Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 69 页

These questions lay the groundwork for an investigation of how the materialist concept of history problematises Heidegger’s deconstruction of the act, an investigation whose origin converges with the problem of the origin [Ursprung] in Being and Time. Schürmann’s work is the crucial point of departure. It demonstrates that the classical relationship between thought and action is essentially inverted in Heidegger: the mantle traditionally assumed by thought passes over to action. For Schürmann, this inversion does not just reground ontology in action, but in so doing renders any distinction between thought and action anarchic because the tension at the heart of Heidegger’s practical a priori releases the origin and the originary from the restrictions of ‘the philosophical principle’.¹²¹ Schürmann traces this release by way of a complex genealogy of the origin. First, he examines the causal and teleocratic dimensions of the kinetic notion of archē [ἀρχή], internally defined as inception and domination over that to which it gives rise, and as the source of the end [telos] which structures both poiêsis (setting to work in order to produce a sensible object) and praxis (setting to work as an end unto itself). He fails, however, to identify the basic temporal makeup of archē: telos provides the futural standpoint from which temporal unification occurs, a unification which is only actual as the past in the present. Archē is the past (cause, inception), yet it is a past which is only intelligible from within the present action it dominates.¹²² Second, Schürmann follows the translation of the Greek archē into the Latin principium through Duns Scotus’s Treatise on God as a First Principle and Leibniz’s Monadology. What is at stake here is how the ‘first from which’ things arise does not represent time forgotten – as Schürmann maintains – but time immobilised, an ossified time under the command of the past as absolute subject, be it in the figure of the princeps which confers an essential order or the law of the principium which grounds logic and truth. The philosophical upshot of this is that action – whilst still within time – cannot be figured as an implicitly temporalising concept. ‘At the close of that epoch [Latin philosophy]’,

¹²¹ Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting, 95-6. According to Schürmann, this is an ontological, epistemological and historical release which simultaneously sunders the boundaries between ontology, epistemology and history.

¹²² This is the temporal logic of archē: ‘In Aristotle, where the origin is understood in the context of human making, the elements of inception and of domination in archē balance each other. Production is a becoming over which telos reigns, perceived from the start as archē.’ Ibid. 110.

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