1070. "In section 19 of the Ister lecture course, Heidegger recounts the muthos of the cosmic procession of the twelve gods, led by Zeus through the immensity of the skies, as it appears in Plato’s Phaedrus. Hestia, alone, stays behind in the gods’ abode: "There in the heaven Zeus, mighty leader, drives his winged team. First of the host of gods and daemons he proceeds, ordering all things and caring therefor, and the host follows after him, marshaled in eleven companies. For Hestia abides alone in the gods’ dwelling place, but for the rest, all such as are ranked in the number of the twelve as ruler gods lead their several companies, each according to his rank. (246e–7a)" It is thus that the goddess Hestia comes to be associated not only with the home, in the very center of which she sits enthroned, but with the earth, to which the home is attached. This connection between home and earth is retained in the way in which, in the Mycenaean house, the circular hearth, identified with the home as such, and with the divinity protecting it, is actually fixed to the ground, as if it were the omphalos or “the belly button that roots the house into the earth.” Because the hearth is the fixed point or center on the basis of which the dwelling space orients and organizes itself, it is identified with the earth, immobile and stable in the very center of the universe, at an equal distance from the most extreme points of the universe, thus enjoying a privileged position within it. Such, at least, was Anaximander’s conception of the cosmos, a conception that found echoes in domains that extended far beyond those of cosmology (in conceptions of ethics and politics in particular). One understands how Plato, in the Cratylus, is then able to offer a twofold and seemingly irreconcilable etymology of Hestia: for some, he says, it must be related to ousia or essia, that is, to the fixed and unchanged essence, while for others it must be related to osia, for they believe that all things that are are in motion. What Heidegger says concerning the polis as the pole around which everything revolves, as the center and the axis in the proximity to which things find their place appears in fact as an accurate description of the hestia: following up on Deroy’s analyses, Vernant suggests that the hestia or the hearth of the Greek home be compared to the mast of a ship, solidly anchored in the deck, yet standing up straight and pointing toward the sky, much in the same way in which, while deeply rooted in the earth, the flame of the hearth elevates itself toward the highest spheres of the cosmos through a hole in the roof of the home, thus establishing a communication and a continuity between the terrestrial abode and the world of the gods, thus bringing sky and earth together in a single gesture. It is in this sense that, with Heidegger, we could read the famous anecdote, recounted by Aristotle, according to which, one day, as he was receiving guests by the fire of a baking oven, Heraclitus declared to his bemused and benumbed visitors: “Here too the gods are present.” In other words, it is not only in temples that the gods can become present, and that man can experience the unity of his being with that of the divine, but in the home as such, if the home is understood originarily, that is, precisely in terms of man’s essential ability to dwell amidst the unfamiliarity of being. Such, therefore, is the image of the hestia that Plato inherits from the oldest religious traditions in Greece: "immobile, yet in control of the movements that gravitate around it, central, but in the way of an axis that runs through a machine and keeps its various parts together." Heidegger’s interpretation seems all the more probable, that to the emergence of the Greek polis between the time of Hesiod and that of Anaximander also corresponds the replacing of the hestia at the very heart of the then newly conceived agora, that open and central space in which communal matters are debated publicly, that space that belongs to everyone and no one in particular and in which the community as a whole comes to gather itself. The hearth that now sits enthroned in the agora no longer belongs to a single family or a single oikos, but to the political community as a whole: it is the hearth of the city, the common hearth, the hestia koinè. There now is a center that is more central than that of the oikos, there now is a law that is more common than that of the family and the home—a law that is nonetheless not identical with that of the priest or the king, the law that comes from on high, but a law that is the deed and the expression of the community of oikoi. Yet whereas for Vernant this transformation designates a specifically political phenomenon, for Heidegger, the emergence of the polis in the re-centering of the hestia designates the openness to being itself, the originary openness out of which the polis comes to exist as such, the pole or the center that gathers humans around an originary opening to the essentially aletheic nature of being. Whereas Vernant sees this transformation as a horizontalization of the relations between men—the hestia no longer serves to establish a contact between the various cosmic levels, but now designates the horizontal space in which the equality and exchangeability of citizens is revealed through logos as the absolutely common value— Heidegger would see the centrality of the open space as confirmation of the founding and inescapable power of being. No doubt, Heidegger would interpret the agora primarily in ontological terms: it is the open space that belongs to everyone, the Open in which beings come to be revealed in their truth and men come to be revealed as the beings for whom this truth is of historical importance. The political, what Vernant identifies as the sharing and exposition of power amongst the various groups of the polis would be interpreted as an effect of this originary disclosure. On 1 December 1949, in a lecture entitled “Das Ge-stell” (“The En-framing”), Heidegger said the following: "Agriculture is now a motorized food-industry—in essence, the same as the manufacturing of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockading and starving of nations, the same as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs." [Beistegui, Heidegger and the Political]
Posted on: Sat, 10 Aug 2013 23:43:08 +0000
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