The Southern Journal of Philosophy (1989) Vol.

XXVIII, Supplement

A RESPONSE TO ROBERT BERNASCONI’S

“HEIDEGGERS DESTRUCTION
OF PHRONESIS”
Walter Brogan
Villanova University
Professor Bernasconi has eloquently recreated for us some
of the excitement and intellectual feasting surrounding the
early lecture courses that Heidegger’s students dubbed the
Aristotle breakfast club.
I found it particularly helpful a n d important t h a t
Bernasconi chose in the beginning of his presentation to
thematize the question of Heidegger’s relationship to the
tradition, his understanding of phenomenology as occurring
historically and as thereby requiring a movement of
destruction. I found this helpful, first of all, because his
understanding of Heidegger’s sense of history and of
Heidegger’s notion of the destruction of the history of
philosophy is so rich and original but also because, after all,
our interest in the early Aristotle material is in part its promise
of providing yet another link to the missing part of Heidegger’s
project in Being and Time.Bernasconi’s message in this regard
is that the missing destruction is there all along, that all
through Being and Time there is a radical retrieval of Aristotle
going on. Bernasconi’s thesis is that destruction in Heidegger
is not a critical project but a task of positively appropriating
the text of Aristotle (does this sense of appropriating here
mean that Heidegger makes it his own?).
Does the fact that Heidegger did not, for the most part, make
explicit his indebtedness to Aristotle or his positive retrieval
of Aristotle make any difference to our understanding of
destruction? In fact, Heidegger not only leaves unmarked his
positive retrieval of, for example, the temporality of Aristotle’s
ontology; his explicit discussion of Aristotle’s treatment of
time in Being and Time is not positive but critical. Despite
your persuasive arguments that the notion of destruction in
Heidegger has a positive sense, it still seems to me that there
is a critical edge to Heidegger’s notion and practice of
destruction. My sense from reading his Sophist lectures was
not only that he saw in Aristotle a thinking akin to his own
but I sensed also an enormous intellectual effort to mark the

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decisive point of ambiguity in Aristotle that also distanced
Aristotle from himself.
I think Heidegger’s struggle to distinguish techne, phronesis
and Sophia was about this. I think he discovers a treatment
of techne in Aristotle that is not akin to his own understanding
of equipmentality in Being and Time, that does not point to
the structure of phronesis the way, in contrast, Heidegger’s
treatment of our involvement with equipment does open up
the issue of human understanding and situatedness. In other
words, I think Heidegger does want to critically abandon part
of what he discovers in Aristotle while appropriating another
part.
A further point with regard to the status of his treatment
of Aristotle in the Sophist lectures: Heidegger announces
frequently and forcefully at several crucial points in the lecture
course that what is guiding his reading of Aristotle is his
desire to understand Plato. Plato’s Sophist is the frame for
his reading of Book VI of the Nichomachean Ethics. He goes
so far as to say that only by reading Aristotle can we genuinely
understand Plato. This has a certain relevance with regard
to the issue of destruction since at least here it is only through
a later thinker that an earlier thinker can be understood. One
almost gets the sense that Heidegger has his own relationship
to Husserl in mind, especially given the themes he and
Aristotle are addressing. But I mostly raise this point to ask
whether you think this framework for the discussion leads
Heidegger in the direction of a Platonic bias in his
understanding of Aristotle and, implicitly, in Being and Time
to the extent that it is influenced by his reading of Aristotle
against Plato?
You observe that those who have been studying Heidegger’s
relationship to Aristotle’s Ethics have focused on the
distinction between poiesis and praxis, whereas in fact
Heidegger dwells much more extensively with the distinction
between techne and phronesis in his Sophist lectures. You
suggest that this may be due to Arendt’s influence. Jacques
Taminiaux, as you know, reads Arendt’s work as a veiled
criticism of Heidegger for having tried to depoliticize and
ontologize phronesis by placing it above praxis. I would be
interested in your response to this claim and also wonder if
you would be receptive to the suggestion that it is not Arendt
but Heidegger himself in his later essays that shifts the
concern to the activities of poiesis and praxis and away from
the question of practical understanding. On a very mundane
level, is it the fact that he is dealing with Book VI of the
Ethics here and with a Platonic question that gives the

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appearance that Heidegger neglects the political dimension
of Aristotle’s work?
You mention four translations of phronesis: Umsicht,
Verstehen, Entschlossenheit and Gewissen. Might these not
be different moments within the structural unity of phronesis?
The most troublesome term of the four is Umsicht, I suppose,
since it is associated with the equipmentality analysis in Being
and Time and with Dasein’s involvement with beings other
than itself. Heidegger points out that what demarcates the
difference between phronesis and techne for Aristotle is that
techne is concerned with other kinds of beings whereas with
phronesis one’s own Being is in question.
Let me see if I can say succinctly what I think is at stake
here. It would be neat, so to speak, if Division I of Being and
Time corresponded to Aristotle’s treatment of techne and
poiesis and Division I1 corresponded to Aristotle’s treatment
of phronesis. But the prevalent use of the word Umsicht to
translate phronesis is at least untidy since this is the word
Heidegger uses in Division I.
This may in fact indicate that something is amiss in the
parallel. Heidegger’s central claim in his lecture is that
Aristotle is at odds with Plato over the question of the
excellence that fulfills techne. Plato says that there can be
no genuine art without practical wisdom. Aristotle in contrast
says that it is Sophia rather than phronesis that governs over
techne. Now, if art for Plato requires knowledge of the good
and, if Aristotle is correct in identifying the kind of knowing
involved in art as a knowing of the eidos, then the good for
Plato is the ultimate eidos. But the eidos that is the arche
or source of artistic knowing does not belong to the object
but to the knower. So our relationship to things is grounded
in our relationship to ourselves and the two kinds of knowledge
have the same character-knowledge of the eidos.
Aristotle says no. The way we relate to ourselves in
phronesis-the way the human being stands out in
relationship to itself, the way we act by holding ourselves
in and towards our end is entirely different than the way we
relate to beings in poiesis or production. The excellence of
techne is Sophia, theoretical wisdom, this because Sophia
involves theoria-the pure beholding of the being as such,
a kind of knowing which would not be appropriate to our way
of being with ourselves but which might be a n even higher
way of knowing than phronesis, according to Aristotle.
If I followed your suggestions and Heidegger’s treatment
correctly, then how does this relate to Heidegger’s own
thinking on these issues? It seems to me that he would agree

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with Aristotle against Plato that the model of techne or art
is inappropriate for understanding human being. A long
section of the Sophist lecture has to do with delimiting the
nature of categorial and mathematical thinking as it is dealt
with in Aristotle. Here the texts of Aristotle that Heidegger
refers to are the Physics and Metaphysics and his discussion
culminates in a treatment of Sophia as the intellectual virtue
that is operative in our relationship to things other than
ourselves.
I t seems to me that in Being and Time, Heidegger is taking
issue with Aristotle’s understanding of techne. T h e
Aristotelian-Platonic understanding of techne covers over the
existential dimensions of our involvement with things-its
categorial and mathematical direction conceals and distorts
the structure of worldhood. Phronesis is always already there
in my everyday involvements, thus Umsicht or circumspection
is also a way of being myself.
Yet Heidegger also wants to retrieve from Aristotle against
Plato a n insight regarding Sophia. If we were, like Plato, to
stop with phronesis and subject all other knowing to self-
knowledge, then the ecstatic, outside-itself character of
Dasein’s Being would be missed. Thus Heidegger retrieves
the Aristotelian insight that Sophia as a way of knowing is
higher than the self-knowing of phronesis. In terms of Being
and Time, I take this to mean that the analysis of Dasein’s
way of Being itself is preparatory for a further, higher
consideration of Dasein’s understanding of Being in general.
Whereas techne involves theoria and Sophia, it is not aiming
for this but for production. But the desire to dwell on and
with Being itself-the aei on-also belongs to the human
condition. Heidegger cautions though that this can only be
thought properly through a retrieval of a proper understanding
of time and motion. So, I would conclude, Being and Time
is written against both Plato and Aristotle. It retrieves from
Aristotle a more radical understanding of human knowledge
that is not tied to the eidetic structure of Platonism; but it
rejects Aristotle’s willingness to take over from Plato this
eidetic structure as appropriate for explaining our involvement
with beings other than ourselves; finally, in Being and Time,
Heidegger does retrieve a certain dimension of this eidetic
discourse as a way of holding open the question of Being in
general.
I take it that your own analysis takes issue with the account
I have just outlined. You indicate that Heidegger should have
said, in agreement with the tradition, that phronesis governs
techne. You express surprise that Heidegger goes to such pains

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to disagree with this account in preference for Sophia. And
you conclude that such an account would actually have been
more in keeping with Being and Time. You suggest that unless
Aristotle follows Plato in making techne be governed by
phronesis, he will face the scholastic problem of an infinite
regress of effects grounding causes without any final cause
to secure them.
But the “for the sake of itself” temporal structure that is
involved in phronesis is really radically different than the
means-end structure involved in techne. Is it this infinite
regress in art that threatens to deprive human life of meaning,
as you say, or rather is this danger of meaninglessness really
at the core of our way of being? You point out that Heidegger
refers this threat of meaninglessness to Aristotle’s account
of being overpowered by pleasure or pain and thus losing sight
of our end and feeling incapable of choosing ourselves. You
wonder how Heidegger can manage to read out the ethical
implications of these passages when he translates them into
his language of resoluteness, authenticity and responding to
the call of our being to return to itself in conscience.
And that is, in the end, I suppose, the question. Is
Heidegger’s insistence on translating these Aristotelian
ethical notions into a discussion of temporality and ontology
a Platonic bias against praxis or an Aristotelian insistence
on a proper foundation for a more profound understanding
of free, human practical life?

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