Sappho, Selene and Phenomenology

   
φάεννον εἶδοσ

Late one night this week the moon passed between Aldebaran and the Pleiades leaving them and the Hyades invisible to our unaided gaze, the moon bright, blinding, as we stood at the patio door, shivering, toes shy of the snow, and then back into the lighted, warm room.

Wm. Carlos Williams: flame-white disc as the appearance of the sun at night in New England or on Lesbos.

Anne Carson 2002, has the Psappho [Ψάπφω] fragment (itself known only as a quote)  as 34 and it can be seen here as page 4.

Compare: Mary Barnard, 1958, fragment 24.

Contra: Late Husserl and his Heidegger on the phenomena in a world after that celestial world was made known to us, adumbrated for us, by a Galileo and a Kepler and a Newton.  Note the influence of Heidegger on Husserl after the loss of a son in the war and the loss of Reinach (flares, moonlight and trench warfare.)

Albert Hofstader's Heidegger

Albert Hofstader's translation of Heidegger's Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie comes with a lexicon which doubles as a partial index. We may have the National Endowment to thank for this as it was often not the norm with Indiana University Press.

Page 371 of the Lexikon offers us the Four Basic Problems of the "science" of being:

1. ontological difference
2. articulation of being
3. modifications of being and unity of concept of being
4. truth-character of being

All of these, we are told, arise from the one "question" variously posed as

What does being signifiy?
Whence can something like being in general be understood?
How is understanding of being at all possible?

What is baffling for a philosphical lexicon by a translator is that its entries are most often without the original equivalent in German.

The lectures come to us through Fritz Heidegger and F-W von Herrmann almost 50 years after they were delivered as lectures in Marburg in 1927. The German reader, without an index, had the one benefit that von Herrmann broke up many long passages into paragraphs.

On the basis that Sein und Zeit was completed in 1926, these pages offer some additions: pg 173 has Heidegger on Rilke:

Rilke versteht auch das Philosophische des Lebesbegriffes, den Dilthey schon ahnte und den wir mit dem Begriff der Existenz als In-der-Welt-sein faßten.

which Hofstader renders with

which Dilthey had already surmised

cutting the reader off from the satisfied tone of Heidegger. The distance from ahnen to vermuten would not have been lost on Heidegger if said of him and his works by another.

To ignore Heidegger's tone is to miss everything he says of Stimmung, Besinnung - especially when he speaks of concepts. In this regard, the tone taken in his letters to Jaspers is invaluable. By 1927 in Marburg Heidegger was not mincing his words as he had in the early days in Freiburg.

Jaspers is, however, absent in these lectures and receives no credit for this Begriff der Existenz. Shrewd foresight on Heidegger's part.  From the name of the lectures no one not present could guess that Kant and Aristotle figure more largely than Husserl, whom Heidegger is soon to replace in Freiburg.