Gigantomachia » Plato

1,2,3 in Plato (1)

mce — Mon, 21 Jun 2004 16:57:05 +0000

What, then, Glaucon, would be the study that would draw the soul away from the world of becoming to the world of being? (…) This trifling matter, I said, of distinguishing one and two and three.
Republic, Book 7 (521d-522c)

Gigantomachia in Plato 2

mce — Mon, 21 Jun 2004 15:29:49 +0000

Yes, for great is the struggle, I said, dear Glaucon, a far greater contest than we think it, that determines whether a man prove good or bad. (Republic Bk 10, 608b)

Gigantomachia in Plato 1

mce — Sat, 30 Aug 2003 13:54:59 +0000

What we shall see is something like a battle of gods and giants going on between them over their quarrel about reality [gigantomachia peri tes ousias] ….One party is trying to drag everything down to earth out of heaven and the unseen, literally grasping rocks and trees in their hands, for they lay hold upon every stock and stone and strenuously affirm that real existence belongs only to that which can be handled and offers resistance to the touch. They define reality as the same thing as body, and as soon as one of the opposite party asserts that anything without a body is real, they are utterly contemptuous and will not listen to another word.
….
Their adversaries are very wary in defending their position somewhere in the heights of the unseen, maintaining with all their force that true reality consists in certain intelligible and bodiless forms. In the clash of argument they shatter and pulverize those bodies which their opponents wield, and what those others allege to be true reality they call, not real being, but a sort of moving process of becoming. On this issue an interminable battle is always going on between the two camps.
…..
It seems that only one course is open to the philosopher who values knowledge and truth above all else. He must refuse to accept from the champions of the forms the doctrine that all reality is changeless and exclusively immaterial, and he must turn a deaf ear to the other party who represent reality as everywhere changing and as only material. Like a child begging for ‘both’, he must declare that reality or the sum of things is both at once. (Sophist 246a-249c)

The just soul (Plato) 1

mce — Sat, 21 Jun 2003 14:19:33 +0000

And there, dear Glaucon, it appears, is the supreme hazard for a man. And this is the chief reason why it should be our main concern that each of us, neglecting all other studies, should seek after and study this thing–if in any way he may be able to learn of and discover the man who will give him the ability and the knowledge to distinguish the life that is good from that which is bad (…) so that with consideration of all these things he will be able to make a reasoned choice between the better and the worse life, with his eyes fixed on the nature of his soul, naming the worse life that which will tend to make it more unjust and the better that which will make it more just. But all other considerations he will dismiss, for we have seen that this is the best choice, both for life and death. And a man must take with him to the house of death an adamantine faith in this, that even there he may be undazzled by riches and similar trumpery, and may not precipitate himself into tyrannies and similar doings and so work many evils past cure and suffer still greater himself, but may know how always to choose in such things the life that is seated in the mean and shun the excess in either direction, both in this world so far as may be and in all the life to come, for this is the greatest happiness for man. Republic Bk 10 618b-619b (emphasis added)

In the myth of Er, Plato describes how souls choose a certain lot in life before they are reborn. This action has a different place and time from the actions in, as we say, this life. But Plato emphsizes that this choice is not only to be faced before we are born: ‘both in this world so far as may be and in all the life to come’.

Heidegger’s description of Dasein is essentially the same. ‘Da-sein’ is ‘located’ in a different place (‘da’) and time (Urzeit) from ‘hier’ and its time (Uhrzeit). In ‘da’, Dasein witnesses the gigantomachia and must choose (‘die Wahl’) the original shape or power or ontology in accord with which its being in the world is to be shaped. For Heidegger this ‘before’ occurs at every instant, augenblicklich, and is constitutive of world.

For both, there are 3 choices: ‘the mean and the excess in either direction’. Thinking for Heidgeger is the question of how to cross back to the gigantomachia and how to cross over ‘da’ to the mean in order to re-start from its complex shape of ‘holding to both’.