Translating “Justice”

Abstract

We could begin by invoking the myth justice, one the oldest myths philosophy-of Er crossing the river at the end the Republic, Solon and Cleisthenes admonishing the citizenry in Aristotle's Athenian Constitution, Matthew's appeal to dikaisyne in the New Testament, or even, if we were daring, the prophet Amos' passionate call to let roll down . . . like an ever-flowing stream (Amos: 5:23-24). This myth justice-of finding an ethical center at the heart being-comprises one the dominant motifs Western thinking. But this is not where I want to begin. Rather, I want to follow the path another lineage and another retrieval that goes back farther than the venerable Platonic myth eternal justice. This one lies buried in the occlusions the fragmented insights another Greek called the obscure one-Heraclitus Ephesus-that ancient Greek philosopher who will offer a different path for genealogical reconstruction and perhaps even a model how to deconstruct this other tradition Western thinking that links and binds the myth to a deep metaphysical reading the ethical. I want to situate my remarks in an attempt to think through a very different kind retrieval, one that is itself fragmented and sometimes violent and begins if not in Holderlin or Hegel then in Nietzsche and in Nietzsche's master-interpreter, Martin Heidegger. I want to look at how Nietzsche's and Heidegger's retrieval Heraclitus-especially his understanding dike-will open up a very different notion justice, one that will offer a way dismantling the Western edifice ethics by rethinking justice as that very structure being within and against which all beings are measured. In this non-juridical, non-ethical reading we will need to think as that which joins all beings together in a peculiar jointure, the jointure adjustment where mortals and gods adjust themselves to a beyond their ken. An uncanny justice, one might call it, one which frees from its ethical moorings in Platonic metaphysics and Christian ontotheology and hearkens back instead to the fragmentary utterances Anaximander, Parmenides, and Heraclitus. In this other myth justice, one taken up by Heraclitus (in Diels Fragment 94), we might even find a way thinking against itself, in terms that do not lend themselves to being translated into the pre-given forms ethical injunctions. In order to recall this other myth justice, one that challenges the juridical notion so as to retrieve a notion as adjustment to the jointure being, I want to look at Heidegger's interpretation the Heraclitean concept dike read against the Nietzschean concept Gerechtigkeit. Unlike Nietzsche, Heidegger will abjure the traditional German translation dike as Gerechtigkeit or justice and translate it instead as Fug or jointure-a kind organizing matrix that brings all beings together contrapuntally within the fugal structure being. In Introduction to Metaphysics Heidegger will raise anew the question being by claiming that Being as dike is the key to beings in their structure [Gefiige], where dike stands for the being beings as a whole (IM: 177/EM: 127). One year after he delivered the Introduction to Metaphysics lectures, Heidegger would enter upon an essential confrontation with Nietzsche in a series lectures that would continue over the next nine years. In these lectures, Heidegger would put forth the outline his overarching history being begun in his 1930 lecture On the Essence Truth. In his 1940 lectures on European Nihilism, Heidegger will take up again the Nietzschean notion measure or Mass, not only in relation to what is zeitgemass or of the times, but more essentially as a way thinking through the history metaphysics from the early Greeks through the early modern tradition Descartes on through Nietzsche. …