Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 40, No.

1, January 2009

TRAGEDY AND METAPHYSICS IN HEIDEGGERS

THE ANAXIMANDER FRAGMENT
KAREN GOVER
I
What happened to the ancient quarrel between tragic poetry and
philosophy? Heidegger says that philosophy is inherently tragic.1 Such an
assertion gainsays the tradition since Plato, which has placed them at odds
with one another. This is an opposition that endures at least until Heideggers
own time (Nietzsche inverted the Platonic opposition but kept its structure in
place), and which Heidegger would again and again seek to dismantle in the
years of his thinking engagement with poetry. To assert the sameness of
philosophy and tragedy would amount to an unprecedented reversal of the
tradition. Yet in a remarkable passage in section 69 of Besinnung, Heidegger
offers this identification: If philosophy is the thinking of beyng in the sense
of the questioning thinking in the grounding of the truth of beyng, then the
name tragic philosophy says twice the same.2 With these words, Heidegger
reduces the diaphora to a redundancy.
I want to address the question of Heidegger and tragedy by beginning with
his most explicit statement regarding its essence and its significance for
thinking. Several commentators have taken up the task of cobbling together
from Heideggers scattered and often oblique remarks his understanding of
tragedy and its significance.3 And yet none of them has incorporated
Heideggers most explicit statement on this topic into their analyses. In some
cases, I find that their interpretations do not accord with Heideggers own
statement on the matter in the Besinnung passage.4 Secondary literature aside,
the text deserves attention because Heidegger is disarmingly and unusually
direct about what he understands by tragedy and its relevance to the history of
being. On the other hand, however, his directness is tempered by his
ambivalence about the tragic plays themselves as well as the usefulness of the
term tragic. This seemingly paradoxical stance is resolved when we consider
that this ambivalence is a sign of just how important the tragic is for
Heideggers philosophical project.
In the second part of this essay I will use the Besinnung passage on tragedy
to help illuminate one of Heideggers last and most evocative uses of the term,
in the 1946 essay The Anaximander Fragment. Although his reference to the
essence of being as tragic appears in the essay as an offhand and seemingly
gratuitous remark, I maintain on the contrary that the understanding of the
tragic that Heidegger outlines in Besinnung 69 can be used as an interpretive
key to the essay. His reading of the fragment, which seems to name the
37

becoming, perdurance, and then decay of beings, is also a meditation on the

history of being as such, in which being appears as presence. The concealing
withdrawal of that which gives presence is spoken in the fragment, and yet,
like a riddling oracle, the saying can only be heard once it is too late. The
trace of the essence of tragedy that Heidegger locates within the fragment is
actually given in the attempt to think what the earliest philosophical fragment
says from out of the end of Western metaphysics. Thus, the tragic dynamic is
not simply to be found in Anaximanders text, as though Heidegger were
simply pointing to something already there. Rather, it speaks to the very nature
of philosophical thinking as an originary disclosure of what has been there all
along.
II
Before we turn to the passage from Besinnung, a few words should be said
about the place of tragedy in Heideggers uvre. His references to tragedy
take place during the so-called turn in his thinking, beginning shortly after
Being and Time in the Rectoral Address, and ending with the 1946 essay, The
Anaximander Fragment.5 Although his references to Greek tragedy tend to be
terse, passing observations rather than sustained treatments, for all of their
brevity they appear fairly regularly in his lectures and writings during this
time.6 The most important of the texts with respect to tragedy are also some of
the most important and influential members of the Heideggerian corpus
generally, viz.: Introduction to Metaphysics, The Origin of the Work of Art,
Beitrge zur Philosophie, the Parmenides lecture course, and the Der Ister
course. At the very least, we could say that tragedy is a leitmotif that runs
through his work during the war years.
And yet, with the exception of two sustained treatments of the same
choral stasimon from Antigone (in Introduction to Metaphysics and the Der
Ister course), the references are often so terse and undeveloped that it is
difficult to infer from them just what Heidegger thinks Greek tragedy was,
and thereby to develop an understanding of its importance for his thought
generally. Heidegger does not offer a theory of tragedy in the Aristotelian,
Hegelian, or even Nietzschean senses of the term. But that is perhaps part of
the problem: for to ask, What is Greek tragedy? is to place it within a
metaphysical formulation. It is to ask about the essence of Greek tragedy,
and therefore to risk reinscribing tragedy within its metaphysical
determinations.
Despite the ambiguity surrounding its place in his thought, there are certain
observations that we can make about the significance of tragedy for Heidegger.
It is clear, for example, that tragedy for Heidegger is exclusively Greek, that it
is closely tied to his readings of the Presocratics, namely Heraclitus and
Parmenides, that it is almost exclusively concerned with Sophocles, and that it
38

is mediated by, and indebted to, Hlderlins engagement with Greek tragedy.
But what is most striking about the significance of tragedy during the so-called
turn in Heideggers thinking is that it has to do with the transformation of the
essence of aletheia in the first, Greek, beginning.
In a 1938 text labelled first draft, included at the end of Basic Questions
of Philosophy, Heidegger explicitly gives tragic poetry a place within the
development of aletheia. He includes it in a numbered list, a linear sequence
of steps that describes the transformation of its essence:
The recollection of the first shining forth of aletheia, as we require it and which we hold to be
possible only on the basis of the question of truth, may be articulated in five levels of
reflection: 1) The unexpressed flaming up of aletheia in the pronouncements of Anaximander.
2) The first unfoldings of aletheia, though not ones explicitly directed to a foundation, in
Heraclitus, Parmenides, the tragic poets, and Pindar. 3) The last glimmering of aletheia within
the question of beings as the basic philosophical question in Plato and Aristotle. 4) The
extinguishing of aletheia and its transformation into homoiosis. 5) The mediate and
mediated transition from aletheia to homoiosis on the by-way over incorrectness (falsitypseudos).7

The fact that he presents this transformation here in such a narrative, linear
format is surprising and indeed misleading. Its formulation as a chronological
sequence makes it resemble a historiological rather than historical
understanding of the history of being.8
From this list, we notice that tragic poetry is mentioned alongside
Heraclitus, Parmenides and Pindar as a site of a certain, rather equivocal
unfolding of aletheia before its eventual collapse into and as metaphysics.
From this we might gather that tragedy is the site for an experience of truth
that is somehow pre-metaphysical. Greek tragedy belongs to a certain
liminal moment in the Greek experience of aletheia. It is a moment in which
certain possibilities for experiencing truth as unconcealment were not yet
completely foreclosed by its decisive transformation into homoiosis, and yet it
is just on the verge of its decisive shift. Yet we would also notice that tragedy
is just one site of this first unfolding of aletheia among other early Greek
thinkers and poets.
The word tragic is used to characterize a thinking that attempts to overcome
metaphysics, and to overcome it not by attempting to go beyond or to transcend
the tradition, but rather by means of an undergoing. Heidegger is perhaps right
to warn against using a term that has been so thoroughly overdetermined by the
very same metaphysical tradition whose limit it is supposed to announce. In his
remarks on tragedy elsewhere, he repeatedly mentions the danger of interpreting
tragic poetry in terms of Christian morality, psychology, or lived-experience.
As Heidegger observes in Basic Questions of Philosophy, tragedy is closed off
to us for the same reason that a real understanding of anything essential to the
Greek world is impossible: the world of those works has passed. But if what we
take to be tragic is determined by the metaphysical tradition, as Heidegger
39

worries that it is, then it would seem that any attempt to think the end and/or
overcoming of metaphysics in terms of tragedy would already be doomed to
failure, insofar as it would be governed precisely by that which it attempts to
think in its overcoming.
And yet this is not simply Heideggers problem with respect to tragic
poetry, but in fact points to the defining problem generally for an attempt to
overcome metaphysics: as Heidegger recognizes, there is no exit, no way
simply to step outside of metaphysics; no language that does not tend toward
and perhaps inevitably succumb to representational thinking; therefore any
attempt to overcome metaphysics will have to come from within it. It will have
to be a turning that employs the language of representational thinking against
itself, in such a way that it is transformed and opens up possibilities that are
totally other to those given by metaphysics. Thus, if it is the case that
Heidegger tries to think the overcoming of metaphysics in terms of Greek
tragedy, this means that Greek tragedy itself will also have to be placed in
question, and our understanding of it will be just as subject to transformation
as the metaphysical concepts that we cannot help but employ are indeed
bound to in its interpretation.
Such a seemingly vicious circularity will already be quite familiar to those
who are acquainted with the movements of his thought. How can it be that
Heidegger would attempt to think the end of metaphysics in terms of the
tragic, when the so-called tragic is itself already determined by an aesthetic
and that means metaphysical tradition of literary criticism whose
ascendancy extends right on down to Heideggers (and perhaps still our) own
time? Can it be that Heidegger himself didnt know what he meant when he
said the word tragedy?
The closest that we have to a declaration by Heidegger of the significance
of tragedy appears in Besinnung 69. While this text by no means resolves the
interpretive question of inferring from Heideggers scattered and oblique
remarks what significance tragedy has in his thought generally, the Besinnung
passage is nevertheless remarkable for its directness, in the sense that it is one
of the rare cases in which Heidegger discusses the philosophical significance
of tragedy. However, what is important about this text is not so much what it
tells us about tragedy, but rather what it reveals about Heideggers
understanding of the nature and significance of his own thinking. I quote this
passage on tragedy at length, because the text is revealing in terms of its
ambivalence and contradictions.
If we see the essence of the tragic in that the inception is the ground of the going-under
(Untergang), but going-under not as end but rather the rounding-out of the inception, then
the tragic belongs to the essence of Seyn.
This however makes possible that tragedies are there, where beings hold sway in the origin
(Ur-sprung) of Seyn, in the history of beings and indeed in that being, whose essence is rooted
in relation to Seyn. The great essential poetry as founding of beyng is tragic. And

40

perhaps the previous tragic poems are only entryways, because due to their belonging to
occidental metaphysics they poetize beings and only mediately beyng. The label tragic has
in this context no special role, especially not in the sense that here a tragic philosophy is
being conceived. What is alone essential is the knowledge of the inception as the ground of the
going-under that completes it. If we speak of the end out of the thinking of the inception, then
this never means the mere stopping and leaving behind. It means rather the accomplishing
equal to the inception and yet having declined from it of that which the inception, leaping
ahead of its history, sets and decides as possibilities.
The first history of being, from phusis up until the eternal return is an under-going inception
[ein untergehender Anfang]. But this history remains in its course concealed. It does not even
know the open place for beings and their production and presentation as background. Because
the inception can only be experienced inceptually, that first beginning and its history will only
come into the open and never into the public out of the other inception of the history of
being.
If philosophy is the thinking of beyng in the sense of the questioning thinking in the grounding
of the truth of beyng, then the name tragic philosophy says twice the same. Philosophy is
inherently tragic in the sense of the word just given. This does not permit philosophy to be
called tragic on the basis of the usual display of emotions. Because of the burdening of this
word through literary-historical and cultivated opinions, we are better off leaving it out of
use. What the essential mark of the inception indicates (the already-decided coming of the
going-under and with it the inception) can also be grasped and understood in the course of
thinking without this word. [Translation modified]

We find in this remarkable passage that Heidegger both distances himself

from the term tragic and embraces it in the extreme. He insists that his is not
a tragic philosophy, and that we are better off avoiding the term, and yet this
disavowal occurs not because it is irrelevant, but because it is philosophy in an
essential sense: the thinking of being.
The tragic for Heidegger names the movement according to which the
history of being paradoxically discloses itself through a kind of withdrawal.
Rather than understanding the origin in a temporally linear, historiological
way, in which the origin is absent in the sense of a completed present that is
now past, the origin instead discloses itself as origin only once its unfolding as
history has reached completion. This resonates with the manner in which the
heroes of Greek tragedy confront the hidden consequences of their past actions
in a sudden, violent moment of disclosure.9 Here we see, however, that this
occurs not at the level of human beings, but describes instead the trajectory of
the first history of being, that is, Western metaphysics. And yet human being,
as that being, whose essence is rooted in Seyn, is nevertheless implicated in
this tragic unfolding, even if it did not intend or will the consequences. What
is important to Heidegger, and also what is distinctively tragic about this, is
that the overcoming of metaphysics, such that it is one, cannot itself operate
according to a metaphysical logic. That is, it is not a matter of going beyond
(meta-) metaphysics, of leaving it behind or having done with it, but rather of
undergoing it more essentially.10
Heideggers understanding of the tragic marks a way of thinking history as
an unfolding that, while not pre-determined, operates according to a hidden
41

necessity. Such a schema threatens to repeat Hegel, whom he regards as the

only other great thinker of the history of being. At the same time, by insisting
on the greatness rather than the paucity of the inception, he attempts a reversal
of him.11 Like Hegel, Heidegger sees himself as standing at the limit of
metaphysics, and he places his own thought as the culmination of the very
history of being that he narrates. The crucial difference, however, is that
whereas for Hegel the story is comic, as the dialectic resolves itself in
Absolute Knowing, for Heidegger it is a tragic going-under; a devastating
recognition of a hidden destiny of being in which Western humanity discovers
itself to be both unwitting victim and protagonist.
We might notice that Heidegger seems rather indifferent here to the tragic
plays themselves. On the one hand, tragic poetry has for Heidegger, as for
many other philosophers, an exalted status within poetry. As he says, the
great essential poetry as the founding of beyng is tragic. And yet he
also says that the tragic plays themselves are perhaps note the hedging,
the ambivalence only entryways (nur Vorhfe) to the essence of being. I
take this perhaps to indicate a reluctance to say unequivocally what is
nevertheless implied in Heideggers remark here: that the tragic plays
themselves are not the origin of tragedy! This distinction is what enables
Heidegger to find a tragic experience of being even in a text such as The
Anaximander Fragment which predates the tragic plays significantly. By
detaching the essence of tragedy from the plays themselves, Heidegger is able
to identify it with philosophy as the thinking of the history of being, and only
secondarily with Attic drama. Nevertheless, even when it is not explicit, we
find that the tragic plays inform Heideggers sense of what is tragic about
philosophy in the specific sense he means.
Looking ahead to The Anaximander Fragment, for example, we find
numerous allusions to tragic drama. For example, he speaks of the difficulty
of translating the fragment in terms of a double bind: We are bound to the
language of the saying. We are bound to our mother tongue. In both cases we
are essentially bound to language and to the experience of its essence (EGT
19)12. We also find Eris (strife) and Moira (fate), Chreon (necessity) and Dike
(justice), all of which are important conceptual terms for tragedy. Fate, destiny,
and self-destruction are all important themes in the essay. Furthermore, and
more dramatically still, in the course of Heideggers translation we encounter
the figures of the prophet/soothsayer, the herdsman, and the riddle, all of
which are familiar figures in tragic drama, particularly in Oedipus Tyrranus.
Western mans essential blindness to himself and to being, despite his
technological mastery, is also a prominent concern for Heidegger in the essay,
and can in that sense be read as an Oedipal understanding of Western man.
Scattered throughout the essay are yet more terms that are evocative of the
tragic hero. Heidegger speaks of present beings in terms of their
42

insurrection, their rebelliousness, stubborn inclination, and haughty

pose. He admits the daring of every thoughtful word addressed to being. He
speaks of the necessarily excessive demands of translation and their seeming
violence toward the original text. All of these expressions in the essay resound
with familiar themes and motifs from the tragic plays, even if they are not
identified as such.
We have noted above that Heideggers ambivalence surrounding the term
tragic is due to the importance that he accords it for thinking the history of
being. He disavows the term for multiple and seemingly contradictory reasons:
on the one hand, the term is not useful because it has been watered down by
literary and cultural determinations. On the other hand, it is not useful because
it is superfluous; it says nothing more than the word philosophy already names.
By decrying the literary or aesthetic conceptions of the tragic which threaten
to obscure the eschatological sense he outlines above, Heidegger tacitly
distances himself from the tradition in German philosophy, including Schelling,
Hlderlin, and Hegel, not to mention Nietzsche, that appropriates Greek tragedy.
His own thought of the tragic marks a significant break from that tradition. And
yet, if Heideggers own words about the end are to be believed, the tradition is
not something that can simply be left behind. The insight that the overcoming of
metaphysics comes paradoxically as a going-under, of thinking its hidden
ground, indicates a double bind that characterizes the tragic aspect of thinking
the history of being. The sense of Not, of distress or emergency that
Heidegger repeatedly invokes in the Beitrge and Besinnung speaks to the dual
recognition of the necessity and the impossibility of overcoming metaphysics;
of the realization that the only tools available for going beyond metaphysics are
the ones provided by it. There is nothing outside it, no escape.
Thus, when Heidegger rejects the literary-historical and cultivated uses
of the term tragic, it would be a mistake to assume that he is in no way
indebted to the tradition and its prior philosophical engagements with the
tragic.13 Even on a relatively superficial level we can see in his other writings
on tragedy that his almost exclusive focus on Oedipus Tyrranus and Antigone
is due to the influence of German idealism, and particularly his engagement
with Hlderlin. But the force of this double bind can most dramatically be
seen, I maintain, in his attempt to undergo the inception, the other beginning
from which the first beginning of metaphysics will be disclosed, by thinking
with and through the pre-Socratics. It is for this reason that I will now turn to
Heideggers essay, The Anaximander Fragment, in which he translates the
oldest, and therefore supposedly the first, philosophical text in the Western
tradition. This text is not just a commentary on, but also a demonstration of the
tragic-philosophical undergoing that Heidegger describes in the Besinnung
passage. And despite his stated reasons there for avoiding the term tragic,
Heidegger in fact does not take his own advice. By claiming to find a trace of
43

the essence of tragedy in the fragment, he is also commenting on the essential

relationship that his own thinking has to Anaximanders saying, and the
Western tradition that spans the two.
III
The last reference to tragedy that appears in the Heideggerian corpus occurs
in the 1946 essay, The Anaximander Fragment. Here Heidegger treats the
oldest known fragment of Western thinking.14 It was originally published in
1950 as the last piece in the collection Holzwege. The volume contains essays
written during the years 1935-1946 and spans the period of time in which
references to tragedy appear with the most frequency and emphasis in
Heideggers work. Although the essay is ostensibly an interpretation of the
oldest known fragment of Greek thinking, and hence a return to the very
beginning of the Western tradition, Heidegger makes it clear that this gesture
of return is governed by a sense of our own lateness, of standing at a point of
crisis and end with respect to the West.
It would seem that what Heidegger discovers in the Anaximander
Fragment, which stands at the dawn of the Western tradition, can only be heard
from out of this traditions passing. This movement of reversal, in which the
beginning is only disclosed at the end, will in the end be important for
understanding the place of the tragic in relation to Heideggers thinking at the
end of metaphysics.
As the oldest known saying of the Western philosophical tradition, the
Anaximander Fragment occupies a place at its beginning, if not its origin. And
yet Heidegger claims that he is not interested in the fragment simply because
of its age or special status as the oldest of its kind. The fragments originarity
is governed not by chronology but by the way in which the essence of the West
does or does not come to language there. Not only is the fragment designated
as belonging to the origin of the West, but it also speaks of origin: ex hon de
he genesis, the first words of the fragment, have traditionally been understood
to speak of that from which all beings have their origin. Strangely, the
fragment seems to turn back upon itself, commenting on itself as origin. In
speaking of the origin, it places itself or is placed back into the originarity that
it opens up. The fragment, though hardly understood, stands as a source text
for the Western tradition. But what necessitates our return to the fragment now,
when the Greek world to which it belonged is irretrievably gone from us, and
has been for thousands of years?
In a reversal of all expectation Heidegger insists that the fragments
distance from us if it is distant consists not in its belonging to a bygone
antiquity but rather in the fact that it is ahead of us, outdistancing all that is
contemporary. We confront the question of how to comport ourselves to the
origin when its disclosure as origin is still to come. Are we, like Oedipus,
44

consigned to an ignorance of our origin whose revelation will come only once
it is far too late? Heidegger suggests the possibility that the reversal of this
ignorance concerning the origin of the West, if it ever does come, will be just
as horrifying a peripeteia as that of the tragic hero.
Do we stand in the very twilight of the most monstrous transformation our planet has ever
undergone, the twilight of that epoch in which earth itself hangs suspended? Do we confront
the evening of a night which heralds another dawn? What can all merely historiological
philosophies of history tell us about our history if they only dazzle us with surveys of its
sedimented stuff; if they explain history without ever thinking out, from the essence of history,
the fundamentals of their way of explaining events, and the essence of history, in turn, from
Being itself? Are we the latecomers we are? (EGT 18)

The gesture of returning to the oldest fragment of Western thinking, to its

origin, belies the fact that it is necessitated by our situation at the opposite
extremity, at the end of the tradition begun there. The suggestion that the
fragment holds the promise of a hitherto unsaid and therefore unthought
beginning defies the logic of a tradition that tries to take hold of its own origins
and to grasp the origin as pure presence. Our current situation as latecomers
to the Western tradition may turn out to have been governed all along by the
force of a hidden beginning a beginning that only discloses itself to us as
such once the possibilities that it has released have been exhausted. The
disclosure of the earliest saying of Western thought, which can only occur at
this late hour, means that we will have undergone a reversal of the way in
which we understand origination in terms of stable, eternal presence.14
Heideggers reading of the fragment, like his thinking generally, places
itself at a key juncture in the history of Western thought. This place is itself a
moment of jointure, a crossing between what he calls the first history of
being and the other beginning that is to come. As he mentions in the
Besinnung passage above and elsewhere, this first beginning begins with the
ancient Greeks and extends all the way to Nietzsches eternal return. As we
will see, Heideggers sense of the complex and ultimately tragic role that
his own thinking plays within and with respect to this point of jointure
between two beginnings bears importantly on the saying of jointuredisjointure that he claims to find in Anaximanders fragment.
But before he begins to translate the fragment, Heidegger makes the
surprising move of fragmenting it even further: he excises both its beginning
and end from consideration, as it is Aristotelian in structure and tone and of
spurious authenticity (EGT 29). He then takes up the remaining words of the
fragment one by one, but oddly, in reverse order. He begins at the end, with
adikia, which he translates as Unfug, or disjointure. This disorienting gesture,
in which he not only translates the words of the fragment from the last to the
first, but uses an archaic German word [Fuge] instead of the standard
translation of adikia as Ungerechtigkeit or injustice, is a nod toward the
very disjointure that he finds in the fragment. He asks:
45

How does Anaximander experience the totality of things present; how does he experience their
having arrived to linger awhile among one another in unconcealment? What at bottom runs
through whatever is present? The fragments last word gives the answer. We must begin the
translation with it. (EGT 41)

Once again, we find ourselves beginning at the end. This gesture of reversal,
which reverberates throughout the essay on so many levels, foreshadows the
reversing, counterturning tension that Heidegger finds spoken in the fragment
itself. But it is also, importantly, a commentary on the movement of his own
thought at the end of metaphysics in which he attempts to disclose the first
beginning and its concealed history.
So far we have focused almost exclusively on the oppositional tension,
which is also a unity, between the beginning and end. As Heideggers
treatment of the fragment proper makes clear, a certain strifely unity of
opposition is the dominant focus of his interpretation. We find in Heideggers
interpretation of the Anaximander fragment a certain proliferation of pairs of
oppositions. Some of these are named in the fragment itself: genesis and
phthoran, which the tradition translates as growth and decay, or coming to be
and passing away, and dike and adikia, justice and injustice.
In the course of thinking through these oppositions, Heidegger adds
numerous others. We have already begun to see that a certain tension between
the beginning and the end is in play in the essay, but other pairs, such as rescue
and danger, illumination and withdrawal, concealment and unconcealment,
persistence and transition, earliest and latest, dawn and evening, obliteration
and preservation, and most importantly presence and absence, appear in
the course of the essays unfolding. Despite the proliferation of oppositions
within which the fragment and Heideggers interpretation move, his chief
concern is with one oppositional unity that has been persistently overlooked
and forgotten, so much so that it has sunk into oblivion: the difference between
being and beings, or presencing and what is present.
From early on it seems as though presencing and what is present were each something for
itself. Presencing itself unnoticeably becomes something present. . . .The essence of
presencing, and with it the distinction between presencing and what is present, remains
forgotten. The oblivion of being is the oblivion of the distinction between being and beings.
(EGT 50)

For Heidegger these oppositional pairs are all operative within and
constitutive of Western metaphysics, but the difference between being and
beings is the most hidden and most important of them all. The irony here is
that this hidden and unthought difference is precisely what metaphysics claims
to articulate, for example in the dualism of the sensible and the supersensible,
in all of its permutations. Just as Oedipuss tragic irony consists in the fact that
he takes himself to be doing one thing (avoiding his parents by fleeing
Corinth), while in fact he is doing the opposite, so too does metaphysics claim
to articulate the ontological difference, when in fact the tradition effaces it.
46

The tragic character of this scenario comes from the insight that this
effacement arises from the distinction itself, rather than from some outside
force. Heideggers role here is that of a latter-day Teiresias, able to look back
over the history of metaphysics to see what no one else can: that this insight
into the beginning of metaphysics is also its long-awaited fulfillment. It is not
coincidental, I think, that in his reading of the Anaximander Fragment he
appeals to another seer, Kalchas from the Iliad, for an even more archaic
understanding of being than the one given in the fragment.
With its sets of oppositions and reference to paying recompense,
Anaximanders saying seems to speak of beings as an economy of growth and
decay, an even exchange in which all give and take. Yet, in the context of these
evenly balanced oppositions, Heidegger draws our attention to a certain
imbalance, a lack of symmetry, even an excess when it comes to the truth of
being itself. Concealment and unconcealment, lethe and aletheia are not
simply opposed pairs, despite their appearance as such. Beings are
unconcealed, while being itself is concealed in this unconcealment. The
difficulty lies, of course, in not regarding the being of beings which withdraws
itself as an entity. The lethic characteristic of being consists in its granting
unconcealment to beings while being itself withdraws precisely in this
illumination. Unconcealment, the ostensible negation of lethe, does not in fact
amount to its reversal, but is actually its intensification. The brightness of
beings in unconcealment is at one and the same time the hiddenness, the selfconcealment of being.
While concealment and unconcealment have a lexical symmetry and
reciprocality, this obscures the abyssal difference between the concealed and
the unconcealed; being is concealed, beings are unconcealed, at one and the
same moment. Because being reveals itself precisely in beings, it is not as
though we can ever hope or expect somehow to overcome beings withdrawal;
for it is not itself a being, but only this relation between being and beings. This
duality is something that Heidegger also refers to as the bifurcated essence
of aletheia (EGT 39). The mystery, the enigma or riddle of being consists in
this difference between being and beings, which is abyssal and yet at the same
time preserves them in their relation.
Heidegger then thematizes this asymmetrical bifurcation in his
interpretation of the fragment. As we have already noted, he begins with the
last word of the remaining text, adikia, which he translates as Unfug, or
disjointure. Beings, insofar as they persist and are present, are characterized by
their disjointure from presencing, or being as such. This difference between
being and beings, in which what is present is experienced as standing in
disjunction, brings to the fore [zum Vorschein] the pessimism not to say
the nihilism of the Greek experience of being (EGT 42). The disjointure
that Heidegger names in his translation of adikia is the abyssal difference
47

between being and beings that is named in the experience of a-letheia. The
unconcealment of beings is the self-concealing of being, and is also the
concealing of the abyssal difference between being and beings.
Beings seem to stand in insurmountable opposition to being. What is
present, beings, become present by virtue of a release from and a turning
against presencing. The experience of beings seems to consist in their
insistence on presence, in their lingering. This is their adikia, their disjointure
or disjunction in which their insurrection and rebelliousness consists. He
asks, does the fragment say that the essence of what is present consists in
disjunction? and he gives a strange non-answer, one which consists of its own
oppositional unity: It does and it does not (EGT 42).
Heidegger explicates (I do not say solves) his riddling answer by
interpreting the Anaximander fragment as saying that the disjointure of beings
is at the same time their giving of jointure. This giving of jointure is thus the
surmounting of disjointure:
The presencing of whatever is present for the time being does not consist in adikia by itself,
i.e. not in disorder alone; rather, it consists in didonai diken tes adikias, since whatever is
present lets order belong in each case. Whatever is presently present is not a slice of something
shoved in between what is not presently present; it is present insofar as it lets itself belong to
the non-present. ? The experience of beings in their being which here comes to language is
neither pessimistic nor nihilistic; nor is it optimistic. It is tragic. That is a presumptuous thing
to say. However, we discover a trace of the essence of tragedy, not when we explain it
psychologically or aesthetically, but rather only when we consider its essential form, the being
of beings, by thinking the didonai diken tes adikias. (EGT 44)

Heidegger acknowledges the hubristic insolence, the presumptuousness, of

his reference to the essence of tragedy in his translation of the fragment. His
own statement appears adiken, obtrusive and out of place. Tragedy and the
tragic are only mentioned once in the essay, and never really explained. Yet
when we keep in mind what Heidegger says in Besinnung about tragedy, as the
hidden inception of the first history of being that remains concealed until its
completion, it becomes clear that the entire essay revolves around this tragic
sense of disclosure. Jointure-disjointure names the dual and distinctively tragic
character of being that Heidegger identifies in the fragment. It would seem on
the surface to be just one among the many paired oppositions that proliferate
in this essay and in Heideggers thought generally. However, this particular
lexical pairing has a special status because it says nothing other than its own
jointed, oppositional belonging. It names the very dynamic of belongingtogether-in-opposition that is at work in concealment-unconcealment,
appropriation-expropriation, presence-absence, which, despite appearances,
are not dualistic pairs, but name instead the different modes in which being
gives difference. Philosophy and the tragic say twice the same insofar as it
is philosophys task to think this difference, to place itself in the dangerous
cleft of this jointure.
48

In yet another gesture of reversal, Heidegger challenges us in his translation

of the Anaximander Fragment to see the essential belonging-together, the
jointure, of certain oppositional pairings, such as that of beginning and end,
presence and absence, growth and decay. And yet it is also a matter of
experiencing a more primordial disjointure: the differing of being and beings,
presence and presencing where their irreducible difference is no longer
experienced but concealed. This disjointure is surmounted, not in a moment of
Hegelian Aufhebung, but in recognizing that the concealment of the difference
arises from the withdrawal of being itself. Again, we are reminded of the way
in which tragedy shows the self-same to be irreducibly in opposition to itself:
Oedipus, for example, is both the saviour of Thebes and the source of its
pollution.
Too late: Creon arrives at Antigones grave too late, Oedipus sees who he
truly is too late, tragedy culminates in the heros discovery of the meaning of
his own actions too late. Heidegger calls us latecomers with respect to our
own history, and he writes from out of a sense of Not, distress or emergency,
as though he can see ahead of us the crisis that is to come. His translation of
the fragment places itself on the tenuous divide between the philosophical
tradition, its language and representational thinking, and an other, different
kind of saying, one that he identifies as primordial poetry. The unorthodox
identification of philosophy and tragedy in the Besinnung passage with which
we began reflects this call for a different kind of philosophical saying, one
which does not simply represent or accurately correspond to that which is
already given, and yet it nevertheless does show us something about the past:
too late, it says, we are always too late.
IV
The tragic attunement of Heideggers thinking with respect to the end of
metaphysics has to do with the suffering of a loss. This loss is the passing of
the richest and most prodigious event of Western metaphysics, which means
that it is also the loss of a kind of ignorance and innocence (EGT 51). It is
a loss then, which is a painful gain, a sudden insight into the way in which the
Western tradition has been destined by the abandonment and oblivion of
being. In human terms, the tragic insight consists in the distress suffered by
our recognition that our attempts hitherto to think the being of beings have
been, all along, precisely the contrary: the metaphysical understanding of
being is nothing other than the event of its concealment and refusal.
As we look back over the role that tragedy and the tragic have in
Heideggers thought, we may also experience another, different kind of loss.
In a way that is perhaps even more profound with the Greek tragedians than it
is with other poets and thinkers, one has the sense that the tragic texts
themselves do not matter to Heidegger very much. Even on the few occasions
49

when he offers an interpretation of a tragic poem, it is never done from the

perspective of the work as a whole. Considerations of poetic and dramatic
context, plot, mythology, are almost entirely absent in Heideggers treatments
of tragedy. This rough treatment of dramatic works which continue to be
treasured as some of the greatest works of Western art is admittedly violent on
Heideggers part. Following his interpretation of the Antigone stasimon in the
Introduction to Metaphysics, for example, Heidegger notes that
If we restrict ourselves to explicating what is directly said in poetry, the interpretation is at an
end. And yet with this the interpretation stands for the first time at the inception. The authentic
interpretation must show what does not stand there in the words and which is nevertheless said.
For this the interpretation must necessarily use violence.15

This interpretive violence brings out the very violence that Heidegger claims
to find within the text itself. We see here that Heidegger acknowledges the
excessive character of his interpretation. He seeks in the poem that which
exceeds the domain of philological or historiological interpretations and
thereby transgresses the limits of what is explicitly said in the poem precisely
in order to bring the poem as a whole to light. This affirmation of the necessary
violence of his interpretation is not merely, or perhaps even primarily, a
strategic move aimed at evading criticism that Heidegger is a careless reader.
Rather, he suggests the necessary violation of the poem takes part in the
violence of which the poem itself speaks. Just as the sea, the earth, the animals
only appear as such and for the first time when their domains are transgressed
and displaced by the violent human being, so too does the poem itself only
appear in its violation.
Yet even when we acknowledge that there is a certain logic in play with
regard to the violence of Heideggers interpretations and that which is brought
out by them, the force of this interpretive violence is not mitigated by his
explicit acknowledgement of it. So much of the richness of tragic poetry is
ignored or obscured by Heideggers treatment of it. This is especially the case
with tragedy, since the Attic tragedies were not artworks in the modern sense,
but were ritual, religious, political, poetic events. Yet any discussion of Attic
tragedy as a historical or artistic phenomenon is almost entirely absent in
Heideggers texts; instead it is the basis according to which he thinks the
history of being.
Perhaps it is impossible to do both perhaps one cannot simultaneously
maintain a sense of the integrity of the tragic poems and at the same time
develop an understanding of philosophy as inherently tragic. Yet we sense the
imperative of paying heed to the tragedies in their historical, literary, and
artistic richness when, along with Heidegger, we invoke the tragic character
of being, or its historical destining. Despite the relation of the latter to the
former, we are also confronted with the impossibility of simply joining the two
together, of tracing this tragic attunement concerning the thinking of the truth
50

of being back to the tragic poems as artworks. The absence, in Heideggers

thought, of a certain kind of heed or respect to the integrity of the tragic poems
draws our attention to the fact that Greek tragedy does not simply serve as a
kind of source or paradigm for his understanding of the tragic character of
being in its historical destining or not simply so. One cannot find already
contained in the tragic poems all that Heidegger says or implies about the
tragic experience of being: that is, they are not an origin in the metaphysical
sense, and yet he nevertheless discovers in tragedy an originary disclosure of
the conflictual intertwining of being, unconcealment, and seeming. The lack
of a more thorough approach to Greek tragedy in Heideggers thought, given
its manifest influence, is an important and profound loss; the palpable anger
and frustration of some of Heideggers commentators on this point attests to
this. And yet precisely for this reason it is in keeping with the tragic dynamic
that Heidegger is attuned to, as it causes us to experience anew the withdrawal
of origin as we find ourselves longing for the source.
Bennington College, Vermont
References
1. Martin Heidegger, Besinnung (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1997), p.222, Engl. trans.
Mindfulness, trans. by Parvis Emad and Travis Kalary (New York: Continuum, 2006).
2. In Besinnung, Heidegger continues his practice from the 1936-38 manuscript Beitrge zur
Philosophie of employing the archaic German spelling for being, Seyn. This is intended to
indicate a more originary sense of being that has since been lost in metaphysics, and it is a
practice most likely influenced by his meditations on Hlderlin and Schelling in the late
1930s/early 40s.
3. See for example: Robert Gall, Interrupting Speculation: The Thinking of Heidegger and
Greek Tragedy, Continental Philosophy Review 36 (2003), pp. 177-194; Veronique Foti,
Heidegger, Hlderlin, and Sophoclean Tragedy in Heidegger Toward the Turn: Essays on
the Work of the 1930s, ed. James Risser (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999),
pp. 163-186; Dennis Schmidt has a chapter on Heidegger and tragedy in Germans and Other
Greeks, pp. 225-266. There are many other articles that take up the topic of tragedy with
respect to some aspect of Heideggers thought, usually the political, without attempting an
analysis of his understanding of the tragic per se. Among the very best of these are the four
interrelated articles published by Reiner Schrmann on the tragic condition of being: A
Brutal Awakening to the Tragic Condition of Being, in Karsten Harries and Christoph
Jamme, eds., Martin Heidegger: Politics, Art, and Technology (London: Holmes and Meier
1994), pp. 89-103, Riveted to a Monstrous Site, in The Heidegger Case: On Philosophy
and Politics, ed. Joseph Margolis and Tom Rockmore (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University
Press, 1992), pp. 313-330, Technicity, Topology, Tragedy: Heidegger on That Which
Saves in the Global Reach, in Arthur Melzer, Jerry Weinberger, M. Richard Zinman, eds.,
Technology in the Western Political Tradition (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp.
190-213, Ultimate Double Binds, in James Risser, ed., Heidegger Toward the Turn, pp.
243-266.
4. Robert Galls article is the most straightforward attempt to make sense of Heideggers
scattered references to Greek tragedy. While offering several interesting insights, I find his
overarching thesis problematic, especially in light of the statement from Besinnung 69.
Gall concludes: What we find is that, for Heidegger, tragedy is an interruption of
speculation, a refusal to philosophize, a way of showing how things are that resonates with

51

5.

6.

7.
8.

9.

10.

11.

the goal of Heideggers own thinking. Gall here seems to understand tragedy and
philosophy in an almost Platonic opposition, insofar as tragedy marks the absence of and
withdrawal from philosophizing. While it is true that, for Heidegger, tragedy has a
complicated and even oppositional relationship to metaphysics, I find Galls generalization
insufficiently supported by the texts and even more difficult to resolve with Heideggers
assertion that tragic philosophy says twice the same. I also find bewildering his claim that
tragedy is a way of showing how things are (Gall, 177). This is problematic because 1) it
makes tragedy fundamentally mimetic, something Heidegger explicitly rejects, for example,
in The Origin of the Work of Art; 2) the only way in which tragedy might provide insight
into how things are is paradoxically by showing the extent to which we cannot ever have
a total vision of how things are. Heideggers point is precisely that concealment is the
abyssal ground of any aletheic disclosure.
The fact that references to Greek tragedy occur almost exclusively during the war years has
led several commentators to interpret them as overtly or covertly political in their thrust. See
for example Foti, Swazo (discussed below), and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art,
and Politics, trans. Chris Turner (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990).
Norman K. Swazo interprets this interest in tragedy during the 1930s and early 40s as
directly related to Heideggers entanglement with National Socialism, and in fact argues
that his meditations on tragedy are the key to understanding his 1933-34 political
engagement and subsequent withdrawal. Gnothi Seauton: Heideggers Problem Ours, in:
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 25 (1994), 263-287. While I understand
the temptation to read Heideggers political errancy as tragic in its ignorance, if not heroic,
I do not find that it accords with his thinking to approach tragedy as an allegory, particularly
as an allegory for his own political mistakes. In fact, I am reluctant to endorse any reading
of Heideggers interest in tragedy that sees it primarily through an anthropological lens, that
is, in terms of the human condition.
Martin Heidegger, Basic Questions of Philosophy, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Andre
Schuwer (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994), p. 186; GA 45: p. 222.
This is a tension that is always present in Heideggers work, particularly in his return to the
Greeks, including tragic poetry. Schrmann articulates precisely this tension when he
observes that The historical is always measured in Heidegger by the scale of being as it
gives itself to and at the same time withholds itself from thinking. The historiological is
measured by a different scale, one that is just the converse of epochal concealing and
unconcealing. Here, facts such as inventions, revolutions, and other seizures of power the
will of leaders, the consensus of rational agents, and so on determine the periods of
history. Thus, each time Heidegger ventures in subsequent writings to date the beginning (for
instance, with Parmenides) and the end (for instance, in three hundred years) of the history
of beings self-withholding, there lurks a risk of succumbing to a second-order positivism,
where acts, including philosophical acts, mark turning points in history; Reiner Schrmann,
Riveted to a Monstrous Site, p. 320.
As Gall observes, the characters of tragedy undergo what has already happened. The past
rises up as a given in tragedy, but a given that has unforeseen consequences, that plays itself
out in unexpected ways to which the characters must submit, op. cit., p. 179.
Gall discusses this in his essay on Heidegger and tragedy, but he focuses too much on the
relevance of this for the individual, rather than seeing how, as Heidegger makes clear in the
Besinnung passage, the significance lies at the level of the history of being and its unfolding
within/as metaphysics.
As Michel Haar notes, if it is true that, for Heidegger, Reason is not what governs History,
neither is it chance or blind destiny. The series of the epochs of Being obeys an inflexible
and coherent necessity which, he writes, is like a law and logic (p. 68). Haar goes on to
observe that it is in the concept of the eschatology of Being that the Heideggerian thought
of History is most in accord with Absolute knowledge and, in another sense, that from which

52

12.

13.

14.

15.

it is most divergent (75). Michel Haar, The Song of the Earth, trans. Reginald Lilly
(Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993).
Gall, among others, makes this mistake when he over-emphasizes the degree to which
Heideggers understanding of the tragic differs from other thinkers, from Aristotle to
Nietzsche.
The Anaximander Fragment, in Early Greek Thinking, trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank
A. Capuzzi (San Francisco: Harper, 1975), p 13. Hereafter cited EGT. German edition in
Holzwege. 3rd ed. (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1957).
See Charles Scott, A (Non-) Passing Sense of Tragedy, in On the Advantages and
Disadvantages of Ethics and Politics (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996), p.50: The sense of
an originary being has within it the projection of a full encompassment, a completed
beginning and end, a present that is essentially a completion, an eternal now.
Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2000), 173.

53