Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 10:06:06 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Re: Medium


--- Michael Eldred <artefact-AT-t-online.de> wrote:
> Jan,
> I wouldn't make too much of the medium voice
> 'between' the active and
> passive voices in Greek for its meaning is by no
> means clear and definite,
> but subtle and varying. The distinction goes back to
> the Alexandrian
> grammarians who developed the first Western grammar
> -- implicitly on the
> basis of Aristotelean metaphysics. All grammar is
> highly metaphysical.
> 
> The medium voice certainly has a definite form in
> Greek, but it does not
> seem to signify in general that the 'subject' is the
> 'medium' for the
> action of the verb. Guenther Zuntz (_Griechischer
> Lehrgang_ Goettingen
> 1991), whose knowledge of Greek is profound, writes
> for instance (my
> translation):
> 
> "Active voice communicates a fact or activity as an
> objective fact; medium
> voice indicates in addition a personal involvement
> of the subject or some
> other special relation to the subject. If this
> relation consists in the
> circumstance that the subject is itself affected by
> the action (that is, is
> 'direct object' of the action), grammarians call
> this structure 'passive'.
> ...
> e.g. _luo_ - 'I free, liberate' (active)
> _luomai_ - 'I am freed, liberated (passive)
> _luomai ton paida_ - '(From personal interest and
> involvement) I free my
> son' (medium)
> ...
> The reason why active or medial forms are used is
> not always clear...
> Ultimately it may be confirmed that the essential
> difference was not
> between active and passive but between the
> 'objective' active and the
> 'subjective' medium." (Band III S.114f)
> 
> Zuntz, of course, uses metaphysical terms to
> describe the different forms,
> which, in turn, could be questioned (as Heidegger
> has done, say, in
> _Introduction to Metaphysics_ 1935).
> 
> As far as Gelassenheit or thinking goes, one could
> say perhaps that it is
> the medium or the dimension in which openness takes
> place or thinking
> thinks its thoughts which is prior and allows the
> thinker and the thought
> to belong to each other. The medium is then not a
> middle between subject
> and object, but rather the encompassing, enabling
> medium.
> 
> Gruss
> Michael

I'm not a superb linguist, and my Sanskrit is pretty
bad (read: non-existent), but I've managed to consult
the linguist friend I'm teaching Heidegger about the
middle verb in Sanskrit.  Sanskrit is a much older
language, and what he says about it reflects what I
earlier mentioned about the middle verb in
proto-Indo-European (in addition to being very similar
in other respects to what you said).  Perhaps the
Greek literature and its grammar are too late to have
preserved the meaning of the middle voice.

>   The "classic" (because repeated ad nauseam in
> grammar books) example of a middle-voice verb in
> Sanskrit is yajate "perform a sacrifice for 
> oneself" vs. yajati "perform a sacrifice for 
> another".  To give a longer definition,
> borrowed from Dr. Andrew Sihler's _New Comparative 
> Greek and Latin Grammar_, "The middle was used for 
> actions in which the subject was intimately
> concerned -- what one did to oneself (the reflexive
> middle); for oneself; with one's own possessions;
> what one felt oneself, and so on.  Thus both Vedic 
> yajati (active) and yajate (middle) mean 'worships,
> venerates, performs a rite': the active forms would 
> be used of a priest, or of a deity cast in the role 
> of mediator; the middle would be used of the
> worshipper himself.  The distinction is easily 
> observed from Greek usage as well.  In both Greek 
> and Indo-Iranian, however, the contrast between 
> active and middle is often subtle if not
> altogether absent."
>  The basic verbal forms of those verbs which are 
> called _syntactically_ "middle" (i.e. those in 
> which the experiencer of an action is the 
> intransitive subject of the verb, as in "the window
> shattered" (="the window was shattered"), "the 
> rice is cooking" (="the rice is being cooked"), 
> "the leaves are burning" (="the leaves are being 
> burned"), "the pail fills with water" (="the pail
> is being filled with water")) were typically in 
> middle voice in early Indo-European languages.

I don't have time to explore this, but I imagine it
would well cohere with the sense of the medium as
encompassing in _Gelassenheit_

Paul

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