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History Versus Nature : a Reading of Aristotle, Hobbes, and Heidegger

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History Versus Nature : a Reading of Aristotle, Hobbes, and Heidegger University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014 1-1-1995 History versus nature : a reading of Aristotle, Hobbes, and Heidegger. Tong, Shen University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_1 Recommended Citation Shen, Tong,, "History versus nature : a reading of Aristotle, Hobbes, and Heidegger." (1995). Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014. 1956. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_1/1956 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014 by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. HISTORY VERSUS NATURE: A READING OF ARISTOTLE, HOBBES , AND HEIDEGGER [ A Dissertation Presented by SHEN TONG Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY September 1995 Department of Political Science @ Copyright by Shen Tong 1995 All Rights Reserved HISTORY VERSUS NATURE: A READING OF ARISTOTLE, HOBBES , AND HEIDEGGER A Dissertation Presented by SHEN TONG Approved as to style and content by: Nicholas Xenos, Chair Roberto Alej^andro Rivera, Member Eric S. Einhorn, Department Head Department of Political Science ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Professor Nicholas Xenos is Chair of my Dissertation Committee. His guidance and advice are always incisive, concise, and thought-provoking. He has helped me so much not only with my studies but also in many other ways. Without his unfailing support, what I have done today would not have been possible. Professor Xenos is an exceptional teacher. It is my good fortune to have had the opportunity of studying with him. I owe to him more than what a graduate student normally does to his or her dissertation adviser. As Members of the Dissertation Committee, Professor Roberto Alejandro Rivera and Professor Luis F. Aviles have read all the drafts of the manuscript, and made insightful criticisms and valuable comments. I am deeply thankful to them for what they have done for me. Over the years Professor James Der Derian has been a constant source of understanding and encouragement. Professor Hao Wang of the Rockefeller University died on May 13, 1995. During the last year of his life, he gave caring and keen attention to my work on this dissertation. Errors and weaknesses in this text are mine alone. iv ABSTRACT HISTORY VERSUS NATURE: A READING OF ARISTOTLE, HOBBES , AND HEIDEGGER SEPTEMBER 1995 SHEN TONG M.A., LONG ISLAND UNIVERSITY Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Nicholas Xenos This dissertation is a reading of Aristotle, Hobbes, and Heidegger in terms of the antithesis between the concepts of "history" and "nature" in political thought. "History" registers the entrenched reality of human collectivity, viz., the fashion in which ethical identity takes shape not in a universal cosmos of reason or nature, but in a particularistic linguistico-ethical scheme. Grounded on the interpretation of a historical people's immediate experience, this Aristotelian milieu of cumulative habituation has stood for millennia as the sole intelligible locus of truth, and the exclusive source of ethical cohesion and ultimate arbitration. Understood as such, politics necessarily draws on ethical ity, not vice versa. Men can never extricate themselves from their historicity by rational choice or political institution. In contrast, for "nature" stands for a dehistoricized way of searching natural reason the source of politics in accordance with reflection on human on-ily. Proceeding from a critical experience, the Hobbesian persuasion sees the Aristotelian- Heideggerian mode of community as based on the multitude's ignorant and irrational state of mind. The received spheres of ethicality only make a packed space of injustice crowded with unburdened claims, private measures, willful manipulations, and hoarded wrongs. The exit on such a miserable "war of all against all" lies in giving up the attempt to find an ethical solution to the discords of values, and reducing the irreducible evaluative disparateness to public tranquility as the only ethico- political test acceptable to all. Drawing on Plato, the dissertation concludes that the rational solution predicates itself not precisely upon metaphysical authenticity, but rather upon a haunting distrust of the interpretative relevance of what a people has experienced in the past. Underlying Plato and Hobbes is the imperative that exposure to the capriciousness of history is too much to bear. "History" has its source in the irredeemable depravity and incommensurable diversity ingrained deep in the kernel of the human condition. Short of a fundamental recast of man's soul and a clean, sustained break of the unbreakable ties to the past, the Leviathan will remain a project next to impossible. To the extent that "history" and "nature" are two ultimate positions antithetic beyond rational knowledge, a synthesis seems hard to conceive. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ABSTRACT V Chapter I. INTRODUCTION II. ARISTOTLE: ETHOS AND HISTORIA AS A SECOND NATURE . 13 A. Arete Independent of Logos 19 B. Practical Particularity and Experience 23 C. Conflict and Coherence 33 D. Phusis and Nomos 42 E. Language 47 F. History 52 G. Identity 58 H. Friendship and Community 65 I. Ethos 70 J. Historia 74 III. HOBBES: FROM SOCIAL ORDER TO SOCIAL ANARCHY 83 A. The Sceptical Turn 88 B. Language 91 C. Natural Reason and Fear of Death 97 D. Moral Relativism 105 E. Self-Preservation and Public Judgment 112 F. The State of Nature: Historia? 121 G. Ignorance and Superstition 124 H. Ecclesiasticism 131 I. A Rational Cast of Mind 136 J. History and Its Abuse 140 K. The Fool's Question and Hobbes's Politics ... 153 IV. HEIDEGGER: MAN THE ANIMAL INTERPRETATUS 163 A. Existence and Essence 172 B. Ready-to-Hand and Present-at-Hand 178 C. Interpretation 183 D. Language and Collective Identity 191 E. Logos 206 F. History 216 G. Heidegger's Eschatology 230 V. CONCLUSION PLATO: THE GROUNDLESS IMPERATIVE OF REASON 244 50 A. Weber: Three Themes 2 260 B. The Platonic Imperative vii BIBLIOGRAPHY 285 viii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION . the task of working out, positively and radically, the different categorial structures of those entities which are Nature and of those which are history. Martin Heidegger^ Niels Bohr once remarked: "It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature. Taking this insight to its limit, the Danish physicist even doubted whether electrons and protons were more than human inventions. Bohr's doctrine of "complementarity" is echoed in Thomas Kuhn's notion of "paradigm" which, in its critique of the empiricist outlook of science, defines a way in which new theories are viewed as being superior to and more refined than those they usurp, not as standing in an authentic, objective progression any closer to the cosmos of nature or truth. Analogically, we may take thinkers in our field as "paradigmatic" theorists, each inspiring a distinctive yet partial way of looking at the world of ethics and politics. The underlying theoretical constructs invariably are not exclusive truth claims but rather linguistic inventions, ^. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, (New York: Harper & Row, 1962) , p. 451. Clarendon 2. Abraham Pais, Niels Bohr's Times . (Oxford: Press, 1991) , p. 427. 1 registering the pressing concerns of our moral experience and collective existence. In such a perspective, the present work is conceived to be a reading of Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes, and Martin Heidegger. We attempt to examine the concepts of "history" and "nature" as two antithetic paradigms upon which ethical theory and political thought inscribe the collectivity. We ask questions such as these: Wherein does the locus lie on which ethical and collective identity takes shape in real history as we have experienced it? What is the source of Aristotle's community and politics? How does the Philosopher evaluate the human faculty of reason as possessing access to the truth? Why is it, on the other hand, that Hobbes dislikes Aristotle so much? How does Hobbes see the fundamental absurdity of the Aristotelian emphasis on ordinary particularity and the stake involved therein? What is the implicit reference, if any, of Hobbes' s "war of all against all?" Does it refer to a pre-ethical, pre-societal anarchy, belonging to a remote past, which we leave behind once and for all the moment we quit it? Or, could we read it as referring to a condition closer and more value-loaded, more threatening and more inexorable? Why does Hobbes insist on the senselessness of historicity while he evidently is aware that historicity commands an exclusive grip on the languages intelligible to what does the us in our received milieu of ethicality? Upon predicate itself rational solution to the evaluative warfare from happens to be if what it is meant to redeem humanity unpleasantly true to the core of entrenched human experience? And, are "history" and "nature" by definition mutually exclusive? What could they imply for ethics and politics? In view whereof, how do we assess the possibility of a synthesis between the two ultimate persuasions? The assumptions and concerns from which the present work will proceed are as follows. Community first can be paradigmatically engraved upon a temporal space, upon accretions of antecedent experience. It is informed by ethicality and intelligible with a general soul. Central to this line of persuasion is a "hermeneutical problem," underscoring our need to see the world as a meaningful cosmos and ourselves as part of some larger scheme. "Meaning" refers to some import, design, or purpose that is meant to be understood, signified, or conveyed by linguistic means, especially through an undertaking called "interpretation." Language is the repository of tradition; and tradition, the repository of truth.
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