Heidegger’s 1924 Clearing of the Affects Using Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Book II

Abstract

In Being and Time, Heidegger famously notes that the analysis of the affects (pathe) has taken barely one since book ? of Aristotle's Rhetoric (H139).1 The occasion for this reengagement with the possibility of a step forward is the availability of Heidegger's lecture course at the University of Marburg in 1924 on the Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy. This course, which includes a detailed analysis of book ? of the Rhetoric, has been published as volume 18 of Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe (2002) and just translated (2009).2 Here Heidegger's penetrating but sparse remarks in Being and Time on Befindlichkeit [affectivity] are deepened and implemented in his reading of Aristotle's Rhetoric. The relevance of this reengagement is direct. The dominant view of the affects in contemporary philosophy is arguably the position that affects are an unclearly expressed proposition, including the cognitively articulated propositional attitude. The position of this essay is that the modern propositional account of the affects is cleared away by and does not survive a reading of Heidegger's volume 18 on book II of Aristotle's Rhetoric. Lest someone think this is a trivial matter, the long and distinguished tradition going back to the Stoics, in which affects are indistinct cognitions that require clarification, is well articulated in modern times by Anthony Kenny and then in Martha Nussbaum's monumental Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions? Nussbaum's position, in particular, is highly nuanced, and it is an oversimplification to say that she is merely a cognitivist about the affects (emotions), pure and simple. One can get to a cognitivist account in at least two ways: first, bottom up, by saying that affects are unclear cognitions (thoughts); alternatively, one can redefine the boundary between affectivity and cognition top down such that thinking becomes infused with affection - pardon the expression, more touchy-feely - that is, affects feedback into thought and enable the eruptions of thought of the kind that produce paradigm shifts in science, creativity in art, and personality transformation in therapy. These eruptions are a function of the affectivity of thinking. The boundary is transgressed not only from affectivity to cognition, but in the reverse direction as well, yielding a quality of thought that is densely suffused with an emotional tonality such as that exemplified in musicality. Nevertheless, I shall include Nussbaum's contribution as belonging to the cognitivist approach because, ultimately, even if she is able to translate partially between the two, she fights continuously against the incommensurability of thoughts and affects. In fact, Heidegger explicitly warns against the second, top down account - any cognitive determining of Befindlichkeit is confused with surrendering science ontically to feeling (H138). Rhetoric is the art of doing things with words, even in a performative sense of speaking a world of commitments into existence in the community (polis), and Heidegger gives matters a strikingly innovative twist. The horizon of this speaking turns out to be acoustics - hearing. The work of is speaking and listening to one another about what matters: rhetoric is nothing other than the discipline in which the self-interpretation of being-there [existence] is explicitly fulfilled. Rhetoric is nothing other than the interpretation of concrete being-there [existence], the hermeneutic of being-there itself' (1924: 76). Aristotle's Rhetoric is for those speakers and listeners - like Heidegger and his authence - whose existence is an issue for them. The three major distinctions or pisteis (views) of the Rhetoric are engaged: character (ethos), affect (pathos), and speech (logos). While the pathe in which the world is disclosed as mattering to human being ultimately cannot be completely articulated and exhausted by ethos or logos (or nous), diverse domains of relatedness are available where our being-with-one-another shows up in the speaking and acting in the polis, where polis is used in the broad sense of engaging with one another as members of the same human community (1924: 72) of agents and doers. …