dmb chimes in with an edited rerun:
Since hammers so loudly and conspicuously hit their targets, I wonder if
Heidegger picked the image as an intentional parody of Zeno's paradox. I think
the paradox should be used to get at the difference between the continuous flow
of time as we experience it and the discrete increments with which we
conceptualize and measure time. (This paradox basically says that motion is an
illusion, because a loosed arrow will never reach its target. And it never gets
there because it travels half of the distance in half the time, and then half
again and again forever.) In other words, the point of this absurdity is not to
deny motion an an illusion. The point is to expose the limits of our
conceptualizations.
This "problem" or paradox arises only because of the way we divide and measure
things and the guy with an arrow through his head will tell you that arrows
certainly DO reach their targets. If he can't tell you, it's only because he
has an arrow through his head. The point (pun intended) of this idea - or at
least one of the points - is to say there is an important distinction between
engagement and reflection, between direct experience and the concepts that
follow. (Although somehow it seems that it's possible to be so engaged even in
reflection. It seems you can lose yourself in thought the way you can lose
yourself in motorcycle repair or hammering or painting or anything else.) I'm
thinking Heidegger picked the image of hammering, at least partly, because its
so repetitive. Nails are fasteners and they're used to construct things. That's
what concepts do too.
"That was why the Quality that Phaedrus had arrived at in the classroom had
seemed so close to Plato's Good. Plato's Good was TAKEN from the rhetoricians.
Phaedrus searched, but could find no previous cosmologists who had talked about
the Good. That was from the Sophists. The difference was that Plato's Good was
a fixed and eternal and unmoving Idea, whereas for the rhetoricians it was not
an Idea at all. The Good was not a FORM of reality. It was reality itself, ever
changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way." paperback
Bantam ZAMM 342
Thus, Zeno explained to his lover through logic and math and passionate kisses
galore how cupid's arrow could never reach his heart.
Then he nailed her.
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