Heraclitus vocabulary etymology for daimon and ethos PDF

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Vocabulary etymology of philosophy 1301 for the spring semester...

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Heraclitus vocabulary etymology for daimon and ethos

Charles Bambach/ TAs: Justin Bensinger, Derek Brown, Amanda Dunbar, Eric Sampson GREEK dike: justice--- but also order, conjunction, fugal structure verb: dikein, to throw (English word “dice” has same root) polemos: war, battle, Eng., polemical eris: conflict, strife, envy physis kryptesthai philei: Fragment B123: Being/nature loves to hide; moreover, as I will put it, Being loves to hide its hiding. ethos anthropos daimon Fragment B119 usually translated: a human being’s character is its fate daimon: fate, divine power, what is allotted, apportioned, ethos: habit, custom, haunts, habitat, dwelling Giorgio Agamben on Heraclitus B119: “Only insofar as it divides or lacerates can the daimon also be what assigns a fate or what destines daiomai first means ‘to divide’ and then ‘to assign’... for the human being, ethos --- the dwelling in the self that is what is most proper and habitual for it--- is what lacerates and divides, the principle and place of a fracture”--Potentialities 118 My interpretation of daimon: Etymologically, daimon stems from the middle-voiced Greek verb daiomai that means "to assign, divide, apportion, allot, and distribute."1

Daiomai, in this sense, comes to be associated with revelation (Offenbarung), the process by which the gods allot divine revelations to human beings. HERE IS MY OWN INTERPRETATION OF ETHOS: Etymologically, ethos ( ἦθος) originally derives from the language of breeders and herders –an idiom that refers to "the customary pasture, the common place of the herd, to which animals incline.” In the Iliad (Bk. VI, 511). Homer deploys the term ethea ἦθεα to refer to the places where animals belong; the stall, pen, stable, or shed to which they customarily return at the end of the day to find shelter and refuge. Ethea ἦθεα, then, evolves to connote patterns of action peculiar to the animal that characterize its customary behavior and the ways in which it gathers and flourishes in the haunts ethea ( ἦθεα) that it habitually frequents. This very movement or conduct of the animal, this habitual return to its haunts, its stable, constitutes its ethos ἦθος. In Hesiod and Theognis ethos ἦθος in its singular form comes to refer to "the hidden, but characteristic part of a person – the place, as it were, to which one returned when one was really him-or herself." In this archaic idiom, ethos ἦθος comes to mean how one is properly one's own in and through the customary places and habits that one is accustomed to, the places to which one belongs. What remains crucial to this early Greek idiom is that it does not proceed from subjectivity in its modern sense. There is no essentialist inner core that grounds this sense of ethos ἦθος. What is of consequence above all is our relation to the place to which we belong and share with other beings. Such an insight opens a reciprocity whereby what matters is not merely the way we humans inhabit a place, but the way a place in-habits us with habits that have us and that form our habitudes and ways of habitation. Unlike the later Greek usage of ethos ἦθος as "character," this archaic Greek sense of ethos ἦθος stresses the relationality of human beings to one another and to the world that opens as a place of/for dwelling. Charles Bambach, “The Ethos of Dwelling in Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism,” International Yearbook for Hermeneutics 15 (2016): 98-99. Latin: more: custom, habit, etymologically related to morals...