Michael Arvanitopoulos

A possible escape from the neoliberal appreciation of “education” and the selling from faculty providers to student consumers of a commodity, such as a credential or a set of workplace skills serving efficiency and productivity, may come perhaps from an alternative understanding of the concept, one that now hearkens to the ringing of a truth preserved in its Latin etymology. Ex-duco can be seen as an allusion pointing to the didactic of Plato’s cave metaphor, where understanding unchains people from the shadows of the ephemeral, the irrelevant, and the false and leads them out into the lasting light of alētheia that defines and informs the human condition. Such a shift in understanding of what...

Much of the criticism Heidegger has drawn from realism, from postmodernism and even existentialism, as well from the anti-Nazi protests on his philosophy, could be diluted if a defaulted connection was made between Heidegger's metaphysics and the Greeks. Being and Time drafted the blueprint of the origin of predication and world-disclosure from the primordial intuition of the limitations of action in the face of human finitude. This existential reprioritization forced a radical reversal of primacy from nature to culture, having assumed the absolute objectivity of some original world determinacy, the phenomenological structure of which, nevertheless, was never produced in Heidegger’s seminal work or thereafter. Existentialism has thus been downplayed as a counterintuitive, fanciful hypothesis, and will remain so for as long as horizontal temporality has not made itself available to itself as a negated object of perception in the horizon of disclosure. The objectified subjectivity of Dasein’s cultural bias should be demonstrable, if there is indeed a determinant even firmer and “causally prior” to the object of perception in reified nature. And the theory of freedom that is existentialism will remain a “theory” with a private definition of the term, if both the phenomenological structures of the “objectification” of subjectivity have not appeared: first as the objectivity of freedom that is absolute and universal, but no less than as the object that frees made up from nothing other than the absolute and universal objectivity of freedom. Heidegger must have felt this most pressing shortcoming in his metaphysics, because in a later monumental work, The Origin of the Work of Art, he avowed of such an object that is both the programmatic manifesto of freedom, and frees, pointing to the Greek Doric temple. He must have realized that the highest objectification of Dasein’s volatile subjectivity was somehow of “Greek” origin, and as I will argue, in this assumption alone he was right. But his proof was premised therein in an incomplete, trivial and self-contradictory way that left exposed to counter-entrenchment his arguments over both the attribution of the origin of reality, and consequently also its subjective constitution. From this point on, existentialism has remained doggedly problematic, if not inconsequential, in being unconnected to its bloodline, that is, phenomenology, and inasmuch as Heidegger’s incomplete metaphysics has remained unconnected to his miscued art theory. My hermeneutic method seeks this elusive, twofold objectification of subjectivity, in order to justify existentialism by simultaneously making the missing connections between Heidegger and the Greeks, and between Being and Time and The Origin of the Work of Art. The connections I am suggesting are both necessary and possible, provided that Heidegger’s theory of art is modified to grant monumental statuary its due hermeneutic primacy. Heidegger attributed the disclosure of world in truth-as-untruth to poetry and architecture, while Gadamer, who advanced Heidegger’s phenomenology to the currently predominant hermeneutic theory, also gave primacy to poetry and architecture. Their mistake is critical, because, as I will argue, Greek statuary is the patent twofold objectification of Dasein’s existential analytic, it is the convergence point of evidence to infer Heidegger’s missing theory of embodiment, and it is the ultimate origin of Western metaphysics. Current theories of embodiment, including Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological case from where a missing dialogue has been attempted to derive Heidegger's theory of embodiment, typically confine themselves to Dasein’s ontological and ontic corporeality. I suggest that such theories should have addressed the necessity of the structures of Reason to incarnate themselves as the fundamental ontological prescriptions of perception. To address the necessity of this incarnation in monumental art as a primordial world disclosure, is to explore in this work a previously untapped tripartite hermeneutic conjecture, where theory of art and theory of embodiment are already theories of perception. My hermeneutic hypothesis adheres to, corroborates and advances basic phenomenological principles, to show how Dasein’s embodied structures in the exclusivity of Greek statuary have so far been misunderstood, decontextualized, and begged the question, accordingly as a “mystery” (Hegel), as “godly” (von Humboldt), as a “misunderstanding” (Buschor), or as “Greek naturalism” (art historians). Special attention will be paid to works such as the Laokoön Group, the Ptoan Apollo, the Blond Youth, the Zeus of Artemision and the Gigantomachy. I argue that these cultural fossils provide the most reliable grounds for a thorough commentary to Heidegger’s implied theory of embodiment, because they manifest as the art which relates most intimately to the instrumental modality through which the being-towards-death makes itself phenomenologically available to itself as the negation of the negation to live. Additionally, and in a postmodern world of academic wars that have claimed every aspect of Greek culture as stolen from other great civilizations, such solely uncontested cultural fossils are arguably the unsolicited proof classicists have been unable to produce regarding the exclusively Greek origin of Western metaphysics. The most consequential thrust of this work seeks to revitalize Heidegger’s claim regarding the origin and the chronology of world against competing alternatives such as Christian metaphysics, science’s Big Bang Theory, or the emasculated feminist case regarding the metaphysical primacy of the womb. The ultimate contribution this work aspires to, is the empowering of a presently stalled paradigm shift from the scientific to an existential-phenomenological world view. This shift would be akin to the one which procured with the advent of the Enlightenment between science and religion - a clash still raging in education – where further progress now demands that humanity leaves behind the disguised alienation which Heidegger himself coined as “the dictatorship of science.”

If there is one pivotal epistemological issue the Eastern and the Western Christian churches have agreed upon, this must be the understanding that God’s essence is inherently and conclusively unavailable to humans. This settlement is based on the shared assumption that there is no possible mode of accessing this or any essence, other than either from objective or subjective knowl­edge. Neo-Orthodoxy has preserved the heritage of Pateric apophaticism and has built upon the shared assumption its own, ecclesial accessibility instead to God’s existence. In this exclusivist orientation Neo-Orthodoxy has further proclaimed itself the only true heir to ancient Greece, cutting off the West and criticizing it as a bastion of rational alienation. A phenomenological investigation of Greek statuary art, however, addresses prosody as a third, hitherto unexplored mode of epistemological intelligibility for an access to the essence of “God.” Through the implementation of suprasegmental theory in the phenomenological reduction of a certain statue, we revisit certain key concepts in the discussion between Christos Yannaras, whose works comprise the Neo-Orthodox manifesto, and Martin Heidegger, who claimed that the Greek statue “is the god himself.” Amongst the conclusions emerging from this comparative hermeneutics is the idea that in fact the West may have remained all along more ready than the East to move into the next historical step of man’s self-elucidation in the light of what is Holy.

A combination of uncritical interpretations of Greek art maintained since antiquity, together with Heidegger’s failed attempt to connect Being with Dasein through the Greeks, has misled the feminist agenda into dismissing both Heidegger and the Greeks. The bad blood left by Irigaray has revitalized scholarship which wants to know why the world-disclosive nullity of Being cannot be primordially transgenderous in essence prior to its worldly dispersal into the two sexes. It takes a radical, phenomenological reduction which applies suprasegmental theory to re-chisel and strip the Greek statue from multiple layers of calcified presumptions deposited by millennia of realism, historicism, naturalism, and psychologism, until the inherently absent primordiality which Heidegger searched in vain in order to ground Dasein, the same which feminism would dismiss as phallocracy if it was not transgender, becomes literally visible. Two fifth century monumental works, the female Euthydikos Kore and the male Blonde Youth, are re-discovered in the reduction, and the prosody that is their faces lets the two genders reunite into something like a dark song.

Heidegger claimed that world beings, existing or extant, including artworks, become intelligible in the preservation of perceptual determinations instigated by some extraordinary art that stands apart in being world-disclosive. In the lack of adequate premising scholarship has found this claim so incoherent, that it dismissed its seriousness and has treated all art Heidegger pointed to as equal. Besides being an issue in itself, this relinquishing leaves unanswered the biggest liability in Heidegger’s philosophy, the so-called “Münchhausen circularity” between Being and Dasein in the creation of world. But there is evidence to actually validate the exorbitant claim, evidence Heidegger himself did not see emerging as a potential from within his own conjectures. A phenomenological reduction that allows the implementation of suprasegmental theory of prosody suggests that Blonde Youth, an early fifth century Greek statue is the missing art through which all art, and with it all world constituency, has become intelligible.