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Heidegger on the Semblance of the Beautiful

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Heidegger on the Semblance of the Beautiful Research research in phenomenology 47 (�0�7) 35�–365 in Phenomenology brill.com/rp Heidegger on the Semblance of the Beautiful Joe Balay Christopher Newport University [email protected] Abstract In his Nietzsche lectures, Heidegger states that there is a concealed discordance be- tween beauty, semblance, and truth in Platonism. This paper explores this claim in detail to show how such a discordance haunts not only Platonism, but the beginnings and ends of Western philosophy. This commences with Plato’s claim that beauty’s ra- diance is both the reminder of the non-sensible εἴδη and a semblance belonging to the sensible world. This discordance is not overcome in the ensuing Western tradi- tion, however, but made more dreadful. This is because in Nietzsche’s anti-platonic retrieval of sensible beauty over non-sensible truth, the platonic reminder of the εἴδη is transformed into the dangerous production of new forms of power. In both cases, however, Heidegger proposes that this metaphysical thinking of Being-as-form con- ceals the early Greek insight that beauty’s tragic radiance lets Being appear as both truth and semblance. Keywords Heidegger – Plato – Nietzsche – beauty – semblance … For the beautiful is nothing but the beginning of the terrible, a beginning we but barely endure, © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi �0.��63/�569�640-��34�Downloaded374 from Brill.com09/25/2021 09:51:47AM via free access 352 balay and it amazes us so, since calmly it disdains to destroy us …1 Rilke, Duino Elegies ∵ 1 Introduction It is a strange thing to say that beginnings are terrible. Stranger still to say that this is bound up with the beautiful. We hear in certain mythological begin- nings, for example, that the world’s most beautiful woman was born from Zeus’s divine rape of Nemesis. The offspring of this illicit act was Helen, whose nimbus-like radiance attracts the greatest passion and calamity with equal in- difference, who loved by all loves none back, whose radiant being cannot be distinguished from phantomlike semblance.2 On the one hand, the terror of Helen’s beauty follows here from the uncanny ambivalence surrounding it. For example, we hear that she both seduces Paris and is seduced by him, loves Menelaus and hates him, dwells in Sparta and is hidden in Egypt. She is a ghost, a phantom that threatens to undermine the truth, propriety, and being of the men and women chasing her. On the other hand, this terror concerns the violent will to possession that her beauty en- genders in those who encounter it. Thus we learn that her mother’s rape is re- doubled in her own rape by Theseus, while her abduction by Paris leads to the annihilation of so many others at Troy. In this way, one might say that the ter- ror of Helen’s beauty concerns the tragic interplay of appearing (Erscheinen) and seeming (Anschein) in the early Greek world, and the inevitable violation that follows it.3 If, however, these insights concern the beautiful within mythological be- ginnings, Heidegger’s invocation of Rilke’s “beginning of the terrible” in the 1 Quoted in Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: Der Wille zur Macht als Kunst (GA 6.1), ed. Brigitte Schillbach (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1996), 116; English translation by David Farrell Krell, Nietzsche Volume I: The Will To Power as Art (San Francisco: Harper, 1991), 116. Hereafter cited as GA 6.1. 2 See, for example, Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (New York: Random House Vintage, 1994). 3 I think here of Charles Scott’s wonderful essay, “Helen, Truth, and the Wisdom of Nemesis” in Living with Indifference (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 11–21. research in phenomenologyDownloaded from 47 Brill.com09/25/2021(2017) 351–365 09:51:47AM via free access heidegger on the semblance of the beautiful 353 Nietzsche lectures invites us to simultaneously think about the question with regard to philosophical beginnings. For in these lectures Heidegger suggests that, in a certain sense, philosophy begins with Plato’s attempt to determine the indeterminable relationship between beauty and semblance within the framework of the εἴδη. In tracing the development of this determination for- ward to Nietzsche, however, Heidegger contends that this violence turns into something still more dreadful (entsetzen). Specifically, in failing to think the essential discordance (Zwiespalt) between beauty, semblance, and Being fig- ured in Helen above, Heidegger suggests that Nietzsche’s reversal of Platonism positions beauty within the volatile dynamics of will to power anticipating technicity today. These are provocative claims. If, however, there is a tragic wisdom in think- ing about these appearances and semblances of beauty, we might ask more carefully just how philosophy can be understood as a kind of violation of the beautiful. Pursuing this question here, I want to begin by closely examining Heidegger’s claim in the Nietzsche lectures that there is a discordance between beauty, semblance, and true Being that Platonism cannot face. I will then turn to his reading of Nietzsche’s attempt to reverse this Platonic determination in the dynamics of will to power. Highlighting the subjection of the beautiful at both the beginning and end of philosophy to the production of form (εἲδος), I shall conclude by showing how Heidegger retrieves a pre-philosophical think- ing of the beautiful in the early Greeks. 2 Plato: Felicitous Discordance In the first volume of the Nietzsche Lectures: The Will to Power as Art, Heidegger suggests that Plato’s thinking of the beautiful serves as the answer to a ques- tion about Nietzsche’s thinking of will to power. This is because in associating the will to power with the beautiful creation of the artist, Nietzsche self- consciously situates his thinking over against the history of Western philoso- phy that has, since Plato, privileged supersensuous truth over sensuous beauty. For this reason, Heidegger states that in order to understand how Nietzsche’s thinking serves as the reversal of the history of Platonism, one must first expli- cate the nature of beauty in Plato. For Plato, however, “everything is gathered into the guiding question of philosophy—the question as to what beings are” (GA 6.1:193/190). In the Phaedrus, Socrates explains that the human has a uniquely two-fold relation with Being. On the one hand, it is the being that has always already glimpsed Being such that its soul stands in essential nourishment of Being. Being, research in phenomenology 47 (2017) 351–365 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 09:51:47AM via free access 354 balay however, is defined by the supersensuous ἰδέα or εἲδος that gives a thing its look. Thus, it is only because the mortal has always already looked at this look that they can encounter anything in the subsequent views of existence. On the other hand, because human being is simultaneously embodied being, their view on true Being is never purely apprehended, but is perceived through dull, limited, and forgetful encounters with sensuous beings. Indeed, while the εἴδη are said to be most radiant in themselves, on earth they do not shine. Thus Heidegger cites Plato’s Phaedrus 250b “In justice and temperance, and in whatever men ultimately must respect above all else, there dwells no radiance whenever men encounter them as fleeting appearances” (GA 6.1:199/195). It is this fundamental aporia of the χωρισμός in Plato—the split between true Being and sensuous appearance—that explains why “most people find knowledge of Being quite laborious, and consequently […] the view upon Being, remains ἀτελής to them […]” (GA 6.1:196/193). In turn, this is why epis- temic achievement for Plato is not an act of discovering something new, but of ἀνάμνησις, of remembering what has already been viewed. Finally, Heidegger observes this is why there is the most powerful “need for whatever makes pos- sible such recovery, perpetual renewal, and preservation of the view upon Being” (GA 6.1:198/195). This need is met, however, by the beautiful. Heidegger cites Phaedrus 250d: “to beauty alone has the role been allotted (i.e. in the essential order of Being’s illumination) to be the most radiant, but also the most enchanting” (GA 6.1:199/195–196). As this description suggests, Platonic beauty is a powerfully doubled phenomenon. More precisely, it is this doubling that makes beauty powerful. This begins with the manner in which beauty makes its appeal to the senses. It does not beckon the olfactory, the haptic, the gustatory, or the aural, but the most intense sense: vision. Beauty shines, it radiates, it scintillates. By virtue of this radiant appeal to the αἴσθησις of vision, however, beauty has the capacity to awaken that still higher sense of vision, θέα. Through this special chiasm of vision, beauty offers human sight true insight. But the Phaedrus is a dialogue on many subjects, subjects that are not treated separately, subjects that stand in essential relation with one another (GA 6.1:194/191). Accordingly, we learn that beauty has its power to illumi- nate true Being not simply because of this radiant visibility, but because of its essential interrelation with ἔρος. This is because, as what is most lovely (ἐρασμιώτατον), beauty has the erotic power to captivate and enthrall its be- holder. The power of ἔρος comes, of course, from the fact that ἔρος is a god, and as what is most in being, the gods exert a most powerful sway on mortals. On earth, however, this erotic overcoming of mortals is experienced as the divine gift of madness. Thus the Phaedrus speaks not only of καλόν and ἔρος here, but research in phenomenologyDownloaded from 47 Brill.com09/25/2021(2017) 351–365 09:51:47AM via free access heidegger on the semblance of the beautiful 355 also of μανία.
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