From Metaphysics to Ethics (with Bernard Stiegler, Heraclitus, and Aristotle)

Kurt Lampe’s “From Metaphysics to Ethics (with Bernard Stiegler, Heraclitus, and Aristotle)” serves as the postscript to the volume, the final encounter of this collection. Lampe considers Stiegler’s appropriations of Greco-Roman philosophemes to think together the metaphysics-ethics doublet, linking first philosophy with the cultivation of the self. In particular, Lampe focuses on the classic fragment of Heraclitus, φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ‎ (“nature loves to hide,” or, with Stiegler, “physis loves to withdraw”), and on Aristotle’s determination of the divine as the thinking of thinking. Through these, Lampe showcases Stiegler’s philosophy of technics, which otherwise seeks to overturn the transcendent and originary regimes of being and truth known as “metaphysics.”