On Immortality

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O

N

I

MMORTALITY

A thesis submitted in partial requirement for the Degree

of Philosophy Research Master’s in Art

At the University of Amsterdam

Supervised by Christian Skirke

By Erik van Zwol

ID: 10182721

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I

NTRODUCTION

This thesis is about the eros of the lover for immortality. Who is this lover? Why is she being erotic? And why is she concerned with immortality? Since there is a long and varied tradition to the interpretation of each of these phenomenon, I will be taking a stand on attempting to understand one ancient description of the phenomena. My thesis will proceed to investigate the phenomenon of the lover, as described by one of western philosophy’s most immortal heroes: the speeches of Socrates in Plato’s works the Symposium and Phaedrus.

The phenomenon of a lover as interpreted by Socrates in his speeches and described by Plato in his dialogues, has, in various ways, been worked on for millennia. And while that work is interesting and relevant to itself in its own ways, I will not be looking at the phenomenon of the lover through the lens of the traditional scholarship and its various categories of meaning. The way in which I will approach the phenomenon of the lover in this thesis, is through Martin Heidegger’s interpretation of Dasein’s fundamental ontology.

My aim will be to take the phenomenological descriptions of the phenomenon of being a lover, and interpret them within the existentiale structure of a possible existentiell way in which we might find ourselves as factical Dasein. While I am taking the stand that the being of a lover is a way of being Dasein, and Dasein analytically is being-in-the-world, a full existentiell analytic of the existentiale being-in structure of a lover is practically beyond the means of this kind of academic exercise. I will focus in this thesis on the attunement of the lover, with a leading question: whether that attunement is at the same time a ground attunement of the ancient Greek period Dasein.

In so far as this thesis is a discursive pointing out of the possible structure of a phenomenon, a written work, however long and detailed, will always be deficient to being the unconcealment of the

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phenomenon in itself. And, while a book may provoke the right questioning and attunement in its reader, I stand by, that love is more often found in a look, than in a book.

There are various issues with this way of proceeding towards an analysis of a lover. The aim of the following discussion is to allay some possible concerns, while leaving others open in a way that places the thesis claim within a context in which its way of proceeding is academically permissible. In so far as this thesis is an academic exercise, my thesis is a first attempt at creating a cogent hybrid, or offspring, of the Platonic phenomenological descriptions of a lover, within Heidegger’s understanding of Dasein. To make this exercise possible I will take a number of broad stands which allow this analysis to proceed.

With the first stand, I will take it as if Heidegger’s early analytic of Dasein is broadly correct with respect to the existentiale structure of human existence. For my interpretation of human Dasein I will draw on Heidegger’s fundamental ontology expressed in: his 1927 manuscript Being and Time (Heidegger M. , 1980); his 1928 lecture course, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic (Heidegger M. , 1984); and his 1929-30 lecture course, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (Heidegger M. , 1995). The secondary literature related to Heidegger is broadly Mark A. Wrathall’s Heidegger and Unconcealment (Wrathall M. , 2011) and his and Max Murphey’s ‘An Overview of Being and Time’ (Wrathall & Murphey, 2013). Some background is drawn from Hurbert Dreyfus’ commentary (Dreyfus, 1991) and the podcasts of his 2007 and 2008 (Lectures U. B., 2007) (Lectures U. B., 2008) Berkeley lecture course on the same text, Being and Time.

The above texts open up the central theme in this thesis, which is that Dasein “… is always in a mood […], and it is only in terms of one’s mood that events and objects show up to one as

significant” (Wrathall & Murphey, 2013, p. 15). Attunements1_{however, have equiprimordially to}

them their understanding: “A state-of-mind always has its understanding, even if it merely keeps it

1_{I will be using the translator’s term ‘attunement’ from The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics instead}

of Being and Time’s ‘mood’ or wider ‘state of mind’. My main reason is that mood has more connotations that are psychological and does not reflect the connotation of our being sensitive to being always attuned only to one possible aspect of a richer situation. In an attunement the situation shows up to us in a particular way, and makes demands on us. That same situation could be attuned to differently, and thus, different demands would be made to deal with it in line with our factical being.

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suppressed. Understanding always has its mood” (Heidegger, 1980, p. 182:[142]). Thus, in so far as Dasein is being-in-the-world, Dasein always is in someway of being, attuned and towards its understanding2_.

This brings in my interpretive stand with respect to the Platonic dialogues, which is that, since Dasein always has an attunement, the lover in the Symposium and3_{Phaedrus, taken as dialogues that}

describe aspects of the factical way of being a lover, too must have an attunement and an

understanding. I will give Heidegger’s ontology priority, and engage it within the phenomenological descriptions in the dialogues to uncover the way of being there as lover. Of course, still as pointing out, but now systematised within a more powerful and clear ontology.

Since I am dealing with historical Platonic dialogues, a number of issues arise with respect to how they can permissibly be interpreted within certain academic traditions. The first task will be to step back from the characteristic tradition that lays claim to the right to interpret the Platonic

dialogues academically. I will look at a way of engaging with the platonic dialogue in such a way that my analysis of the lover is closely read out of the dialogue, rather than an analysis of the lover out of the prose of the current most prominent secondary sources4_.

To free myself in certain ways from the broadly platonic tradition, I will follow the lead of John Sallis in his own close reading interpretation of the Platonic dialogues in his book Being and Logo: Reading the Platonic Dialogues (Sallis, 1996). Sallis is weary of the tradition that reads “the

philosophy of Plato” into the dialogues, since Plato’s voice appears nowhere in the dialogues (Sallis, 1996, pp. 1-2). Sallis’ approach is to carefully read the dialogues and pose questions to it, such that asking the right question in the right way, frees the dialogue to manifests in itself to us as a whole (Sallis, 1996, p. 5). This process is broadly hermeneutic, in that we first read the dialogue to find its

2_{Were this to be a longer thesis, I would have embedded the whole thesis within a discussion of}

unconcealment and truth.

3_{In so far as they are about the same way of life, this will be taken up further I note here to prevent}

possible controversy.

4_{One issue is that secondary interpretations thematize the wrong issues in selecting only certain aspects}

of passages related to staying within the bounds of the traditional thesis about Plato’s metaphysics, and thereby cover over aspect of dialogue that may be useful to my thematized analysis of the dialogue in asking questions about the lover (Sallis, 1996, p. footnote 5).

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character, then return with the essential question of that character, and let its answer manifest to us (Sallis, 1996, p. 13). In so far as the character of a dialogue is intimately related to those whom are in dialogue, Sallis finds a central question to ask the dialogues to be ‘what is philosophy’ which he asks with respect to ‘who is Socrates’. He relates particularly that the Phaedrus and Republic are dialogues suited to manifesting an answer to what is essential in those questions.

While I very much enjoyed Sallis’ text and draw lessons from it, I will mostly take over aspects related to his method, while mostly not engaging with interpretation of his reading of the dialogues. I will, through Sallis’ method of returning the dialogues to their phenomenological description that strikes us in our reading, attempt to appropriate the dialogues through the question ‘who is the lover?’ The dialogues won’t be free however to answer independently of a background in which to

understand them, the dialogues are freed for themselves, then what is freed is placed within

Heidegger’s interpretive framework that brings with it, its own ontology. I am therefore not stepping beyond metaphysics, rather I will be playing with the dialogue’s phenomenology, seeing in how far it can fit within Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein. I am therefore also stepping outside Sallis project, since how the dialogue manifests will be squinted at with a particular look, the look of discerning within it the fundamental ontological structure of Dasein as a lover.

There is at least one serious problem with the interpretive aspect of my thesis. With regard to working with ancient Greek dialogues5_{, I rely almost solely on English translations of the Platonic}

dialogues, and do not extend into philological analysis. The sources I cite in this thesis are from Plato’s Complete Works edited by John M. Cooper. The translation of the two primary dialogues are both translated by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. There are two major problems here, one of the problems that Sallis highlights is that the traditional translators leave open in their translations the possibility of the interpretations of the tradition. The translations may thereby already be

contaminated by the tradition categories (Sallis, 1996, p. n5). The more serious problem is that I currently do not have a background in the ancient Greek language and an understanding of its full

5_{While this is also a problem with the German texts of Heidegger, these are more recent works within a}

period in which English and German exist side by side, the English translations may thereby be more reliable.

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range of discerning phenomena. This means that I will be left over to trust, for the most part, the translators and the description of the phenomenon related to a term by the text itself. Certain terms like a ‘good’, for which Heidegger suggests the origionary Greek meaning, will be taken up into discussion. For other terms however, I will need to find their meaning, if they differ from the English term’s connotation used by the translator, out of the structural relations of my interpretation: out of making sense of the lover as a Dasein that must have its existetiale structure fulfilled.

To align my thesis with a wider literature, and to criticise a contemporary commentator, I will introduce a paper by Richard Rojcewickz. In his paper ‘Platonic Love’ (Rojcewicz, 1997) Rojcewickz explores the idea that eros in the Symposium and Phaedrus might have something to tell us about Being. Rojcewickz follows up on a remark by Heidegger: “… that the love Socrates speaks of is nothing else than Dasein’s ‘urge toward Being itself’ (Drang zum Sein selsi)” (Rojcewicz, 1997, p. 103). Rojcewickz’s project is, on the surface, similar to this thesis, his aim is to “… let these two— our understanding of Dasein and our understanding of Platonic love—shed light on one another” (Rojcewicz, 1997, p. 103). While I will take on that there is a relationship between eros and Being, I will also argue against Rojcewickz interpretation of that relationship. I argue that the relationship stems from its being a ground attunement. Methodologically, I will take over his interpretation that the Symposium and Phaedrus have a particular affinity to each other: the Symposium is descriptive of eros in theory, while the Phaedrus relates to the phenomenon of its praxis (Rojcewicz, 1997, p. 104).

Bringing together Heidegger and Plato brings with it a line of potential issues however, which have to do with Heidegger’s often antagonistic relationship with the works of Plato: “for Martin Heidegger metaphysics is Platonism. Heidegger's attack on metaphysics is equivalently an attack on Platonism” (Dostal, p. 71). My aim here is merely to look at some papers that consider this view to be too restricted, and the possibility of freeing the dialogues from Heidegger’s narrow reading while still eschewing the tradition that reads Platonic ‘doctrine’ into the dialogues.

A central issue Heidegger has with Plato’s work, is that its ambiguity about truth, transformed truth from that of the rich possible manifestation of beings in themselves, into the correct way of looking at phenomena, from unconcealment to correspondence (Wrathall M. , 2011, p. 73). The

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understanding of truth as unconcealment was lost, in favour of truth correspondence; this ultimately meant that we buried over the phenomenon of unconcealment (Wrathall M. , 2011, p. 73).

Heidegger’s own project is related to returning to an understanding of unconcealment. Unconcealment is related to the way in which we hold open the possibilities of a world in terms of a historically contingent essence (Wrathall M. , 2011, p. 1). There is not however, one true essence, there are many clearings in which the beings in the world are accessible and unconcealed as a particular whole, by the truth of that period’s essence (Wrathall M. , 2011, p. 31). Each of these ways of having disclosed beings, makes it possible, since there must be a state of affairs disclosed in advance, to be able to directed propositions at phenomenon that tell us what is essential to that historical clearing way of gathering together phenomena (Wrathall M. , 2011, p. 13).

There are (at least) three dangers in privileging a correspondence way of interpreting the truth of disclosed phenomenon, there is representationalism; there is a tendency to condition what

comportments with entities are ‘correct’ and which ‘incorrect’, independently of the kind of being it is in itself (Dostal, p. 79); and there is the problem of idle talk where the original word is no longer used in an engagement with the phenomenon and becomes distorted from its original meaning, yet its distortion is still held as correct by a community (Wrathall M. , 2011, p. 78). The loss of truth as unconcealment has meant that philosophy itself can find itself trapped in metaphysics, where it develops an understanding of its historical essence, but fails to grasp hiddenness and the contingence of essence. Metaphysics, working out the “true” being of phenomenon (Dostal, 1985, p. 80), may then produce ‘true’ concepts from principle, that it (Dasein) binds on itself as itself and everything else only being the kind to be produced (Wrathall & Murphey, 2013, p. 5) (Dostal, p. 86) (Gonzalez, 202, p. 365). The metaphysical interpretation of Dasein’s being and all beings, conditions and forcibly holds open the ‘correct’ comportments as permissible within its period of history (Dostal, p. 79) (Wrathall M. , 2011, p. 33), while closing off and policing as incorrect, or they remain hidden because it cannot see outside its limited conceptual and practical ‘look’, ways of understanding being which contradict the correctness of its essential understanding (Wrathall M. , 2011, p. 34). The purported problem is that Plato’s work moves us away from an understanding of the groundlessness of essence,

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such that we harden our being convinced6_{that a historical period’s understanding of essence, and}

being in light of it, is the only and/or ‘true’ way to understand existence.

Another problem Heidegger introduces, besides loss to an original experience of

unconcealment, is his interpretation of Plato’s dialectic as a barrier to moving beyond language. Heidegger claims that Plato’s dialect is limited to criticising the domain of idle language over which it operates, by questioning only the language itself. It cannot reach behind the language to privilege seeing the thing themselves and their being drawn from unhiddenness (Gonzalez, 202, p. 366). Heidegger, while generally critical of Plato’s project because it turns us to becoming trapped in the unseen errors of speech and the importance of errors in speech7_{, does suggest that dialectic and}

dialogue may be “a provocation to return to the things themselves, but nothing more” (Gonzalez, 202, p. 372).

Now, considerable criticism has been directed at Heidegger regarding his stand on Plato, especially from his students (Dostal, p. 74) (Gonzalez, 202, p. 361); secondary commentators, for instance Adriaan Peperzak, points out particularly that Plato himself never claimed that there is only one ‘true’ essence to being (Peperzak, 1993, p. 283); Heidegger’s narrow reading of Plato from Aristotle8_{for its clarity, Gadamer suggest, means he misses the deeper richness of the dialogues}

(Gonzalez, 202, p. 365); Heidegger’s provocative reading, to get behind the thinker he criticises, to reach what is guiding and unthought (Wrathall M. , 2011, p. 74), may all, with respect to Plato, have meant Heidegger himself covered over what Plato hopes to help us understand about existence.

In his later period Heidegger does, after critique from his peers on the matter, come to question his early assessment of Plato, stating to Georg Picht that: “One thing I must confess to you: the structure of Plato’s thought is completely obscure to me” (Gonzalez, 202, p. 382). Heidegger’s Plato may then, with respect to its thought itself, have been a straw-man. Even if Heidegger’s lessons

6_{Although in the background, not as an individual cognative act. We are brought into the clearing}

(forcibly) as we are educated into it, taking on its metaphysical order; our being called to take part in the correctness of its world and our possible place in it.

7_{Such that something is assessed on its ability to speak ‘correctly’, and not its ability to disclose.} 8_{This might also mean that it is Aristotle that brought about the change in truth, as his historical}

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regarding the transparency of metaphysics to itself when it has taken complete hold of essence (Wrathall M. , 2011, p. 33), are generally correct and that this may have begun with Plato (Wrathall M. , 2011, p. 74). Gonzalez suggests that if Heidegger had taken up his interest in re-reading Plato (Gonzalez, 202, p. 383) he might have seen that that the ‘true’ dialectical method may have solved one of his own problems, that of human Dasein being a constant inter-play between saying and seeing:

Plato’s dialectic absolutizes neither conceptual mediation nor intuition; on the contrary, by continually opposing the one to the other, it exposes the finitude of each. By revealing our inability to say all that we see, as well as our inability to see with perfect clarity all that we say, dialectic exposes the limitations of both our seeing and our saying. (Gonzalez, 202, p. 388)

One of the central notions in this thesis is eros. I will be using eros rather than the term ‘love’ which is often used in these kinds of discussion. Even if I sometimes switch between them for literary effect; unless it is referring to a commentator’s use, it is the term eros. My choice for eros is that it has less contemporary romantic connotation even if it bespeaks romanticism. A number of commentators that discuss Heidegger’s reading of Plato, mention Heidegger’s lack of engagement with the

phenomenon of eros and the phenomenological description in some of the dialogues, Joseph O’Leary, for instance, wonders:

[Is] it true that for Plato ‘philosophy was nothing more nor less than dialectic’ (309)? The dialectic in the Symposium, the Phaedrus and the Phaedo turns around central phenomena that it seeks to clarify, and the phenomena prompt Plato at climactic moments to leave dialectic behind for mythic utterance, which is not particularly dialogal either. (O’Leary, 2012, p. 311)

Further, Dostal for instance notes that “the absence of any attention to eros in Heidegger's comments on Plato is perhaps the most remarkable feature of his Plato interpretation” (Dostal, p. 96), he goes on to link eros with transcendence:

But Heidegger does not see that, rather like his own notion of transcendence that grounds intentionality, so too Plato's notion of eros grounds logos. In the "erotic mania" of philosophy one comes to stand outside oneself and in the truth. Heidegger would call this the ecstatic character of Dasein. (ibid)

In his essay ‘Heidegger on Desire’, Ben Vadder explores authentic desire as the idea that: “Heidegger can affirm that ‘Who the deepest has thought, loves what is most alive.’ […] This love makes

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Explain […] the ’possibilizing’ capacity in Dasein as ‘Mögen’. […] This ‘Mögen’ he designates as a gathering love in which each entity can come to itself […]. This ‘Mögen’ is not characterized by appropriation or control, but by letting the entities be. (Vadder, 1998, p. 363)

A further discussion relating to love as a possible ground attunements that marks a possibility for Dasein to affect itself and take itself over authentically, is found briefly in Klaus Helm discussion on how Heidegger understood one of the fundamental attunements of the Greek period to be wonder:

Heidegger has also named it […], that state of wonder or being astounded from which, according to Plato and Aristotle, philosophy began. According to Heidegger, this wonder was the fundamental mood of the first beginning from which metaphysics and our philosophically formed culture arose. (Sallis, 1993, p. 294)

This attunement of “wonder in the sense of (...), which institutes the beginning is a unique mood: it is in itself in the position to attune Dasein to authenticity” (ibid). The operative moment of this

attunement is to be thrown back into the unfamiliarity in which Dasein began, in a way that Dasein is able to again begin something new from: “a reverence in the face of the wonder ‘that there is

something at all rather than nothing,’ an awe in the face of the mystery that the dimension of

openness, “world,” has been freed from the reticence of the nothing” (Sallis, 1993, p. 295). Helm goes on to suggest that the “intimate form of awe … is love”.

Tanja Staehler partly criticises Helm for the suggestion that love might be a ground attunement, her principal concern is that love is a relation between people, it cannot seem to arise out of Dasein itself: “the object of love is not indeterminate like the ‘there’ or the ‘nothing’; it does not determine the world as a whole, even if the beloved person is the most important being in my world” (Staehler, 2007, p. 427). While I do not have the room to engage her possible criticism directly, the structure of the attunement that I discuss should not fall to her consideration. Eros, while it can deficiently be directed with others, can show up in Dasein’s essence as eros for its own immortality and existence, thus in its ‘there’. In so far as Dasein exists towards that immortality that is its own, it, in its most profound moment, is thrown onto itself as a whole.

While Heidegger himself points out wonder as a ground attunement of the ancient Greek period, we too know that a period can have more than one ground attunement. We have anxiety and boredom, as well as “a creative and essential activity of human Dasein, philosophy stands in the

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fundamental attunement of melancholy” (Heidegger M. , 1995, p. 183). A leading thought then is that the ancient Greek period may also have had eros as a fundamental attunement.

With regard to the above discussions, my concern has been to provide a space in which the possibility of exploring eros as ground attunement is made possible. The aim of the rest of the thesis is to give a preparatory account of eros as possibility of the attunement in a lover. The thesis being too short to give a full account of the phenomenon.

Methodologically the thesis has two parts. The first chapter is devoted to exploring Heidegger’s ground attunement of boredom. The purpose is to identify the general structural features of a ground attunement. I have given the chapter a critical target, Matthew Ratcliffe. This gives the discussion something to answer, while also laying out as a case study a fundamental attunement. My aim is to characterise ground attunements in a way that I take up in the second chapter. The second chapter too has a critical target, the work of Rojcewickz which I introduce in §2.1. The rest of that chapter will look at the structure of the possible forms of the attunement eros. For this, I will treat the Symposium and Phaedrus as containing phenomenological descriptions of the way of life of the lover. Thus, following Sallis’ letting the dialogues answer ‘what is philosophy’ in ‘who is a lover’. I will treat the dialogues as if they are telling us, something like the different phenomenon Heidegger described when he interprets the structure of the different forms of boredom. The dialogues are without his existential analysis of what they describe, that analysis is what the thesis aims to provide for the dialogues.

To make the existential claims that I make regarding ontology cohere with my interpretation of speeches in the Platonic dialogues, I will work backwards with regard to Heidegger’s analysis of boredom. Heidegger analysis the different forms of boredom to find himself at origionary temporality. Here I will be let the dialogues manifest a possible essence of eros as a kind of self-eros for their own existence, then working through the dialogues again with that structure, such that they present a relatively unified disclosure within Heidegger’s framework of the different forms of being a lover as described in the dialogues. While the dialogues discuss more forms of eros a lover might find themselves in, I will look only at two possible forms. These are both related to the ‘higher mysteries’ of eros.

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The first form of eros I look at is like the second case of boredom, deficient in a particular way. This deficiency is that, while the eros for Dasein’s immortality comes out of itself, it works itself out through the lover’s eros for its existence as artistic being. This form of eros produces certain works of beauty that have as their characteristic, immortality. Thus, rather than Dasein being called towards its immortality it is towards immortality through an intermediary being and its offspring, the work.

The final form of eros is more complex and its analysis is short and tentative. This form strikes Dasein in itself as eros for its existence as Dasein. As such it attunes Dasein to manifest itself as a whole, since it is in eros for that existence. Its whole world is put on hold by what is disclosed in this final form, as well as itself as “I-being”. The highest form of eros then, frees Dasein and its sight in a particular way to authenticity. It is this authentic state of being that is transmitted, through its form of reproduction. Its ‘it is beautiful for One’ is passed on through the midwifery of dialectic and beauty of this way of being Dasein, to help other Dasein come to themselves authentically. This is not a transfer of knowledge or doctrine. Immortality is passed on through a dialogue of questioning the opinion of others, and irony, where that other is in the presence of the philosopher’s beauty.

The thesis project merely seeks to open up this way of investigating a possible historic way of being, while relating itself in its exercise to uncovering the structure of a philosophical way of being, expressed in the philosophical hero: Socrates as a lover9_{. In this exercise I will follow up on questions}

left by Heidegger, and his not engaging with the phenomenon of eros in the dialogues, as well as criticising and extending Rojcewicz’s project. My reasons for such an investigation are that it might disclose something interesting about the lover’s way of life, and eros as an “urge towards Being itself”, not accessible through more traditional techniques that do not deal with the being-in in itself. As well as laying the foundation for another possible ground attunement in the ancient Greek period: eros.

9_{In so far as Socrates may have been an ontic expression of this way of life. Similarly to how someone}

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C

HAPTER

O

NE

:

T

HE

G

ROUND

A

TTUNEMENT

,

B

OREDOM

The aim of this chapter is to bring into discussion the way in which to characterise a ground attunement. In so far as one aim of this thesis is to investigate whether the lover’s kind of attunement is a ground attunement, and may thereby be able to announce Dasein to itself as a whole, the structure of that kind of attunement will be presented here as a case study for my own analysis of two forms of eros in the second chapter. Besides the issue of the attunement of the lover, there is also the way in which a lover is able to be a midwife to their interlocutors’ development in its most profound form. An understanding of attunement and the way we can be affected and affect other Dasein, may give us clues to how a lover might be able to attune their beloved towards self-understanding.

§1.1.

R

ATCLIFFE ON

G

ROUND

A

TTUNEMENT

The aim of this section is to introduce what Heidegger calls ‘fundamental attunements’ or ‘ground attunement’. To introduce this structure of Dasein, I will discuss Matthew Ratcliffe’s interpretation of the phenomenon. In ‘Why Moods Matter’ (Ratcliffe, 2013) Ratcliffe finds that the literature on this kind of attunements faces a difficulty, for “it is not entirely clear what the criteria are for being a ground mood” (Ratcliffe, 2013, p. 166). Since my thesis turns on making clear whether eros meets those criteria, the (1) first issue I will investigate is Ratcliffe’s claim regarding those criteria. The second (2) issue, is that Ratcliffe claims that certain kinds of work can only be

understood in the attunement that bore them. The first (1) issue is critiqued in this chapter, the second (2) is merely expanded upon and taken aboard for the broader thesis claim.

The first (1) issue relates to the classification of the structure of ground attunements. Ratcliffe investigates two possibilities before settling on the second as what is characteristic of the ground attunement.

A first possible criteria is that ground attunements are attunements relevant to the existentiell expression of philosophers as philosophers of Dasein and its existentiale structure: “… a mood is

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required that serves to reveal rather than just to constitute that structure. So Heidegger searches for a ‘way of disclosure in which Dasein brings itself before itself.’ He finds this in the mood of anxiety (Angst), which he takes to be a ground mood (182).” (Ratcliffe, 2013, p. 167) It is a feature of a ground attunement then that it allows for us to do such and such a kind of philosophical enterprise (rather than say ethics or philosophical logic). It is a ground attunement if, in our finding ourselves in it, we can achieve philosophizing rather than merely achieving metaphysics or idle talk. Ground attunements, like anxiety and boredom, are one way in which Heidegger thinks we might disclose to ourselves to ‘ourselves’ as “Dasein [being] an entity that interprets its own essence,” (Wrathall & Murphey, 2013, p. 6) and potentially articulating answers to the fundamental question of metaphysics: “What is world? What is finitude? What is individuation?” (Heidegger, 1995, p. 174)

Ratcliffe’s second possible criteria is that ground attunements have depth. By depth, Ratcliffe interprets Heidegger to mean that the possibility space of ways in which to meaningfully comport oneself, in their access to the beings in the world, are constrained by Dasein finding itself ever deeper in a particular kind of attunement to a situation. This relates to the ways that make sense for Dasein to comport itself with entities and with itself in its coping with a situation. The deeper the attunement, the more limited is the space of meaningful possibilities (Ratcliffe, 2013, p. 164). Eventually, the only possibility that remains as meaningful to be, is Dasein as it-interprets-itself to resolutely be. It should be noted that the reason (as being-in such and such a situation) for the limitation of meaningful possibilities, need not itself be the same between levels: it is not merely an intensification of one form of being that designates depth, but the transformation of being-in as a whole. Something like fear, Ratcliffe reads Heidegger as suggesting, is only available as a possibility in the face of our already being pre-ontologically in a care for our own-most existence as a whole in the face of death (Ratcliffe, 2013, p. 167). This is the anxiety that slumbers in our Dasein. Being anxious is however, covered over – we are not “there” in our being already anxious, it sleeps (Heidegger M. , 1995, p. 60)(Ratcliffe, 2013, p. 168). Yet the possibility of death must be existentially already accessible to Dasein for a derived form of it, our fear of something that could impede our everyday projects, to be meaningfully taken up in our being everyday Dasein:

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… we could maintain that what makes something a ground mood is its being a condition of possibility for the presence or absence of other moods, which does not itself presuppose a further mood. Anxiety takes away possibilities that fear presupposes. (Ratcliffe, 2013, p. 168)

It needs to be noted that this phenomenon can be taken from the other side, where Anxiety doesn’t take away possibilities, it makes them available. It is because we fundamentally care about our time, where we always already are facing our impending death, that we can come to flee this reality, and fear for the derived being-in our everyday projects. Only when the possibility of death affects us directly and anxiety for the end awakens as a way of being-in in which we were always already able-to-be disposed, can Dasein come to itself as a whole, and does profound anxiety withhold all of its derived forms of being attuned (dread, alarm, terror, etc. (Ratcliffe, 2013, p. 163)).

Now of these criteria, Ratcliffe appears to select the condition of intelligibility of Dasein to itself, which he thinks revises the other possible ways to characterise the phenomenon: “Hence my proposal that we understand “ground moods” in terms of conditions of intelligibility alone is, to some extent, revisionary one” (Ratcliffe, 2013, p. 169). Yet is this right, should we understand the essential characteristic of ground attunement in terms of intelligibility, that a more profound attunements takes away the possibilities that derived forms presuppose? While I agree that it is a way to characterise such attunements, I will show that there is also another way that too appears as essential, which is helpful for my later thesis claim regarding eros of existence.

The second (2) issue that Ratcliffe interprets in his analysis of attunement is the way in which we might create meaningful works of philosophy. Thus possible criteria one is more nuanced than described so far. The problem Ratcliffe responds to is that in existential anxiety we might not be able to be productive discursively (Ratcliffe, 2013, p. 169). He asks whether it is only when returning from anxiety, that we find that the norms that rule in our everyday attunement of how things show up as mattering, are merely one way in which to make sense of existence – the seemingly privileged position of the our factical everyday is only there by virtue of a certain contingent historical development, the ground of which is itself null and groundless (outside of the factical enforced clearing). He wonder whether it is in having been in the deepest anxiety, and having put it to sleep again, that we may be able to compare the way in which we are in anxiety, where the norms of the

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everyday have been put on hold, with the way we are in the more tranquil attunement of academic discourse. In being disposed again to being academic, we are able to express in tranquillity the understanding that echoes our factical philosophizing in our deepest existential anxiety (Ratcliffe, 2013, p. 169).

We may further question how we move between ways of allowing the world to matter as a whole. This is related to our changing attunement: “given that mood changes play an important phenomenological role, the question arises as to how they might be evoked” (Ratcliffe, 2013, p. 169). He interprets that attunements are not merely passive with respect to how we find ourselves attuned; there is a possibility of allowing oneself to become attuned through something: “Heidegger also refers more specifically to the effects that written and spoken language can have upon mood. The orator, he says, ‘must understand the possibilities of moods in order to rouse them and guide them aright’ (139)” (Ratcliffe, 2013, p. 170). Awakening the attunement through which a work is accessed, Ratcliffe suggests, may need to be worked into the style of a work, as, for a certain set of sentences to be understood as meaningful in the way that the author intends them to be understood, may require the reader, or listener, to be, or be able-to be, disposed in such and such a way, as “the scope of what discourse can make intelligible is constrained by a space of mood-determined possibilities” (Ratcliffe, 2013, p. 162). A work may then, sometimes, need to provide with it the right attunement in which its possibility is open and meaningful:

The prose can serve to attune a reader or listener, to instill a mood through which the philosophy is best understood. Hence, we cannot cleanly divorce the style from the content of a philosophical work, as the style can serve to evoke a mood through which the content is intelligible and without which it can only be misunderstood. (Ratcliffe, 2013, p. 170)

With respect to the dialogues, the beauty of Plato’s dialogues as works of poetics (in their original Greek moreso I imagine), may be what can, or could, attune its reader to the proper way to understand how what is said, is meaningful as a whole. Merely academic squinting may thereby not be sufficient for accessing its meaning, its literary affect should not be divorced from our reading.

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§1.2.

B

OREDOM

In the previous discussion, I briefly looked at the characteristic structure of ground attunements. In the following discussion I will elucidate the structure of a possible ground attunement, Boredom. Heidegger elucidates the structure of this attunement in his lecture course The Fundamental Questions of Metaphysics. The course seems to have two aims: to awaken a fundamental attunement in his students, and to elucidate the phenomenon of boredom down to its essence in Dasein so that we might disclose origionary temporality.

Heidegger first describes and analysis three distinct situations in which boredom comes over us. The first is that Dasein is affected by a situation that affects existentiell Dasein to come up against their familiar interpretation of time. In the second situation, Dasein gives itself ‘free time’ thereby transforming their everyday interpretation of time, such that it may become bored with situations. In the final situation of boredom, “it”, our constitutive temporality, affects Dasein to be bored with itself as Dasein as a whole, and be attuned to itself.

§1.2.1.

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§1.2.1.1PASSING TIME

Heidegger comes to describe that, particularly in this period of history, boredom is a way in which we can find ourselves, and this is in part because of the way in which contemporary society regiments our time. We live out of agendas that practically map out at what time we will be doing so and so, and for how long; often following institutional dictates. When a disruption occurs within our temporal mapping we may find ourselves waiting somewhere unfamiliar, and with things that too show up as unfamiliar and outside of their normal way of being dated, for the next appointment to arrive. It is in these moments, that our time may show itself to us in a way we normally supress through our everyday being busy (Heidegger M. , 1995, pp. 101:[152-53]).

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Besides us and our publically mapped temporality10_{, entities we are with within our}

environment too have their time (Heidegger, 1995, pp. 104:[156-58]). They have a place in time to be used in the referential whole of significance of everyday practical comportments, and this use requires us to find ourselves in the right significance relationships with them, doing what must be done in the right temporal order within its timeframes, thus, doing our job right.

When we find ourselves with beings in a way that is outside their normal significance relationships, we may find our ejection from the normal way of being with entities as oppressive: “becoming bored is a peculiar being affected in a paralysing way by time as it drags and by time in general, a being affected which oppresses us in its own way...” (Heidegger M. , 1995, pp. 98:[147-49][Emphasis added]). Passing the time is “an intervention into time as a confrontation with time” (Heidegger, 1995, pp. 96:[ 144-46]). Where we may attempt to temporally create a game11_with

objects such that “the time that drags [is] coerced into passing more quickly, so that its being paralysed does not paralyse us, so that the boredom disappears” (Heidegger, 1995, pp. 98:[147-49]). There is a particular structure to the oppression of time, which is being left in limbo and empty.

§1.2.1.2BEING IN LIMBO

The first structural moment of passing time is being held in limbo. This arises out of finding ourselves in a situation in which we are waiting for something. Heidegger uses as an example a railway station, where we arrive four hours early and must endure the interval until departure. This waiting is an open period in which we may find ourselves released momentarily from the everyday’s temporality, the limbo is “over this particular interval of time that drags between our arrival and the departure of the train” (Heidegger, 1995, pp. 100:[150-52]).

There is another issue however, the ‘between’ shows up as a ‘nothing-in-between’ and is related to the second structural moment, as we are ‘being left empty’ from everyday comportment with entities that are there with us at the station.

10_{This is not occurant, this mapping is our familiarity with our everyday existence in which we are doing}

our part.

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§1.2.1.3BEING LEFT EMPTY

The second structure of becoming bored is the way in which entities leave Dasein empty of their everyday temporal possibility. This implies that we find ourselves empty of particular things that can fill the limbo into which we have fallen and thereby allows it to stretch out and become

oppressive.

Entities are withdrawn from Dasein and leave us in peace as we lack a meaningful relation with them, yet they are still manifest to us, we cannot escape in our existence their relations to us and us with them in how they could be significant (Heidegger, 1995, pp. 102:[153-55]). They just sit there, and so do we, holding and being held empty by the situation and its entities. We find ourselves bored, waiting for what satisfies us, our work or play, while station is at hand and yet has retreated from a meaningful engagement with it: airports and train stations are boring when we are there out of their time (Heidegger, 1995, pp. 105:[ 158-59]).

To add some secondary commentary on boredom, I will look briefly at Ratcliffe’s elucidating remarks on boredom. His central way to characterise the first form of boredom is in our having a sense of “boredom as contingent and of there being other possibilities. Indeed, one is all too aware of the boredom, as things continue to matter in ways that are not encompassed by it but obstructed by it” (Ratcliffe, 2013, p. 165).

§1.2.2.

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§1.2.2.1.PASSING THE TIME

The second form of boredom Heidegger claims is more profound in that rather than being bored by a situation, factical Dasein is itself bored with situations:

Here on the other hand, in the second case, what is boring does not come from outside: it arises from out of Dasein itself. This means that precisely because the boredom is dissipated throughout the whole situation in this creeping way, it cannot be bound to this situation as such. (Heidegger M. , 1995, pp. 128:[192-94])

The second form of boredom presents the being of Dasein with a different temporal freedom than that of the first. In the second form of boredom, what makes the attunement possible is not that Dasein is

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held in waiting by a situation, but rather that Dasein has set time aside for itself. Heidegger’s example is that someone accepts an invitation to a dinner party, and ‘frees an evening’ for such an event (Heidegger, 1995, pp. 115:[173-75]). In setting time aside for an evening in which there is no

conditioned meaning for things in terms of a temporal significance, Dasein again opens themselves to the possibility of finding themselves bored, but in a different form.

At the party, we play out various social roles and generally have a good time. Yet, he also claims that on reflection upon this evening, we may find that we were bored. This boredom however, was not apparent to us explicitly like the oppression we felt at the station.

What Heidegger wants us to notice is two things (1) the party is a form of us passing our free time (Heidegger, 1995, pp. 112:[169-70]), thus, the whole party pushes boredom aside (2) we can be bored at, and of, the party itself. This can only happen if we have become bored of (1): we are bored our own passing the time in general (Heidegger, 1995, pp. 113:[170-72]). And, in so far as we are bored or the very thing we were doing to stop ourselves from becoming bored, it is the more profound of the two. In the situation of the dinner party, Heidegger suggests that boredom flows from Dasein itself as an atmosphere, forcing the situation as a whole (but not yet the whole world) to show up as boring:

Boredom becomes more and more concentrated on us, on our situation as such, whereby the individual details of the situation are of no consequence; they are only coincidentally that with which we ourselves are bored, they are not that which bores us. (Heidegger, 1995, pp. 113:[170-72])

§1.2.2.2.BEING LEFT EMPTY

The transformation of being left empty arises from the way in which being left empty arises from ourselves when we take part in an evening that does not satisfy us. The evening is a way to waste our time, it is a way of obstructing us from ourselves that now comes close to us in having taking hold of its own time (Heidegger, 1995, pp. 118:[177-79]).

While we comport ourselves along the significance relations inherent to a dinner invitation, the way we relate to what is happening rises out of us in the possibility of the time available for the evening being free to be interpreted as we please. Yet, in that freedom creates the possibility of a kind

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of casualness in which nothing matters, where we go with the flow, being left empty of the meaningfulness of the situation as a whole, which is just a way of passing our free time:

There is a peculiar casualness to be found here, and indeed in a twofold sense: first, in the sense of abandoning ourselves to whatever there is going on; and second, in the sense of leaving ourselves behind [Sichzurucklassen]: ourselves namely, our proper self. (Heidegger M. , 1995, pp. 119:[179-80])

§1.2.2.3.BEING IN LIMBO

The second form of boredom too has the structural feature of being held in limbo. Heidegger shows however, that it has undergone a transformation. It is no longer in terms of waiting that the limbo takes hold, rather, we come to be held in limbo by the standing of the openness of the time we have given ourselves (Heidegger, 1995, pp. 121:[182-83]). This freedom from the regimentation of time, opens the possibility of that freed time leaving us in limbo.

Heidegger’s temporal structure is made up of three ecstasis, broadly, the past, the present and the future. The claim with respect to this form of limbo is that the past and the future become open as their horizons are freed: “this being cut off from our own having-been and our own future does not mean that the latter are factically removed or taken away, but means a peculiar dissolution of the future and having-been into the mere present...” (Heidegger, 1995, pp. 124:[186-88]), this constant being in the present, shows up as the standing of time:

Sealed off and unbound on both sides, it becomes stuck in its abiding standing, and in its being stuck it stretches itself [...]. Without the possibility of transition, only persisting remains for it–it must remain standing. (Heidegger M. , 1995, pp. 125:[188-89])

This then finally leads to an understanding of becoming bored as being left in limbo with the time we have left open for ourselves: “is our being held in limbo to time in its standing, and is thus the sought– after structural moment of being bored with . . . ” (Heidegger M. , 1995, pp. 126:[189-9 1]).

Ratcliff interprets Heidegger’s analysis of boredom to offer a further limiting of the space of possibilities that are available to Dasein with respect to the first form of boredom. However, this second form of Boredom he claims, does not yet exhaust Dasein of its everyday meaningfulness, the evening is only a limited situation that will pass:

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In this second mood of boredom, it would not be possible to be bored―by something that occurred in the context of the evening, as the shallower form of boredom requires the presentation of alternatives, kinds of significance that can be contrasted with the possibilities that the boredom offers. (Ratcliffe, 2013, p. 165)

§1.2.3.

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OREDOM

This form of boredom is made available Heidegger suggests by having a ‘questioning attitude’: “For this reason we can only ever encounter such a fundamental attunement of our Dasein in a

question, in a questioning attitude” (Heidegger, 1995, pp. 132:[199-200]). Now, by this I will interpret the claim that, in so far as Dasein has a being that is the questioning of the being it has of its own legitimacy to be only that way of being, it can affect how it is. It can, when it questions its own relationship to its time, bring into question the way in which time is regimented or given freely to itself, and, eventually, allows itself to become bored with the interpretation, and every derivative interpretation:

We determined philosophizing as comprehensive questioning arising out of Dasein's being gripped in its essence. Such being gripped however is possible only from out of and within a fundamental attunement of Dasein. (Heidegger, 1995, pp. 132:[199-200])

It may then discloses itself to itself as primordial temporality, as its own time that it cannot ever escape, because it is (and always already was) what constitutes every existentiell derivative form of temporality.

In this form of boredom, we no longer say that ‘I am’ bored, but rather that ‘it is boring for one’. By ‘one’ Heidegger takes hold of not a particular ego, but rather places an ‘it’ that has no determinate occurrence and suggests that it is this ‘it’ that is bored (Heidegger, 1995, pp. 135:[203-204]). In this undifferentiated no one, there is also no ‘I’ or ego: “it is boring for one; not for me as me, but for one, and that means for one as this particular Da-sein. Yet this determinacy of Dasein is not connected to the petty I-ness that is familiar to us.” (Heidegger, 1995, pp. 139:[209-10]) We are through this attunement then related to being Dasein directly rather than being the derived “I” or through that “I”.

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§1.2.3.2.PASSINGTHETIME

In profound boredom the activity of passing the time is no longer meaningful, the essence of boredom penetrates so deeply into Dasein that Dasein holds off the possibilities required to pass the time as unintelligible to the meaning of its mode of being. Profound boredom, in its mode of disclosure, is a holding back of Dasein from its everyday self, thus from its factical everyday interpreting time in ways that supress it, “the passing the time corresponding to this boredom is not simply missing, but is no longer permitted by us at all with regard to this boredom in which we are already attuned” (Heidegger, 1995, pp. 135-6:[203-206]). Where “this entails already understanding this boredom in its overpowering nature” (Heidegger, 1995, pp. 136:[204-206]).

This makes accessible the unexploited further aspect of being in the ‘it is for one’ rather than for “I”, in that Dasein is compelled to listen to the call of its own-most being, and thus finds its freedom from its everyday being in presenting us with the possibility of taking on our calling in authanticity, as Heidegger explains:

…we now have a being compelled to listen, being compelled in the sense of that kind of compelling force which everything properly authentic about Dasein possesses, and which accordingly is related to Dasein's innermost freedom. The 'it is boring for one' has already transposed us into a realm of power over which the individual person, the public individual subject, no longer has any power. (Heidegger, 1995, pp. 135:[203-204])

This being compelled to listen to what this attunement has to show is that which further comes to unconceal Dasein existence in the way particular to that attunement:

We experience our being compelled to enter the peculiar truth or manifestness that lies in this attunement as in every attunement in general. (Heidegger, 1995, pp. 139:[209-10])

These above passages, when related to being compelled to listen to the call of immortality, and the manifestation of beauty as truth in it, will have considerable import later.

§1.2.3.3.BEING LEFT EMPTY

The first structural moment I will look at is being left empty. In so far as Dasein is no longer able to pass the time, everything is found to refuse Dasein its everyday use. Everything leaves Dasein empty and we are therefore indifferent to it: “Beings as a whole do not disappear however, but show

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themselves precisely as such in their indifference. The emptiness accordingly here consists in the indifference enveloping beings as a whole” (Heidegger, 1995, pp. 138:[207-209]).

The disclosure of beings and being in the everyday falls into a form of indifference (Heidegger, 1995, pp. 150:[224-26]), yet not such that their status as beings falls away and there is merely nothing. Rather, they stand before us resisting us the openness to take up their possibilities, while, as we will manifest them, they show themselves to Dasein as their possibilities of significance: “Being left empty in this third form of boredom is Dasein's being delivered over to beings' telling refusal of themselves as a whole” (Heidegger, 1995, pp. 139-40:[209-12]).

There needs to be some clarity on the phenomenon of the telling refusal. The key idea is that in all beings refusing themselves, they also make themselves manifest as a telling of that which refuses itself in its ways of being. Thus, it tells us what it refuses to be for us, as we refuse it our everyday being with it (Heidegger, 1995, pp. 140:[210- 12]).

§1.2.3.4.BEING IN LIMBO

The second structural moment is a transformation of being in limbo, this form the limbo arises out of being left indifferent to possibilities that are not Dasein opened to its own-most extremity to be. This opening is related primarily to what is always available but left unexploited to Dasein in its everyday fallen and absorbed existence within its role within the wider significance of Das Man (Heidegger, 1995, pp. 141:[212-13]).

The third form of being in limbo is not merely the indifference of the telling announcement of Dasein’s own-most possibility, but also to be impelled towards it as a whole:

… for this peculiar impoverishment which sets in with respect to ourselves in this 'it is boring for one' first brings the self in all its nakedness to itself as the self that is there and has taken over the being-there of its Da-sein. For what purpose? To be that Da-sein. Beings as a whole refuse themselves tellingly, not to me as me, but to the Dasein in me whenever I know that 'it is boring for one'. (Heidegger, 1995, pp. 143:[215-16])

This possibility in its disclosure however, also makes inherent sense to the being of Dasein and it is called forward towards its own-most possibility as authentic Dasein: “We have thereby determined

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the specific being held in limbo of the third form: being impelled toward the originary making-possible of Dasein as such” (Heidegger, 1995, pp. 144:[216- 1 7]).

Ratcliffe suggests that the final mode of this attunement is the deepest because it is what limits the possibility space of the Dasein it affects the deepest:

Everything is encompassed by it, and no sense remains of there being any possibilities for anyone that fall outside of the boredom. […] This is why Heidegger (GA 29/30: 101–2) maintains that the most “powerful” moods are those we are oblivious to. (Ratcliffe, 2013, p. 165)

It therefore covers everything, not merely Dasein’s being or the situation in which one finds oneself.

§1.2.4.

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Heidegger finally turns from boredom to the structure of temporality to identify how it is related to boredom and the existence of Dasein as Dasein as such. While it does bear implicitly on the

following discussion, I have transferred some of it to the following, the content as a whole can be found in the appendix.

§1.3.

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HARACTERISING

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ROUND ATTUNEMENTS

Returning to the first (1) issue, the aim of the above discussion of boredom (although truncated) was to show that we matters in the profoundest moment of the attunement is what is affecting us into being attuned to our self-understanding. And, while it seems clear that one of the characteristic features of a ground attunement is that there is a hierarchy of dependence in terms of something like intelligibility, as Heidegger himself makes this claim clearly:

The third form is the condition of the possibility of the first and thereby also of the second. Only because this constant possibility–the 'it is boring for one'–lurks in the ground of Dasein can man be bored or become bored by the things and people around him. Only because every form of boredom comes to arise out of this depth of Dasein....(Heidegger M. , 1995, pp. 156:[233-35])

It is not clear that Ratcliffe’s revision to a unitary characteristic does not inadvertently hide something equally important about that phenomenon. The condition of possibility is not only what is essential to what in one attunement is grounding, while others are derivative ways of expressing that attunement.

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A quote that moves us closer to understanding what constitutes the ‘ground’ in the ‘ground attunement’, here related to boredom, might be:

What bores us in profound boredom, and thus–in accordance with what we have said earlier-what is solely and properly boring, is temporality in a particular way of its temporalizing. (Heidegger M. , 1995, pp. 158:[236-39])

My interpretation will be that for something to be a ground attunement it must arise from something constitutive of Dasein and a factical aspect of the always disposed ‘how’ of being Dasein that affects there-being. Yet, only in a particular form of boredom, does Dasein disclose itself to itself as being what it is itself already constituted by as Dasein:

Yet to question concerning this fundamental attunement does not mean to further justify and continue the contemporary human traits of man, but to liberate the humanity in man, to liberate the humanity of man, i.e., the essence of man, to let the Dasein in him become essential. (Heidegger, 1995, pp. 166:[247-48]) With regard to boredom, the constitutive structure is time:

What is boring is neither beings nor things as such-whether individually or in a context-nor human beings as people we find before us and can ascertain, neither objects nor subjects, but temporality as such. Yet this temporality does not stand alongside 'objects' and 'subjects', but constitutes the ground of the possibility of the subjectivity of subjects, and indeed in such a way that the essence of subjects consists precisely in having Dasein, i.e., in always already enveloping beings as a whole in advance. (Heidegger M. , 1995, pp. 158:[236-39])

Boredom then is a particular way in which Dasein finds itself forced to reinterpret its time, until it discloses origionary temporality. It is however, its time itself that discloses Dasein to itself when it comes to be towards itself in the future:

This sort of thing is possible only in that Dasein can, indeed, come towards itself in its ownmost possibility, and that it can put up with this possibility as a

possibility in thus letting itself come towards itself–in other words, that it exists. This letting-itself-come-towards-itself in that distinctive possibility which it puts up with, is the primordial phenomenon of the future as coming towards.

(Heidegger, 1980, p. 372:325)

To contrast and show that something similar is in play with profound anxiety, “our entire being in the world is fundamentally structured by a being toward death, and we are constantly coming to grips with death … (Wrathall & Murphey, 2013, pp. 23-4). As will be discussed there may be another constitutive structure to Dasein as Dasein that may be able to make Dasein whole in a certain respect, and attunes Dasein out of itself.

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My aim has been to present a different way of characterising the essence of ground attunement to that of Ratcliffe, by suggesting it is in someway related to something constitutive of Dasein that is able to affect it directly and as a whole. This lurks inside, sleeps, and can be awoken.

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The aim of this chapter is to first discuss a secondary source that is relevant to the literature in which this thesis may find a place. I will critique that perspective before laying out my own existential analysis of the relevant Platonic literature. This will first require arguing for something constitutive of factical Dasein that allows for the possibility of eros as a ground attunement in the second section. The third section is an initial working out of that structure.

§2.1.

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ERSPECTIVE

The aim of this section is explore Rojcewicz’s text ‘Platonic Love: Dasein’s Urge towards Being’ (Rojcewicz, 1997). This text has similar themes to my thesis claim, and while independently reached, needs to be explored in some detail. Rojcewicz’s paper is an attempt to marry Platonic and Heideggarian themes, consummating that union through bodily intercourse. Physical love, Rojcewicz surmises, has something to tell us about our Being, and Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus are the texts from which to draw conclusions about physical love.

Rojcewicz proceeds by investigative analysis of the phenomenon described in the Symposium and the Phaedrus with particular eye to the relationship between Socrates and his lovers. He analyses the texts in terms of various qualities: literary symbolism and descriptive elements are taken up into his analysis. The vision he presents, tells us how it is that Dasein might go about uncovering its Being, through penetrating into Being, in sexual intercourse with other men.

I will first look at Rojcewicz central claim, before drawing one argument from the Symposium and one from the Phaedrus to show that Socrates is consistent in his abstaining from sexual pleasure

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and intercourse with his interlocutors, even while being in love with them. This will present negative arguments to this aspect of Rojcewicz’s thesis. The second mode of argument will require an

existential interpretation of the structure of the attunement that affects the different kinds of being a lover. This is the aim of thesis as a whole, and will also be brought to bear on Rojcewicz’s

interpretation of these dialogues, again showing his interpretation may be in error.

Rojcewicz claims that the Symposium and the Phaedrus have a simple unity. The Symposium is theory (presumably it is Diotima’s speech that is the theory), while the Phaedrus is a description of the praxis. Rojcewicz notes that the lover is interested in the birth of a ‘good’ soul, thus that it is the higher mysteries he is interested in; Socrates is interested in being a midwife to males. To be this kind of midwife, Rojcewicz claims, Socrates needs to engage in sex. It is precisely because of physical intercourse that the lover, as philosopher, is willing to help their interlocutor:

He continually uses masculine terms to refer to these lovers and describes the typical Greek homosexual relationship in which the lover undertakes the education of his beloved boy (and receives sexual favors in return). (Rojcewicz, 1997, p. 105)

The general structure of their affair gives rise to virtue, and has the following schema:

Abstracting from all inessentials, then, we can say that Socrates characterizes the higher love as involving three steps, and the final step is the decisive factor: 1.) encounter a person with a beautiful body; 2.) touch and have intercourse; 3.) beget virtue. This is the first and most basic outline of Platonic love. (ibid)

There are a number of places in the texts in which we find Socrates denying a physical sexual side to the praxis of his erotic art. I will draw two examples the first can be found in the Symposium and the second in the Phaedrus. The first of these is an individual case of him not seeking sexual favours in exchange for helping his interlocutor, Alcibiades. The second argument aims to make a general claim regarding why Socrates does not seek sexual favours from his interlocutors.

The first example is found in Alcibiades’ speech in the Symposium, where he relates to the rest of the guests at Agathon’s symposium on eros, about the terrible sense of pain and frustration Socrates has thrown him into, in their relation with each other. He explains that in his terrible eros, for which only Socrates is the cure, he has on a number of occasions attempted to bed Socrates. Each attempt involved the design of some innocuous roués, attempting to please Socrates into being alone with him.

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In each attempt, through which he sought Socrates to grant him the beauty he so desired, he would find himself rebuffed:

So there I was, my friends, alone with him at last. My idea, naturally, was that he’d take advantage of the opportunity to tell me whatever it is that lovers say when they find themselves alone; I relished the moment. But no such luck! Nothing of the sort occurred. Socrates had his usual sort of conversation with me, and at the end of the day he went off. (Plato, 1997, p. 499:217c)

After a number of such situational episodes, Alcibiades finally confronts Socrates directly on his issue. Essentially begging Socrates that he becomes his physical lover so that he might be taught to become a better man, to which Socrates replies:

“Dear Alcibiades, […] you seem to me to want more than your proper share: you offer me the merest appearance of beauty, and in return you want the thing itself, ‘gold in exchange for bronze.’” (Plato, 1997, p. 500:218e)

Alcibiades at the end of his eulogy of his eros for Socrates, concludes that:

He spurned my beauty, of which I was so proud, members of the jury—for this is really what you are: you’re here to sit in judgment of Socrates’ amazing arrogance and pride. Be sure of it, I swear to you by all the gods and goddesses together, my night with Socrates went no further than if I had spent it with my own father or older brother! (Plato, 1997, p. 501:219c)

Socrates at least, is not described, with one of his most famous interlocutors, to have engage in sexual activity; and clearly not for a lack of attempt on the part of his interlocutor. Now things might be different with Phaedrus, maybe Phaedrus is a better interlocutor for Socrates, with whom physical sex is permissible, maybe because Phaedrus’ naïvely innocent soul is better suited for existing philosophically and therefore might exchange gold for gold.

Rojcewicz explicitly discuss the Phaedrus and claims that in it we find that Socrates does make physical love with Phaedrus:

Socrates now delivers his first speech. My thesis is that while doing so he carries out the second step of Platonic love, i.e., he engages in sexual contact with Phaedrus. This is, perhaps, not expressed directly by Plato, but it is indicated, I hope to show, clearly enough. (Rojcewicz, 1997, p. 114)

A central argument for their sexual union, is that symbolic status of the nymphs, which, force in this instance, Socrates and Phaedrus to mate:

Now the danger is this: the nymphs punish unresponsive lovers. So Phaedrus has forced Socrates to avoid this danger; i.e., Phaedrus has forced Socrates not to be

On Immortality

O

N

I

MMORTALITY

CONTENTS

P

REFACE

I

NTRODUCTION

C

HAPTER

O

NE

:

T

HE

G

ROUND

A

TTUNEMENT

,

B

OREDOM

§1.1.

R

ATCLIFFE ON

G

ROUND

A

TTUNEMENT

§1.2.

B

OREDOM

§1.2.1.

T

F

F

B

§1.2.2.

T

S

F

B

§1.2.3.

T

T

F

B

§1.2.4.

T

T

S

B

§1.3.

C

HARACTERISING

G

ROUND ATTUNEMENTS

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HAPTER

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WO

:

E

ROS

§2.1.

A

NOTHER

P

ERSPECTIVE