take My hand away and you will see My back [acharaim]; but My face must not be seen.” (Exodus 33:18—23)

The passage bears a powerfully evocative relationship to the “Ehyeh” passage on a number of levels, including the semantic, the syntactic, and the aural. The phrase “I will grant the grace

that I will grant” and so on picks up the syntactic structure of Ebyeh-Asher-Ehyeh, as well as echoing its sound, but through key word substitutions adds significant semantic substance. This is possible because the Hebrew verb forms for granting grace and showing compassion do not have the same ambiguity of reference as the being verb e/yed. In this “replay,” though there is a nod back to the syntax and sound of the original, Moses is posing a more pressing narrative challenge in asking to see Yahweh's face. At this point, the narrative logic fragments once again. The request to see God's face does fit logically with the suggestion in

the story that this is, in fact, a “face-to-face meeting” between man and God —the only one. But God's offer to let Moses see His

“back” is a play off of that logic, while at the same time being a denial of it. It seems perverse enough to have been written by Beckett himself. Not only will there be no more story here, but the very idea of a story about God, perhaps even the one told up to this point, is ridiculed. By thus “covering its tracks,” the discourse ensures that no other text will be able to reach the limits of power in quite this way. Discourse which seriously aspires to truth must not only take care not to Say too much, but also keep what it is able to say inaccessible to others. In this way, it achieves the degree of singularity necessary to its hermeneutical objective;

the hermeneutical objective of the discourse here intersects with its rhetoric. In the example before us, to be consistent with itself, the biblical story must rhetorically make good on its hermeneutical claim to be the true story of the Jewish people. Thus the nar-

rative “path” to this point must be closed off. No other story can be told in this way; there can be no Torah but this one. And this story must end its telling here. Truth-Aspiring Discourse at The End of Philosophy m 987

Although the storytelling ends, there is another hint of what lies beyond the reach of the story. Just as the first “HAyeh” passage pointed to the opening from which narrative springs, so this one similarly indicates an opening. The indication is contained in the Hebrew word for back, acharaim. As with “Ehyeh,” it represents something of a break with the narrative logic that precedes it (while still preserving the hint of a connection), and also brings with it a healthy dose of semantic ambiguity. In this case, the sug-

gestiveness of that ambiguity is heightened by the fact that in Hebrew “[e]xpressions of time .. . are borrowed from the thought forms of space.”*” Thus “acharaim” here can suggest the “back-

side” of time, that which lies behind narrative disclosure and makes possible what is told in the story. It is the unthought thought of narrative, the unseen dimension of time that makes the time in which we live what it is, and gives our stories whatever ontological force they might have.

Thus what might have been the supreme narrative moment, the story of man’s meeting God face-to-face, is left unnarrated. And, it should be noted, the geographical places of these encounters are also left unmarked and unnamed, unlike the sites of earlier encounters whose names and stories made possible a return

to the place for further story. There will be no more story here, for this is the place where narrative reaches its limits. And at this place, the author achieves rhetorical power by renouncing it. Heidegger again: “The poet must renounce having words under his control as portraying names for what is posited.”*° But, it might be argued, these defiantly poetic passages, placed at the limits of narrative, continue to exercise power; it is simply power in a different form. I would suggest that, in the present context at least, the author explicitly denies claims to power “formerly willed” through the earlier narratives of naming and explanation.

The Bible begins with the storyteller’s traditional claim to authority —the presumption that everything necessary to the satisfying completion of the story lies within the storyteller’s narrative ken. The biblical narrator even suggests at the beginning that the narrator's word and God's Word are one. But, after the story of the beginning has been taken as far as it will go, the question

of what preceded the beginning comes into view: What is the 88 m Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

story of this God who started it all, whose authority warrants the entire story? At this crucial juncture, the narrator renounces any claim to narrative omniscience. Before Genesis, there was what Levinas calls the “unrepresentable before,’2? echoed in the biblical text by “Hhbyeh-Avher-Ehyeh.” This is “an absolute past —a past

that never was or will be present.”8" Thus it is beyond the capacity of narrative language to name, and so, by turning to wordplay at this point, the narrator turns power over to language itself, and becomes more of a “listener” than a speaker. As Gerald Bruns paraphrases Heidegger on this exchange of roles: “Seeing is objectifying and possessive; hearing means the loss of subjectivity and self possession, belonging to what we hear,

owned by it. Think of the call. The ear puts us in the mode of being answerable and having to appear.”*! Thus the Bible’s story of our life with stories can be read as a dialectical drama of seeing and hearing, where seeing represents the presumption of narrative to describe, and hearing represents the humility of poetry before the ineffable. At the limits of narrative, thinking turns from

the visual to the auditory. And from the Exodus example just recounted, it seems that narrative itself provides the resources for the turn. As one tries to keep one’s language in line with one’s thinking, the challenge becomes to “let Zo. of Logos at precisely the point where “logical” thinking has reached its limits. The Zegos —in this

case, narrative Logos —which leads up to that point, readies a space that conventional discourse cannot fill. And so the language

is let go, but it has been pointed in a particular direction by the path already forged. To put it another way, the path created by rhetoric positions us to make a hermeneutical discovery. Speaking readies us for listening. Indeed, in the course of the hermeneutical act of discovery, speaking Jecomev listening as the resources of narrative are teased into a denial of its inventive power, thus opening up a new formal possibility. By taking narrative to the limits of rhetorical power and then letting the language that emerges at that point

“speak for itself,” the truth-aspiring discourse in the Pentateuch shows itself to be faithful to its hermeneutical mission. As this chapter has argued, it is its hermeneutical faithfulness, rather than Truth-Aspiring Discourse at The End of Philosophy m 8&9

the force of its narrative structure, that lies at the root of the Pentateuch’s rhetorical power.

Recent narrative theory, of course, would point us in a different direction. According to this view, rhetorical power, especially that of constitutive narratives like the Bible, is ascribed pre-

cisely to the genius of narrative art to compel.*” Such an explanation assumes that life and narrative structure are isomorphic. As Stephen Crites puts it: “The stories give qualitative substance to the form of experience, because it (experience) is itself an incipient story.” Thus the capacity of a narrative to ring true to our experience, so much so that it can become our experience, has to do with the cogency of its narrative structure. The case for the centrality of narrative is indeed compelling. The biblical text before us, as is true of so many of those “arguments” which frame human existence, does, after all, have a nar-

rative structure. But what if narrative is merely an incidental frame for another discourse hidden within —a discourse which is

the actual vehicle for the “aspiration to truth”? To say that narrative lies at the limits of human understanding because life itself has the structure of a story perhaps mistakenly takes the bait left close to the surface. It may be that the compellingly isomorphic narrative structure of both life and discourse merely sets the stage for the real hermeneutical adventure —an adventure whose starting point lies hidden at the limits of narrative.

We have seen how the great narrative writers from the biblical authors to Beckett find their way to that starting point by using the “technical” resources of narrative itself. But philosophy does not have the luxury of a “technique” with which to surrep-

titiously maneuver around the limits of its own discourse without being detected. The hiding of technique is simply not an option.

Rather, philosophy must v4ow what it knows of what it is doing even in the very course of doing it. Philosophy is consciousness

taken “all the way down,” through to the linguistic grounds of consciousness itself —what Gadamer called “linguisticality.” But how can philosophy phenomenologically show Dasein’s linguis-

ticality from the “inside out,” and do that in the very course of seriously “bearing a message and tidings”? Looking back to what I have called “Hermes’ rhetorical problem,” we might ask: What 90 «= Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

happens when Hermes decides that he cannot adequately bear the message unless he can “think the bearing” — or as Heidegger puts it in relation to Plato: “[attain] the correct ground for inter-

preting the sophist in his Being”? Notes 1. For a detailed and compelling view of the rhetorical dimension of rabbinic interpretation, see Fraade, From Tradition, chap. 2: “Re-presenting Revelation.” 2. Perelmen and Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentatuon, 8.

3. MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study tn Moral Theory, 201.

4. Ibid., 201.

5. The Pentateuchal narrative had, of course, many authors, but I hope my readers will indulge my use of the singular in describing the authors’ hermeneutical performance, first and foremost, because the narrative has always been read traditionally av it had one author. Recent scholarship has also given more and more credit to the “authorial” artistic skill of the so-called redactor who brought the disparate texts together in a way that supports this traditional reading. And so it seems fitting to speak of a single author as we try to recover the authorial imagination driving the rhetorical force of the story as it has been received. 6. This is Heidegger’s gloss on Nietzsche's idea of art as the will to power. See esp. Heidegger, Metzsche, vol. 1: The Will to Power as Art, 69. 7. Valéry, “Memoirs of a Poem,” in The Art of Poetry, 105. 8. Ibid. 9. See White, When Words Love Their Meaning: Constitutions and Recondlituttond of Language, Character and Communtty.

10. See Heidegger, “End of Philosophy.” 11. This reading of Beckett depends heavily on Martha Nussbaum’s essay “Narrative Emotions: Beckett’s Genealogy of Love.” 12. Beckett, Wolloy, 13. 13. Beckett, as quoted in Taylor, Zeary, 203. 14. Nussbaum, “Narrative Emotions,’ 236—37. 15. Beckett, Molloy, 134.

16. Ibid., 175-76. 17. Not only does Beckett’s antinarrative narrative undermine the smooth continuation of his readers’ narrative habit; it also resists philosophical interpretation, thus foreclosing another way out. See Simon Critchley, Very Little... Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Luterature, \41-AA4,

Truth-Aspiring Discourse at The End of Philosophy m 9/

18. Heidegger, “End of Philosophy,” 375. 19. Ibid., 392. 20. Ibid., 383. 21. Beckett, Molloy, 137. 22. My review of this struggle is confined mainly to passages in Gen-

esis and Exodus. The passages that follow contain some of the key moments in the narrative tradition as we find it in the Pentateuch—a tradition at the core of the Torah, the text that can be said to constitute the Jewish people. Although these five books are not all by the same author, they follow closely upon one another, not only in the inner connectedness of their stories, but in their shared self-conscious struggle with the possibilities and limits of the narrative form itself. It is not only as if a single authorial voice were holding the story together, but also as if a single authorial mind were struggling through the tension between

form and meaning that grounds the story being told. The interpretive tradition of midrash, which treats the Pentateuch as an integrated whole,

written by a single author, bears compelling testimony to the striking inner and outer coherence of these texts. 23. From Heidegger’s “Hélderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” as translated by Gerald Bruns, in HeiwWeggers Estrangements: Language, Truth and Poetry tn the Later Writings, 38. 24. Fisher, Human Communication ad Narration: Towards a Philosophy of Reason, Value and Actton, 47. 25. See Terrien, The Elusive Presence: Toward a New Biblical Theology, 108.

26. Heidegger, “Nature of Language,” in On the Way, 66. 27. Terrien, Elusive Presence, 147. 28. Heidegger, “Words,” in On the Way, 147.

29. Levinas, as quoted in Taylor, Jeary, 24. 50. Ibid. 31. Bruns, Heidegger 4 Estrangements, 166. 32. See esp. Alter, Art of Biblical Narratwve.

33. Crites, “The Narrative Quality of Experience,” in Hauerwas and Jones, Why Narrative? Readings tn Narrative Theology, 72. 34. Heidegger, Platoy “Sophist,” 9.

92 uw Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

A Rhetorical Phenomenology of Heidegger’s Speech The Philosopher as Rabbinic Sage Dte Sprache spricht.

— Martin Heidegger

Heidegger makes much of “speaking” in the later writings. How could it be otherwise? When he asks, “What is language?” the unavoidable answer is “Language shows itself first as our way of speaking.”! This chapter applies that observation to Heidegger’s own style and asks, “How does language show itself in Heideggers way of speaking?” An investigation of this question localizes Heidegger’s phenomenological inquiry very appropriately in the

concreteness of Heidegger’s own speaking. I call this part of the investigation a “rhetorical phenomenology” for two reasons:

first, it assumes that certain important aspects of Heidegger's thinking about language may be brought to light by attending to his way of speaking; and second, it examines Heidegger's speaking in terms of how it seems to function in the form in which Heidegger casts it.” What sort of speaking, then, is Heidegger's way? What func-

tion’ does his speaking perform in bringing his thinking about language to light? This chapter will focus on what is perhaps the

most central and challenging rhetorical project of Heidegger's later work: his attempt to appropriately render the “call of being.” While I will make some reference to the earlier “call of conscience” in Being and Time, my main focus will be on the call of being, rendered as the call to think, in What ls Called Thinking? 95

My thesis is that Heidegger “speaks” the call to think, or at least one of his most significant hearings of the call to think, by means of a rather lengthy, meditative engagement with a sentence from Parmenides that reads: “Crhé to legein te noein eon emmenat.”4

The manner of this engagement will then be juxtaposed with the way the rabbis perform their reading of the biblical text to reveal a most significant stage in the movement of the formally indicating rhetorical.

Heidegger’s Reading of Parmenides The sentence from Parmenides is conventionally translated, “One

should both say and think that Being is.” But again, it is not so much the “content” that is of interest here as “the rhetoric” — Heidegger’s way of speaking his exegesis of Parmenides. There is a deep meditative quality to Heidegger's professorial performance that is quite typical of the way he reads significant passages from

the classical texts central to his thought. The audience is there, to be sure, but not so much addressed, as invited to observe, while Heidegger encounters the text in the hermeneutical way. Heidegger typically begins these exegetical performances by first finding the conventional translation or interpretation of the passage inadequate. He then digs deeper into the individual words themselves, listening for echoes of forgotten etymologies, shuffling the words around into different groupings, and finally recasting the sentence “paratactically” into a form that lends itself to a new hearing —a hearing that “happens” to Heidegger as he stands before the text, intimate and alone with it. At the same time, the new hearing is also a new speaking for which we become the audience, as hermeneutics converges with rhetoric. At this point, it might be objected that I am covering old ground, that my so-called rhetorical phenomenology merely takes a wellknown aspect of Heidegger's interpretive practice and recasts it in a different set of terms. I hope what follows meets that objection by showing that Heidegger indeed “speaks” his way to a new hearing of the passage, and that this way of speaking is an essential part of the unfolding of his phenomenology.

94 w= Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

I do not mean to suggest that Heidegger's exegesis of Parmenides

in this case w the call to think or that it is Heidegger’s definitive version of the call to think. Rather, I will argue that in this text, Heidegger indicates a way of speaking, through which the call to think being, indeed, the call of being itself, may be heard. One final methodological note. I have characterized what I am doing in this chapter as a “rhetorical phenomenology” of Heidegger's saying as a showing. But such a phenomenology, to be faithful to Heidegger’s way, would not presume to bring that way of showing fully to light —in other words to contain it. Heidegger's saying as a showing is itself a phenomenology, and therefore is meant only to indicate a form in which being shows itself. The formal indication was one of Heidegger’s early ways of characterizing the task of phenomenology and distinguishing it from metaphysics.” In phenomenology, saying does not itself presume to show being. Rather, the saying of phenomenology merely indicates, points out, sheds light on one of the ways in which being shows itself. More specifically, the formal indication points out the directionality or, as Heidegger might say, the “way making” of the phenomenon. Thus I need to emphasize that my rhetorical phenomenology merely tries to enrich our understanding of Heidegger's saying as a formal indication by characterizing it as the sort of saying it is. This characterization, if successful, will itself serve as a further indication of the way being shown —in this case, the way toward, and at the same time back to, the call of being as it may be experienced in an epoch of withdrawal. But

does not this extension of the indication itself violate the elegant minimalism of the formal indication? As a series of formal indications, I believe Heidegger's phe-

nomenological rendering of the call of being is unnecessarily incomplete. I would suggest that this incompleteness is due to Heidegger's inability to hear his way of speaking the call as the sort of speaking it is. In all his discussion of the centrality of speaking, he reflects hardly at all on his own speaking and how it functions in his phenomenology. Thus a rhetorical phenomenology of Heidegger’s way of speaking might complete the formal indication of the call of being as he himself could not, owing

A Rhetorical Phenomenology of Heidegger’s Speech m 95

to his apparent reluctance to reflect on his own way of speaking as an integral part of his phenomenology of the call. But I surely do not mean to “charge” Heidegger with this reluctance. As he observes at the beginning of Platov “Sophut’: “Pre-

cisely here lies the element of creative research, that in what is most decisive this research does not understand itself.”° As I hope

the present work shows, an essential element in Heidegger’s research is the rigorous thinking through of the relationship between

rhetoric and hermeneutics in philosophical discourse. For the thinking of that relationship to be appropriately accessible to those who came after, however, Heidegger’s own rhetorical capaciousness had to remain “unthought.””

The Rhetorical Moment in Heidegger’s Hermeneutics With the somewhat awkward preliminaries at an end, let me begin my phenomenology from a safe distance by delineating the few “hints” Heidegger does give us concerning his view of the intended function of his most striking sayings. How might Heidegger have characterized the objective of the most fully realized moments of his own discourse? Or, in Heidegger's own terms, what does he mean to “show” in his own most fully realized sayings? We have already suggested that Heidegger had precious little to say directly concerning his own discourse as it functions in the

context of his philosophy. Thus it is not surprising that we find his most explicit expression of rhetorical purpose in his interview with Der Spiegel.® Although the interview does not pose as philosophy, Heidegger suggests it might serve as his “final word.” And so we might not be too far off the mark in looking here for traces of Heidegger's view of how he wished his speaking to be heard.

In the interview, Heidegger (MH) has made the distinction between philosophy and “thinking” and is trying to explain the practice of the latter and its effect. The Der Spiegel interviewer (DS) pursues the question of who is doing such thinking and what might be its appropriate expression: Ds: Approximately two years ago, in a conversation with a Buddhist monk, you spoke of a “completely new way of speaking” 96 m= Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

and you said that “only a few people are capable of” this new way of thought. Did you want say that only a few people can have the insights which in your view are possible and necessary? MH: To “have” them in the utterly primordial sense, so they can, in a certain way, ‘say’ them. Ds: But you did not make clear in this conversation with the Buddhist monk just how this passing over into reality [Verwirklichung| takes place. MH: I cannot make this clear. I know nothing about how this thinking “has an effect” ["werkt’]. It may be that the path of think-

ing has today reached the point where silence is required to preserve thinking from being all jammed up just within a year. It may be that it will take 300 years for it “to have an effect.”

Ds: You do not number yourself among those who could show a way if people would only listen to them? MH: No. I know of no paths to the immediate transformation of the present situation of the world assuming that such a thing is humanly possible at all. But it seems to me that the thinking which I| attempt would awaken, clarify, and fortify the readiness which we have mentioned.”

Here the interviewer moves on to politics, leaving us to pursue the very suggestive implications here concerning Heidegger’s view of his own discourse. Heidegger finds himself in a bind similar to that proclaimed by rhetorically sensitive philosophers from Lao-tzu to Socrates: one who knows or even has an inkling of the

truth, knows that the truth cannot be spoken. What then does the sage say, and why does he say it? No clear answer from Laotzu, Socrates, or Heidegger. Yet all three continue to speak. Language seems to leave them a space that somehow must be filled. But their speaking does not violate the silence mandated by true thinking because in one way or another, they claim to be making no claims. They speak, but essentially say nothing.!° Heidegger’s way of speaking and saying nothing is to deny rhetorical respon-

sibility. His speaking aspires to rhetorical innocence. It does not do anything —at least not anything substantial. Rather, it merely A Rhetorical Phenomenology of Heidegger’s Speech m 97

serves to “awaken, clarify and fortify” a “readiness.” Awaken is the

key word here. Gadamer, who unabashedly admits being quite taken by Heidegger's way of speaking, picks up on the word awaken as the centerpiece of his celebration of Heidegger’s rhetoric. He paradoxically describes Heidegger's eloquence as characterized by what he calls a deficiency of language —a linguistic impasse that he himself ran up against. [Yet in mainstream philosophy, a] deficlency of language as such is not encountered at all. There

is a forgetfulness of this deficiency of language that is the counterpart to the forgetfulness of Being that Heidegger speaks of; indeed, the former may be the very expression and general proof of the latter.

Perhaps it was not to be avoided that [Heidegger’s] language often resembles a tormented stammering, for itisa language struggling to awaken from the forgetfulness of Being and to think only that which is worthy of thought.!! Notice Gadamer does not speak of Heidegger’s “rhetoric of deficiency” as awakening the audience, at least not directly. Rather,

Heidegger's rhetoric is self-reflexive: it is language struggling to awaken itself. But it is important to note that, reflexive though it may be, the phenomenon of language struggling to awaken is decidedly rhetorical in that it takes place in public. How could it be otherwise? Dasein simultaneously is a being-with-others and a being-with-language. As “the house of being,” language necessarily brings hermeneutics and rhetoric together. This is due to the essential nature of language as “spoken.” Because language reveals its essential nature to us through speaking, Heidegger is

led to the equation: “The being of language —the language of being [Das Wesen der Sprache: Die Sprache des Wesens).”” If “being

| Wesen|” indeed comes to language, it can only be through language as it is; that is, the “being” of language as speaking —an essentially public activity. Gadamer’s insight suggests a “rhetorical” version of one of Heidegger’s central critiques of metaphysics: it suggests that the forgetfulness of being is enacted through a way of speaking —a 98 um Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

way of speaking that forgets the inadequacy of language. Philosophy is spoken by philosophers as if their language were ade-

quate to the task. This is the rhetorical presumption of metaphysics. But the reversal of that presumption is no simple matter:

as a being-with-others, Dasein, even the Dasein of philosophy, cannot resist speaking in public. Indeed, there is a moment in “A Dialogue on Language between

a Japanese and an Inquirer” when Heidegger appears to recognize the problematic implications of this inevitability in relation to his own speaking. Heidegger (MH) has tried to give his Japanese interlocutor (JI) a more subtle rendition of “Language is the house of Being”:

JI: If we heed this, then your phrase can never become a mere catchword. MH: It has already become one.

JI: Because you demand too much of today’s manner of thinking. MH: Too much quite true, too much of what has not yet ripened. JI: You mean ripened so that it drops like a fruit from a tree. It seems to me there are not such words. A saying that would wait for that would not be in keeping with the nature of language. And you yourself are the last person who would lay claim to such a saying. MH: You do me too much honor... . !° This rhetorical presumption, to prematurely put one’s understanding into words, which Heidegger himself succumbs to, is

not the result of mere hubris. What moves us, even the most thoughtful among us, to make our hearing of the speaking of language public, is our concern, a concern that fits with the essential spokenness of language to bring about a most important dimension of our hermeneutical (I now want to say also “rhetorical”) situation, namely, our fallenness. And Heidegger’s insistence that authenticity is only achieved in the course of falling can now be A Rhetorical Phenomenology of Heidegger’s Speech m 99

understood rhetorically. Authenticity only occurs in the course of concernful speaking, a speaking whose very motivation throws it into a seemingly irreversible inauthenticity. As Heidegger puts it in his 1922 essay on Aristotle: “Factical life gets lived by the ‘nobody,’ to which all life sacrifices its concern. Life exists [wt]

as always somehow bogged down in inauthentic tradition and habituation.”!4 I would suggest the main way in which this sacrifice is enacted is through the concernful public discourse that connects Dasein to its world. Thus the hermeneutical struggle with language becomes rhetorical. In the course of philosophical speaking, a way must be found to somehow reverse usual rhetorical practice —that is, the usual, concerned way in which language speaks itself in public. Because

philosophic Dasein cannot desist from this concerned speaking and withdraw into silence (even though hermetic thinkers through-

out history have made a valiant attempt to do so), somehow, the necessary reversal of usual rhetorical practice must itself be a way of speaking-with-others, that is, the rhetorical reversal itself must be rhetorically enacted. This rhetorical reversal cannot be theorized as a general prin-

ciple. It must be worked out factically in individual rhetorics. Because Heidegger speaks as a philosopher in a particular historical situation, he must enact the reversal factically as it might occur in the course of attempting to use the philosophical speech typical of his time and place. Because Heidegger characterizes typical philosophical speech as “metaphysics,” we might say that the “tormented stammering’ Gadamer speaks of is Heidegger's way of enacting a rhetorical reversal of metaphysics. Stammering can be understood rhetorically as an attempt to reverse the ease that might accompany a conventional public saying of one’s thoughts. It intrudes into one’s speech like a Socratic

tic, which forcibly —that is, seemingly against the will of the speaker — opens up a space of authentic possibility in the midst of inauthenticity. Gadamer strongly suggests that, as a rhetorical device, Heidegger's artificially produced stammering might itself “carry his message.” !°

But Gadamer also must admit that Heidegger is not always stammering. Indeed, the most striking moments in Heidegger's 100 « Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

discourse are not that way. As Gadamer puts it: “Sometimes he makes a real discovery; then the words spark suddenly, and one sees with one’s own eyes what Heidegger is saying.” !© Whata wonderful characterization of a supreme moment of eloquence in Heidegger’s phenomenology. Thus the last, and I think most crucial, step in my rhetorical phenomenology is to try to chacterize the sort of speaking which brings Heidegger and his audience to such moments. How can authentic discovery take place in the course of rhetorical eloquence? In other words, how can one keep from “inauthentically” inventing the words that will most effectively enact one’s concern in public, especially at the particular time and place where those words might be most useful.

The Rabbis’ Way

Here I turn again to the rabbis who, I think, found themselves in a similar hermeneutical dilemma and whose rhetorical resolution gives us a way to read this dimension of Heidegger’s phe-

nomenology. The most salient characteristic of the rabbis’ hermeneutical-rhetorical situation might be described as the absence or withdrawal of revelation. The saying of the sacred Word directly by Yahweh had come to an end. What were the rabbis to do, especially as regards their responsibility to their present community, who looked to them for guidance? They could not presume themselves to speak the words that would guide the community on the right path. Only the Torah spoke such words. On the other hand, they could not withdraw into silence to study the holy words of the Torah in solitude. Israel was still responsible to fulfill the will of God, and the will of God was contained in the words of Torah. Yet the circumstances in which the words needed to be spoken were different from the

situation of the originary saying. How might the rabbis bridge that gap without presuming to usurp the authority of the divine voice of the Torah? The solution the rabbis came up with, indeed, that they “dug up” (the original meaning of midrash) out of the words of the Torah itself, links hermeneutics as a way of listening to rhetoric as a way A Rhetorical Phenomenology of Heidegger’s Speech ma J01

of speaking. The words of the Torah were to be taken as “perfect symbols.” That is, these precise words exhaustively represented, held perfectly within themselves, all the meanings which would ever be required to understand them completely, and so had the capacity to speak meaningfully to a multitude of situations beyond the original one. As perfect symbols, the words of the Torah were endlessly interpretable. But because the meaningful saying of these words could not be exhausted by this or that interpretation does not mean that any interpretation is as true to the words as any other.

The way the rabbis put it, “true interpretation,” that is, the “oral Torah,” was revealed at Sinai along with the original written Torah,

and then passed down through the authorities in each generation who bore the responsibility for preserving the truth of the tradition.!’ Thus the words given to Israel at Sinai already contained the fullness of their interpreted truth —a truth to be understood gradually through interpretation as history unfolded. But, in order to be revealed, those future interpretations had to wait upon the interaction between the original words and the unfolding of the subsequent historical situations to which the words would apply. The rabbis did not have the authority to speak for God. They were not prophets to whom God’s Word came directly. They were sages whose wisdom lay in their hermeneutical relationship to the words of the Torah. It was this relationship which lent to their wisdom an aura of transcendence. The aura could only be illuminated by the Torah itself. And so the rabbis had to somehow wait upon the words to speak. The question was, What should they “say,” what

should they talk about, while waiting for the light to shine? A significant answer is given in Joshua 1:8: “. . . you shall meditate [upon the words of the Torah] day and night.”!® The waiting was to be an active waiting, carried on through the sacred practice of Torah study. So the rabbis waited together in community —a community continuously involved in the practice of interpreting the Torah. This practice engaged them in a multileveled conversation with the sacred words, one another, prior interpretations of Torah by their predecessors, and the different historical situations in which they found themselves. It is this multileveled hermeneutical prac-

tice that constitutes the “rhetorical situation” in which the speaking of the sacred words of the Torah might occur. 102 uw Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

Heidegger’s Formal Indication of Rhetorical Authenticity Heidegger's “formal indication” of a hermeneutical method in What Is Called Thinking? is remarkably similar to that of the rab-

bis. He begins with a riddle, a riddle that seems to arise out of the historical moment in which he is speaking. He puts the riddle to the tradition. This move positions his speaking in such a way that he might hear the sacred words anew. Like the rabbis, he needs to find a way to ask the text the right questions in the midst of his speaking at a particular historical moment, for it is only through such a dialectic that the hermeneutical situation comes to include historical particularity. The riddle goes like this: “Most thought-provoking tn our thought-provoking time ts that we are still not thinking.” ?

The recognition of this essential “not yet” leaves Heidegger, like the rabbis, awaiting the call. But what does he do while waiting? More to the point, what does he talk about? As one proceeds through the lectures, Heidegger talks in and among the words of the riddle —with the riddle, as it were ~as he interrogates the tradition, listening for some hint of how to interpret it. In this way, the call to think is permitted to come from within the tradition. This listening is also a remembering —a remembering tinged with devotion (Hingabe) . One enacts a belonging to the historical tra-

dition engendered by the original words, by listening in a posture of devotion. Joining the stream of effective history in order to comprehend the meaning possibilities contained in the originary words cannot be purely a scholarly exercise. Repetition and remembering go together in interpretation, linked by devotion. The importance of the devotional posture in hermeneutics is visible in the horizon set by the Torah itself in the injunction to reflect

upon these words endlessly through time.?? Heidegger's indication of the hermeneutical situation takes a very similar form. At one level, he tells us to view thinking as a thanking for the gift of the words which call to us from the tradition.*! In a posture we have characterized as the “hermeneutics of appreciation, Heidegger devotionally positions himself and his audience to hear the voice of tradition —in this case, the words of Parmenides in response to the riddle. A Rhetorical Phenomenology of Heidegger’s Speech m 103

But even as he hears Parmenides’ words and gives them a first,

general preliminary articulation, he still must place them properly in a context in which they might speak for themselves. Here he must slow down and silence the rhetorical urge from within, prompting him to simply appropriate the words to his own voice. He begins with an indication of caution: “But how are we to hear without translating, translate without interpreting? ”** He continues by performing a sort of “epoché,” clearing the mind of all the interpretations that intervene between Parmenides’ saying and our own biased hearing: “Without regard to later philosophy and its achievements in interpreting this thinker, we shall try to listen to the saying, so to speak, in the first bloom of the words.” “Blooming flowers” is a common metaphor for eloquence. We are trying to hear the words in the first shining of their eloquence, perhaps as they shone to Parmenides himself. That is not to say

we hear only what they actually meant to Parmenides, whose ability to fully understand the meaning of his own saying was likely limited by the circumstances of his time and place. But he was able to “hold the gift in safekeeping” by the words he handed down to us. Thus the words themselves become a “starting point” at which we can join the thinker in hearing the call. For in these words, Heidegger argues, Parmenides’ own hearing of the call is preserved: “By the words of Parmenides, it can be shown that he is subject to a call, that he recounts what is addressed to him in order to respond to it.””4 In Parmenides’ words, Heidegger recognizes a formal indica-

tion of the call, and that formal indication takes the form of a saying, a saying that itself preserves the call for subsequent hear-

ing. Heidegger more closely positions himself to hear the call present in them by shuffling the words around into a new paratactic version of the original. In this way, a voice is permitted to speak from inside the words: “We call the word order of the saying paratactic in the widest sense because we do not know what

else to do. For the saying speaks where there are no words, in the field between the words that the colons indicate.””° This is a way of hearing that goes beyond Parmenides’ own intentions to the primordial interpretedness of the world contained in the words themselves. 104 w Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

But how is that primordial interpretedness given to us in these words, or, for that matter, any others: “Wav spricht in ‘es gibt’?””°

This question can only be preserved through a rhetoric appropriate to it. Heidegger ends the lectures with a question: “Can thinking take this gift into its hands, that is, take it to heart, in order to entrust it in /egein in the telling statement, to the original

speech of language?”*’ The original speaking of language can only be captured through the “telling statement’ of the Sage, uttered in the course of the sage’s own listening to the sacred word. The sacred Word itself is recognized by the sage as a hearing that reaches further back in time to the original gift. And how can we identify the words of the sage as a “telling statement,” in which the original speech of language is preserved? In faithfulness to the rabbinical style, I must answer that question with another. The final question in this case is an interrogative paraphrase of an unripened piece of fruit dropped by Richard Rorty that, in various forms, has served as a sort of refrain through-

out these chapters: Is Heideggerese only Heidegger's gift to us, or is it Being’s gift to Heidegger? The question leaves us with

only two options: to attend to Heidegger asa prophet whose words transmit the gift of “Being,” or to attenuate our hermeneu-

tical appreciation of Heidegger down to simply another philosophical voice. This exhaustive bifurcation of the possibilities is understandable. When Heidegger does reach for eloquence, his voice assumes a prophetic tone. And there are even those critical readers who are willing to grant this prophetic tone a hearing, at least initially, just as such a hearing might be granted to the voices of Plato, Hegel, or Nietzsche.”8 But the striking analogy between Heidegger’s way of speaking and that of the rabbis, suggests another possible hermeneutical orientation. Even though he sounds, perhaps even to himself, like a prophet, Heidegger's way of speaking his interpretation of certain sacred texts might more closely resemble the voice of the hermeneutical sage. The revelatory voice of Being speaks in its own time. The name

the Bible gives to those who hear the voice in such times and transmit its words is “prophet.” The speaking of the prophet has the iconic plasticity of magic, indeed, might even be accompanied A Rhetorical Phenomenology of Heidegger’s Speech m 105

by a warranting magical performance. But the prophet does not think. His gift is a mantic and temporary capacity to carry and transmit the sacred words. After revelation ceased, ancient Judaism faced a hermeneutical-rhetorical crisis. Who now spoke for Yahweh? The rabbis who took up the mantle of authoritative speaking could sound like prophets, might be accused of posing as prophets, and often had to compete with those who claimed to be prophets. But their

hermeneutical capital was not a direct line to God; rather, it was their wisdom —a wisdom which enabled them to perceive a referent for the sacred words of the Torah in their own life situation, and to interrogate the sacred words from the perspective of that situation. Their ability to forge the linkage between the

ancient sacred words and the present situation, and to put that linkage into effective words, is what gives the rabbinical sages their hermeneutical-rhetorical power. That power constitutes the ongoing conversation of Jewish tradition, as amended by generations of subsequent readers, who find themselves and their present situation reflected in the hermeneutical spaces opened by the rabbis in and among the ancient sacred words of the Torah. I propose a reading of Heidegger, not as prophet but as rabbinic sage, speaking the link between Parmenides and the present situation in which thinking finds itself. As with those who followed the rabbis, Heidegger's rhetorical expression of this linkage requires the rigorous hermeneutical attention of subsequent read-

ers to remain a link in a live conversation. The question is not whether he is a true or false prophet, but whether his speaking successfully forges a link between our own thinking and the most closely watched words of those who thought in grander times. From what we have just learned, that link is forged by rhetoric —rhetoric of a most capacious sort —able to transmit the way

in which understanding moves through language. For the rabbis, the possibility of that transmission emerges out of the expressiveness of language itself, as inscribed in the Hebrew of the Torah. But philosophy has no such “holy tongue” in which the understanding of originary language may be rhetorically reenacted “in

each generation.”*? Although Heidegger insisted, “Philosophy speaks Greek,” he had to find his way “inside” the rhetorical work 106 w Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

of Greek philosophy in order to somehow transcribe it into German. As Heidegger read it, especially out of Plato and Aristotle, this work consisted in the retrieval of philosophy from out of the corrupted discourse of everyday speech.*” Thus, following Aristotle’s footsteps in the Rhetoric, Heidegger discovers a discourse of philosophy in the apparent rhetorical disarray, but inherently hermeneutical organicity, of everyday speech.

Notes 1. Heidegger, “Way to Language,” in On the Way, 120. 2. In identifying form with function, the sort of “rhetorical” analy-

sis attempted here of Heidegger's speaking is similar to an innovative version of biblical form criticism dubbed “rhetorical criticism” by the biblical scholar James Muilenburg. See Muilenburg, “Form Criticism and Beyond.” 3. Perhaps the most influential contemporary definition of rhetoric in terms of function is Kenneth Burke’s: “[Rhetoric] is rooted in an essential function of language itself, a function that is wholly realistic, and continually born anew; the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols.” Burke, Rhetoric of Motwes, 43.

4. Heidegger, What ls Called Thinking?, 171.

5. For a fuller treatment of this essential aspect of Heidegger’s method, see “Trusting the Words: Forming the Hermeneutical Relationship” in chapter 1 and “The Formal Indication as the Rhetorical Enactment of Heidegger’s Phenomenology” in chapter 3. 6. Heidegger, Platoy “Sophist,” 8. 7. The tendency of great thinkers to leave their rhetorical capaciousness unthought/unspoken 1S, of course, a concomitant of “Hermes’ rhetor-

ical problem,” as discussed in chapter 3; see esp. the chapter introduction and “The Rhetorical Problem in Augustine: The Significance of the Sacred in Hermeneutics.” 8. Heidegger, of course, stipulated that his Der Spiegel interview, reprinted in Wolin, The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, 91-116,

not be published until after his death. 9. Ibid., 109-10. 10. Iam, of course, echoing Samuel Beckett here once again. See “Beckett and Heidegger at the Limits of Narrative” in chapter 4. 11. Gadamer, Hewweggers Ways, 25.

A Rhetorical Phenomenology of Heidegger’s Speech m 107

12. Heidegger, “Nature of Language,” in On the Way, 76. 13. Heidegger, “Dialogue on Language,” in On the Way, 27. 14. From Heidegger's Phainomenologtsche Interpretationen, as translated

by Michael Baur, in “Phenomenological Interpretations,” 365. 15. Gadamer, Hewdeggers Ways, 25.

16. Ibid. 17. This “lineage” receives its best-known articulation in a rabbinic text entitled Pirke Avot: Sayings of the Fathers, 1:1. For a fuller examina-

tion of the part played by “perfection” in hermeneutically constituting a sacred text, see my introduction. 18. See note 45 in chapter 1. 19. Heidegger, What ls Called Thinking?, 6. Emphasis original. 20. See esp. Deuteronomy 6:6—9. 21. The phrase “thinking as a thanking” echoes a suggestion of Heidegger’s in “Conversation on a Country Path,” in Discourse on Thinking, 85. 22. Heidegger, What ls Called Thinking?, 175. 23. Ibid., 176. 24. Ibid., 175. 25. Ibid., 186. 26. Heidegger, “End of Philosophy,” 392. 27. Heidegger, What ls Called Thinking?, 244. 28. See Rosen, The Question of Being: A Reversal of Hetoegger, xi.

29. For a discussion of the ethically problematical, but hermeneutically essential, character of an “originary language” in both Jewish and Heideggerian hermeneutics, see the introduction to chapter I. 30. Heidegger, Grundbegriffe, 109.

108 w Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

Heidegger Reading Aristotle The Rhetoric av Ontology But rhetoric seems to be able to observe the persuasive about “the given,” so to speak. — Aristotle

It is time to take notice of a potentially embarrassing aspect of “Being Jewish.” While we have theorized Judaism's intimate engagement with the words of the text as having profound philosophical —even ontological —implications, the passages of the Torah that arouse the deepest and most intricate exchanges in rabbinic dialectics are those concerned with the most mundane matters of everyday existence. The rabbis of the Talmud do not show much interest in theology, per se.! Their careful attention to the words of the Torah does not lead them to higher planes of thought — most decidedly not to the discovery of what was being recognized in Greece around the same time as the “idea.” To the contrary, their complex deliberations take their understanding of God’s words deeper and deeper into the give and take of everyday life.

But as Levinas observes: “It is certain that, when discussing the right to eat or not to eat ‘an egg hatched ona holy day’ or payments owed for damages caused by a ‘wild ox,’ the sages of the Talmud are discussing neither an egg nor an ox, but are arguing about fundamental ideas without appearing to do so.”” This impulse to search for God at ground level comes straight from the Torah itself. The laws of the Torah make it clear that God's “care” for the world is immersed in the hows and wherefores of everyday being-with-one-another. The way to enter a L09

relationship with God, according to the Torah, is therefore to join Him in His caring —to care as He cares. The medium in which divine and human care may “meet” is in the words of the law. And so Israel is commanded to “meditate [on those words] day and night,” and “teach them diligently to [their] children” (Joshua 1:8; Deuteronomy 6:7),° and Torah study (Zalmuod Torah

in the Hebrew) comes to be at the center of Jewish practice. The similarity between the rabbis’ relationship to the Torah and Heidegger's relationship to Aristotle is particularly striking in this regard. Heidegger makes it abundantly clear that he reads Aristotle’s ontology as firmly grounded in what he calls the “phenomenological hermeneutics of facticity.”4 Philosophizing proceeds not by indulging its propensity for abstract concepts. Rather, phi-

losophy is “the explicit actualization of the interpretive tendency already operative in the basic movements of life which ‘goes about its self and its being.’”> Just as the rabbis tracked that movement through dialectics on the laws governing everyday life, Heidegger sees Aristotle's ontology as emerging most forcefully from out of his study of Dasein’s interpretive dealings with the world, in and through everyday speech. As Heidegger emphatically puts it in the 1924 course: “Rhetoric ts nothing other than the tnterpretation of concrete Dasein —the hermeneutic of Dasein itself (Die Rhetortk tst nichts anderes als die Audslegung des konkreten Dasetins, Ote hermeneutik des Daseins selbst).”®

Thus, for Heidegger, it is the very concreteness of its focus that makes Aristotle's Rhetoric the perfect site for the realization of certain key aspects of his ontology. This sense of the profound philosophical significance of the Rhetoric stayed with Heidegger beyond his direct encounter with the text in his 1924 course, and 1s reflected

in that tantalizingly suggestive, but protracted reference to the Rketoric in Being and Time: “Contrary to the traditional orientation,

according to which rhetoric is conceived as the kind of thing we learn in school, this work of Aristotle must be taken as the first systematic hermeneutic of everydayness of Being with one another.

... What has [also] escaped notice is that the basic ontological interpretation of the affective life in general [contained mainly in the discussion of the emotions in Book II] has been able to scarcely make one forward step worthy of mention since Aristotle.”” 110 «w Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

In Heidegger's view, Aristotle’s genius and value to philosophy lie in his ability to see and articulate the paradoxical process by which Being-as-such (the focus of ontology), shows itself in the life movement of particular beings. At the core of that paradox, recognized by Aristotle, Heidegger, and the rabbis is the fact

that the very seeing and articulation of Being, undertaken by ontology, is itself a “basic movement of factical life”: The basic direction of philosophical questioning is not added on and attached to the questioned object, factical life, exter-

nally; rather it is to be understood as the explicit grasping

of a basic movement of factical life... . [P]hilosophical research itself constitutes a determinate How of factical life, and, as such, in its actualization, it co-temporalizes the concrete Being of life as its is in itself, and not first through some “application” after the fact.®

Similarly, Halakhah (Jewish law) constitutes a determinative way of life, as much from “inside itself,” through the careful study it requires, as through the “external” application of the laws emerging from that study. In other words, “Talmud Torah,” the study of Torah, is itself a basic movement of factical life in its very grasp-

ing of the way of life the Torah contains. In this double-edged movement, Being Jewish again finds itself in a familiar relation-

ship to Reading Heidegger. In this chapter, I turn Being Jewish specifically to a reading of Heidegger's reading of Aristotle's Réetoric in order for this aspect of the formally indicating rhetorical to show itself philosophically.

As the basis for his reading of Aristotle in the 1922 “Introduction,” Heidegger is at great pains to point out the unceasing rigor of Aristotle’s attempt to capture a basic movement of factical life from inside itself.” Although Heidegger says “a” movement, he clearly means to suggest, following Aristotle’s example, that philosophy does best when it is able to join the movement

most central to human life’s process of becoming itself. This most central movement of life he locates in our capacity to make

our way through our given temporal moment, what Heidegger calls our “concerned dealings” with our particular lifeworld.!”

So the question, What does it mean to be? comes down to the Heidegger Reading Aristotle: The Rhetoric as Ontology m= J//

almost unbearably difficult, but at the same time simplest of questions — How do we as human beings meaningfully go about our everyday lives, or at least meaningfully enough to cope? The answer, to Heidegger, is obvious, so obvious as to be easily missed by most of those who take up the mantle of traditional philosophy. We are able to make our way in the world, day by day, minute by minute, because our world is already “there” for us, prepackaged in the meaningfulness of everyday speech. Thus

the deepest of philosophical concerns, the meaning of Being, comes to be located in the apparently most superficial of phenomena, the there-being of our everyday world. Here Heidegger finds

his staunchest ally in Aristotle, most particularly the Aristotle of the Rhetoric.'' Because the meaning of Being is contained within

the understanding that underlies our everyday dealings with one another, it is to the phenomenon of rhetoric that true ontology must turn. Heidegger's cycle of courses on Aristotle thus reaches its climax with his 1924 seminar on the Réevoric.

Conceptualizing Rhetoric through the Definition The necessity of locating ontology in the concrete hermeneutical situation of particular beings is reiterated by Heidegger very directly

in the early moments of the 1924 lectures: “Being itself [that is, “being” with a small 4] is always experienced primarily, [that is] before Being [Das Seinde selbst ist primdr immer vor dem Sein erfabren].”

The difficulty in forging the link between phenomenology and ontology here is that this “before” experience of being must somehow be thematized in its “foreness,” that is, en route to Being. As

Jean Grondin puts it in his recent /ntroduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics: “Heidegger's insight into the so-called fore-structure of understanding is very well known. Rarely[, however, | has anyone given much thought to the question of what this forestructure is really “fore” to, and so (to put it rather awkwardly) the “wherefore” or “thereafter” of the fore-structure has remained for the most part in the dark.”!*° To extend Grondin’s observation a bit further, what is needed is a hermeneutics of the “thereafter of the forestruc-

ture.” In terms of the basic argument of the present work, the hermeneutics by which the forestructure of understanding is linked 112 « Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

to everyday being-in-the-world is precisely what Heidegger finds in Aristotle's conception of rhetoric. But it is a specific embodiment of Aristotle’s concept that Heidegger has in mind here, namely, the definition of rhetoric in Book I. Here we are left to follow hints again. Before getting to his discussion of Book IJ on the emotions, Heidegger engages in a lengthy excursus on the nature of Aristotle’s concepts and of the relevance

of definitions to their development. For Heidegger, Aristotle’s definitions hold the key to understanding his basic concepts “phenomenologically,” that is, in their development av concepts. He says early in the lectures: “In the definition, the concept comes to itself [Jn der Definition der Begriff zu sich selbst kommt].”'4 He makes it utterly clear to the students on the first day, that the objective of this course, formally entitled “Basic Concepts of Aristotle’s Philosophy,” is not to understand the “content” of the basic concepts,

but rather the source out of which the basic concepts develop, and how they develop: “[T]hat means the basic concepts will be considered in relationship to their specific conceptuality [es handelt sich um das Verstindnis von Grundbegriffen in threr Begrifflichkeit\.”'

That relationship, which is at the core of Heidegger’s phenomenological study of Aristotle, is built around the definitions of the basic concepts: “In the definition the concept is expressed, comes to appearance [/n der Definition wird der Begriff ausdriicklich, kommt zum Vorschein|.”!®

Although Heidegger never explicitly calls his reading of the Rbetoric an “ontology,” nor specifically grounds his reading in Aris-

totle’s definition, the compelling indications leading up to his explicit discussion of the definition itself (which does not occur until almost halfway through the course) seem to ready the stage for the words of Aristotle's definition of rhetoric to make the case. This sort of emergent hint at an almost too radical reading of a neglected or misunderstood text is very much in tune with Heidegger’s way. As with his readings of other “canonical texts,” espe-

cially those of the pre-Socratics and Nietzsche, Heidegger's task here is merely to call attention to the deep significance of words already uttered, so that the words can speak for themselves. Here is Heidegger, just prior to his discussion of the definition, dramatically setting the stage by arguing for the philosophical Heidegger Reading Aristotle: The Rhetoric as Ontology m= 113

importance of the “neglected discipline of rhetoric”: “The original sense of rhetoric had long ago disappeared. Insofar as one forgets to ask about the concrete function of Aristotelian rhetoric, one forgoes a basic possibility —that is, to understand rhetoric in such a way that it becomes obvious that it is nothing other

than the discipline in which the self-interpretation of Dasein explicitly takes place. Rhetoric ts nothing other than the interpretation of concrete Dasein, the hermeneutic of Dasein itself.”\” The echo of this

phrasing in the later reference to Aristotle's Rhetoric in Being and Time seems unmistakable. By connecting Heidegger’s brief later reference to the Rhetoric with this full-blown earlier discussion, we gain a clearer understanding of the philosophical significance

Heidegger saw in Aristotle's Rhetoric as “the first systematic hermeneutic of everydayness of Being with one another. "18 Rhetoric, as conceptualized by Aristotle in his definition, provides and makes accessible to philosophy, the systematic “how” of our everyday being-in-the-world Un-der-Welt-seins), which at the same time is a being-with-one-another (Witetnandersein) through speech.!? The dynamus of rhetoric represents our capacity to “see” our situatedness in the world (our hermeneutical situation, Dasein)

as a set of language possibilities which constitute the raw materials out of which we construct our everyday life with one another. My argument here is that within this same rhetorical dynamus is also contained the dynamw of philosophy as a seeing of a seeing —

that the “how” of the being of philosophy is located within the “how” of the being of rhetoric. Borrowing Heidegger’s terminology, what we have in the Rketoric, as epitomized in the definition, is “transcendental phenomenology” as “fundamental ontology. "20 The ontology is “fun-

damental” because it is concerned with the meaning of Being as such. The phenomenology is “transcendental” in the Kantian sense of being a priori—that is, the process by which Being shows itself

in the comings and goings of everyday speech is a necessary precondttion of human existence. The methodological implications

of this intimate connection between fundamental ontology and transcendental phenomenology are outlined by Heidegger early in Being and Time in a section entitled “The Preliminary Concep-

tion of Phenomenology”: “Because phenomena, as understood 114 «w Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

phenomenologically, are never anything but what goes to make up Being, while Being is in every case the Being of some entity, we must first bring forward the entities themselves if it is our aim that Being should be laid bare; and we must do this in the right way. These entities must likewise show themselves with the kind of access that genuinely belongs to them.””! I would argue that it is through rhetorical activity —what Heidegger called “everyday speech” —that human beings “show them-

selves with the kind of access that genuinely belongs to them.” Thus rhetorical phenomenology has a transcendental dimension. But how does this phenomenology of everyday speech achieve the status of an ontology? Here Heidegger’s notion of thrownness combines with his conceptualization of Aristotle's fundamental ontology to form a crucial linkage.

Thrownness and Ontology

Human beings are rather urgently “thrown” into the world. From the very start, we are bodies projected in motion. The direction of this projected movement is far from clear, but what

is clear is that we somehow must fall in with it, must join the movement of our thrownness in order to continue the process, so precipitously begun, of becoming ourselves. Thus the world into which we are thrown is given to us — “already interpreted,” Heidegger would want to say —as a world in motion. As Heldegger puts it in 1922: “Factical life always moves within a determinate interpretedness which has been handed down, or revised, or re-worked anew.””” This interpretedness within which life moves, our linguistic world in the process of construction, is itself in movement —in movement toward. It is not the objective toward which we are moving — our telos — that is given to us with language, but rather the “movement toward” which is itself our gift. It is this “towardsing’ which moves us to interpret ourselves as the particular individuals we become. What is given to us as already interpreted, therefore, is a determinate set of possibilities, into which we are thrown or projected by our sense of being in motion toward becom-

ing our individual selves. This movement toward particularity is Heidegger Reading Aristotle: The Rhetoric as Ontology m= 115

the a priori condition of human existence and constitutes rhetoric as “the hermeneutic of everyday life.” But if we understand our being-in-the-world as somehow contained in an individualizing movement toward particularity, how are we to think about this movement ontologically without mistaking our own particularity for the universal? The key, according to Heidegger, is both to keep ontological thinking in close touch with the basic movement of factical life —that is, of particular being —and, at the same time, to maintain a focus on the “form,” the movement foward, that particular being takes on. This focus on form is a crucial link between the phenomenological methods of Heidegger and Aristotle, and their presumed relationship to ontology. For Aristotle, natural phenomena are characterized by their purposeful movement toward becoming themselves. This entelechial tendency may be defined as the “form”

of a phenomenon.”° Form, for Aristotle, is thus not a preexisting static “idea” into which the world shapes itself. Rather, form is

motion, the motion of natural phenomena from potentiality to actuality. The problem for phenomenology is how to capture the movement of form, from potential to actual, without mistaking a moment of potentiality for the actual essence of the object. The difficulty of the problem is immeasurably compounded, of course, when it comes to comprehending the nature of human beings by phenomenologically describing their form. For the form we are trying to describe, the movement of becoming we are trying to capture as it moves toward becoming what it is, is ourselves, our very own movement toward the particular beings we are. What seems necessary for such an undertaking is a way of seeing the movement of life toward particularity, which at the same time can reflexively see itself in motion. (One may liken this view

of philosophy to an attempt to snap a picture of oneself on the run, from the perspective of one actually being the run.) For Heidegger, hermeneutical philosopher to the core, this means posit-

ing, for the moment, a way of catching sight of ontology as a whole —the Being of human being —as, at least, a temporary vantage point from which to view the factical movement of a partic-

ular human being.

116 w= Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

In his 1922 course, Heidegger finds Aristotle setting the ontological framework for such a view in the famous first sentence of the Wetaphysics. Heidegger reads the first sentence of the Weta-

physics thus: “The urge to live in seeing, the absorption in the visible, is constitutive of how the human being is.”24 Whatever its philological merits, this reading fits with other crucial elements of Aristotle's ontology and connects suggestively with his phenomenology. The usual translation, of course, is “All human beings by nature

desire to know.” But, according to Aristotle, what it is that we might know, our sensible world, is made up of natural objects perceived in motion toward becoming themselves, what he calls their “form.” As a metonym for knowing, therefore, seeing is aptly

suggestive of how our perceptions guide our moving about our world, from the most superficial “taking a look,” to the most profound contemplative “beholding.” Some people are distinguished by their impulse to see more deeply into the movement of certain natural phenomena, not just to see how they move, in order that

they might appropriately use them (a kind of pragmatic seeing), but to see even more deeply into why they move as they do. This is the seeing characteristic of philosophy. But, at whatever level, human seeing is carried on in the course of purposeful movement toward a particular-being-oneself. Thus we make our way toward individuality by a continuing process of seeing or interpreting, a process whose direction is initially set by the already given interpretedness of the existential situation in which we find ourselves, our Befindlichkeit. During the 1920s, Heidegger characterized this originary situated-

ness, which grounds and propels understanding, as “hermeneutical.”*° For not only does human life proceed toward its realization in the particular, by means of an ongoing process

of interpretation; this process of interpretation is itself already “interpreted.” That is, our possibilities for being-in-the-particular are given to us, already interpreted, as our life in movement

toward becoming itself. It is this movement toward becoming the particular individuals we are that constitutes the given interpretedness of our world. Furthermore, this a priori condition

Heidegger Reading Aristotle: The Rhetoric as Ontology m= 117

of human existence is a condition originarily “set in motion” by the dynamus of rhetoric.

Care: From the Ontology of Seeing to the Phenomenology of Speaking Whatever one sees, even contemplatively, is seen in the course of one’s “getting around.” One's seeing is in the service of one’s cop-

ing, and one copes not just in order to survive, but in order to achieve excellence (arefe) as the being one is, be one a farmer or

a philosopher. The impulse that motivates one’s seeing, in the service of arete as the being one is, is care. Care accounts for the absorption in seeing that characterizes our being. Indeed, Heidegger subsequently modifies his translation of the first sentence of the Metaphysics to read: “The care for seeing belongs essentially in man’s being.”*°

But in addition to being pragmatically concerned with doing

what we do, our seeing is also freighted with the care of circumspection (Umyicht). “Caring is circumspecting [Sichumeehen],” says Heidegger, “and as circumspect [wmvichtig] it is at the same time concerned about the cultivation of circumspection, and about

safeguarding and increasing the familiarity [that one has] with the object of the dealings.”*” Thus, even though this circumspection may be used for philosophical reflection, it is still necessarily grounded in the pragmatic orientation of getting around, coping, “doing a life.” This pragmatic aspect of care which absorbs us in coping, in

getting around, on our way to becoming our particular selves, also necessarily involves us in communication with others. This is because the coping of human beings in the world is accomplished in large part by the actions of the group. These actions are induced by words —words that are uttered by individuals on their way to becoming individual selves through participation in a particular historical moment. Thus there is something unavoidably duplicitous about the speech that links individuals together in action, what Kenneth Burke calls “consubstantiality. "28 Tn Hei-

degger’s terms, the care that motivates our pragmatic seeing also absorbs us in actively joining with others in a historical moment 118 uw Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

constituted by discourse —a discourse that Heidegger characterI1zes as representing “the averageness of the general public at any

given time.””? This absorption, or falling into averageness, is accomplished by rhetoric, the everyday speaking with others in which we enact our seeing as coping. There is a paradox here that would seem to doom Heidegger's project of a philosophy that lives in everyday speech. In our movement toward particularity, we participate in a world by articulating our particular seeing in a form that is recognizable by a community. This participation, our being-with-others as Heidegger puts it, necessarily involves merging ones circumspect view of

what is with an image of the world that is congruent with the “averageness of the general public at any given time.” Thus our concern for realizing our particular selves in the world leads to our absorption into the “they.” This absorption into the they is even less than an inauthentic version of ourselves. It is “nobody.” In Heidegger’s words: “Factical life gets lived by the ‘nobody,’ to which all life sacrifices its concern.”°”

Does this mean that the philosophical enterprise is also condemned to fall hopelessly into the rhetorical trap, mistaking the publicly verifiable version of a particular seeing for the “real thing”? Plato obviously thought so, and insisted that the only way

for philosophy to maintain the purity of its beholding of Being was to steer clear of the temptations of rhetoric altogether and rechannel hermeneutical inquiry into dialectic. Heidegger strongly rejects this attempt to somehow set philosophy above the rhetorical situatedness of human being. As human beings, philosophers necessarily find themselves “with a world” — a world already made meaningful by the projective tendency toward particularity and the concomitant urge to articulate to others the seeing that comprises particularity. The urge to articulate one’s particular seeing locates one’s being-in-the-world as a being-withothers. And so the philosopher's concern with the question of Being must somehow be carried out in the course of one’s “falling” toward particularity, while also necessarily taking on the accompanying weight of one’s being-with-others in language. Indeed, if human beings bear any knowable relationship to Being as such, that relationship can only be glimpsed from inside language as we have Heidegger Reading Aristotle: The Rhetoric as Ontology m= 119

it —language itself in movement toward a particular view of our life with others in community — language as rhetoric. Heidegger’s affinity for Aristotle at this point in the argument is striking. Imagine him, as he often did, zeroing in on a single

sentence ina key text, which seems to capture the moment of shared insight. In this case, that key sentence is Aristotle's definition of rhetoric: “What is r4eloric after all? In what sense is rhetoric connected to legein? | Wav besagt Rhetorik éiberhaupt, in welchem Sinn hat dte Rhetortk es mit legein zu tun?|">! And Aristotle “replies”:

“Let rhetoric be [defined as] an ability (@ynamw) in each [particular] case to see the available means of persuasion.” In an attempt to emulate Heidegger’s deferral of his actual discussion of the definition in his 1924 lectures, much of what I have been saying in this chapter was said with the echo of that definitional sentence

in the background. I will conclude by explicitly noting some of the ways the sentence might indeed productively ground what has been said.

The Definition As noted earlier, Heidegger's only explicit reference to the Rhetoric in Being and Time is his statement that, especially in its discussion

of the emotions, the Rhetoric represents ‘the first systematic hermeneutic of everydayness of Being with one another. "55 That is, our construction of everyday life with one another is grounded in our emotional reactions to what befalls us —our “moods,” as Heidegger called them. Heidegger felt that Aristotle shared this

phenomenological insight and, further, that he elaborated with great precision and perspicacity the ways in which our basic moods “give us” our already interpreted situatedness. In Heidegger's view of Aristotle, the sections on the emotions phenomenologically describe the ongoing praxical operation of Dasein’s urge

to see and understand. Life “happens” to us through our basic “moodiness.” Our moods give us the understanding that situates us, Sometimes moving us to ecstasy and art, sometimes overwhelm-

ing us with despair and leaving us defeated. According to this view, we may say that the rhetorical situa-

tions in which we find ourselves are defined by an emotional 120 «a Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

urgency that calls for a response. The emotional urgency which, through our concern, links us to the situation also contains within it the possibilities for “being dealt with.” Those possibilities for coping show themselves by marking the salient speech that might serve as an appropriate response. Thus, in “Heidegger’s Aristotle,” the situations in which we find ourselves, which comprise the world in which we live, call us to live our particular lives by imposing themselves on us as highly charged emotional moods; and we move about in the world, becoming ourselves, by articulating responses to those moods that seem “appropriate” in our life with others.

Thus rhetoric becomes the ability to “see” the emotionally defined situations in which we find ourselves (our Befindlichkett) on at least two interconnected levels. We are able to see a situa-

tion as worthy of our care through the urgency of the mood it arouses; and we are further able to see the linguistic resources available to us in the situation to cope appropriately with that mood. But the possibilities for seeing, which rhetoric contains, go deeper still. Rhetorical seeing can reflect on itself and observe

“what is persuasive about the given” — how words move us through a given mood to a particular action. That is, rhetoric carries with it the capacity to see how we are led almost imperceptibly from life’s possibilities as they befall us, to the life we make with others through speech. Aristotle and Heidegger are both struck by the extraordinary (but also quite ordinary) sifting process through which each human being moves from the possibilities as they are given, to the path chosen as somehow “them.” Aristotle directs attention to that sifting process in his definition: rhetoric as “the ability to see the avail-

able means of persuasion in the particular case.” “The available means of persuasion” hold for us the possibilities for action with others in the particular case. Those possibilities are “given” to us with mood, along with the different ways of reading or interpreting our moods in the words of an appropriate response.

Aristotle also hints at the possibility of philosophy within this rhetorical process: the more perspicacious among us can see

more deeply into how human beings make their choices from amongst the possibilities. In Heidegger’s terms, one may behold Heidegger Reading Aristotle: The Rhetoric as Ontology = 12]

a glimpse of the meaning of Being through the careful observation of one's movement through the rhetorical process toward one’s “ownmost possibility for being.” In other words, the meaning of Being comes to human beings in a rhetorical form, and that rhetorical form lies in fragments, scattered amid the available means of persuasion in the particular case. The philosopher's gaze sees not only how the fragments might fit together as a persuasive whole, but also how that very process of fitting defines us, and reflects our relationship to Being as such. In this reading of Aristotle, it is only in the lived experience of the rhetorical process that the meaning of Being may be glimpsed. Thus ontology becomes phenomenology through the perspicacious seeing of a perspicacious seeing in each particular case what are the available means of persuasion. That is, a philosopher carefully observes the process by which he or she sifts through the given possibilities to find his or her ownmost possibility for being.

The philosopher’s careful observation of the movement of this world-creating, self-defining rhetorical process is a function of the philosopher’s own comportment toward his or her rhetorical becoming through speech. In his influential book The Halakhic Mind, the contemporary rabbinic scholar Joseph Soloveitchik sees the study of the law serving a similar mediating function: “Halakhah is the act of seizing the subjective flow and converting it into enduring and tangible magnitudes.”*° This conversion is made possible by the formally indicating structures of everyday life, as we are moved to respond to them. For Aristotle, this responsive movement is “seen” by philosophy in “what is persuasive about the given,” a seeing

that becomes a thinking of “the being in the how of its being moved.” Likewise, Soleveitchik sees in Halakhic dialectics, not a “rabbinic legalism,” but rather a concrete response to “what supremely moves us.”°° What is truly given in the giving of the law is care —the problematical preoccupations which constitute the dwelling of Dasein as being-in-the-world. In both cases, a willingness to dwell in the caring and focused seeing of the “Da” of Dasein in its everyday being-in-the-world holds within it possibilities for the most far-reaching and perspicacious seeing. As Heidegger puts it: “But the explication of Dasein 122 « Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

in its average everydayness does not give us just average structures in the sense of a hazy indefiniteness. Anything that, taken ontically, w in an average way, can be very well grasped ontologically in pregnant structures that may be structurally indistinguishable from certain ontological characteristics [Bestummungen] of an authentic Being of Dasein.”*” For Heidegger as for the rabbis, the grasping of such ontologically pregnant structures occurs when, in the course of factically “getting around,” life “gets to us

[geht mir an.” In looking into the “how” of its being moved at a particular time, Dasein glimpses the horizon of ontology: rhetoric becomes philosophy; Halakhah becomes theology.

Notes 1. Guttmann, Philovophies of Judatsm: The History of Jewtsh Philosophy from Biblical Times to Franz Rosenzwetg, 42. 2. Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, 4.

3. See notes 16 and 45, respectively, in chapter 1. 4. See Kisiel, Genesis, 259. Emphasis original. 5. Ibid. 6. Heidegger, Grundbegriffe, 110. Emphasis original. 7. Heidegger, Being and Time, 178. See also Michael J. Hyde and Craig R. Smith, “Aristotle and Heidegger on Emotion and Rhetoric: Questions of Time and Space.” 8. Heidegger, “Phenomenological Interpretations,” 359, 360-61. 9. Ibid., 358-61. 10. Ibid., 362. 11. Aside from the passage in Being and Time, 178, cited above (note 7), see also Grundbegriffe, 109-14, where Heidegger develops this connection at some length. 12. Heidegger, Grundbegrtffe, 9. 13. Grondin, /ntroduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, 92-93. 14. Heidegger, Grundbegriffe, 10.

15. Ibid., 5 16. Ibid., 11. 17. “Der urspriingliche Sinn der Rhetorik war langste verschwunden. Sofern man vergisst, nach der konkreten Funktion der aristotelischen Logik zu fragen, begibt man sich einer Grundméglichkeit, diese

so zu interpretieren, dass dabei durchsichtig wird, dass die Rhetorik nichts anderes ist als die Disziplin, in der die Selbstauslegung des Daseins Heidegger Reading Aristotle: The Rhetoric as Ontology m= 123

ausdriicklich vollzogen ist. Die Rhetortk wt nichts anderes als dve Audlegung des konkreten Davsetns, 0te Hermeneuttk des Daseind selbst.” Tbid., 110.

Emphasis original. See note 39 in chapter 1. 18. Heidegger, Being and Time, 178. 19. Heidegger, Grundbegriffe,” 122-23.

20. This particular phrasing is borrowed from Robert Dostal, “Time and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger,” 151-52. 21. Heidegger, Being and Time, 61.

22. Heidegger, “Phenomenological Interpretations,” 363. 23. For a fuller discussion of Aristotle’s view of form that is very similar to the one suggested here, see Lear, Aristotle: The Desire to Understand,

16-22. 24. Heidegger, as translated by Kisiel, in Genesis, 239.

25. Kisiel, in ibid., appendix D, presents an exceedingly helpful chronology of the different terms, “Befindlichkeut,” “hermeneutische Situ-

ation,’ and so on, that Heidegger uses to refer to Dasein’s basic situatedness. However enlightening, discussion of the interrelationship between these terms is beyond the scope of this chapter. 26. Heidegger, as translated by Kisiel, in ibid., 241. 27. Heidegger, “Phenomenological Interpretations,” 362. 28. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 20. 29. Heidegger, “Phenomenological Interpretations,” 365. 30. Ibid., 365. Emphasis original. 31. Heidegger, Grundbegriffe, 114. Heidegger's introduction seems to serve as a “formal indication” of the significance of his discussion of the

definition to follow —introduced almost halfway through the course. For more on the formally indicative function of the introduction, see “Heidegger Enthymematically Brings His Students to Philosophy” in chapter 7. 32. Aristotle, On Rhetoric, 36. 33. Heidegger, Being and Time, 178. 34. Aristotle, On Rhetoric, 37. 35. Soloveitchik, The Halakhic Mind, 85. 36. Ibid. 37. Heidegger, Being and Time, 70.

124 «w Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

Heidegger’s Teaching Philosophy as Torah Whoever is a teacher through and through takes all things seriously only in relation to his students — even himself. — Nietzsche

After all is said and done, what does “Being Jewish” have to do with “Reading Heidegger’? And what do they both have to do with ontological inquiry? The possibility of an answer emerges from the affinities we have found between how Heidegger reads the classical texts of Greek philosophy, especially Aristotle, and how Being Jewish reads the classical text that grounds Jewish tradition, namely, the Torah. These two hermeneutical “hows” I identify with the basic theme of ontology, as Heidegger reads it out of Aristotle’s Physics: “the being in the How of its Being-moved.”!

But, to serve as the basis for ontological inquiry, these two “hows” must first be brought into concert with one another — into what Heidegger calls a “correspondence”: a common way of “being de-termined, étre dwposé, by that which comes from the Being of being.”* How does such ontological common ground “show itself”?

And then, in terms of the challenge of the present project, how might that correspondence be “reshown” —convincingly displayed —in the text before you? We might begin by noting that these parallel textual “events” —

Aristotle becoming the Aristotle; the books of the Pentateuch becoming the Torah —are amenable to phenomenological investigation in the first place precisely because they are “historical.” That is, the words of the Torah and the words of Aristotle did,

in historical fact, spawn the interpretive traditions to which 125

Being Jewish and Reading Heidegger most properly belong. These traditions and the relationship they bear to their originating texts are ‘here for us as history — “effective history,” we might say, meaning their effects can be hermeneutically “traced,”

and thus repeated in the “how” of their coming to be. To this primordial movement of events, which engenders the possibility of hermeneutical repetition, Heidegger gives the name “authentic historicity’: “The past —experienced as authentic historicity —is anything but what is past. It is something to which

I can return again and again... as authentic history [the past] can be repeated in its ‘how.’”° In the 1922 “Aristotle Introduction,” Heidegger clarifies the concept:

For philosophical research, the destructive confrontation [Auseinandersetzung| with philosophy’s history [in this case,

Heidegger's reading of Aristotle] is not merely an annex for illustrating how things were earlier . . . not an opportunity for projection of entertaining world-historical perspec-

tives. The destruction is rather the authentic path upon which the present must encounter [begegnen|] itself in its own basic movements; and it must encounter itself in such a way that through this encounter, the continual question springs forth from history to face the present: to what extent

is it (the present) itself worried about the appropriations of radical possibilities of basic experiences and about their interpretations?‘ We may safely say that, during the 1920s, Aristotle is Heidegger’s most persistently thought “appropriation.” Consequently,

to ask after the how of this appropriation reaches beyond the investigation of influences that are the staple of intellectual biog-

raphy, and points to the basic structure of hermeneutical phenomenology —the coming to be of understanding through textual interpretation. Thus we might ask, as does Theodore Kisiel in a central chapter of his groundbreaking work The Genevts of Hetoeggers Being and Time: What did Heidegger find in Aristotle? As an indication of the hermeneutical relationship, Kisiel’s question echoes throughout the present work, though in a slightly 126 uw Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

different form: What does Being Jewish find in Reading Heidegger? And originarily, at least for this study: What did the Jews find in the Torah? Kisiel begins the discussion of his version of the question with the following observation: “[Heidegger] first found a remarkable affinity between his own original phenomenological researches and Aristotle’s texts, in method as well as in content.”” I think Kisiel understates the remarkableness of the affinity here. It is not simply Aristotle’s method and content, as separate but related entities, which provoke Heidegger's affinity, but, more precisely and remarkably, the way Aristotle’s method folds into the content — one might even say, “becomes the content” —such that what Kisiel calls the “dynamized facticity of life” is made present in the

texts themselves as method. In Aristotle, Heidegger founda philosopher whose way of proceeding —whose “way making” in philosophy —was as radically phenomenological as his own. I would suggest therefore, that rather than “What Did Heidegger Find in Aristotle?” Kisiel might have more aptly entitled his chapter “How Did Heidegger Find Himself in Aristotle?” I would then give a preliminary answer to the question as follows: in his reading of Aristotle, Heidegger finds himself already in the midst of philosophy, moving with Aristotle on the way to philosophy’s becoming what it is. It is this communicated possibility of a moving-with that enables Aristotle’s texts, when appropriately encountered, to open up onto a “living present,” in which the philosoph-

ical tradition may be joined as an ongoing practice. In the “Aristotle Introduction,” Heidegger reveals the underpinnings of this phenomenological sense of philosophy as a “mov-

ing-with.” As already noted, it is in the Physics where Heidegger finds the primary indication that guides his reading of Aristotle:

“The central phenomenon, whose explication is the theme of the Physics, becomes the being in the How of its Being-moved.”° Philosophy shares with physics this focus on the “How of the Beingmoved” of its object of investigation. But in the case of philosophy, at least as Heidegger conceives of Aristotle's conception of it, the object of investigation is its own “How,” as a basic movement of factical life. Insofar as philosophy separates itself —tries

to distinguish itself —from its own basic factical dynamic, it Heidegger’s Teaching: Philosophy as Torah m 127

becomes, to use Heidegger's word, “Ent-leben” (lifeless). By striving to establish some “scientific distance” from itself, philosophy cuts itself off from its own factical movement —its opportunity to become what it is.

But how might philosophy find its way into its own ongoing factical movement? That is, how can philosophy situate itself in its already being underway, without pulling back from that very being underway, and thus objectifying itself? This is precisely the “methodological problem” that Heidegger identifies as his major preoccupation in Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie.’ John Van Buren

frames this methodological problem as the search for “a type of non-objectifying language that would allow one to speak about and yet precisely preserve the ‘mystery’ in the movement of this groundless absence-permeated, incalculable and differentiating matter of thinking.”® Heidegger sees the methodological problem as linguistic, really “rhetorical” in the common, basic sense of “how to say... how to put things.” Heidegger's resolution of the problem, I will argue, is likewise rhetorical —in this case, a rhetorical approach to the problem of saying the “How of philosophy’s Being-moved” as a moment in the already being underway of that very movement.

Heidegger’s rhetorical approach to the problem of how to “speak philosophy” takes the form of the formal indication. Of course he did not call this central methodological innovation of the early 1920s “rhetorical” (that would have violated Aristotle’s advice to speakers to conceal the artful devices driving their speech), but I believe it is best understood so. To think through this possibility, we will revisit some of the central texts discussed in earlier chapters, in which Heidegger most explicitly demonstrates the essentially rhetorical work of the formal indication. At another level, I will use the formal indication as a way to read Heidegger reading Aristotle in order to account for my experience as Being Jewish / Reading Heidegger. In other words, this concluding chapter will develop its summary argument as a response to a series of formal indications I find in Heidegger’s own reading of Aristotle. But first, some further discussion regarding the how —the way of proceeding — of the formal indication itself. 128 au Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

Following the Way of the Formal Indication The formal indication begins with —is grounded in —“the thing itself,” that is, the object of investigation. The formal qualities of the object serve as the originary indication of a saying, whose form then indicates the way to a further saying, which indicates the formal way to a further saying, and so on. This way of proceeding from the object of investigation as the source of the orig-

inary indicative saying, which then spawns a series of further indications, is perhaps most clearly and succinctly realized in the late work What ls Philosophy? After establishing that “[t]he word ‘philosophy’ now speaks Greek,” Heidegger proceeds to unfold a series of formal indications of philosophy derived from the originary Greek “sayings” of philosophy as philovophia.? The first indication in our present investigation that I want to call attention to—that seems to call out for our attention —on the way to understanding philosophy in the how of its being moved is in the very formally suggestive 1922 “Aristotle Introduction,” already alluded to. Early in the essay, Heidegger says:

The fixing of the basic attitude regarding interpretation grows out of the explication of the sense of philosophical research. Its object was defined in indicative fashion av factical human Dasetn as such. The concrete specification of the

philosophical problematic is to be derived from this, its object. For this reason, a first preliminary highlighting of the specific character of factical life becomes necessary. But not only because it is the object of philosophical research, but also because philosophical research itself constitutes a determinate How of factical life... .1°

This first indication firmly fixes the direction of philosophical research as “retroflectively” focusing on its own factical life. As part of this fixing, we also see in play here another essential constituent step in the method of the formal indication. Heidegger calls this the “focus on ambiguity [Hinvtellung auf Vieldiitigke:t],” a

term suggested to him by an indication he finds in Aristotle: “pollaches legomenon. "11 Th the present case, this aspect of the formal

indication works as follows. The first indication highlights the Heidegger’s Teaching: Philosophy as Torah m 129

ambiguity between philosophy itself as both the object and the method of research. It is soon followed by another indication, which brings a focus to the ambiguity just fixed, preparing the formal way for the next indication, which will continue to drive the investigation deeper into the space of ambiguity established by the original indication. This crucial next indication I find on the following page of Heidegger’s essay. Picking up on the terms “philosophical research” and “factical life,” in the context just spoken, as defining the for-

mal space in which the investigation is to proceed, Heidegger highlights the severe tension within the ambiguity he means to focus on: “[P]hilosophical research is the explicit actualization of a basic movement of factical life and maintains itself always within factical life.”!” This indicative saying of the hermeneutical situation in which philosophy finds itself calls for an explicit and uncompromising

“facing up to” the essential character of philosophy as itself a basic movement of factical life. What is more, according to Heidegger, philosophy must view its facticity as simultaneously the

process and object of its investigation. This simultaneity provides the ambiguity wherein philosophy will find the determinate how of its own being-moved. This relationship of philosoph-

ical Dasein to its own facticity might be characterized, anachronistically to be sure, as that of “participant-observer.” Through the perspective created by this attempt to be participant-observer in the movement of its own factical life, philosophy comes to its own peculiar Umvicht, as Heidegger calls it —its take, as it were, on its own facticity. With respect to this circumspective take on its own facticity, philosophical Dasein is not unique. Dasein’s facticity generally lends itself to—really encourages —a circumspective looking at

itself, a circumspection that to a substantial degree determines the individualized form facticity takes as a particular mode of being-in-the-world. In other words, Dasein’s facticity provides the formal indication that points the way to the realization of its ownmost potentiality for being. But what is unique to philosophy —that is, how philosophical Dasein distinguishes itself from the facticity of everyday Dasein, thereby making philosophy what 150 « Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

it is—is the particular Umvicht that philosophy assumes in relationship to its own facticity as the object of its concerned dealings. In the how of its own factically being moved, philosophical Dasein radicalizes the concern that constitutes Umvicht in general to the point where its concern becomes a Bekiimmerung —a “worrisome preoccupation”!’ — with facticity. This worrisome preoccupation “overilluminates” the object of its concern, namely,

its own facticity, to the point where the how of its being moved comes to light —becomes accessible. In its becoming accessible to the Umvicht of philosophy, factical Dasein shows itself to be firmly rooted in everydayness. In its everydayness, or more precisely from within the already interpreted quality of its everydayness, Dasein begins to “compose itself” —to piece together the Umesicht within which its own factical life moves. Therefore, to maintain itself within itself as a basic movement of factical life, philosophy must rigorously keep its linkages to the facticity of its own everydayness firmly in its sight; for those linkages constitute the raw material from which philosophy derives the determinative “How’” of its own particular “Being-moved.” Here, as we saw in chapter 6, Heidegger finds perhaps his most important connecting link to the philosophical preoccupations of Aristotle, especially the Aristotle of the Rhetoric. Philosophy, for Aristotle, grounds the “How of its Being-moved” in the overillumination of the salient characteristics of everyday “Being with one another.” Once again, Heidegger's reference to the Rhetoric in Being and Time is most telling: “Contrary to the traditional orientation, according to which rhetoric is conceived as the kind of thing we ‘learn in school,’ this work of Aristotle must be taken as the first systematic hermeneutic of everydayness of Being with one another.” !4

The central focus of that hermeneutic for both Heidegger and Aristotle is, of course, moods (Aristotle devotes the entire Book II to an extended hermeneutical phenomenology of the emotions, to which the citation in Being and Time makes specific reference).

The concerned dealings through which we enact our being-inthe-world are grounded in our “bemooded attunement” — our “betimmten Gestummthett,” as Heidegger might have put it—to the

objects of our concern.!° Heidegger’s Teaching: Philosophy as Torah m 13/

But Aristotle’s exhaustive hermeneutic of the emotions in Book II of the Réetoric is not an end in itself. For while “[u]nderstanding always has a mood,” as Heidegger puts it, moods themselves

are merely a propaedeutic to speech, as Book II of the Rhetoric

on the emotions is a propaedeutic to Book III on the how of actual speaking —the rhetoric of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, so to speak.

But what is the philosophical relationship between Aristotle’s “hermeneutic of everyday life,” composed as a treatise on the emotions in Book II, and the material on the actual how of rhetor-

ical practice in the rest of the work? Is philosophy merely one bemooded Dasein in the person of the professor forming his or her speech so as to suit another bemooded Dasein, namely, that of the students? In other words, is philosophy just another “rhetor-

ical phenomenology” —just another “how,” being moved from thought to speech? The answer, of course, is yes and no, and with the infamous first sentence of the Réetoric, Aristotle indicates that that very ambiguity will serve —indeed, must serve —as the framework for his distinctive view of rhetorical practice: “Rhetoric is the anttstrophos of dialectic.” I leave the connective, which formally indicates the relationship between rhetoric and dialectic, untranslated in order to highlight the focus on ambiguity that the term evokes. Antistrophos metaphorically suggests a kind of mirroring or echoing here. 16 Following the first sentence, Aristotle goes on,

in the next few sentences, to further focus the ambiguity of the antistrophos (or perhaps I should say, “ambiguates the focus”) by elaborating the ways in which rhetoric and dialectic proceed in parallel voices. When we recognize that the text before us itself represents a series of lectures spoken by a philosopher about rhetoric, the antistrophos in the first sentence widens its focus to take in the more general ambiguity between rhetoric and philosophy.

What follows is in the form of a speech —albeit a systematic and rather formalistic one —a speech that is simultaneously phi-

losophy, at least insofar as it is written by a philosopher who begins by claiming, “Rhetoric is the antistrophos of dialectic.” This

confluence of suggestive cues may be read as indicating that, in what follows, philosophy will show itself as a “rhetoric” —a rhetoric characterized by its own peculiar way of bringing thought 152 «w Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

to speech. As we will see, this rhetorical process of bringing thought to speech is a necessary concomitant of philosophical Dasein as being-in-the-world. And so, we may say, that through its essential “expressedness [Awsgedriickheit|” as rhetoric, philosophy shows itself to be a basic movement of factical life.

But this showing, though related to the rhetoric of Dasein’s everyday factical being-with, is not itself isomorphically identical with everyday speech, the apparent subject of the text. On the one hand, Aristotle’s own speech, the “rhetoric” of the Rhetoric,

so to speak, is and must be prepared to think of itself as a species of everyday speech. But at the same time, its speech must distinguish itself as philosophy in the “How of its own Being-moved.” Tread Heidegger in his 1924 lecture course on Aristotle’s Rhetoric as performing the same delicate phenomenological dance in the space between philosophy and rhetoric that Aristotle performs

in the Réeforic itself. Both texts uncover and disclose the distinctive how of philosophy's being moved in and through the formal indications each takes from its Umsicht on Dasein’s speech as everyday factical being-with, and then turns into verbal expression as philosophical Dasein.!” Furthermore, the saying of philosophy in Heidegger’s course is itself a reading of the formal indications of Aristotle’s Rhetoric —a philosophical Umsicht presented

as a formally indicative perspective on a philosophical Umvicht. A parallel look at the all-important beginnings of the two, as indicating the formal frame for what follows, will serve to bring the mirroring dance of the two texts into ambiguous focus.

Aristotle’s Rhetoric as a Formal Indication As already noted, Aristotle begins his work with the claim that rhetoric is the antistrophos of dialectic. As George Kennedy observes

in his translation and commentary on the Rhetoric, this first sentence, by its form and its relationship to what follows, announces itself as an enthymeme.!® That is, the first sentence of Aristotle’s Rbetoric itself exemplifies —embodies really —the central trope in Aristotle’s whole system. To further focus the ambiguity here, before we have any further indications of what the enthymeme is, Aristotle asserts a few sentences later that “the enthymeme is Heidegger’s Teaching: Philosophy as Torah m 133

the ‘body’ of persuasion.” Yet all we have at this point to help us understand Aristotle's meaning is the first sentence, apparently serving as an exemplar of that embodiment, thus “formally indicating” to us bow the enthymeme “is the body of persuasion.”

One way of interpreting this indication would be to say, “The enthymeme ts as the enthymeme Joes.” So what does this first sentence “do”? By focusing on a significant ambiguity —in this case, the relationship between rhetoric and dialectic (may I now say “philosophy”?) —this first sentence

provokes the student into a questioning, a hermeneutical questioning, 19 if you will, thus joining Aristotle in his inquiry. But this questioning is not completely open-ended. The term used to focus

the ambiguity of the relationship between rhetoric and dialectic, namely, “antiwtrophos,” goes against the conventional view of the

relationship by suggesting the possibility of parity, even identity between the two. Perhaps rhetoric is —or has the capacity to be —philosophy, but only if it can reach its fullest potential as a dynamw, its “arete,” one might say.

In this reading, the revolutionary thesis of the work is that “philosophical rhetoric” —the saying of philosophy —1s rhetoric

par excellence, that is, rhetoric in its most fully realized form, rhetoric in its arete. As a consequence of this opening claim, Aristotle (and later Heidegger) must assume a weighty pretense indeed, but one that becomes necessary when philosophers take on their own facticity as a subject. As itself a basic movement of factical

life, philosophy must display the how of its being moved, its distinctive bemooded attunement, in the rhetorical quality —that is, in the effect — of its own speaking. Heidegger suggests that this “pretense” is a requirement of philosophy, in a key passage in his course on Plato’s Sophwt: “In opposition to the sophist, the dialec-

tician and the philosopher are determined by the fact that they take that about which they speak seriously, they intend their speech to bring about an understanding of the content, whereas the sophist pays no attention to the substantive content of his speech but is simply concerned with the speech itself, its apparent reasonableness and its brilliance.””” Putting the claim in phenomenological terms, we might say that the seriousness of philosophical intent would show itself in 154 «w Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

the speech of the philosopher, by means of the capacity of the speech to make evident —to “show” in a way that can be clearly seen —that the speaker goes beyond the mere appearance of brillance and reasonableness to truly bring about an understanding of the matter at hand, which, in this case, is that rhetoric is the antistrophod of philosophy. It is through the use of the enthymeme, as the rhetorical embodiment of its argument, that rhetoric shows itself to be the antistrophos of philosophy. Through the enthymeme,

rhetoric rises above the level of “mere rhetoric” taught in the handbooks that Aristotle criticizes, and achieves a level of signif-

icance parallel to that reached through dialectic. Understood in this way, the first sentence of Aristotle’s Rhetoric becomes a formal indication of the hermeneutical reach that is possible through the dynamus of rhetoric —a dynamus that philosophy shares with everyday speech. Here Aristotle’s conceptualization of rhetoric begins to assume philosophical significance and opens up a space wherein the how of philosophy’s being moved may be conceived as a distinctive rhetorical phenomenology, through a distinctively philosophical deployment of the enthymeme. More specifically, in philosophical speech, the enthymeme will

project the questioning that is the essence of philosophy on its way of speaking. Philosophical being-with is communicated as a “shared focus” on the ambiguity of philosophical Dasein’s facticity, embodying both the object of its investigation and its method for investigating that object in its speech. In short, what Heidegger finds in Aristotle is a being-with appropriate to philosophy. In his book, The Hermeneutics of Original Argument, Christopher

Smith notes this communicated being-with as the distinguishing mark of the enthymeme as over against the dialectical syllogism: “We could say accordingly that the dialectical syllogism is already aimed at the intellect of someone looking on, a theoretes, whereas

the rhetorical enthymeme is aimed at the practical will of someone participating in what is happening. The one seeks to bring someone to the point of saying, ‘Yes, I see this is so,’ whereas the other seeks . . . to move someone to the point of saying ‘Yes, I will do this.’”*! Through the enthymematic connection offered them in the first sentence, Aristotle asks his students to join with him in the philoHeidegger’s Teaching: Philosophy as Torah m 155

sophical work of the Rhetoric, namely, to throw into question the relationship between philosophy and rhetoric as traditionally conceived, and to reconstitute that relationship as an antistrophoos. This reconstitution will take the form of philosophy as a virtuoso rhetorical performance, and will emerge enthymematically through the students’ (and subsequent readers’) participation in the construction of the argument. Once again, the enthymeme in the first sentence is as it does. The first sentence simultaneously throws into question the proposition “Rhetoric is the antistrophos of dialectic,” even as it suggests that the questionability of the proposition

will itself be resolved through the capacity of the text to “make it happen.” That is, the text will rhetorically enact (and thereby “show’) rhetoric to be the antistrophos of dialectic. As is true of a dance or choral stanza, meaning will be indicated through the evocative movement of the dance itself. In other words, the way in which rhetoric is the antwtrophos of philosophy will not be delineated explicitly. Instead, it will be “shown” — formally indicated —

in the text to follow. We see here a parallel between the rhetori-

cal work of Aristotle's enthymeme and Heidegger’s formal indication. Both utilize the possibilities of being-with, offered by the rhetorical dimension of language, to guide the “student” in seeing what is shown in the words of the text — words carefully chosen to point beyond themselves to a possibility of thought that cannot be contained in a conventional formulation.

Heidegger Enthymematically Brings His Students to Philosophy Let us now look at the opening moments of the 1924 lectures to get a sense of the parallel enthymematic dance performed by Heidegger on the first day of the course. The course was officially titled “Basic Concepts of Aristotle’s Philosophy.” But, as was his wont, Heidegger begins by enacting the title as an “erasure.” He puts a Derridean line through it, thus indicating to his students not only that the course would not proceed according to the title, but that such a project would not even be appropriate to the teaching of philosophy as he conceives of it: “The lecture does not have

any sort of a philosophical purpose, but rather it deals with the 156 «w Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

comprehension of the basic concepts in their conceptuality. The purpose is philologic; it intends to make the reading of philosophers a more common practice.”**

The way to properly philosophize being indicated here is a practice that Heidegger claims is “not philosophy,” but rather “philology” —a practice that would seem to be a way of attending to the surface contours of the words themselves. Yet this approach is intended to yield access to the deepest possible mean-

ing of the words — going deeper even than the concepts themselves, to reach the “concepts in their conceptuality.” Imagine, if you will, the students coming to class the first day,

expecting to hear a professor with a growing reputation as an expert on Aristotle teach them Aristotle’s basic concepts. Their expectation is warranted by what seems like a rather conventional and straightforward course title. The reasonable flow of this expectation, from title to course, is immediately interrupted by Heidegger. He turns the title back on itself as a questioning — an interrogation of Aristotle's basic concepts. The so-called basic concepts are merely the face —the sur-face — of the true matter for thinking. They serve to indicate the way for the questioning that constitutes the real work of thinking-with-Aristotle. The professor (in cooperation with the students) means to “ask after” the true “Grund” of Aristotle’s “Grundbegriffen” —to seriously bring these basic concepts to understanding by “interrogating” them in their conceptuality. The path of the interrogation is further indicated by Heidegger's name for the enterprise: not “philosophy,”

but “philology.” One might borrow from the etymology of the Greek and render philology as philo-logos —loving the logos —lov-

ing words for what they do. With this indication, rhetoric again comes into ambiguous focus.

Heidegger surprises his students by taking an obvious and accepted view of the subject and turning it back on itself as a question. As Aristotle asked, “Might not rhetoric be the antustrophos of dialectic?” Heidegger asks, “Might the fundamental concepts in philosophy be found in their ‘conceptuality’?” And, as we philologically trace the concepts through their saying back to their conceptuality, might we not find ourselves observing the rhetorical work of philosophy in its loving attention to its own Heidegger’s Teaching: Philosophy as Torah m 137

words? Heidegger's “conceptuality,” like Aristotle's “antistrophos” serves to highlight an ambiguity (Vieldiitigke:t) between philosophy and rhetoric —an ambiguity whose purpose it is to focus the direction of the inquiry.

And so Heidegger will not present the students with Aristotle’s basic concepts as an already completed and packaged discourse. That might be philosophy as usual, but for Heidegger, that would be philosophy as sophistry — presenting the students with “merely brilliant speech” —a display that gives the appearance of teaching Aristotle's basic concepts, without seriously working to “bring about understanding.” Here Heidegger distinguishes himself from the merely brilliant sophist, just as Aristotle did, by

the rhetorical seriousness of his intent. But how can Heidegger as rhetor-teacher get the students to take on the seriousness of this project with him in order to bring about its successful completion as philosophical discourse? He proceeds by laying down a few “prerequisites [Voraussetzungen|” for the course as philosophical project. His first move in this direction is to equate the seriousness he wishes the students to take on with the predominant academic value of the day, namely, science. He tells them “that conceptuality makes up the substance of all scientific research, and conceptuality is not merely an acquired technique [Scharfsinn|, which is to say, that the one who had chosen sctence had taken over the responstbility for the concept (a matter that is

lost today).”*° Heidegger then multiplies the ambiguities already introduced by his “philological,” now “scientific” orientation to philosophy,

by adding religious overtones to the project —presaging what would later be called “the piety of thinking.” Heidegger imposes a weighty moral dimension to the assumption of “scientific” respon-

sibility he has just placed on his students, telling them “that we are all not so advanced that there is nothing more that we need to be told, that én vome regard, something w still wrong with us [dads wir alle noch nicht go fortgeschritten sind, dass wir und nichts mehr héitten sagen

zu lassen, 0add ed Mat uns in irgendeiner Hinsicht nicht stimmt] v4

And finally he deepens the enthymematic participation he asks of his students in taking on this religio-scientific orientation by thrusting it very personally upon them: “Science is not 1358 wu Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

an occupation, nora trade, nora pleasure, but rather the podstbility of human existence. This is not something that one lands upon by chance or coincidence, but rather it carries within itself

certain prerequisites, which one must possess, insofar as one moves earnestly within the environment of that which is meant by scientific research.””° By making a choice — by taking on a certain set of commitments — the students, together with Heidegger, will realize a possibility of existence.*° And so the enthymematic rhetoric of Heidegger’s teaching provides the “Bidoung” tor philosophical Dasein’s

realization of its ownmost potentiality for being. This occurs by means of a “complicating” of the basic hermeneutical structure of communication. In the course of this complication, Mlittetlung (everyday communication) becomes a philosophically thought Mitdasein —a distinctively philosophical being-with which severely

tests the capacity of the participants to cooperatively construct a discourse that will amount to more than “mere rhetoric.” Such a discourse might properly be called “instruction” —a saying rhetorically shaped by the effect it means to have on the student, namely, to seriously communicate an understanding (ein Sichverstehen). This rhetorical enactment of a possibility of being-with resembles the seriously committed pedagogical rhetoric which characterizes the “being-with’” of the Torah, whose Hebrew root means to see, to show, and to teach. The Torah is a seeing that shows itself in speech as the most serious instruction — speech, whose value is measured not by its apparent reasonableness or philosophical bril-

lance, but solely by its capacity to bring the hermeneutical force of its seeing to language —to “bring about an understanding of the

content’ it offers. The burden of its content is truth —truth as it is displayed —laid out (/egei) in the words of the text. These words are said in such a way that the seeing they show may be repeated in its how. As such, the words constitute a moment of “authentic historicity” —a teaching that contains within it the seeds of being

taught again, as if for the first time, in each succeeding generation. The possibility of this repetition gives the words a sort of “materiality,” which the text of the Torah suggests is there in the way God's other acts in history are present.~” Of course those acts

themselves, embodying the relationship between God and His Heidegger’s Teaching: Philosophy as Torah m 139

people, cannot be repeated; but the words formally indicating those acts can. And so J ews, in each generation, are commanded

to repeat the words as an instruction (indication) to their children. As spoken instruction, the words carry the “message and tidings” of God’s acts in history, which embody His relationship to Israel, to each successive generation of Jews —thus constituting the repeatable how of Being Jewish. Being Jewish is thus set in motion as a relationship to God's words inscribed in the biblical text.** I again quote the verse that has become a sort of thematic chorus in the present work: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words which I command you this day shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children .. .” (Deuteronomy 6:5—7 ) 29 Israel’s love of God —the core of their relationship to Him —

is to be repeated as an ongoing reenactment of God's original instruction to Israel, the spoken instruction of a spoken instruction, the Torah of God’s Torah. For the rabbis to faithfully transmit an understanding of the Torah, they had to open their students to the transformative power

of God’s Word: that is, to teach “with the serious intent to be understood.” To understand God's Word is to obey it; to obey it is to truly teach it. One undergoes the transformative power of the Word by teaching it diligently. Heidegger “thinks” this same connection in regard to the rela-

tionship between philosophy and teaching, perhaps most poignantly, in his reading of Nietzsche's Zarathustra.°" Zarathustra addresses his audience as what Heidegger calls a “an advocate [ein Fiirsprecher|.”°! He is a spokesman on behalf of what truly

addresses his hearers, what they must hear in order to become who they are. One is reminded of Plato’s noble rhetoric, “which is inscribed with genuine knowledge in the soul of the learner. "52 Zarathustra teaches the Ubermensch by being an advocate for “the one thing that always and above all else speaks to human beings.”*?

In aremarkable letter to Engelbert Krebs in 1919, Heidegger similarly characterizes his own call to philosophy: “TI believe myself to have the inner call to philosophy. By fulfilling this call in research

and teaching, I wish to do all that is in my power for the eternal 140 «a Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

vocation of the inner man —and only for this —and so to justify

my existence and my work itself before God.” In his reading of Aristotle, of Nietzsche, and ultimately of his

own call to philosophy, Heidegger sees the instruction of the “Dasein within” as the driving force behind the discourse of philosophy. Herein lies the essential link between Being Jewish and Reading Heidegger: what might be called the “rhetorical hermeneutics of Torah” —the study of God’s Word enacted as diligent instruction —defines the Being-with of Being Jewish, simultaneously as

both a response to God's call, and an obligation to one's fellow Jews, especially one’s progeny or one's students. Similarly, in Heidegger’s hermeneutics: “The answer [to the call of Being] is not a [simple] reply (2 et pas une réponse), [but] rather the co-respondence (/a correspondence) which responds to the Being of being.”

Heidegger explains further, “We find the answer to the question ‘What is philosophy?’ not through historical assertions about the definitions of philosophy, but through conversing with that which has been handed down to us as the Being of being.”* This ongoing conversation is joined by Heidegger, through a rhetorical-hermeneutical reenactment —a teaching with the serious intent to be understood, one might even say “sacred instruction” — of the originary words of philosophy as “spoken in Greek.”

Notes 1. Heidegger, “Phenomenological Interpretations,” 373. 2. Heidegger, What ls Philosophy?, 77. 3. Heidegger, Concept of Time, 19-20. The related term “effective history’ is Gadamer’s. See Gadamer, Truth and Method, 267-74.

4. Heidegger, “Phenomenological Interpretations,” 371. 5. Kisiel, Genests, 228.

6. Heidegger, “Phenomenological Interpretations,” 373. 7. Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung, 110. 8. Van Buren, “The Ethics of Formale Anzeige in Heidegger,” 157. 9. Heidegger, What ls Philosophy?, 29-35. 10. Heidegger, “Phenomenological Interpretations,” 360. 11. Ibid., 361. Aristotle's phrase may be taken here as indicating the rich and suggestive ambiguity that characterizes the “basic words” at the core of philosophy. The phrase also presages the quotation from Heidegger’s Teaching: Philosophy as Torah a /4/

Aristotle, so important to Heidegger's view of the relationship between rhetoric and hermeneutics, with which he ends What ls Philosophy?: “To on legetat pollachos,” which Heidegger translates here as “Existence is revealed in many ways.” Ibid., 97. 12. Ibid., 361. 13. Ithank Theodore Kisiel for his help in appreciating the suggestive possibilities of this translation of Bekdimmerung. 14. Heidegger, Being and Time, 178.

15. Although the English and, I believe, the German terms are my inventions, they are intended to echo Heidegger’s way of speaking — I hope appropriately. 16. George Kennedy observes in his commentary: “In Greek choral lyric, the metrical pattern of a strophe or stanza is repeated with different words in the antwtrophe.” Kennedy, in Aristotle, On Rhetoric, 28-29, n. 2. 17. In chapter 6, I argue that this reflection of philosophy on its own rhetorical activity is made possible, according to Aristotle, by the fact that our rhetorical capacity not only “sees the available means of persuasion in the particular case,” but is also capable of recognizing “what is persuasive about the given.” See final paragraph of “Care: From the Ontology of Seeing to the Phenomenology of Speaking” in chapter 6. 18. Kennedy, in Aristotle, On Rhetoric, 29, n. 3.

19. In a compelling section entitled “The Hermeneutical Priority of the Question,” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 325, argues: “We cannot have

experiences without asking questions.” My interpretation of Aristotle and Heidegger in this chapter owes much to that insight. 20. Heidegger, Platow “Sophist,” 150. 21. Smith, Ze Hermeneutics of Original Argument: Demonstration, Dtalectic, Rhetoric, 28.

22. “Die Vorlesung hat gar keine philosophische Abzweckung, es handelt sich um das Verstandnis von Grundbegriffen in ihrer Begrifflichkeit. Die Abzweckung ist philologtsch, sie will das Lesen von Philosophen etwas mehr in Ubung bringen.” Heidegger, Grundbegréffe, 5. See note 39 in chapter 1. 23. “dass dte Begrtfflichkett die Substanz jeder wtssenschaftlichen Forschung

ausmacht, dass Begrifflichkeit keine Sache von Scharfsinn ist, d. h. daws der, der 0te Wissenschaft gewahlt hat, de Verantwortlichket fiir den Begriff tiber-

nommen hat (eine heute abhanden gekommene Sache).” Ibid., 6. 24. Ibid., 5. 25. “Wissenschaft ist kein Beruf, kein Erwerb, kein Vergniigen, sondern die Méglichkeit der Extstenz dei Menschen, nicht etwas, in das man 142 « Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger

zufallig hineingeraten ist, sondern sie tragt in sich bestimmte Voraussetzungen, die man aber mitzubringen hat, sofern man sich im Ernat im Umkreis dessen bewegt, was wissenschaftliche Forschung besagt.” Ibid., 6. 26. I see a similarity here between Heidegger's “appeal” to the scientists in his class and what is arguably Aristotle’s purpose in the introduction to the Réetoric, namely, to “connect” his subject to philosophy. In each case, the teacher suggests to the students that the practice being

taught is not only appropriate to what they do, but perhaps represents the unique opportunity to understand their practice in its “arelé.” 27. Indeed, along with the command to “diligently teach [the words] to your children,” Jews are also commanded to “bind them as a sign on your hand and let them serve as a symbol on your forehead” (Deuteronomy 6:8). The rabbis take this command “at its word”; and so the words literally “become material” and are placed inside one of the small boxes of the phylacteries (tftllin), which is positioned on the forehead. The sign of one of God's names is made with a strap wrapped around one’s hand. 28. As Levinas, Beyond the Verse, 117, puts it: “All relation of the believer

to the revealed God admittedly begins in his relation to Scripture.” 29. See note 16 in chapter 1. 30. Heidegger, “Who Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?” in Metzuche, vol. 2: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, 211-33.

31. Ibid., 211 32. Plato, Phaedrus, 70. 33. Heidegger, “Who Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?” in Metzuche, vol. 2: Eternal Recurrence, 212.

34. Heidegger to Krebs, January 9, 1919, as translated by Kisiel, in Genests, 76.

35. Heidegger, “What Is Philosophy?,” 69, 71.

Heidegger’s Teaching: Philosophy as Torah m 1435

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Index

Abraham, 82 respect to...” (1922 ms.), 11,

Alethéta, 4, 61, 78 115, 117-19, 124nn27, 29,

Alienation (from a text), 31, 36 126-27, 129-31; Physics, 13, 125,

Allegory, 37 127; Rhetoric, xxii-xxill, xxviin27, Ambiguity: focus on (Hintellung auf 40n6, 47, 71n65, 107, 109-10,

Vieloiitigkett), 129-30, 132-34, 113-14, 120, 131-36

137-38 Augustine, Saint, 6, 10, 37-38,

Appropriation, 63, 83, 120 42nn38, 39, 47, 51, 53, 56, 58, 61,

Arendt, Hannah, xvii, 1 64-65, 107n78; On Christian DocAntistrophod, 132-38, 142n16 trine, 47-50

Areté (excellence, virtue), 118, 134 Audience, xxi, 30-31, 33-36, 38, 44,

Aristotle, xv, xxi, 4, 28; concept of 47, 50, 73, 79 form. See Form: Aristotle’s con- Authentic historicity, 20, 126, 139

cept of; “Grundbegriffe der...” Authentic reading, xviii (1924 course), xxu, xxvnll, Authenticity, 39, 58, 60, 67, 69732,

112-14, 120, 123nn11, 14-17, 100, 122 124nn19, 31, 133-34, 136-39, Author, 33, 39, 73, 75, 79, 81, 83 142nn22—25; Heidegger and, 7-8, Authority, xvi, xxii, xxivn4, 22, 38,

10, 16, 110-12, 116, 120-21, 61, 65, 72, 83, 89, 101-102 126-28, 131; Heidegger’s reading Awakening, 63, 97-98 of, xvi, 3, 12, 14, 16, 110-12, 117-20, 126, 128; “Phenomeno- Baste Problems of Phenomenology (1927

logical interpretations with course), xxvi718 153

Beckett, Samuel, 72-73, 75-77, Conceptuality. See philosophical con-

84-86, 108710 cepts

Befindlickkett, 117, 121, 124n25 Concealment, 47, 78 Being, 78, 94, 105-106, 110, 112, Conscience: call of, 20, 61, 6878, 93 115-16, 122; call of, xxi, 47, 61, Creation: biblical story of, 79-80 93, 95, 141; in-the-world, 11, 18, Dahlstrom, Daniel, xxvn16, 26736,

28-29, 55, 113-14, 116, 122, 130; 71n56 “Being Jewish,” xx, xxi, xxii,

xxi, 8-11, 13, 16-18, 21-25, 66, Dasein, xix, 11, 15, 19-20, 122-24, 109, 125-27, 140-41; language 25n5, 90, 100, 110, 114, 123, 129;

of, xix, 5, 98; -with, xxii, 8, as being-in-the-world: vee being23-24, 29, 56, 98, 110, 114, in-the-world; as being-with: vee

119-20, 133, 135-36, 139; being-with; as transcendent moved, 13, 21, 25228, 26n29, 123, being: vee transcendence

125, 127-28, 131-32, 134 Derrida, Jacques, xxivn4, 6, 136 Being and time, 26nn38, 39, 43, 40n3, Desire to understand, 52—53, 117

65, 68nn85, 6, 8, 10, 69n29, Dialectic, 27, 47, 50, 119; and rheto-

70nn48, 53, 131, 142n14 ric, 132, 134 Beiner, Ronald, 406 Diligence (Augustine's dlige), 6, 10, Bektimmerung (troubling preoccupa- 140 tion), 3, 8-9, 18, 26740, 131 Discipleship, xxi Blochmann, Elizabeth, 57 Discourse (Rede), 55—56, 58, 75, 119 Burke, Kenneth, 10773, 118, 124228 —Discoveredness (Entdeckheit), 23—24

Burning bush, 43-45, 83-85 Dreyfus, Hubert, 62, 70252 Dynamus (ability) of philosophy,

Call (Ruf), 20, 46, 58-59, 103-104; 114; of rhetoric, 114, 118, 120,

Heidegger's, 140-41; Moses,’ 134-35 43-44; of conscience: vee con-

science, call of Eliade, Mircea, xvii

Caputo, John, xxivn4, 2, 4-5, 7, 65 Ein-Sof, xvii Care, 20, 21, 122; God’s, 109-110, 118 | Eckhardt, Meister, 58

Cavell, Stanley, 4026 Effective history, 120 “Christian Theologian”: Heidegger Eloquence, 38, 64-65, 72, 74, 77,

as, 15-18, 23, 53, 64 104-105; Heidegger's, 98, 101; Circumspection. See Umetcht Scriptural, 48-49

Commentary, 31 Emotions, 113, 120-21, 131 Communication, 8—10, 29-30, 44, Enthymeme, 133-36, 139

49-50, 56, 61, 118, 139 Eretgnis, 54, 84 Community, 22, 28, 61, 66-67, 73, Exegesis, 94

119-20 Everyday (Altaglichkeit), xxii, 60,

Concept of Time (1924 Marburg lec- 109-10, 112, 114, 116, 123,

ture), 262n42, 44, 126, 14173; 130-32; speech, 107, 115, 120,

HMtstory of The (1925 course), 135 26247, 28, 40nnd, 7 Expressedness (Awsgedriickhett), 133 154 «= Index

Facticity, x1ix-xx, 2475, 56, 100, Halakhah (Jewish law), 109, 111,

130-31, 134; relation to ontology 122 14-18, 20, 23. See also Philoso- Hebrew, 6, 85-88, 106, 139 phy: as a basic movement of facti- Heimat (homeland), 20; Torah as, 21

cal life Heraclitus, 64

Falling (Verfallenheit), 60, 99, 100, Hermeneutical experience, xxi, 45,

119 50, 52-53, 61-62, 64; intimacy,

Forgetfulness (of being), 63, 98-99 xvu, 10, 12-13, 94; performance Form: Aristotle’s concept of, 116 72-74, 94; intuition, 53—54; situa“Formally indicating rhetorical,” xvi, tion, 28-31, 60, 99, 103, 113,

xvi, xxiv25, 7, 111 124n25, 130

Formal indication (formale Anzeige), Hermeneutics: in Augustine, 47—50;

x1x, xxi, xxv716, 8-9, 16, 22, 59, of everyday life: vee Everyday;

61-63, 71n56, 95, 103-104, Gadamer’s, xvi-xvii, 22, 27, 124731, 128-30, 133; in Aristo- 30-32, 35, 52; Jewish, xvii, xx,

tle’s Rhetoric, 133-36 xxl, 4; rabbinic, xx, 11, 34; and Forestructure: hermeneutical, 28, rhetoric, 27—32, 37-40, 43,

112 46-47, 61, 64, 73, 94, 96, 141n11

Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics History. See Authentic historicity,

(Heidegger’s 1929-30 course), effective history

12, 19, 25224, 26n41 Homesickness, 19

Horen (hearing), 56, 86, 89, 94-99,

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, xvi, xvii, 102-104 xxii, 22; hermeneutics of: vee Husserl, Edmund, 54, 69723 hermeneutics: Gadamer’s; view of | Hyde, Michael, 27, 29, 40nn1, 2 Heidegger, xxvn8, 62-63, 68712, 98, 100-101; view of rhetoric, 27, Inauthenticity, 100-101

530-31, 57 Ineffability: of divine rhetoric, Genesis, 79-82 51-52

Gift, 17, 46, 57, 104-105, 115 Interpretation, 28-33, 37, 39, 57, 62 God: as “author” of Scripture, 49; Invention: rhetorical, 32—33, 38,

name of xx, 44, 51, 84-86; love 75-75, 81, 83 of, 7, 10, 140; Moses’ encounter with, 86-88; speech of, 20, 51, 79; = Jews, 2, 73, 127, 140

word of, xvii-xviil, xx, 45, 62, Jonas, Hans, xxivn4

101-102, 109, 140-41 Judaism, xv, 5, 10 Greek philosophy, xix, 36, 107, 125, Judgment, xvii, 39, 4026, 71265 129, 141; Heidegger and, 6, 10,

24 Kabbalah, xvi, xviii Grondin, Jean, 112 Kant, Immanuel, 114 Guttmann, Julius, 12371 Kennedy, George, 133, 142716, 18 Kisiel, Theodore, xxivn5, xxvin7,

Habilitationsshrift: Heidegger's, 25n15, 26235, 69nn23—28, 37,

xxivn4, 53, 63, 70238 124nn24—26, 126-27, 142713

Index mw 155

Language, 32-33, 78-79, 82, 93, Parataxis, 94, 104 97-98, 105, 120; experience of, Parmenides: Heidegger’ reading of, 64; as house of being, 58, 98-90; 41n21, 46, 64, 94, 103-104 originary, 56, 105, 107, 10829, Particularity, 115-19, 121

141 Paul, Saint, 37

Levinas, Emmanuel, xx, 89, 123n2, Perelman, Chaim, 40417213, 72

143228 Persuasion, 27—28, 31, 120-22, 134

Limits, 72, 75, 77, 79, 82-84, 8&6, Phenomenology, xxi, 11-12, 16,

89-90 61-62, 90, 101, 116, 122;

Linguisticality, 33-35, 90 hermeneutical, 7, 22, 46, 53, Logos, 46, 79, 81, 89, 137 58-59; rhetorical, 93-95, 101, Léwith, Karl, 15-17, 23, 26730, 63 115, 132, 135; of Religion (Heidegger’s 1920-21 course),

Mac Intyre, Alasdair, 73 xxvi17, 9

Maimonides, xv, xxi 1 Philo, xvi, 36-37, 42740

das Man, 60 Philology, 137

Metaphysics, 78, 90, 99-100; of Philosophia (Greek for philosophy),

Aristotle, 117-18 6, 26229, 129

Midrash, 34, 101 Philosophical concepts, 12; concepMitetnandersein, Mitsein. See Being- tuality of, 137-38

with Philosophical: hermeneutics, 32, 38,

“Monolingualism,” 6 43, 67n1; practice, Heidegger’s Moods. See Emotions view of, xv, xxvii, 10-12, 60, Moses, xv, xxii, 38; at the “burning 96-97, 111, 115-20, 127-31, bush, 43-45, 51, 83-86; face-to- 136—39

face with God, 87-88 Philosophy: as a basic movement of Mysticism: Heidegger and, 53-54, 58 factical life, 115-17, 122, 127-34; end of, 72, 75, 77-78; Greek: vee

Naming, 79-82, 84-85, 89 Greek philosophy; language of Narrative, 67, 72, 82; crisis in, 83; 99-100; and rhetoric, 115—17, limits of: vee Limits; logic of, 122, 132, 136; and science,

85-88 138-39, 143n26

National Socialism: Heidegger and, Physts, 81

1, 66 Plato, 4, 27, 39, 47, 50, 60, 91, 119

Neitzsche, Friedrich, 17, 39-40, Platos Sophtst (Heidegger's 1924-25 42n43, 113, 125, 140-41; perspec- course), 91, 134, 138, 142720

tivism of, 39 Pollachus legomenon. See ambiguity, focus on

Onto-theology, 56, 64 Poetry, 79-81, 83, 88-89

Origen, 42240 Pre-Socratics, xv, xxl, 47, 52, 64, Ontology, xix, 8, 13-14, 17-18, 20, 113 22, 27-29, 32, 56, 64, 109-10, Primordiality. See rhetoric:

113, 115, 122-23, 125 primordial

Otto, Rudolph, xvii, xxivn4 Prophet, 105-106 156 «= Index

Public realm (te Offenlichkeit), 60, Seeing: as an aspect of philosophical

101, 119 practice, 86, 89, 117-18, 120-22

Rabbis, 66-67, 72, 94, 101-103, 105, Scholem, Gershom, xxiii7 108-11, 123, 140; and biblical “Sichverstehen” (mutual understand-

interpretation, 11, 91n1 ing), 8, 66

Rahner, Karl, xxivn4 “Shema” (including “you shall love Reading Heidegger: problem of, 53, ... ),4, 7, 10, 140

61, 64-66 Silence: Heidegger’s on Jews, 2, 11

Religion: experience of, 17-19; Hei- Sinai: revelation at Mount, 21, 54,

degger’s view of, xxva11, 15; fun- 83, 102

damentality of, 23 Situation-I (das vituations-Ich), 58, Renunciation 75, 77-78, 83, 88-89 70n40 Revelation, 20, 34, 43-45, 54, 78, Smith, Christopher, 135, 142221

835-88, 102, 106 Smith, Craig. See Hyde, Michael Rhetoric: Aristotle’s definition of, Socrates, 47, 50, 100 113-14, 120-22, 14217; Heideg- = Soloveitchek, Joseph, 122, 124735 ger's view of, 114, 120, 128; and Speech: divine. See “word of God”;

dialectic: vee dialectic and rheto- Heidegger’s xxii, 47, 61, 93-95, ric; function of 28-30, 34, 36, 44, 100-101, 104—107 51, 67n3, 93; Hemeneutics and: Der Spiegel: interview with Heideg-

yee Hemeneutics: rhetoric and; ger, 96-97, 107n8 primordial, 46, 50, 55-56, 59, 61, Spinoza, Benedict de, 35—36 6876; of Aristotle: vee Aristotle, Story. See Narrative

Rbetorte of Subjectivity: hemeneutical problem

Rhetorical: criticism, 10772; of, 11-15 hermeneutics, 66; power, 72, 74,

78, 89-90, 106. See alio Word: Talmud, 72, 109 power of; restraint, 60; situation, Teaching: Heidegger’s, xxii—xxiii,

28-35, 37-38, 103, 119-20. See 94-101, 125-26, 129-31, 136-41;

also Hermeneutical situation Aristotle’s, 112-15 Ricoeur, Paul, xxivn4, 6, 10, 33 Technique, 90-91

Rilke, Rainer Maria, xvii Textuality, 33-35, 38 Rorty, Richard, 5, 62-63, 105 T’fillin (phylacteries), 143226 Theology, 109, 123

Sacred texts, xv, xvi, xix, xxi, 11; Thing (matter) itself (de Sache velbst),

interpretation of, 29-32, 36, 38, 78, 129

57, 66 Thrown-ness (Geworfenhett), 115

Sacredness (of sacred texts), 32—34, Torah, xv, xvi, Xvil, XVill, XX, XXIl,

36, 38, 51-53 67, 72, 101, 106, 109, 125, 127,

Sage: Heidegger as rabbinic, 139; as “Heimat”: see Heimat, as

105-107 Torah; meditation on the words

Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 57 of, 101-102, 110; oral, 102; as Science and philosophy. See philoso- sacred text, 10-11, 21, 34-35;

phy and science study of, xxi, 14, 21-22, 110-11 Index mw 157

Tradition, 22, 24, 32, 35, 47, 52, 75, Unthought thought, 78, 86, 88, 96 100, 102-103, 126; Jewish, xv,

xx, xxl, 8, 106; philosophical, Valéry, Paul, 74

XXI—XXI11 Van Buren, John, 128, 14178 Transcendence, 41227, 55, 102

Transformative texts, xvil, xx, Will to power, 74, 80

xxivn4, 140 Wisdom, 102, 106; and eloquence, 49 Wholly other (as ganz Andere), xvii, 55

Umetcht (circumspection), 118, Word-play, 83-89

130-31 Word: power of, 79-81. See also

Unconcealment, 61, 78, 81 rhetorical power Understanding (Verstehen), 28-30,

32-34, 45, 49-50, 53, 57, 61, 72, Zarader, Marléne, 4—5, 7, 69722 99, 106, 109, 113, 132, 135; fore- Zug (pull), 60 structure of, 112; limits of, 90; self, 31

158 a Index

Perspectives in Continental Philosophy John D. Caputo, verted editor

1. John D. Caputo, ed. Deconstruction tna Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida.

2 Michael Strawser Both/And: Reading Kterkegaard — From Irony to Eotftcation.

3 Michael D. Barber Ethical Hermeneutics: Rationality tn Enrique Dudsels Philosophy of Liberation.

4 James H. Olthuis, ed. Knowing Other-wise: Philosophy at the Threshold of Spurttualtty.

5 James Swindal Reflection Revisited: Jtirgen Habermas 4 Discursive Theory of Truth.

6 Richard Kearney Poetics of Imagining: Modern and Postmodern. Second edttion.

7 Thomas W. Busch Circulating Betng: From Embodiment to Incorporation — Evsays on Late Exwtentialtam.

8 Edith Wyschogrod Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics.

Second edition.

9 Francis J. Ambrosio, ed. The Question of Christian Philosophy Today.

10 Jeffrey Bloechl, ed. The Face of the Other and the Trace of God: Essays on the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas.

11. = Ilse N. Bulhof and Laurens ten Kate, eds. Flight of the Gods: Philosophical Perspectives on Negative Theology.

12. ‘Trish Glazebrook Hetoegger 3 Philosophy of Sctence.

13. Kevin Hart The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology, and Philosophy.

14 Mark C. Taylor Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard. Second edition.

15 Dominique Janicaud, Jean-Francois Courtine, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion, and Paul Ricoeur Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate.

16 Karl Jaspers The Question of German Gutlt. Introduction by Joseph W.

Koterski, S.J.

17. Jean-Luc Marion The Idol and Distance: Five Studtes. Translated with an introduc-

tion by Thomas A. Carlson.

18 Jeffrey Dudiak The Intrigue of Ethics: A Reading of the Idea of Discourse tn the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas.

19 Robyn Horner Rethinking Goo As Gift: Marton, Derrida, and the Linuts of Phenomenology.

20) Mark Dooley The Polttics of Exodus: Soren Keirkegaard 3 Ethics of Responstbiltty.

21. Merold Westphal Toward a Postmodern Christian Fatth: Overcoming Onto-Theology.

22. Edith Wyschogrod, Jean-Joseph Goux and Eric Boynton, eds. The Enigma of Gift and Sacrifice.

23 ~# Stanislas Breton The Word and the Cros. Translated with an introduction by Jacquelyn Porter. 24 #£=}Jean-Luc Marion Prolegomena to Charity. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis.

25 Peter H. Spader Schelers Ethical Personaltam: Its Logic, Development, and Promuse.

26 Jean-Louis Chrétien The Unforgettable and the Unhopeod For. Trandlated by Jeffrey Bloechl.

27. Don Cupitt Is Nothing Sacred? The Non-Realtst Philosophy of Religion: Selected Essays.

28 Jean-Luc Marion In Excess: Studtes of Saturated Phenomena. Translated by Robyn

Horner and Vincent Berraud.

29 = Phillip Goodchild Rethinking Philosophy of Religion: Approaches from Continental Philosophy.

30 William J. Richardson, S.J. Hewoegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought.

31. Jeffrey Andrew Barash Martin Hetdegger ano the Problem of Historwcal Meaning.

32 Jean-Louis Chrétien Hand to Hand: Lastening to the Work of Art. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis.

33. Jean-Louis Chrétien The Call and the Response. Translated with an introduction by

Anne Davenport.

34 =D.C. Schindler Han Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatte Structure of Truth: A Philosophical Investigation.

35 Julian Wolfreys, ed. Thinking Difference: Critics tn Conversation.