I
N T H E SY M P O S I U M, Plato’s character Aristophanes tells a story about the origin of love.1 This fantastical story follows originally spheri-cal creatures who, having threatened the gods, were split in two as pun-ishment. Human life as we now know it is the quest for our respective‘other halves.’ This quest is love or eros. In describing human life in this way, Aristophanes’s story gives us a set of basic concepts in terms of which to understand life and love: transcendence, impiety, punishment, and insuffi ciency. It is an origin story not in the sense that it goes back to the beginning of a historical timeline but in the sense that it goes deep into our ways of making sense of things to articulate and to reinforce our foundational concepts.
Heidegger takes the fi rst choral ode (the “Ode to Man”) from Sopho-cles’s Antigone to be doing something similar. Like the play from which it comes, the ode has received much philosophical and literary attention.2 It reads as a narrative of human development, describing characteristic human activities and skills through a progressive historical development from the time of the ‘primitive’ hunter-gatherer to that of the ‘civilized’
city-dweller. But as Heidegger reads it, the ode is not an account of what prior generations have accomplished, which we might check against our knowledge of history and social evolution. The ode is indeed an origin
1 Plato, Symposium, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis, IN:
Hackett Publishing, 1989).
2 For an exhaustive discussion of how Antigone has been appropriated by Western phi-losophy (and German philosophers in particular), see George Steiner, Antigones: How the Antigone Legend Has Endured in Western Literature, Art, and Thought (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1996). Steiner memorably notes the privileged role of tragic confl ict or confrontation in Antigone: “It has, I believe, been given to only one literary text to express all the principal constants of confl ict in the condition of man. These constants are fi vefold: the confrontation of men and of women; of age and of youth; of society and of the individual; of the living and the dead; of men and of god(s)” (231).
story, but the origin it tells is not a historical origin. The story is not ontic but ontological: it is an account of the human essence or what it means to be human. Like Aristophanes’s story, the ode gives us the basic con-ceptual framework within which to make sense of human being. It is the later Heidegger’s retelling of the story of original angst.
In a sense, the ode not only tells the origin of the human being, it is the origin of the human being. It is in the choral ode specifi cally, and in the Antigone play and Greek tragedy more generally, that “Greek [b]eing and Dasein [ . . . ] were authentically founded” (EM154/110). This is to say that the ode establishes or founds the Greek—and by extension, Western—understanding of what it is to be human and of what it is to be at all. What Heidegger calls ‘poetry’ or ‘art’ accomplishes for a com-munity this founding of intelligibility, laying out what things are—how they hang together, how they make sense, how they matter. “Poetry is the saying of the unconcealment of [entities].”3 Heidegger calls this saying or founding work ‘poetizing’ or ‘poetic projection.’ The choral ode is “a po-etic projection of human being [Seins [des Menschen]] on the basis of its extreme possibilities and limits” (EM165/119). It lays out for the Greeks how the human being is to be understood; it “provides the authentic Greek defi nition of humanity [Mensch]” (EM161/116).
So by interpreting the ode, Heidegger can uncover those basic concepts and categories in terms of which human being makes sense—both those in terms of which we ourselves are intelligible and those that we use in making everything else intelligible. In following Heidegger’s project, we must thus follow at least two interpretive guidelines. First, we must not read the ode’s timeline as a historical timeline, and second, we must not read the ode’s characters ontically.
First, the timeline. In telling an intelligible origin rather than a histori-cal origin, a poetizing like the ode gives us a pre-history or “primal his-tory” of the sort that Heidegger calls “mythology” (EM166/119). Such a myth is true not if the events recounted actually happened in the past but if the narrative lays out the phenomenon in an intelligible way. Thus there is a sense in which the ordinary timeline of events recounted is fi ctional.
If we are to speak of time here, then the time that the story traverses is the essential time of the ‘prior’ in the a priori. That is to say that what gets laid out on the timeline is not a series of events but the structure of an essence. In following the story from one event to another, we grasp
3 Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” trans. Albert Hofstadter, Basic Writings: From Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964), ed. David Farrell Krell, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), 199.
relations of ontological priority and posteriority. Heidegger himself uses such a mythical timeline to understand essences by treating an essence not as a static thing (a spatial fi ction) but as something that happens (a temporal fi ction). Thus he turns ‘essence’ (Wesen) into a verb, saying that human being essences (west). He does this because he uses the same temporal fi ction to make sense of being. Being essences (EM173/124) in that it is coming-into-appearing. I will return to this later. The point for now is that the ontic timeline of the story, while fi ctional, is nonetheless ontologically signifi cant.
Second, the characters. It will be impossible to understand the ode as a poetic projection of human being if we persist in taking the ode’s characters at face value, as the natural entities and human phenomena that are most signifi cant for human existence. It is by reading the entities mentioned as fi gures for ontological phenomena that Heidegger can take the ode as a story about being and Dasein even though it mentions only nature and the human being. Thus words like ‘sea,’ ‘earth,’ and ‘living things’—each of the ‘characters’ in the ode—refer not to natural entities but to ontological phenomena. Holding fast to this is the major interpre-tive challenge in reading the ode. It requires that we translate the ode’s ontic vocabulary into appropriate ontological vocabulary. This is diffi -cult because Heidegger only intimates the direction of this translation,:
“The fi rst strophe and antistrophe name the sea, the earth, the animal as the overwhelming” (EM166/119). ‘The overwhelming’ is one of Hei-degger’s words for being. The ode needs to talk about being by speaking of entities because being is never accessed directly. As Derrida puts it:
“Being, which is nothing, is not a being, cannot be said, cannot say itself, except in the ontic metaphor. And the choice of one or another group of metaphors is necessarily signifi cant.”4
The basic ‘metaphor’ used in the choral ode is nature, phusis. The natural entities in the ode are all fi gures of being. This is because, accord-ing to Heidegger, the Greeks understood beaccord-ing as phusis. I shall return to this. For now, start with the idea that the ode makes an ontological rather than an ontic claim. Thus its talk of nature articulates and founds what it is to be a natural entity. But for the Greeks (according to Heidegger), phusis refers beyond those entities that we are inclined to call ‘natural’;
it refers to entities as a whole and as such (EM14/10). Combining these ideas, we see that the ode, in its talk of natural entities, is speaking of being.
4 Jacques Derrida, “The Ends of Man,” Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chi-cago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 131.
Further, “just as little as the fi rst strophe and antistrophe speak only of nature in the narrower sense does the second strophe speak only of the human being” (EM166/119). Just as the natural entities in the ode are ways of addressing being, so too ‘human being’ in the ode refers neither to individual human beings nor to the human race but to Dasein. Like
‘Dasein’ (SZ12, 42), ‘(the) human being’ picks out the human with re-gard to its being. As Heidegger later says, ‘the human being’ names “the essence of Western humankind [Menschentum]”: our (Western) Dasein.5
Accordingly, the ode is not telling us what the human being is by tell-ing us how it interacts with entities in its environment. This is how Hei-degger’s interpretation of the ode is typically read.6 Instead, the ode is telling us what the human being is by explaining the human relationship to being. It is the story of Dasein. And on this story, Dasein is deinon, uncanny.
As he often does, Heidegger acknowledges that his reading of the ode goes beyond what is said on the surface of the text. This is quite delib-erate, and it stems from Heidegger’s understanding of what it means to engage in interpretation and translation (see, for instance, HI61/74).
5 Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 43/51, translation modifi ed. Hereaf-ter HI. Page references in the text will be given in the form (HIxx/xx), where the fi rst page number refers to the English translation and the second to the Gesamtausgabe edition—
Martin Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister,” Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 53 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1984). Heidegger says, “When we speak of ‘der Mensch’ here and throughout these remarks, we always mean the essence of the historical Mensch of that history to which we ourselves belong: the essence of Western Menschentums. ‘Der Mensch’
means neither ‘der Mensch in general’, ‘universal Menschheit’, nor indeed mere ‘individual’
Menschen, nor even some form or other in which several or many are united” (HI43/51, translation modifi ed). Let me take ‘Western’ as understood, since although it is signifi cant for the text’s discussion of the unhomeliness of the German people, it is not particularly relevant to my more general discussion of uncanniness. In EM, the translators render ‘der Mensch’ variously as ‘humanity,’ ‘the human,’ ‘the human being,’ ‘human beings,’ and
‘humans.’ To preserve the ontological dimension of Heidegger’s discussion, I usually amend the translation to read ‘the human being’ (although not when quoting the translation of Sophocles’s ode). (Similarly for HI). I transliterate Heidegger’s Greek (which is not trans-literated in the English translation) and alter the translation to read ‘entities’ instead of
‘beings’ for ‘das Seiendes’.
6 For example, Richardson takes the fi rst strophe and antistrophe to describe “those beings which are completely external to There-being and surround it, v.g. [sic] the sea, the earth, the animal kingdom.” William Richardson, Through Phenomenology to Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), 270. Haar has the ode describing the human being as the entity who “can raze and subjugate the earth, capture and tame wild animals, invent sciences, arts and techniques, institute political life” in a “confl icting encounter with natural forces, other human beings, the gods.” Michel Haar, Heidegger and the Essence of Man, trans. William McNeill (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 153 and 152.
He holds that “[t]he authentic interpretation must show what does not stand there in the words and which is nevertheless said” (EM173/124).
Rather than limiting itself to explicating the propositional content of a text, authentic interpretation reveals what the text allows to show up or make sense—even if the text accomplishes this indirectly or despite itself. But while Heidegger’s vocabulary and translations are unfamiliar and his interpretation extreme and novel (he would say, violent), the picture of the human being that he fi nds in the ode is not too far re-moved from what a thoughtful reader of the ode might herself come to.
It presents a familiar picture of the human being.7 Let us read it in full (in Heidegger’s translation):
Manifold is the uncanny, yet nothing
more uncanny looms or stirs beyond the human being.
He ventures forth on the foaming tide amid the southern storm of winter and crosses the surge
of the cavernous waves.
And the most sublime of the gods, the Earth, indestructible and untiring, he wears out, turning the soil from year to year, working the ploughs to and fro with his horses.
And the fl ock of birds that rise into the air he ensnares, and pursues
the animals of the wilderness and of the ocean’s surging waves, most ingenious man.
He overpowers with cunning the animal that roams in the mountains at night, the wild-maned neck of the steed, and the never-tamed bull, fi tting them with wood, he forces under the yoke.
And into the sounding of the word and swift understanding of all
he has found his way, even into courageous governance of the towns.
And he has pondered how to fl ee
7 For more on the plausibility of Heidegger’s reading as a reading of Sophocles’s ode, see Haar’s discussion in Heidegger and the Essence of Man, 151–155.
exposure to the arrows
of unpropitious weather and its frosts.
Everywhere venturing forth underway, experienceless without any way out,
he comes to nothing.
The singular onslaught of death he can by no fl ight ever prevent,
even if in the face of dire infi rmity he achieves most skillful avoidance.
Craftiness too, as the work
of his ability, he masters beyond expectation, and if he falls on bad times
other valiant things succeed for him.
Between the ordinance of the earth and the order ordained by the gods he ventures:
Towering high above the site, forfeiting the site is he for whom non-entities always are for the sake of risk.
Such shall not be entrusted to my hearth, nor share their delusion with my knowing, who put such a thing to work. (HI58–59/72)8
A thoughtful reader of the ode might take the surface story to be that the human being leaves its natural habitat to brave the foreign environ-ment of the sea; it depends on and is rooted in the earth and its cycles, yet through agriculture tries to control the earth and exploit its cycles; the human being is a predator who does not merely kill to survive but makes slaves of animals, relying on their natural order and instincts at the same time as it disrupts them; it builds walls and invents technologies like medicine to ward off the inevitable eff ects of its natural environment and condition. In short, the human being is the entity for whom it is natural to be unnatural. The human being is naturally unnatural or unnaturally natural. The human being is such, we may suppose, because it is dissatis-fi ed with its given condition or is born inadequate to its environment and so is moved to reach beyond itself: to explore, control, and learn. The fi nitude of the human being sparks transcendence. The ode’s claim, on this kind of reading, is that it is precisely this reaching-out-from-poverty, this erotic gesture, that makes the human being what it is.
8 Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 58–59. Reprinted with permission of Indiana University Press.
It is something with precisely this shape that Heidegger fi nds expressed in the ode and that he calls ‘uncanniness.’ The diff erence is that he under-stands the human being as Dasein. So while the ode is typically read as an account of the origin of the human being, Heidegger reads the origin in question as the ground of the understanding of being—the ‘fi rst’ coming-into-appearing of being and human being. The ode tells this origin as a story about the human being’s audacity and perseverance in the face of overwhelming diffi culty, which Heidegger refl ects by telling the story of Dasein’s struggle to bring being to appearing. This is the remarkable and mysterious happening by which the human being fi rst attains that which makes it what it is and so in which it comes to itself—not as builder of civilization but as openness to being. According to Heidegger, this achievement consists in the human being’s essential expulsion from its es-sence, or the productive play of its essence and non-essence. This mirrors the ode’s picture of the human as both natural and unnatural. To say that the human being is uncanny, then, is to say that the openness to being is grounded in a play of appearing and concealment, essence and non-essence. So while Heidegger’s reading will go well beyond the surface text of the ode, and while it is certainly violent in some sense, it does not obvi-ously abuse or usurp the text for its own purposes. It is plausibly a read-ing of the ode and its claim that the human beread-ing is the uncanniest entity.
To Deinon
πολλὰ τὰ δεινὰ κοὐδὲν ἀνθρώπου δεινότερον πέλει
polla ta deina kouden anthrōpou deinoteron pelei. (line 332)9
Vielfältig das Unheimliche, nichts doch
über den Menschen hinaus Unheimlicheres ragend sich recht.
Manifold is the uncanny, yet nothing
uncannier than man bestirs itself, rising up beyond him. (EM156/112)
The human being is deinoteron—more uncanny—than other entities. ‘Dei-non’ is usually translated into English as ‘terrible,’ ‘fearsome,’ ‘mighty,’
‘powerful,’ ‘wondrous,’ or ‘strange.’ Heidegger translates (and so inter-prets) it in German as ‘unheimlich’ (uncanny). He explains this translation in EM by hyphenating: das ‘Un-heimliche’ (the un-canny). This draws our
9 Sophocles, Sophocles: Plays: Antigone, ed. P. E. Easterling and R. C. Jebb, trans. R. C.
Jebb (London: Bristol Classical Press, 2004).
attention to the element of the -heim- or home. What is homely or un-canny is “that which throws one out of the ‘un-canny’, that is, the homely, the accustomed, the usual, the unendangered” (EM161/115). Being thrown out of the homely—being un-homely or un-canny—is “the basic trait of the human essence [des Menschenwesens]” (EM161/116), the “essential trait of the human being [Wesenszug des Menschen]” (HI73/89).
On the face of it, the claim is that the human being is unique because it is uncannier than other entities. Since Heidegger goes on to identify the hap-pening of uncanniness with the haphap-pening of unconcealment (EM178/127), human uncanniness must be the strangeness of its openness to being. This is the most deinon, the most strange, because it is unique. Open to being, the human being is radically unlike other entities. And yet it dwells amidst them. This makes the human being unhomely—and unhomely precisely where it makes its home. This is how William Richardson interprets the claim in both EM and SZ: Dasein is uncanny because its openness to being makes it a stranger in the ontic.10 To be uncanny is to be unique, and Dasein is the most unique because it is ontico-ontological. The home with respect to which it is uncanny or unhomely is the ontic realm, the realm of entities.
On the face of it, the claim is that the human being is unique because it is uncannier than other entities. Since Heidegger goes on to identify the hap-pening of uncanniness with the haphap-pening of unconcealment (EM178/127), human uncanniness must be the strangeness of its openness to being. This is the most deinon, the most strange, because it is unique. Open to being, the human being is radically unlike other entities. And yet it dwells amidst them. This makes the human being unhomely—and unhomely precisely where it makes its home. This is how William Richardson interprets the claim in both EM and SZ: Dasein is uncanny because its openness to being makes it a stranger in the ontic.10 To be uncanny is to be unique, and Dasein is the most unique because it is ontico-ontological. The home with respect to which it is uncanny or unhomely is the ontic realm, the realm of entities.