Seynsgeschichte

To Philosophize with a Broken Hammer: A Brief Remark on a Familiar Discussion

2011-08-15T22:02:00.007-04:00

The interference of φύσις, in the sense in which it is made accessible within Sein und Zeit's tentative schematic of possible innerweltliches Seiendes, might be understood according to two, seemingly mutually exclusive possibilities. The first of these is the obstinacy of nature, in which something natural is zuhanden in a deficient mode: the rock that you stumble on while hiking, the snow that prevents your flight to Boston from leaving on time, etc. The deficiency here in view, namely that which yields obstinacy, is in principle the same, albeit in a manifestation less extreme, as that of the all too underscored "broken tool" of Sein und Zeit. What is characteristic of this interference of nature is that it is an interference at all by virtue of its modal deficiency; it remains totally comprehended by the phenomenal realm of zuhandenheit precisely as a negative phenomenon --one which receives its negative character only to the extent that it has been freed a priori as something zuhanden. But this negative interference seems also to coincide, and even perhaps necessarily, with a positive interference; the zuhandenheit of nature seems also to require the possibility of, if I may venture this use of the word, a physiology of zuhandenheit. When, in the course of hammering the nail which will hold up the canvas and frame whereby the rustic summer house cottage room will be illuminated anew by Van Gogh's Peasant Shoes, the metal of the hammer snaps at the thinnest part of the neck, not only has the referential totality (within which the hammer already resided and by virtue of which alone it was capable of being used) lit up as such, but nature, hidden in the hammer, has conspicuously announced itself. The lighting up of the one and the announcing of the other coincided, but they are not at all identical. What nature here announces itself in this positive interference of nature? Such nature is, to be sure, not a Naturding; even less is it any "ding an sich" in the sense of a de-worlded vorhanden ding, an individuated res extensa. Thus, the classical understanding of the artificial substance as a thing possessed of a natural substratum reasserts itself here --yet in a way in which neither that artificial thing nor nature can any longer be confused with what is vorhanden, which confusion is precisely what definitively characterized the classical understanding. Thus the "broken tool" is not simply the occasion of a loss of world that lights up what is thus lost; it is also the very assertion of φύσις itself -- its interference is the intrusive reminder of a forgotten world, or of a forgotten 'part' of the very world which has been lit up as the worin of the referential totality.

This is of interest to me because, as I have already tried to emphasize, it is not that nature has ceased to be zuhanden in the broken tool or the airport delay. Whether we trip over a hidden tree stump, catch sun-glare on the windshield while driving to an appointment we are late for, snap a screw-driver in the midst of a last minute fix, or get attacked by a bear while trying to survey some wooded forest land, nature not only asserts itself and interferes, but it does so only within and through a world in terms of which, for example, we might disclose ourselves through panic, and our 'world' might go to pieces.

So the point is: the broken tool is not only a sign of the illuminating retraction of, but also the assertion of world. We would almost want to speak of two worlds passing by each other and intersecting on the way, were it not for the phenomenal evidence before us: the worlds are not so radically different as to not be understood as the singular world of In-der-Welt-Sein, and these retractions and assertions, it must at least be provisionally conceded, have as their common ontic site innerweltlich Seiendes. Thus the question is, how does one account for the paradoxical interference of φύσις in which world is at once asserted and rescinded? Again, one cannot say that this is reducible to the traditional distinction between nature and artifice for many reasons, but perhaps the obvious and most persistent one is the one we have already indicated: nature and artifice are not to be distinguished according to vor- and zu-handenheit. Nature is already zuhanden, but zuhandenheit is already natural --and yet not at all because there are natural things -- a collection of individual substances or 'objects' in the 'great outdoors'. The plane that you can't take to Boston might very well have frustrated your future and thus lit up the 'fact' that the world you are in also lies ahead of you, but it has done so just as much through a startling assertion of the world which I would now, imputing a different sense to the word, want to call a physiological assertion. However, the physiological assertion enacts itself just as much as it is already contained in the world, the same world capable of illuminating retraction: the sudden snowstorm not only disrupts, it also surprises.

The Logic of Catastrophe: A Study in Arachnology, Part I

2010-11-07T11:36:00.013-05:00

Kant… This catastrophic spider…

- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist (hat-tip Edward Feser)

In a discussion spawned by the last post's attempt to defend Heidegger against a common historicistic misreading, I was given occasion to sketch a rough, formal definition of that logical specimen which may serve, within certain limits, as a criterion according to which the difference between historicism and Heidegger's seynsgeschichte may be judged irreducible. The Liar's Paradox, as the specimen is sometimes called, was there specified as follows:

The "Liar's Paradox" names any proposition the form of which contradicts that same proposition's content due to the manner in which the latter referentially contains the former." The Liar's Paradox as I have just formulated it can assume either a universal or a particular form, in keeping with the twofold possibility of the form of all predication (or if you prefer, propositional formation).
An example of its universal form would be: "All propositions are false". An example of its particular form would be "This proposition is false."".

The Liar's Paradox has a history whose origins may be traced at least as far back as the ancient Greek Cretan Epimenides, whose famous warning that "All Cretan's are liars" raised suspicion in regard not only to its credibility but, remarkably, also to its incredibility. But for the purposes of the present post, it is not its alleged ancient Greek origin but its alleged exemplification in modern transcendental idealism that is in need of some consideration: the author of Just Thomism has recently drawn attention to the way in which the "basic thesis" of Kant's first Kritik offers us a shining example of just such a logical fallacy:

The basic thesis of the Critique is that the mind cannot move beyond the bounds of possible experience. But the more often he argues and repeats the point, the more ironic it becomes, for sooner or later it becomes clear that Kant is giving page after page of non-empirical arguments to show that only empirical arguments are possible. To use Kant’s own language in his preface, when does he ever put the nature of the mind on the witness stand and force it to only answer the questions that he is putting to it?

Is Kant, logically speaking, a bold-faced Liar? The question, however seemingly simplistic, is obviously an important one: perjury is perhaps least acceptable before the tribunal of Rational criticism. And while the objection is not an uncommon one among intelligent readers of Kant, it is all the more pressing since Kant himself does not leave the peculiar character of his "thesis" unaddressed:

That the understanding, therefore, cannot make of its a priori principles, or even of its conceptions, other than an empirical use, is a proposition which leads to the most important results. A transcendental use is made of a conception in a fundamental proposition or principle, when it is applied to things in general and in themselves, an empirical use, when it is applied merely to appearances , that is, to objects of a possible experience. (KrV A 239, B 298)

If we are to examine Kant's words in the light of the aforementioned objection, then the first order of business is to ensure that no equivocation is afoot --or, in other words, that the terms to which the objection has been raised can be translated without significant remainder into those of the Kritik's actual proposition. Thinking along these lines we may be inclined to take observation of a state of affairs at once superficial and significant: the word Kant employs above which has been rendered as "understanding" is verstand. An immediate difference in terminology becomes apparent with the force of something obvious: Kant's work is not entitled "Kritik der Reinen Verstand", but "Kritik der Reinen Vernunft". It would be hard to overstate the importance of differentiating between the two faculties and of never losing sight of their difference, not only in the first Kritik, nor only in the entire critical project of Kant, but in German Idealism as a whole --even when, as in Hegel, the goal is to arrive at the Identity within this difference.

But for our present purposes, such a superficial observation, while necessary, is insufficient. For what is at stake in the task at hand is not only that the powers of the mind cannot be reduced to verstand, but that the nature of verstand, when positively expounded and clearly specified, be unconfused with the source of Kant's proposition regarding the limitations of the employment of that same verstand. What does Kant mean by speaking of the "use of the understanding", in either its transcendental or its empirical variety? What is the nature of such "use" or "application"? In his most general accounts, Kant speaks of verstand as "a spontaneity of knowledge" in distinction from the receptivity of sensibility (KrV A 126). At such a level of description we might very well be inclined to think of the understanding as identifiable with "mind" or with "the mental faculty" broadly conceived. But Kant also supplies his reader with far more specific accounts of the understanding: Kant's revolutionary claim is that it is possible "to reduce all acts of the understanding to judgements" and thus to regard the understanding specifically as "faculty of judgments" (KrV A 68, B 93). The precise sense then, of "the use of the understanding" here in question regards those functions whose combinatory power enables the setzen, the positing, that occurs in and is proper to all scientific, that is, synthetic judgment. Analytic judgments such as those that are to be found in logic, may well constitute a propaedeutic to science, but they can never constitute a body of scientific knowledge proper; they are not to be regarded as a use or application of the understanding, either in its transcendental or empirical variety. The use of the understanding, then, precisely in so far as it is so regarded, results in the acquisition of objective knowledge, i.e. not simply tautologous, but ampliative knowledge, which extends the wealth of what is already known, and whose systematic possession constitutes, for Kant, the aims of all science. The use of the understanding is most properly referred to the acquisition of scientific knowledge, and that scientific knowledge, because it must be ampliative (and therefore objective), must depend upon the possibility of categorial judgement, i.e. the capacity to say something about something.

But it is here that the question is only begged all the more: when we revisit Kant's quotation above, isn’t Kant therein saying something ("cannot make any use other than empirical") about something ("the understanding" as it relates to its "a priori principles" and "conceptions")? But if we bear firmly in mind the specific meaning of the understanding that Kant has clarified, then an answer becomes detectable. For what is meant by "saying something about something", i.e. by categorial judgment, is that act by which one can establish relations with an object --and not just any manner of relations, but precisely those in terms of which the object itself can be known and knowledge can thereby be amplified. In other words the combination achieved in such judgment must be achieved in just such a way that that combination be justified and necessitated by nothing but the object itself; the grounds of our judgment must be looked for nowhere else than in the object itself. Only thus is knowledge truly objective. I can, on the other hand, say something about an object without my statement being objective knowledge (but only an opining about perception), as in Kant's famous example: "the rock in the sun over there is warm". This judgment does indeed refer to an object as to its matter. But --and this is the crucial point --it does not find the ground of its combination therein. Rather we should say in such a case that this combination is only to be found in the representing subject, in which the representations of "rock" and "warmth" have happened to coincide. Such a judgement is a judgement of perception. But if a judgment is to produce objective knowledge, if it is to truly say something about something, if it is to be a categorial judgment, then it must be a judgement of experience, the sole possibility of which depends upon the application of the categories and not upon subjective coincidence. Thus, when I say: "the sun causes the rock over there to increase in temperature", I am now relying on much more than a coincidence of representations to intend the object of my judgement; I am relying not on the mere subjective simultaneity revealed within time as inner intuition but upon the objective succession of time as universal intuition, i.e. as the element in which alone the matter of my representations (and not my representations qua form) can be given. Such a distinction is the fundamental basis of the second of Kant's Analogies of Experience, and, more generally of all dynamical determinations, and it must therefore be regarded as elementary to the entire argument, the "basic thesis", of the Kritik itself.

To recapitulate: the use of the understanding, when specified as judgment, can be roughly spoken of as the act whereby one predicates or "says something about something", but such saying is itself a πολλαχῶς λεγόμενον. When we sort out the equivocation at play here, we discover that the primary sense of such "saying something about something" is the judgement qua judgment of experience, whose combination is objective, and not the judgment of perception whose combination is subjective. The case of Kant's proposition regarding the use of the understanding that we are discussing above can be classified in neither of the two ways just mentioned; the necessity of its connexion depends neither upon the use of the a priori principles of the understanding, nor upon the coincidence of representation, which is why the statement is properly logical in the transcendental sense; its matter, while belonging to a determinate domain (unlike General Logic, which bears no reference to material content whatsoever), is itself yet formal and only that. It is for this reason that Kant begins his second book of the Transcendental Analytic, namely, The Analytic of Principles, by noting the following regarding the material content of all knowledge proper to Transcendental Logic:

As Transcendental Logic is limited to a certain determinate content, namely to the content of those modes of knowledge which are pure and a priori, it cannot follow general logic in its division...Understanding and judgment find, therefore, in transcendental logic their canon of objectively valid and correct employment. (KrV A 131, B 170)

Kant's point here bears repeating: a canon of the objective and correct employment of the understanding, and not that objective knowledge gained by such employment, is to provide the proper subject matter of the transcendental logic. For the Liar's Paradox to be operative in Kant's transcendento-logical statement that "the understanding, therefore, cannot make of its a priori principles, or even of its conceptions other than an empirical use", that statement must be a product of the use of the a priori principles or conceptions of the understanding, i.e. it must be establishing a categorial saying something about something. But this is not what it is doing, since categorial application, because it by definition is grounded in the object itself, always depends on the givenness of time in terms of which the appearance of that object is informed. If all objects of knowledge are in the first place given in and under the conditions of intuition as Kant has transcendentally exposited them, and if one accepts that the very application of the categories depends on those conditions and owes all of its (formal) meaning to them, then his thesis regarding the empirical limits of the use of the understanding is logically unassailable. But however his exposition and analysis of the conditions of knowing be understood, it cannot be understood as vulnerable to the Liar's Paradox.

Footnote to a Common, All Too Common "Explanation" of Seynsgeschichte

2010-10-21T14:06:00.012-04:00

I find myself regularly marveling at the attempts, made by many an otherwise adept reader, to explicate Heidegger's understanding of the History of Being in a manner that inevitably ends up reducing the whole affair to a cultural historicism (sometimes even empirically ascertained!). What's worse, Heidegger's "idea about Western history" is depicted as one that is not even aware of its own vulnerability to the liar's paradox! Thus, either the question of how Heidegger himself would be able to 'access' the meaning of previous ages or the question of how he would be able to access the fact that he could not access such meaning often goes entirely neglected in such historicistic readings. I don't mean to suggest that there aren't insightful inquiries and honest work being done on Heidegger's seynsgeschichtliche denken, even in the abbreviated form afforded by the "blogosphere" (see, for example, the excellent William Koch's Philosophy Blog among others). Nor am I suggesting that the thought take only one form of articulation --indeed by definition, as it were, it cannot. But there is a persistent and often even crude misunderstanding of Heidegger's Seynsgeschichte that seems to me to have plagued its English-speaking reception, and it should be purged.

It is fortuitous, then, that even a reader who finds himself inept in the art of interpreting Heidegger carefully has been provided many passages in which Heidegger is nearly vitriolic in his appraisal of both "culture" and historicism. In Besinnung (1938-9), Heidegger writes:

"Finally, the thinking in terms of values is the most superficial superficialization of Being as objectness...Domination of cultural consciousness and consequently domination of cutural politics pursues a growing consolidation of modernity in the direction of that which modernity as such pursues, namely, the forgottenness of Sein. The uprootedness of man does not consist in a certain shaping and particular degeneration of culture and cultural consciousness. Rather, culture as such is this uprootedness and indicates the severance of man's as yet ungrounded ownmost from history...Historicism is the total domination of history in the sense of reckoning with what is past in view of what is present, all in order to claim thereby once and for all man's ownmost as 'historical' --not geschichtliche. The domination of history will be overcome only through geschichte, through a novel decision and through an ever-first inquiry into the truth of Seyn." (GA 66, pg. 147 in the English translation (poorly) entitled "Mindfulness").

Here it is quite obvious that historicism is not only being deliberately contrasted with Seynsgeschichte but that the latter is proposed as a manner of overcoming the former. What are people thinking when they try to 'describe' the history of Being as a succession of cultural understandings that are simply not governed by any overarching rationality? With such a description, one may have succeeded in offering an understanding of history that has lost --or rather simply negated --any resemblance to Hegelian Universal History, but they are equally (if not further) removed from Heidegger's Seynsgeschichte. As if Heidegger were speaking of a sociological version of Kuhnian paradigm shift. What could be more facile? (And, in fact, that is not being fair to Kuhn). It is perhaps well past time to take seriously Heidegger's insistence that in order to think the History of Being we must first of all understand that and how it is something yet to come, something which properly lies in the future (zukunft). The History of Being is no account of past cultures, practices, or even concepts. It is no account of the past at all. Rather, as Heidegger reminds us in his widely read letter to Jean Beaufret, the History of Being lies imminently before us. It is the History of what has not yet been thought --and this now means: the way the unthought intiates and rules the very movement of History. What is still unthought: this criterion should be applied to all 'synoptic accounts' or 'explanations' of seynsgeschichte --not as a measure that can be replaced by or confused with the explanatory grounds of irrationality (say, the id or unconscious), but as a measure which always separates itself off from such explanatory conceptions by differing from them in a manner that relies on the future.

ENT-GOTTERUNG

2010-08-12T13:29:00.006-04:00

Resuscitating an earlier conversation regarding the problem of past love -- the problem, that is, of whether love can, as time passes, ever retain (or even resuscitate) its very essence, indeed, of whether love must not of necessity contradict and so lose itself the moment it should take leave of the present and become a thing of the past, Amos of KTL has seen fit to expound upon the likeness obtaining between such a past love and a god that has passed away:

If [the god] is gone and dead, how can it have been a god? Certainly, it is not the God who "at every time and in every place,...draws close to man" (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1). By withdrawing from me after exacting my promise it has withdrawn its right to be called a god. But a god does not change, so it never was a god. Never to have been a god: this is how a god dies.

The logic of divine death --unmistakably Nietzschean in origin --is in a certain sense deceptively simple. Among the many who have revisited its simplicity since it was first proclaimed through the mouth of a "mad man", in that famous failed attempt to teach the common man the basic principle of a fröhliche Wissenschaft, it is Jean Luc Marion who offers perhaps the most succinct formulation of its general shape:

A “God” who can die harbors already, even when he is not dying, such a weakness that from the outset he falls short of the idea that we cannot not form of a “God.” And is it not the least of courtesies that he should satisfy a propaedeutic concept, even if it is only our own? A “God” who decides to die dies from the beginning, since he undoubtedly needs a beginning –which means that the “death of God” sets forth a contradiction: that which dies does not have any right to claim, even when it is alive, to be “God. (The Idol and Distance)

Omitting for the nonce a consideration of, for example, Marion's conspicuous use of a double negation (" we cannot not..."), we may yet appreciate how crucial the function of temporality is for this logic of divine mortality: a single moment --that moment of terrible epiphany in which it is finally ascertained that god is no longer --this single moment, it is claimed, reveals as so much illusion all the moments, indeed, the entire history, that had lead up to this very moment of revelation. Prior history, as the history of the god who has been, is simply the process by which its own farcical nature has now unfolded. The logic's conclusion thus offers itself straightforwardly: the god never was. If anyone has promised things or himself to such a god, those promises are to be esteemed null and void ---unless, as Rainscape has suggested, it can be supposed or in someway believed that another, this time immortal, god was evesdropping on such promise-making all along. But what if one, upon carefully examining the temporality by which god's life becomes a lie, were to object that somewhere along the way the original problem at stake had become conflated with another, entirely different problem? After all, is the problem of a despondent 'god' the same as the problem of a god who has become despondent? It is Nietzsche himself, who refused to lose sight of the double edged necessity of this logic: the truth of the moment of the death of god required god's previous life precisely to the extent that it would be capable of denying it. The Moment, if it was going to mark the beginning of an eternity in which god never existed, would have to mark it off from an eternity in which he always existed. Thus does Nietzsche have Zarathustra recognize the remarkable and confounding demands such a moment would have to make upon the one who endures it (I shall quote at length):

“Look at this gateway! Dwarf! It hath
two faces. Two roads come together here: these hath no
one yet gone to the end of.
This long lane backwards: it continueth for an eternity.
And that long lane forward—that is another eternity.
They are antithetical to one another, these roads; they
directly abut on one another:—and it is here, at this gateway,
that they come together. The name of the gateway is
inscribed above: ‘This Moment.’
But should one follow them further—and ever further
and further on, thinkest thou, dwarf, that these roads
would be eternally antithetical?”—
“Observe,” continued I, “This Moment! From the gateway,
This Moment, there runneth a long eternal lane backwards:
behind us lieth an eternity.
Must not whatever can run its course of all things, have
already run along that lane? Must not whatever can happen
of all things have already happened, resulted, and
gone by?
And if everything have already existed, what thinkest
thou, dwarf, of This Moment? Must not this gateway also—
have already existed?
And are not all things closely bound together in such
wise that This Moment draweth all coming things after it?
consequently—itself also?
For whatever can run its course of all things, also in
this long lane outward—must it once more run!—
And this slow spider which creepeth in the moonlight,
and this moonlight itself, and thou and I in this gateway
whispering together, whispering of eternal things—must
we not all have already existed?
—And must we not return and run in that other lane
out before us, that long weird lane—must we not eternally
return?”—
Thus did I speak, and my speech grew ever softer: for I was
afraid of my own thoughts, and the thoughts behind my thoughts.
(Thus Spake Zarathustra)

The moment of the death of god, the moment of eternal contradiction that contains the impossible yet necessary union of two eternities --this moment is extraordinary in its very structure as a moment, its very temporality. Even without asking what truly singular thing is happening in this moment, there is the easily overlooked question of how it is happening. How does this moment itself happen? Zarathustra proclaims at the turning point of his discourse to the dwarf -- the culminating moment of his discourse on the Moment --that "This Moment draweth all coming things after it...consequently—itself also" (bold mine). Nietzsche elsewhere, both through the double of Zarathustra and through his own private letters, refers to this moment as the moment of his "loneliest loneliness". But with this characterization, Nietzsche is not giving some "biographical context" for his thought, as if the moment should be situated within the extensive background of a solitary life; he is rather describing the very intensive structure of the moment and it only. For if god is to die in such a moment, then this moment must take place as the expression of its own impossibility. Of course it is true that the eternity of god's presence can never have been an eternity if it ends, AND the eternity of god's absence will never have been an eternity if it begins. But above all even the moment itself cannot have happened ---and this because of what transpires in it: an event which denies a priori both its past (god's presence) and its future (god's absence), thereby denying also the possibility its present, namely the moment itself. The moment therefore steals itself away. It is a time not spent but stolen. It is nothing but the moment of its own withdrawal, and it is therefore nothing all the more, indeed emphatically.

But if, then, the moment has this problematic yet emphatic character of preceding itself, along with everything that has come before it and everything that will come after, if it "draweth all coming things", that is all things which come and go, "after it", then it is so unprecedented that it threatens to lose its character as a moment. And again, such a loss would necessarily not be one that occurred at any subsequent time, but would occur in and as the moment. The moment is thus a moment of self-loss; it can never really happen, can never really have happened, at best it is a flash of what is already the case, namely god's presence or his absence. And this is in fact what Nietzsche's German famously calls it, for the English "Moment" does not render the German appropriation of Latin, i.e."Momente", but rather the truly Germanic "Augenblick". The moment under consideration here is a sudden flash, a momentary lapse, a blink of the eye, an Augen-blick. Like the Anglo-Saxon blican, the German blicken signifies "a glance, a glimpse, or a glittering, a shining." Not insignificantly, Blicken itself passes through such terms as blinzen and blinzeln, to wink and to blink, and is found in such expressions as blinz-äugig, that is, blink-eyed or weak-eyed. The term then passes on to designate a complete privation of sight as in Blinde-kuh, or that ancient children's game "blind man's buff".

The deceptively simple logic of divine death leads to this compound loss: the loss of time in time ---Die Ewige Wiederkunft des Gleichen in der Augenblick. It now becomes apparent that if we hold fast to the demands of this logic, then not only the god but also the death of god withdraws --and with it the very moment in which all of this happens. But this withdrawal of everything --so radical that it requires that everything never have been, that everything be essentially gone --this withdrawal itself, surely it (to return to the conspicuous use of a double negative) is not nothing. It is this peculiarity of the withdrawal, that it is not nothing, even if only (and especially) because it gives nothing ---it is this peculiarity that Heidegger, that one and only speaker of a word still missing, was compelled with gadfly-like insistence, never to cease invoking in our memory. And indeed, not only the death of the divinity or the moment of this death, but also the logic of this death, has a place in our memory that antedates the death itself, a place that stretches much farther back than its Nietzschean variety, a place to be found, then, not only at the Nietzschean end but at the Platonic beginning, and even at that beginning it is imbued with a waning mythical echo:

"The μύθος is that appeal of foremost and radical concern to all human beings which makes man think of what appears, what is in being. Λόγος says the same; μύθος and λόγος are not, as our current historians of philosophy claim, placed into opposition by philosophy as such. On the contrary, the early Greek thinkers (Parmenides, fragment 8) are precisely the ones to use μύθος and λόγος in the same sense. Mύθος and λόγος become separated at that point where neither μύθος nor λόγος can keep to its original nature. In Plato's work, this separation has already taken place. Historians and philologists, by virtue of a prejudice which modern rationalism adopted from Platonism, imagine that μύθος was destroyed by λόγος. But nothing religious is ever destroyed by logic; it is destroyed only by the god's withdrawal." (Was heißt Denken?)

Heidegger is here, as usual, exercising a very particular care over his words. The audience of his lecture is at once the recipient of a daring proposal and of caution as to how it should be understood. Although ontology, if it is to take its first step, must recognize that it does not involve itself in "μῦθον τινα διηγεῖσθαι", in that is, "telling a myth" (Plato's Sophist, 242c) --a phrase famously quoted and insisted upon by Heidegger some 25 years prior to his delivery of the Was heißt Denken? lectures, nevertheless we are here told that μύθος itself "makes man think of what appears, what is in being." Μύθος not only engenders but compels a thinking of what appears, what is in being. We cannot here consider how cautiously Heidegger lays this comma down --more cautiously then if it were a stick of dynamite; for "what appears" precedes "what is in being" not only in the order of Heidegger's sentence. But for the immediate purposes of the question at hand, it is enough to underscore the surprising compulsion of myth upon thinking, the seemingly implausible force that through the "green fuse" of thinking drives philosophy and its logic to flower. It is this unexpected claim that gives the further support for Heidegger to assert that "philosophy as such" is entirely innocent of the crime of making μύθος and λόγος oppose each other; μύθος belongs to a soil altogether subterranean to philosophy, and indeed, one by which its first growth, its first appearance, is made possible and even "compelled". No, not philosophy as such, which is indebted to μύθος, but both μύθος and λόγος themselves are to be held responsible. What is it that they did? They did not, and more precisely could not keep to their original nature. Only thus did they come into conflict in such a way that λόγος was fated to overtake μύθος and to bid it farewell. What is this not-keeping in which a failure of essential proportions takes place? We may gather at least this much en route to an answer: the original nature of μύθος and λόγος are of such a sort that they need to be kept, to be preserved. When they are not kept, they are given, and thus given away, lost. Only in the loss of this their original nature --a nature in which their appearance remained concealed, that is kept, do the two come into opposition. Philosophy as such, before the time of Plato, thought of "what appears, what is in being" but it did not expose the original nature of what it was thinking. The Presocratics could not achieve this, because what they were thinking was of such a nature that they had to keep it in their thoughts; they had to keep thinking about it, for it had not yet ever been thought. But Plato, who, we are told, in some measure had to achieve this exposure, was faced with the vexing problem that he could no longer keep thinking in the way Parmenides had, and therefore he could no longer keep in thought the original, concealed nature of μύθος and λόγος. Such failure was emphatically not Plato's doing --rather it is only the lucidity of Plato as opposed to the chiaroscura of the Pre-Socratics that attests to the fact that "this separation has already taken place." But as nonchalant as Heidegger is in delivering such a "fact", he is at the same time speaking with masterful care: the separation does not take place in Plato's work, but "has already taken place" in Plato's work; indeed, it has taken place as the very condition for the possibility of Plato's work, even though it is precisely this separation that will be problematized in Plato's work. We are thus faced with a curious state of affairs: it did not yet happen in the Presocratics, only to have already happened in Plato's work. When then --at what moment --did such an event take place? Instead, like the death of god, this event of separation in which μύθος and λόγος both fail to keep to their original essence steals away unseen, unexperienced, unsuffered, untranspired, only to be proclaimed later, in a thought out of season. There is no present moment of separation. There is only the time when it has not yet happened, and the time when it has already happened. In the former time, such a separation is not yet conceivable, that is to say, it is not yet possible. In the latter time, such a union is no longer conceivable, that is to say no longer thinkable. The separation testified to by the work of Plato, like the death testified to by Nietzsche, both obey a logic in which the testimony each thinker gives buries the event to which it testifies. Both falsify so completely the past from which they are breaking that even the moment of the break is cast into an enigmatic obscurity. And amidst the ruction of such a break, certain quiet questions slip away unasked and unaccounted for. Why was something like a break ever needed? What can account for this original and long lasting entanglement with μύθος? Why did god need to die? What was this comforting and great illusion of the eternal existence of the god? These were not nothing. Nor were they deliberately decided upon or contrived, as I have had pause to consider elsewhere on this blog:

First, it must be admitted that we do not ever decide to be involved in that dimension in which the divine brilliantly flashes. If the Greek gods were by no means the stupendous, ex nihilo inventions of the poets, still less were they the fruits of a some sort of consensus among the people. Ancient man was pre-committed to hierophany. The failure to recognize this pre-commitment to such a hierophantic realm is what in part characterizes the essential presumption of modern impiety. Ancient piety, understood in terms of this characterization, is not --at least in the first place --a personal decision, since it could only be something fit for the scales of phronetic deliberation if it has beforehand lost all of its gravitas as a compelling, commanding hierophany, i.e. as something quite other than either a fact or a contrivance. Homer himself offers his testimony in this respect:"Far-darting Apollo descended upon the Achaian camp as the night." This is neither contestable nor incontestable. It occurs in a realm whose stillness and purity lies before any possibility of contention. From out of the overwhelming brilliance of such a realm, men find themselves pouring libations and sacrificing in holocausts in accord with a need which they have not yet understood ---a need which has all the same been given for them to attempt to fulfill. Such need, such necessity understood as ἀναγκὴ, is the pulse of the tragic essence of the Greeks, which means of course the Greek essence of tragedy, namely τραγοιδία as the scape-goat's song of sacrifice.

What can account for this pre-given experience of the god? What can eradicate it? If the god once was, yet is now no longer, does this falsify the god? Does it destroy the god? Or is this destruction of the god, like that of myth, one that is preceded by a certain inexplicable concealment? Does all destruction always fall short of truly destroying, since it can never destroy the past that preceded it? Does not this past, not simply as what is past, but as what has indeed once been envelop in perfect remove what is now destroyed? The withdrawal of what once appeared limits the very reach of destruction, and so this withdrawal itself gives testimony to whatever has withdrawn. But the withdrawal is of the god. The god who is asserted to never have existed on the basis of his evanescence, is a fortiori the god who once was. But what god is this whose very flight testifies to his arrival and above all where can such a god be found? As the culmination of Heidegger's Beiträge would have it:

Flight and arrival of gods now together move into what has been and are removed from what is past.
But the futural, the truth of Seyn as refusal, contains within itself the ensuring of greatness, not the empty magnitude of empty and gigantic eternity, but of the shortest pathway.

Is then, the once irresistible love, which, in departing from the heart in which it once had burnt and abandoning it to the tragedy of an inexplicable fragmentation, not all the more undeniable for that fact?

The Threefold Fortune Cookie: Hegelian Phenomenology in 30 seconds

2010-04-28T13:26:00.000-04:00

1.) Motion is Illusory.

2.) In order for something to be Illusory, it is necessary that it appear as true, only to afterwards undergo a change such that its appearance moves from truth into untruth.

3.) Motion is therefore not --as it first appeared to be --simply illusory, but is an essential part of the truth, since the truth about illusion itself is dependent on motion.

* * *

Like every fortune cookie, it is the message inside --in this case the inner movement --that counts. Whether that message comprehends even the future is a question worth leaving on the table.

.

What Has Already Been Lost In Space? (Part 1)

2010-02-27T15:31:00.000-05:00

Commenting on our last consideration of the problem of the definition of space (after taking the time to apply some warranted scrutiny), Amos of KTL found that same consideration to be missing something essential: the proper requisites of the very definition itself seem to have been lost on that previous consideration:

How is the coinciding permeation of space by time a definition, rather than a fact about space? Could not one ask, if space were its own being permeated by time as something other, what would it be prior to this permeation such that it could be permeated?

It is only from within the confines of the problematic of space as it was first introduced (over at A City in Speech) that a proper response can now be ventured to these important observations offered by Amos, if only because one must never fail to exercise a certain respect for the place where he already is, and this a fortiori in the case of a consideration of the a priori nature of space. What we have tried to show in our previous consideration was that the subterranean understanding which governed the initial introduction of this problematic is one that can and must be brought to light and drawn out in meticulous fashion along lines that are unmistakably Kantian. If we keep this hermeneutic situation firmly in view, then a certain light falls upon the otherwise tangled thicket of possible responses to Amos' question regarding the temporal permeation of space.

What does it mean to think space as a pure form of finite intuition? More specifically, when we ask the question "What is space?", how is our search for this 'what' impacted by the peculiarity that space is not intuited like something spatial, but is rather intuited a priori along with and in advance of anything (in space)? The question of what something is either has an object or it does not. If it does, then this is a possible object of experience about which an empirical question may be raised; if it does not, then this is a condition for the possibility of such experience about which a transcendental question may be raised. In the case of the former, namely, the empirical question, what is aimed at is constituted at the most fundamental level by two elements: 1.) the receptivity of intuition and 2.) the spontaneity of the understanding; any possible object of experience, any "what" about which we make inquiry, depends upon 'what' is intuited (the sense manifold) and 'what' is understood (i.e. the categorical organization of the sense manifold). Kant sometimes calls this dual dependency which combines intuition and understanding the "unity of representation". Strictly speaking, only if space, considered in exclusion from anything else, required the unity of representation could it possibly be an object of experience to which an empirical question may be plied. Only if this is the case can we extend our knowledge about space and discover, as Amos would have it, "a fact about space". And, indeed, Kant does more than concede that such discoveries are, in point of fact, possible; his entire first Kritik relies upon and, in another way, founds such discoveries. They are none other than what Kant calls formal intuitions, and in the case of space, they are to be found in that familiar body of apodictic knowledge known as geometry. But a formal intuition of space can in no wise be confused with the form of intuition of space:

Space, represented as object (as we are required to do in geometry), contains more than the mere form of intuition; it also contains combination of the manifold, given according to the form of sensibility, in an intuitive representation, so that the form of intuition gives only the manifold, the formal intuition gives unity of representation.(CPR B161)

Space, insofar as it is formally intuited, is given as a unity of representation in reference to which facts can be established. Thus we may ask and give definitive answer to the question "what is a line?" But the question "what is space?" asks for what any such formal intuition, in its unity of representation, depends upon, namely the transcendental form of intuition of space. To this latter transcendental question and its answer the synthetic a priori judgment capable of establishing facts about space is necessarily indebted. Therefore the question "what is space?" can neither offer a definition produced by the understanding nor ipso facto can it look for that unity given in and by the "unity of representation". The definition of space as a pure intuition must be given in its unity by pure intuition. The oneness or unity of pure space can only be discovered only when its borders or confines are seen, and yet because this unity is not the unity of representation, these borders cannot be de-fined by the understanding, but rather must be intuited. It is as if we must in some way see rather than apprehend the definition of space. But how is such seeing to take place if what is to be seen is neither something we can experience nor even conceivable? It must take place by way of an intuition that is non-empirical, i.e. pure. And for this reason we cannot expect it to be positively demonstrated (and therefore understood in its necessity); it must instead be given, i.e. intuited.

Now, if there were nothing to be purely intuited other than space, then the form of the intuition of space would have to be able to give itself, in its unity, and therefore constitute itself as self-defining. But because something else is given as a form in pure intuition, namely time, this is not necessary. The question remains: is it possible? The only answer to this question must be found by way of recourse to pure intuition. Kant himself indicates the answer by the following observation:

Whatever the origin of our representations,...whether they arise a priori, or being appearances [i.e. possible objects of experience] have an empirical origin, they must all, as modifications of the mind, belong to inner sense. All our knowledge [i.e. any intuition, concept, or unity of representation] is thus finally subject to time, the formal condition of inner sense. In it they must all be ordered, connected and brought into relation.(CPR, A 98)

Kant's observation can be supplied with the testimony of a quick reference to our awareness of anything in space: this awareness itself is not spatial, it is not something that we might bump into like a tree in the forest. It is not defined by space. On the other hand, what about space? If it can be said to be anything, and it is already lost to any attempt to conceive of it, than it must be received as an intuition, i.e. as a form given in the intuition of a sense manifold. But, as Kant just observed, not just the understanding, but intuition too, and any sort of representation, takes place in time. So much is this the case that when Amos proposes the possibility of the alternative, namely,"Could not one ask, if space were its own being permeated by time as something other, what would it be prior to this permeation such that it could be permeated?" he has already presupposed time insofar as he speaks of "space prior to this permeation" ---in other words, the priority is nothing if it is not a temporal one.

When this problematic of the temporal definition of space as Kant has framed it is reflected upon, a paradoxical formulation which it seems we must be content with asserts itself regarding the definition of space: the essence of space is, in the immediate pure intuition of space, lost in that intuition. Space, because it is definable by the pure intuition of time and this alone, must first be lost, since the essence of space is not only, according to the order of intuition, found later, but above all because it is found precisely as what is found later. The de-finition of space is found as what has been lost in space. And it is in this sense that I would like, at least initially, to read the last and most astute comment Amos has left in connection with our recent post on Ereignis:

Also, is space as it transpires in the shifting encounter an example of what "always comes too late?"

Ereignis

2010-02-19T07:53:00.000-05:00

Thinking, Heidegger never fails to remind us, is preliminary. But the reason for this, its preliminary nature, is often, and quite wrongly, understood as the limitation of a perspectival horizon ---as if this preliminary nature of thinking were simply the result of the fact that "one can always learn more." But the preliminary nature of thinking consists in just the opposite: one already knows too much --indeed long before he has ever tried to think about what it is that he already knows. The preliminary nature of thinking has nothing to do with the constantly expanding itinerary of some "philosopher of infinite tasks". It is rather a consequence of the radical confinement of thinking to what it already has to think; the proper matter always comes too late to thinking, refusing thinking the luxury of "forging ahead", compelling it to retract itself from the outset, taking back its very beginning. Therefore, it must be vigilantly recalled that the preliminary nature of thinking is a consequence of its dilatory arrival. The thoughtful word hesitates. Otherwise, what there is for thinking to first of all think would be missed entirely.

It is with this dilatory essence of thinking in mind that Heidegger writes in his letter to Jean Beaufret:

Things that really matter, although they are not defined for all eternity, even when they come very late still come at the right time.

Lost in Space

2010-02-17T10:31:00.000-05:00

If borders or limits are required for definition, and if space by definition cannot be anything spatial --and must therefore by definition be refused any limit or border --then we seem prima facie to confront in the problem of space an irresolvable ἀπορία. The apparent force of this problematic has once again asserted itself in a debate that has since fallen into ellipsis over at A City in Speech:

We will close at the present by highlighting that space constantly retreats to the background whenever it is involved in a question. Turn your mind now to the concept of space, and try to fix your thoughts upon it. What comes into your mind? If there are any images of objects within space itself, clear them at once, since space itself cannot be that which it contains. Clear away all materiality from the conception, and fix your gaze upon space itself. Stripped of matter, what remains? What is space?

Thus does the problematic initially impinge itself upon our initial effort to in any way clarify it. But what initially, that is immediately, seems to of itself deny any resolution, often needs only enough pause to embark on a second reflection, i.e., it needs only the mediation of time; although space will refuse all shape and form, it nevertheless must permit of definition insofar as there properly belongs to it the possibility of being encountered as formless. After all, it must be admitted that space is not in the first place experienced as indefinable. The question is therefore begged:

What condition is necessary to make such an encounter of space, namely, as indefinable, possible?

The answer can be brought into relief negatively: there must be something non-spatial about our very encounter of space, something which allows us to see it at first only as a backdrop that is always already there in our encounter of any object of experience, only to allow us to see it later on as an indefinable fore-ground that vexes our attempts to think it. And indeed, in the course of this shift, space itself does not change, yet our encounter with it changes emphatically. The implication being brought into relief has now become obvious:what is capable of constituting the condition for the possibility of any such shifting encounter of space is not space itself but something outside of space itself, something which, being other than space, could not simply reside alongside of space (in just another space, as it were), but would have, at the same time as it remained outside of and beyond space, to permeate it through and through. Of course, in keeping with this a priori permeation, the positive identity of this non-spatial condition has, even in this our present musing upon the definition of space, necessarily already been mentioned. Space is not only bordered by what already permeates it; it is defined by this very coinciding permeation: space is defined by being defined already, i.e. it is defined by time.

Such an answer is in many ways a stock response. It is clearly drawn along Kantian lines, and is --like many things Kantian --easily incorporated into the System of Hegel. As Kant would have it, the pure inner intuition of time is not simply some complement to the pure outer intuition of space: time is not only inner intuition but also universal intuition. What is spatial is already temporal. What is important to see is that this universal status does not erase or correct time's designation as internal. Rather, time is universal intuition in a manner that outer intuition cannot be, and it must therefore be other than what is outer; it must be internal. Time must be internal intuition at the same time as it is universal intuition, and this alone vouchsafes its universal status. But what time is this, which would allow the intuition of time to be necessarily differentiated into what is internal and what is universal, while at and as the same time, insisting upon the necessity of their identity?

Aphoristic Meditation I: Hegel and The Miscarriage of History

2010-02-10T16:31:00.000-05:00

Some days I wake up in the morning and it hits me: the world is coming to an end.

Other days it dawns on me that I know better: the world has long since already ended.

But what's this?
Could the end of the world be such thing as to have been missed?

-Pseudonymic Aphorism 1

What would it mean that the end of history is presently missing, that history is, at this point in time, still missing its end? Hegel spoke of the end as nothing other than the beginning which has, in the passage of time, ceased to be the beginning, and has thus become other than itself. For Hegel, this self-othering of the beginning becomes complete in and as the end. The end is the other beginning. Here we must be more precise: the end is indeed the beginning, but no longer bound, that is, no longer bound to end. This is why Hegel spoke of the Unendlich end, the Infinite end. The Infinite end is not the endless succession of present moments, of 'nows' that never stop coming ---if only because, by virtue of their succeeding, these moments are bound; they are by nature bound to succeed. Because they are bound to succeed, they fail to reach beyond this boundary. Success, as that in terms of which these moments approximate their boundary, is the very thing which keeps them from ever attaining ---that is, overcoming ---it. For Hegel however --and that means, with the establishment of the system of science as absolute knowledge, we now already know the end towards which all of this has been leading.

Contra Hegel, however, Heidegger, by way of that other historical thinking, had to indicate that the true end is not the unbound beginning which, coming after succession itself, necessitates it. The true end is not the Infinite end. Rather, the end is the interruption of the beginning, and it is merely this. For the beginning, if it is truly a beginning and therefore harbors the greatness that alone gives the beginning its possibility, is by no means bound by the end; it is bound by itself only. Because of this it is not bound to end, but to return to the beginning (a difference that is impossible for Hegel). In the movement of seynsgeschichte, the end is, therefore, not something that is initially missed (in and as the beginning) and finally attained (in and as the end). Instead, the end is missed in itself, i.e. in a missing that is proper to the end. The end is missed ---essentially. This is why the true meaning of the end cannot be conceived in terms of limit, but must be found in those words that are most of all already spoken, the earliest words: πέρας, or as Heidegger often reminds us, "that from which something begins." The earliest word for end means beginning.

The Piety at the Heart of Technology: Conversations along a Cyberpath

2010-02-09T15:23:00.000-05:00

Not long ago, over at the excellent KTL, an attempt to stoke the ashy embers of a fire that hasn't "even yet been kindled" regarding the Technikfrage began with the following question:

"How are we to decide whether the claim a work of art makes on us is one which it is pious to obey? If it is impious to ask such a question, how are we to become initiated into the correlative of piety? Or if it is a matter of returning to an original piety from the impiety of our questioning the claim a work of art has made on us, how are we ever to extricate ourselves from idolatrous claims?"

It is this train of inquiry that recalls that famous, oracular pronouncement which concluded a consideration of the historically-founding power of art --a consideration which itself served to conclude a hitherto unattempted inquiry into just what we are to think the essence of technology is. This pronouncement famously runs: Questioning is the piety of thought. With such a pronouncement, Heidegger consummates his consideration of what has been called art in ancient Greece, and no doubt refers most of all to the third of that cryptic triptych of questions cited above. For here, Heidegger is referring to the calm heroism not of asking a question or a collection of questions, but of raising and upholding a line of questioning, i.e., of following through on such questioning in such a way that an entire passage of questioning surprisingly unfolds as the very way one is to question, a way which the questioner must go. This questioning attains its essential necessity by undermining itself, i.e. by eventually putting into question the presupposition of the intial question it in the first place raises. In this manner of a continual stream of interrogative retractationes, it moves according to a strict necessity, as opposed to whim; what such questioning presupposes beforehand is what it asks after. In the case of piety, the above commentator seems to recognize this necessity of questioning to be inherent in the very precondition of locating the 'correlate of piety', when he asks: "if it is impious to ask such a question, [then] how are we [ever] to become initiated into the correlative of piety?" Here --in this very question --the necessity of such questioning is confirmed even as it is questioned.

But the question that is begged from this confirmation is "Why?". Put another way, if it is true that the piety of the ancient Greek experience of the overwhelming yet uncertain presence of divinity ensured in advance that one would never, at least so long as that presence remained, raise so much as a single interrogative syllable towards such divinity, then on the strength of the very same principle it is just as true that we, lateborn as we are, must question. For ancient man did not win the piety which characterizes his essence by way of a preliminary series of deliberations or interrogative exercises: the divine ALREADY came to presence before his eyes. Indeed, even before he opened his eyes the appearance of the divinities rested on the tip of his tongue, in the telling word of μύθος which he had inherited. But let it be stated with the assurance of a principle: the manner in which what is divine is given is also the manner in which it is missed; such is the peculiar essence of what can properly be called divine. Therefore, according to the very same divine essence whereby ancient man could not help but begin in a certain unsolicited and undiscovered piety, so too must the attempts of today, i.e. in the age whose essence lies in technology, begin in an unsolicited and undiscovered impiety. To sustain a line of questioning which not only arises from but goes after its starting point, i.e, the starting point inherited by an age thoroughly ruled by the essence of technology, is to bring the origin of impiety into question even as such a questioning springs from this its origin. Through such an effort, it may happen that impiety thus for the first time faces itself. What does such impiety look like and why has it taken so long to even be glimpsed? Is it possible that this very impiety hid in the piety of the ancients? Is it possible that the ancient piety hides in the impiety of man's existence today?

Several highly important distinctions must be observed here:

1.) First, it must be admitted that we do not ever decide to be involved in that dimension in which the divine brilliantly flashes. If the Greek gods were by no means the stupendous, ex nihilo inventions of the poets, still less were they the fruits of a some sort of consensus among the people. Ancient man was pre-committed to hierophany. The failure to recognize this pre-commitment to such a hierophantic realm is what in part characterizes the essential presumption of modern impiety. Ancient piety, understood in terms of this characterization, is not --at least in the first place --a personal decision, since it could only be something fit for the scales of phronetic deliberation if it if it has beforehand lost all of its gravitas as a compelling, commanding hierophany, i.e. as something quite other than either a fact or a contrivance. Homer himself offers his testimony in this respect:"Far-darting Apollo descended upon the Achaian camp as the night." This is neither contestable nor incontestable. It occurs in a realm whose stillness and purity lies before any possibility of contention. From out of the overwhelming brilliance of such a realm, men find themselves pouring libations and sacrificing in holocausts in accord with a need which they have not yet understood ---a need which has all the same been given for them to attempt to fulfill. Such need, such necessity understood as ἀναγκὴ, is the pulse of the tragic essence of the Greeks, which means of course the Greek essence of tragedy, namely τραγοιδία as the scape-goat's song of sacrifice.

2.) Second, on the basis of this aforementioned pre-commitment, a clearer idea of modern impiety comes to light: it too is not the result of a deliberation. Thinking that the gods --or a god --lie in the hands of men, to be believed or not believed, is a thought which does not precede but is rather precisely made possible by this impiety. In the words of Beitrage, the "decision regarding the flight or arrival of gods" is not some personal decision of an individual 'ego' that preliminarily confronts the 'possibility of religion'. It is an historical decision; it is not a decision about one's preferred 'world-view', but about whether one will have recalled his prior state of pre-commitment.

3.)Thirdly and most relevant to the above quotation, however, is the following line of inquiry: in which domain is the proper response/responsibility to the mysterious hierophany of historical divinity bounded? The answer can be pointed to by reflecting on a few superficial observations:

A.) The Ethical Hierophany of the Ancients.
In the throes of ancient piety, an ethical dimension was inextricable from hierophany. In other words, the divinities were not a landscape which some diviners had the luxury to gaze upon. Nor were they in some perhaps more mysterious way removed from their witnesses. They were rather the homeland itself, in the sense that they arose from and coyly inhabited the habitual haunts, the familiar ways and by-ways of the people, the ἤθος. Such an inhabiting made itself known in and as the ἤθος; the gods flashed in the sense of demanding prayer, sacrifice, and even housing (whether housing in myth under the roof of the mouth, or in the sacred precinct under the roof of the temple). In this way the pre-commitment of ancient piety necessarily entailed an ethical obedience which was itself entirely pre-reflective and unamenable to later conceptual elucidation. It was obeyed without being decided on or 'cognitively' known. It is important to recognize that on account of this ethical intimacy, even a man who was 'impious' was not a man who denied the pre-givenness of the gods, but a man who wished to supercede or resist their interventions or aims.

B.)The Ethical Blasphemy of Modernity.
Modern impiety shares precisely the same mode of pre-givenness as ancient piety. One is from the outset ethically un-committed. He must decide what and who he will believe ---or so he has been given to believe, and this is the point. Thus the realm of divinity to which historical humanity had been committed does not, in modernity, get erased or even put up for decision ---any more than its premodern, and indeed, Greek origin is effaced or confronted -- rather, it simply grows so obscure as to be a vaccuum of unacknowledged pre-commitment. It is in this hidden indebtedness that Modernity achieves its innermost identity.

C.) The Non-Ethical Hierophany of the Technological Age.
By way of contrast, the questioning that arises in and by virtue of the age of technology does not find the divinity pre-given in an inevitable hierophany, nor does it find it as an object of man's consent or deliberation or disbelief. Instead, the questioning that genuinely arises in the present age finds the very pre-givenness as something itself not yet understood and therefore questionable. In such a posture of questioning, what has happened to the aforementioned ethical intimacy? When one questions in this fashion, has he committed hastily to an unknown master? Or has he undertaken for the first time to prepare for the arrival of what ancient man only experienced the fading after-glow of? Can one defer and wait for what he has pre-committed to since time immemorial?

Heideggerian Hyperbole PART 2: The Nature of Dasein's Body

2009-12-28T09:31:00.000-05:00

Spurred on by Enowning's observation of the glacial pace at which Seynsgeschichte postings occur, I have decided to publish this present post an entire year early. Such is the high regard in which I hold all the fine, frequently-posted things going on in that forum, which was the original other Heidegger website.

If the remarks of the previous post (Part 1 of the full consideration at hand) have gone any stretch of the way in clarifying the manner in which nature can be present-at-hand, thereby gaining some measure of liberation from the presupposition that nature is obviously present-at-hand, they were not intended to mislead the reader into supposing that there is no reason why nature should be mistaken for the present-at-hand, as if this were just some random and arbitrary error. Not only is there such a reason for this possibility; explicitly articulating this underlying reason provides the clue in terms of which Heidegger's statement that Das Dasein ist nie vorhanden can be appropriately interpretted. For the presupposition that nature is ---by its very nature, as it were --present at hand (vorhanden), and that there are things-in-themselves 'objectively' existing irregardless of Dasein is a mis-articulation of an ontic experience which is both true and indisputable (because not yet articulated):

“[T]he ontical obviousness of the Being-in-itself of beings within-the-world misleads us into the conviction that the meaning of this Being is obvious ontologically, and makes us overlook the phenomenon of the world...” (BT152, SZ116)

In acknowledging "the ontical obviousness of the Being-in-itself of beings within-the-world" Heidegger is simply pointing out that he is not in anyway neglecting that evidence that Dr. Samuel Johnson so famously appealed to in his attempt to refute Bishop Berkley's esse est percipi, for in this legendary attempt he did not utter a word --except to point out that his refutation was accomplished without the utterance of a single word:

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it -- "I refute it thus."
Boswell: Life

What Johnson had so desperately tried to say without actually saying is precisely what Heidegger is here calling "the ontical obviousness of the Being-in-itself of beings." It is beyond the scope of our present discussion to discuss the necessary shortcomings of Johnson's refutation or to consider how, because this refutation could only pretend to be an ontological response while at the same time not quite remaining in the realm of ontic experience whose evidence it sought to uphold, Berkley, and not Johnson, inevitably 'won the day'. Suffice it to say that Heidegger's point is formally indicative: Heidegger is beset with the task of bringing to light just what it was that Johnson only kicked, and for that very reason he must first of all acknowledge (i.e. formally indicate) that something is there to be kicked. The formale anzeige or formal indication serves the purposes of drawing explicit attention to and countering the necessary fact that this 'something' which has been kicked is straightaway articulated and thought of as a some thing, a vorhanden, individual object (or collection of objects). It is in this way that Heidegger's formale anzeige is, as an indication, merely formal, a mere place-marker for what has yet to be 'placed', i.e. what has yet to be fully articulated and appropriately interpretted; in short, it indicates 'something' but not as such, and is therefore an ontological means of referring to the ontic --and inarticulate realm --necessarily preliminary to all ontological articulation (of that ontic realm). In its most condensed (and, no doubt, ridiculous) description: the formal indication refers to something as not as such.

There is no need to focus any further at this juncture on Heidegger's employment of formal indication (although, as we shall see later, this is important for the overall consideration of Dasein's body). What is crucial here is rather that Heidegger is by no means content to acknowledge the "ontical obviousness of the Being-in-itself of beings within-the-world", nor even that this "ontical obviousness" is mistaken for vorhandensein when it is first articulated. More important than this is the peculiarity that the former truth tends to mislead us into the latter error, in the perilous passage from the ontic to the ontological. For Heidegger (and not merely in Sein und Zeit) the danger is always the same: it is hidden in what is obvious, and it is precisely this hiding (cf. the previous post's remarks on die gefahr). In the case we are now discussing, the danger regards misunderstanding the beings around us. This danger of misunderstanding lies hidden in "ontical obviousness", since in the ontic realm we (already, in advance) discover beings without having to utter a word (at least, that is, a word regarding them as such); we effortlessly consort with everything around us as though we know it in advance, which in someway we do: it is obvious. On the other hand, however, in passing through the gates of articulation and escaping, as Homer likes to put it, "the barrier of our teeth," the danger now hides on the other side, in the ontological realm, and this is far more dangerous; for the truth of the obviousness of the ontical realm consists in the fact that beings are there already without further ado --we neither asked for them or have yet said 'thank you', as it were. Despite our having never been formally aquainted with beings within-in-the-world (or with ourselves for that matter, a point toward which we will return shortly), we already are familiar with them. To 'tone down' an oft-used, more vulgar expression: "we're already working with them before even the hand shake". But what about when it finally comes time to learn their name, to meet them as such and greet them? At this point we are completely unprepared and unsuspecting of the exertion that is now required, since it has up to this point been effortless: the fact that we are already in the midst of beings has been one of those things that "goes without saying". We are therefore led to presume by the effortless truth of the obviousness of our ontical dealings that the truth of our ontological articulation will be no differently won --but nothing could be farther from the truth, as the most famous 'line', chanted in slight variations throughout Sein und Zeit, reminds us: the closer something is ontically, the farther away it is ontologically, or in other words, to the extent that something is discovered in advance and is obvious, to that precise extent does it remain implicit, or as the later Heidegger will emphasize, withheld.

This is a consideration worth savoring, to wildly understate the issue. Heidegger himself pursued 'nothing else' throughout the course of his entire denkweg; so let us take a moment to at least "blink" over it, before "moving on". No one wakes up in the morning vexed by the fact that there are beings surrounding him on all all sides, and that along with this fact, he himself is (a being). Nor is it the case that the reason why we are not throttled into astonishment by this 'fact' is because we have gotten used to it, like riding a bike; rather is it the reverse: in order to 'get used' to something, it must already be there. The easy example of getting used to some thing, e.g. riding a bike, is nevertheless still instructive, since it makes one thing clear: obviousness is a function of time. Usually, something happens in time --we learn to ride a bike --and after a certain time, what one does with a bike is 'obvious'. Likewise, even though no one "wakes up in the morning vexed by the fact that there are beings surrounding him" there is still a fading afterglow of wonder for those for whom 'the world is still new', those ones whom we simply call children. But one's youth is always also a "growing up" and one's wonder always a relunctantly departing companion --it hesitates for a while, and we call that while childhood. But no one, not even as a child, was ever young enough to, for the for the first time, encounter any being whatsoever. When it comes to beings, we are right from the very beginning already in some measure or other familiar. This, our being in media res, is the "ontical obviousness" of which Heidegger speaks in the quote above. Before the first occurrence of something or another, indeed of anything whatsoever, we have already discovered and understand that there are things to begin with ---this much is obvious. Obviousness of any sort, however, is, as we have just said, a function of time. But the time which has already transpired before anything in time comes to pass is by no means obvious; everything obvious comes after this time. It is regarding this "time that has already transpired," a time which we in some way must have endured in order to find beings familiar (including ourselves), that Heidegger says "Dasein is always already ahead of itself". This already-transpired-time is no actual occurrence in time, it does not take place like something occurring in front of us, as it were; it is rather precisely what, having already transpired, is missed in any actual occurrence ---missed not only in the sense of "missing a target" but also in the sense of "missing your mother". A secret nostalgia, then ---but a nostalgia for no thing, a nostalgia only for that which allowed us to be already familiar with any being whatsoever, a nostalgia for what Sein und Zeit initially calls the "worldhood of the world." This condition for the possibility of ontical obviousness, this missed time in which the world has been passed over, is precisely what makes our consorting with beings effortless, and it is therefore also what misleads us, once the time finally comes to say just what these beings are which we have always been around and have even ourselves always been, into thinking we effortlessly accomplish our goal. With this in mind we now return to the quote above, this time in its fuller context

“Just as the ontical obviousness of the Being-in-itself of beings within-the-world misleads us into the conviction that the meaning of this Being is obvious ontologically, and makes us overlook the phenomenon of the world, the ontical obviousness of the fact that Dasein is in each case mine, also hides the possibility that the ontological problematic which belongs to it has been led astray.”(BT152, SZ116)

The mistake that occurs when we first begin to speak of beings as such, i.e when we engage in ontology, is that we suppose we are "synched up" with what we are now bringing to explicit understanding: we take for granted the manner in which we have already understood and thus even previously discovered beings within-the-world ---in short, we completely forget about this "previously" itself, this missed time. Accordingly, the articulation of nature as present-at-hand is inevitable initially; it is only after that first articulation is offered that the opportunity arises to detect the possibility that this ontological articulation has missed its mark and "been led astray".

It is with this, at last, that we are poised to revisit the problematic of Dasein's body raised by the maverick commentator cited in our last post (PART 1). In a sense, we have, at this point, already come to the answer: Heidegger can justifiably say that Dasein is never present-at-hand because, as was demonstrated in the PART 1, anything present-at-hand has already been discovered within-the world as ready-to-hand, and Dasein can never be discovered as something ready-to-hand within the world. This last claim is grounded by the fact that the ready-to-hand depends, in its very Being, on having already been assigned to Dasein in advance, since its inner-worldly Being is itself made possible or "freed" by Being-in-the-world (i.e. Dasein's way of Being). The argument is thus direct:

1.) Dasein cannot (ever) be ready-to-hand
2.) Readiness-to-hand is a necessary condition for presence-at-hand
3.)Dasein cannot (ever) be present-at-hand a fortiori.

This 'proof', however, can only be regarded as a negative demonstration of why Dasein is never present-at-hand. It does not yet achieve its results phenomenologically, since it does not show how the error of considering Dasein to be (at least in some respects) present-at-hand is possible. Admittedly, we have gone a certain stretch of the way in satisfying the rigors of phenomenology, insofar as we have given a formal sketch of the manner in which the ontical obviousness of beings within-the-world misleads us into possibly mis-articulating them ontologically. But with this we have still not yet achieved a positive result. The question before us is not only asking about beings within-the-world, but about that disclosure that makes their discovery possible: How is it even possible that Dasein can appear as something present-at-hand? The positive phenomenological demonstration must expose precisely this possibility, and it must expose it as a possiblity. In this way, phenomenological research's positive results amount not to the disclosure of some actual positum (as is the case with the positive results of any ontic science), but to the disclosure of a possibility that is itself the condition for the possibility of ontic scientific discovery, as Heidegger says at the end of Sein und Zeit: "Higher than actuality stands possibility."

Dasein ist nie vohanden. So we are told. But then we start thinking for ourselves: What about anthropology, biology, human-anatomical studies, and even psychology to name just a few instances. Isn't Dasein the object of these studies? In so far as these sciences make claims about the nature of humans ---and they certainly seem to make such claims --don't they owe the possibility of their claims to the fact that Dasein can be present-at-hand, or in other words, to the impossibility that Dasein is never present-at-hand? In a consideration such as this one, everything depends on our appreciation of the limits, that is to say the domain and reach (bereich), of such claims, and therefore at the same time on our ability to perceive what lies entirely beyond their reach:

[E]ven beings which are not worldless --Dasein itself, for example --are present-at-hand within the world, or, more exactly, can with some right and within certain limits be taken as merely present-at-hand. To do this, one must completely disregard or just not see the existential state of Being-in.(BT 82, SZ 55, italics Heidegger's)

With what "right" and within which "certain limits" can Dasein be taken as present-at-hand? Heidegger's answer is peculiar: only to the extent that one fails to see that Dasein is not present-at-hand, i.e. to the extent that they "disregard or just not see the existential state of Being-in. Despite the misgivings it provokes, this answer is no mere tautology. The point Heidegger is drawing the reader's attention to (even through his italics "can" and "taken") is crucial: the very possibility that one can take Dasein to be present at hand is granted by Dasein's existential state of Being-in: this possibility is Dasein's possibility of fore-saking itself, a possibility that cannot belong to anything present-at-hand. In other words, only if "Dasein is in each case mine", i.e. is that being which ontically is addressed as "I", must it always either be owned up to or fore-saken:

It may well be that ontically it is always correct to say of this being that 'I' am it. Yet the ontological analytic which makes use of such assertions must make certain reservations about them in principle. The word 'I' is to be understood only as a formal indicator, indicating something which may perhaps reveal itself as its 'opposite' in some particular phenomenal context of Being. In that case, the 'not-I' is by no means tantamount to a being which essentially lacks 'I-hood', but is rather a definite kind of Being which the 'I' itself possesses, such as having lost itself [Selbstvorlorenheit]. (BT 152, SZ 116)

The extent, then, to which Dasein can legitimately be taken as something present-at-hand is precisely the extent to which it cannot but initially fore-sake itself, that is to say, be ontologically misled by the fact that it is ontically obvious. Thus, because Dasein is already familiar with beings (by understanding their Being in advance), so too has it already understood itself as a being, thereby missing its unique way of Being --existenz --because of its unique way of Being, i.e. as a consequence of having understood beings in advance --including the being which it itself is. The assertion that "Dasein is never present-at-hand" can only be a false exaggeration, contradicting the admission that Dasein can be taken as present-at-hand, if this "never" is understood as a negation of the possibility of any present-at-hand instance. But this "never" refers instead to the very condition for the possibility of taking Dasein to be present-at-hand: Selbstvorlorenheit.

Heideggerian Hyperbole PART I: The Problem of Nature

2009-12-02T10:45:00.000-05:00

Somewhere in Sein und Zeit, in a gesture of such consummate “grand style” that it rouses in the reader a suspicion of hyperbole –and there is, of course, no dearth of such gestures in Sein und Zeit –Heidegger once again tries to say the whole all at once at the risk of sounding radically reductive:

“[T]he ultimate business of philosophy is to preserve the force of the
fundamental words in which Dasein expresses itself, and to keep the common
understanding from leveling them off to that unintelligibility which
functions
in turn as a source of pseudo-problems.”

If such a pointed, not to say confined, characterization of philosophy’s “ultimate business” and essential task can be conceded for the nonce, then a surprising conclusion necessarily follows from this concession, forcing the reader to confront a unique and unexpected danger. How so? The primal power of language –the manner in which it entrances and enthralls, but also the manner in which it indicates and discovers, bringing to its first luminous appearance what had all the while been in front of one’s eyes, yet overlooked –this primal power of language obeys a certain rhythm; it recedes and falls dormant precisely to the extent that something first uttered in the trepidation of discovery becomes, in a sequence that is inevitable, irresponsibly inherited, repeated without being rediscovered, and eventually taken for granted as a commonplace. It would be unnecessary for us to labor further over the details of this narrative of forgetfulness, the analysis of which is not uncommonly lauded as one of the indisputable virtues of Sein und Zeit, and which is not infrequently rehearsed with varying degrees of accuracy. And yet, that which it is necessary –even urgent –for us to confront, the “unexpected danger” of which we have just above made mention, resides so close to the recitation of this well-known narrative that it hides in its shadow: if, in the throes of philosophic discovery, Heidegger claims philosophy must assume a unique responsibility for the original meaning of words, and if indeed, he claims that philosophy is essentially beset with this task of stirring and restoring such meaning, what happens, in the course of its public reception, to the meaning of Heidegger’s own claim? In ‘diagnosing’ the danger of the atrophy of language, and in extolling the primal power of its original meaning as the proper object over which philosophy must labor to restore, Heidegger presents a possibility far more perilous; with the pronouncement of Heidegger’s claim, the danger arises that not only this original meaning of language remain taken for granted and forgotten, but that, the meaning of the appointed task to recover it sink into an oblivion, thereby making both become altogether irrecoverable. This danger is the danger par excellence, since it is simultaneously the danger that the possibility of being freed from this danger be forgotten. This danger is, of course, die gefahr, the danger that will be more decisively and perilously engaged much later as the turning point on which the age and essence of technology hinges. It is not, however, upon that essential turning point that I wish now to concentrate. Here let it be sufficient to reflect on the fact that this danger which regards the appointed task of thinking is also alluded to in the later Heidegger’s fore-warning issued in Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens: “We are still too inexperienced in the difference between an object of scholarship and a matter thought.” Much could certainly be offered in elucidation of this quote, but for present purposes, let it simply serve as a reminder that the aforementioned task of philosophy to restore what is original nevermore easily threatens to become a platitude and a commonplace than at that time when it is received by scholarship, whether it be sophisticated and prestigious or the mere banter of a “blog”. It is with this forewarning firmly in mind – a forewarning which began in what might be called an instance of “Heideggerian hyperbole” –that it seems appropriate to consider a recent maverick complaint leveled against just such hyperbole:

[C]onsider Martin Heidegger. Somewhere in Sein und Zeit he writes that Das Dasein ist nie vorhanden. The human being is never present-at-hand. This is obviously false in that the human being has a body which is present-at-hand in nature as surely as any animal or stone. What he is driving at is the truth -- or at least the plausibility -- that the human being enjoys a special mode of Being, Existenz, that is radically unlike the Vorhandenheit of the mere thing in nature and the Zuhandenheit of the tool. So why doesn’t he speak the truth, and nothing but the truth, without exaggerating?

What I think is most worthy of response in the above objection is the presupposition upon which it stands, a presupposition which has, shall we say, “in advance,” ossified into an obviousness almost entirely recalcitrant to the blows of further questioning. (It should be noted that this presupposition is not unique to the objection quoted above; it persists more or less surreptitiously in more than one camp of current (and especially past) Sein und Zeit scholarship). Indeed it is on the basis of the unquestioned obviousness of this presupposition that the above objection can unflinchingly identify Heidegger’s own maxim regarding Dasein as “obviously false.” In fact the commentator even supplies a rough and ready formulation of the proximate reason for such an objection: “the human being has a body which is present-at-hand in nature as surely as any animal or stone.” This must be considered a proximate reason because it rests on the deeper presupposition –again, shared by some scholarship –that nature is itself a domain of vorhandenheit, and that it is accordingly comprised of things that are present-at -hand. It is on the strength of this presupposition that the commentator feels his point sufficiently made by the mere gesture toward the example of other natural objects, “any animal or stone”, for these are indubitably –“surely” –present-at-hand in nature. Amazingly, when one reduces the argument to this presupposition, the possibility emerges that the cumbersome ‘terminology’ of “vorhandenheit” or, even more awkward, “presence-at-hand”, may be thrown out altogether, and a more vernacular paraphrase of the argument can be made: Nature is comprised of objects, the human body is natural, therefore the human being cannot be said to be in no wise an object –unless such a claim be understood to be a false exaggeration. With this paraphrase in place, the remainder of the objection follows as a sort of safe-guard set in place to preclude the possible rejoinder that it has succumbed to its own critique of exaggeration: after all, Heidegger was on to something, its just that he got too worked up when he tried to talk about it and he ended up exaggerating. What he really meant, however, was that the human being is different from tools as well as other things in nature, and this difference, this added feature, Heidegger calls “Existenz”. It takes no great measure of familiarity with the history of philosophy to recognize that this apparent claim of Sein und Zeit, the supposed revolutionary seminal work of twentieth century philosophy, is nothing more than an oversimplified version of a refrain repeated ad nauseum in various ‘re-touchings’ and guises since philosophy first began: man is composed of body and soul, or, more broadly, nature and spirit.

Is this what Heidegger is saying? Surely others have pointed out this fact with greater clarity and profundity ---not to mention less awkward neologism. If we were ‘prepared’ to unquestioningly accept an appeal to the alleged obviousness of the vorhandenheit of nature, then something like this sort of reductive obfuscation of Sein und Zeit is inevitable. But we are not so ‘prepared’ –we, who perhaps once were ‘sure’ of such things, “have now become perplexed,” to quote the Platonic epigram of Sein und Zeit itself. Let us more closely examine the implications of this presupposed character of nature as vorhandenheit. According to this presupposition, nature means as much as anything that has not been tampered with or constructed by man, i.e. the natural as opposed to the artificial. Nature thus has an independence from any sort of involvement with man; the tree that falls in the woods ‘is there’ whether heard or unheard: it is not contingent upon an encounter with the human subject, it is ‘objective’. What could be more natural than that we speak of beings in nature in terms of natural objects, that is, present-at-hand things? Conversely, artificial things are contingent upon human involvement; the hammer is only a combination of natural present-at-hand things, namely, metal and wood, until it is brought under the aims of the person using it, aims which Heidegger calls “a referential totality of assignments constitutive of readiness-to-hand” or, ultimately, in fewer words, the “world”. Thus, it is as if, in a dark forest of objects called nature, there is a luminous sphere of light, which Heidegger calls “Dasein”, which projects ‘meaning’ on the things that immediately surround it. While this remains a crude formulation, nevertheless the underlying prejudice we are seeking to clarify by its means remains to this day one of the most pernicious obstacles to readers of Sein und Zeit’s first division, and, consequently, of the entirety of Heidegger’s works that follow. Thankfully, somewhere else in Sein und Zeit, Heidegger expressly repudiates such a claim:

Readiness-to-hand is not to be understood as merely a way of taking [these
beings that are nearest to us], as if we were talking such ‘aspects’ into the
‘beings’ which we proximally encounter, or as if some world-stuff which is
proximally present-at-hand in itself were ‘given subjective coloring’ (BT 101,
SZ 71).

Here, as in many other places in the first division of Sein und Zeit, Heidegger is emphatic that no being, nevermind Dasein, is ever present-at-hand or ‘objectively standing there’ before Dasein encounters it. There can never be a group of things present-at-hand that have not yet been discovered within-the-world by Dasein. This is a point which even Heidegger takes the time to note he has been repeatedly emphatic in regarding:

Within our present investigation the following structures and dimensions of
ontological problematic, as we have repeatedly emphasized, must in principle be kept distinct:
1.) the Being of those beings within-in-the-world which we proximately encounter –this is what we have called readiness-to-hand
2.) the Being of those beings which we can come across and whose nature we can determine if we discover them in their own right by going through the beings proximally encountered (i.e. the ready-to-hand) –this is what we have called presence-at-hand (vorhandenheit)
3.) the Being of that ontical condition which makes it possible for beings-within-the-world to be discovered at all –this is what we have called the worldhood of the world (BT 121, SZ 88, emphases mine).

This enumeration emphasizes once again that any being that is discovered as an ‘individual object’ or thing simply standing there must already have been discovered within-the-world as ready-to-hand; only by ‘going through’ these already discovered beings that are closest to us can we come to find ‘things’ just standing there which seem to be simply individual objects, since the world has become and remains concealed and unnoticed in order for them to appear in this way. The world is no “net” or “coloring” cast over a group of present-at-hand, natural objects; rather it is the reverse, beings can only appear as present-at-hand when the place where they have already been discovered has sufficiently been disengaged and overlooked. This means that the distinction between readiness-to-hand and presence-at-hand can in no wise be equated with the distinction between artificial and natural objects; the former distinction is ontological, the latter ontic. The hammer is that which only comes to me as it is not when it is blankly stared at but on the half-shingled roof of my uncle’s house throughout the course of a blazing-hot August workday. Only after this manner of having discovered the hammer has taken place can the hammer ever be a conglomerate of two things that are for some reason stuck together, namely steel and wood, as two natural ‘objects’ lying in front of me. By the same token, the rock is only found at all if it is first found next to the picnic table in the backyard, or 'in the way' of my lawn-mowing, or as what I must have just tripped over in my hurry to chase the dog that is unleashed and getting away. It is rare and only after all this that the rock is a thing to be inspected. Looking again at the evidence: the path in the forest is the one along which my grandfather used to walk, or it is the one that I had never noticed before when I went to get firewood. It is never in the first place an object ---even when the cartographer surveys its shape he already stands within a possible escape from the interruption of sudden danger in the woods. In fact, even the photograph of the birch tree in the middle-school text book is already part of, e.g., passing an environmental science course --or passing the time after 'lunch period' in the midst of day dreams.
Of course, I could go on, but, for love of the reader, I won’t. The point to be gleaned is not only that nature is never at first present-at-hand, but also that, even when it becomes present-at-hand, that natural 'thing' is never exclusively present at hand; there persists a concealed relation to it as ready-to-hand already discovered in the world. It is only when this relation is disregarded even as it persists that the misconception of nature befalls us that beings encountered in nature, as maverick would have it, “rocks and animals," are “surely present-at-hand,” as Heidegger famously says:

If its kind of Being as ready-to-hand be disregarded, this ‘Nature’ itself can be discovered and defined simply in its pure presence-at-hand. But when this happens, the Nature which ‘stirs and strives’, which assails us and enthralls us as landscape, remains hidden. The botanists plants are not the flowers of the hedgerow; the ‘source’ which the geographer establishes for a river is not the ‘springhead in the dale’. (BT 100, SZ 71).

Topological Thomism PART ONE: The Error of Place

2009-01-24T12:42:00.000-05:00

With a brevity and precision that I have grown accustomed to expect from this commentator, the terrain of the so-called 'problem of universals' has recently been mapped out ---this time however, for the purpose of an introduction to a precautionary note regarding what might be called the 'non-phantasmic' character of intellection:

"The problem of universals is usually explained as a problem of where a universal is. We are told there are three options: the universal is in the thing, or not; and if not, it is either only in the mind, or it is outside of it."

Reiterations of this sort have the advantage not only of succinctly circumscribing a presupposition that has long since donned the mantle of self-evidence. Much more than this, such reiterations circumscribe it for the first time as something self-evident, as something which has in advance been granted, as something presupposed. For those engrossed in philosophy as a problemgeschichte, this presupposed terrain of the 'problem of universals' is as unworthy of our attention as the ground beneath our feet. To offer such a 'problem-historian' a map of this terrain would be for the first time to awaken in him an explicit appreciation of bedrock assumptions on which he stands, thereby simultaneously offering him the opportunity to consider how it is that things are not otherwise. But this turning, which does not so much turn one away from as it does turn one toward the place in which they seem to be quite at home is of an even more unique sort when it turns one's thoughts toward the possibility that the very concept of place itself may be wholly unsuited for the kind of thinking which is called "universal". As the commentator goes on to say:

"The debate is caused by a trick of the imagination. When talking about the universal, we clandestinely create a ghost that we imagine in three vague places. We imagine a vague man, a vague object and a space in between, and then imagine this ghost as either being in the man, in the thing, or somewhere outside of both. We can dress up this ghost story with all the philosophical jargon we want, but it will only take us farther and farther away from experience. We are imagining the intelligible as some third, ghostly thing that must link the knower and the known. Where does this thing come from? It is nowhere in experience. It exists only in the imaginary world we construct for ourselves to discuss the problem of universals."

The problem, then, lies latent in the supposedly self-evident question as to where a universal is to be properly situated, since to consider a universal with respect to place is to consider a universal precisely not qua universal, but rather qua individual; and while it is true that universals can be considered as individuals in so far as they differ from other universals, it is nevertheless true that the individuation required of something to which place properly belongs is an individuation whose principle is (ultimately prime, not secondary) matter. (The reason for this is itself based upon Aristotle's definition of τόπος as given in his Physics which we will not consider at the moment.) Now, if a universal is known precisely by way of abstraction from matter, then to consider it with respect to something by definition contingent upon matter, namely, "place", is to fail to consider it as such at all. It is for this reason that, as the above commentator emphasizes, we are led to consider the universal as something like a ghost, for a "ghost" in this sense fails to attain to that of which it is a ghost. The ghost of a man gives us something which we can designate as that very man, and yet it is precisely not him. In the ghost of a man, the man himself has eluded us. The ghost is not no one, but neither is it someone; it is only a trace of someone. Furthermore, when we ask the question of universals in terms of their "whereabouts" the "ghost" is a strange compensation for the unsuitability of the terms of our question: the ghost does not inhabit any place, but only haunts it, hovering over the place, as it were. It is there, but only as the suggestion that it is not there.
But what is responsible for this misunderstanding which, instead of understanding the universal as a grasp of what makes something real, quidditas, imagines it to be a mere "fleeting vapor of reality", a mere phantom? The commentator tells us: "The debate is caused by a trick of the imagination"; the phantom is a phantasm, a production of the faculy of imagination. But why do we merely imagine when we are attempting to engage in intellection? Why do we fall into the habit of asking the question "where" ? Presumably, the answer relies on the old Aristotelian adage turned scholastic maxim that "those things which are most knowable to us are least knowable in themselves, and those things which are least knowable to us are most knowable in themselves." In other words, we first know material individuals, and for us they are most knowable, but only because there is not much to know in them, since qua material individual they are not intelligible at all.
Even before Aristotle, didn't Plato, the first to witness 'the universal' as such ---at least the first to do so and "live to tell the tale", didn't he already have something like this in mind when he had inscribed over the very entrance to his acedemy the imperative: ᾿Αγεωμέτρητος μειδεὶς εἰσίτω!, i.e., that no one un-geometrical be admitted, or in other words, that one must know geometry before passing through these gates. Plato wasn't here talking about the mere capacity to practice geometry correctly, he was talking about the knowledge of geometrical things, of the "geometricals". I can draw a dot and call it a point, but I don't speak with geometrical knowledge regarding this point unless I also know that the dot is precisely not the point. The point, unlike the dot, has no shape, has no borders, and has no place, even though it is known as the end of a line. To offer an image of the point is to miss the point. But the genuine geometer knows precisely what he is missing. The dot, like the ghost, is a place marker for something which has no place. For our purposes here we need not consider the problematic fact that the point is in some way both individual (for not only can there be many points but there is also the universal "point" which is recognized in each of them) as well as possessed of a place (for this is precisely what differentiates one point from another). Indeed, geometry stood only as a prerequisite to a proper vision of the εἶδος, and ipso facto its peculiar vestigial dependence on place and individuation are to be expected --otherwise how could it be a threshold, that is, a place only in passing, for that which is properly without a place?
Granted then, that if the 'universal' is to be properly understood, then it cannot be imagined, why is it that the imagination's trick, its "clandestine creation of a ghost", happens to aim at placing the universal? Why are we not rather inclined to imagine the quality (e.g. the color), or the quantity (e.g. the size) of this 'ghost'? Again, we do not ask "When is the universal?" but only "Where is the universal"? What priviledges our prejudice of place? Is there something essential in this mistake? At the risk of falling into the same error, we must ask: whence does such a question as "Where?" spring?