Monday, November 10, 2008
Michel Henry's Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body is difficult to find, and of course it's a whole book and many people have little time for whole books. Fortunately, then, Michael Tweed has been working on a translation of Henry's The Living Body which is a nice, provocative little bit of philosophy. I think.
Some jots.
If life belongs not the order of what appears but to appearing itself, as Henry maintains, does it quite follow that Heidegger is wrong about Dasein providing our access to life for the reason Henry provides, namely that Dasein is primarily being-in-the-world, which he takes to mean something like "being-in-the-horizon-of-what-appears" in contradistinction to something like "being-in-a-horizon-of-appearing"? Does life itself, or, perhaps better said, life in its very appearing, have horizons? Henry asserts that life is fundamentally acosmic, but I throw it out there as a question. As you mull over that question you may see why I am not as quick as Henry to see that biology has radically, completely and irrevocably bracketed out the study of life. (Can this be the most generous reading of François Jacob's comment that what is studied in the modern biological laboratory isn't life itself?) Rather I see questions, uncertainties, opacities or even confusions, but not a science of life settled on any particular definition or non-definition of life. Of course I haven't settled on any idea of what it means to be worldly, to have a world, or to have horizons, so my question of life's horizons may be a hinky question from any angle.
If we are to make a distinction between what appears and appearing itself, does relation belong originarily to appearing? (Equiprimordially?) Must we be free to relate? (I've been struggling to give "existence" an existential meaning.) Only a being who could freely relate, who could free itself to relate, could interpret the relations of another being as relations. To reiterate Jonas' dictum, only life can understand life. But wait, Henry tells us. "[T]he ego is free, only on the inherent ground of a me that necessarily precedes it, i.e. on the ground of this Self generated in the self-engendering of life, in other words given to itself in the self-givenness of life." Life is passive before it is free.
Only life can understand life. Am I reduced now to repeating platitudes? Modern biology doesn't imagine itself as an anthropomorphic science, but that doesn't mean that in actual practice it doesn't know things by way of an anthropomorphism that would contradict its self-image, were it brought to light and interrogated, or indeed, its paradigms, which we will not confuse with foundations. What does anthropos contribute to understanding? What is our existence that is not a bacterium's? Is it a privative interpretation, or indeed by way of a corruption of human existence that we come to understand life through human existence? Why don't we say that we think biomorphically, or psychomorphically? Well, sometimes we say "zoomorphic" and mean "in the shape of a particular animal." Do we also mean something like "animistically," thinking in the shape of animals. Monstruation. Kaleideation. Why not also with the shape of our whole soul? What is the shape of bios? A narrative? Does that cover all the bases? What is the shape of life in its very appearing? Well, Henry argues for a fundamental passivity of life. This would rule out projections, shapes and, I think, freedom, as means of grasping life. Life simply isn't grasped in Henry's view, or, as he says, it isn't visible.
Is this still phenomenology? Life, Henry says, "phenomenalizes itself in its phenomenality and according to this phenomenality." What can be said about a mode of understanding that isn't also a grasping? In speaking of a mode of understanding are we going around Henry illicitly? Yet could it be that he means to block understanding?
Some things about my life are just perplexing. "To be born does not mean coming into the world, to be born means coming into life," Henry says. I never know what to make of my natality. In truth I feel that I was brought into this existence, this worldly existence, borne into it, that I didn't just appear ex nihilo. On the other hand I have no memory of my conception. My earliest memories do just appear ex nihilo, it seems. In them I am walking, all by myself. Should we never depend on other people for our memories?
Henry reverses himself: "we do not come into life, it is life that comes into us." By "us" does he mean Dasein?
Is there a philosophy beyond questions? What would be the relationship between worldlessness–a non-chaosmos at that–and being beyond questions, and what, if anything, would looking into that relationship tell us about worlds or about questions? What is the way of existing of the question?
Labels: Heidegger, Henry, Jacob, Jonas, life, Tweed, world
Thursday, November 06, 2008
Incidentally I'm undertaking an unguided reading of Being and Time, a text I've ransacked on occasion. Not that I've sworn off ransacking. I haven't. But having entered into the text with a question in my mind (the question of the question) it became unmistakably clear that a challenge had been issued to keep the question open, and, more broadly, to keep questioning open, which also means to keep interpretation open, to inhabit the text in the light of day unclouded even by questioning, to be as it were unguided by questioning. My allegiance to questioning is apparently uncertain. Could a questioning not be a part of a zeitgeist? Could it not slip away?
Levinas, I surmise, was no stranger to questioning. Was. Is there anything of his secrecy left to discover–as if that weren't the problem right there, in the very attitude of openness, the willingness to sacrifice anything to openness, everything for the sake of openness. That's not, however, how I live, not how anybody lives. Somebody pitches a tent on the nudist beach and nobody bats an eye. No point in going to extremes. Archeologies, autopsies, necromancies, cameras, every kind of cold, hard postmortem examination. A morbid image: a spiral-cut Fido. I marvel at the efficiency of my disposal. I should apologize for daring to read a text, a supermarket flier. Someday I won't be able to plan for next week's meals. I have plans for that day as well, perhaps secretly knowing that the truth is not nearly so mundane. I am out of countenance at the thought of death.
If I feel any ethical obligation towards the dead thinker it is only out of respect for our plurality, dear reader. Let's harken the dead thinker:
Memory recaptures and reverses and suspends what is already accomplished in birth–in nature. Fecundity escapes the punctual instant of death. By memory I ground myself after the event, retroactively: I assume today what in the absolute past of the origin had no subject to receive it and had therefore the weight of a fatality. By memory I assume and put back in question. Memory realizes the impossibility: memory, after the event, assumes the passivity of the past and masters it. Memory as an inversion of historical time is the essence of interiority.
(Totality and Infinity, p. 56)
I ask your forgiveness for any possible trivialization of our mortality. I haven't called Emmanuel to our seance in order to force a confession, or a cold realization, but simply to learn–dreading, perhaps, that such an ambition may be enough to break a thing so fragile as the life of the mind. "The psychic life, which makes birth and death possible is a dimension in being, a dimension of non-essence, beyond the possible and the impossible" (p. 57). Do I misremember fragility? Memory unfolding in a dimension of non-essence. Failing to grasp the non-essential questions. Not being in step with the leader of the psychic life. Out of countenance. Out of out-of-the-questions. It's not surprising then to see Jean disappearing behind a door. The book that would close the book on memory has yet to be experienced. The book asks for memory as if to resist the deadness that accompanies the fetishization of the letter, revivifying a belletristic enchantment that somehow wouldn't lapse into phoniness, not this time. I encounter our plurality as a call not to lapse into phoniness, as if panecastics required that I lay my memories on the table, open them up to the opening of questions, and, at once, an invitation to step into a non-essential dimension of interiority, perhaps we might call it ours, not measured beforehand but measured in the very stepping into it, with no assurance that memories will remain intact, that questions will remain open. I thank you for your time.
Labels: Améry, Heidegger, Levinas, memory, mortality, questions, reading
Thursday, October 23, 2008
"Genuine questioning always involves a laying open and holding open of possibilities that suspend the presumed finality of both the text's and the reader's current opinions" (David E. Linge, "Editors Introduction," Hans Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, Berekely: University of California Press 1976, p. xxi, cited by Andrew Cashin, A Hermeneutic Phenomenological Study of the Lived Experience of Parenting a Child with Autism, p. 1.) And, "We speak, therefore of having gotten into a discussion, or of being caught in a discussion, and these expressions serve to indicate the element of buoyancy in understanding that leads the conversational partners beyond the original horizons into a process of inquiry that has a life of its own and is often filled with developments that are unanticipated and unintended" (Linge, xxii, in Cashin, p. 13). I'll check this book out tomorrow.
From David Krell's "General Introduction: 'The Question of Being,'" Martin Heiddegger, Basic Writings (Harper & Row, 1977, p. 31):
Yet this linear image of a way into the neighborhood of Being–as though that were somewhere over the rainbow–is annoying. Isn't such dogged persistence a mark of stubbornness or eccentricity; doesn't it ultimately betray a plodding imagination? And isn't the question of Being from first to last an academic one, bloodless and without force, like one of the shades Odysseus awaits in the underworld? Another student bends the linear image by emphasizing the essential restlessness of Heidegger's passage and the many turns of the path. "Although it always circles about the same thing," he notes,
Heidegger's thinking does not come to rest. Each time believe we have finally arrived at the goal and prepare to latch onto it we are thrown into a new interrogation. Every resting point is shaken. What seemed to be the end and goal becomes a departure for renewed questioning. If Descartes sought an unshakable foundation for philosophizing, Heidegger tries to put precisely this foundation in question.
Labels: Biemel, Cashin, Gadamer, Heidegger, Krell, Linge, questions
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Heidegger analyzes the question of nothingness and argues that it's logically impossible to question the nothing without making something of it (What is Metaphysics?). How do we question the nothing without calling it into being? The question of the nothing, he says, robs itself of its own object. He continues:
Wenn wir uns aber durch die formale Unmöglichkeit der Frage nach dem Nichts nicht beirren lassen and ihr entgegen die Frage dennoch stellen, dann müssen wir zum mindesten dem genügen, was als Grunderfordernis für die mögliche Durchführung jeder Frage bestehen bleibt. Wenn das Nichts, wie immer, befragt werden soll–es selbst–dann muß es zuvor gegeben sein. Wir müssen ihm begegnen können.
However, if we do not allow ourselves to be distracted by the formal impossibility of the question of the nothing and nevertheless confront the question, then we must satisfy what is a basic requirement for the possible carrying through of any question. If the nothing itself would be questioned then it must be given beforehand. We must be able to encounter it.
Possibly there is no nothing itself but only a nothing als etwas. In calling the nothing into question we would indeed be questioning the formal concept of an imaginary nothing, perhaps because that's all that's meant by thinking "nothing." So what then do we make of the requirement that we be able to meet what we question before we begin to question? Or that the questioned must be given? Is givenness never to be called into question? Is a question never to be creative?
Is a question essentially a consciousness? Let's say that it is a conscious act. We might call such an act a thought just for the sake of following Heidegger's argument. He says that thinking, which is essentially always thinking of something, while it is thinking of the nothing must act contrary to its own essence. Wouldn't it be more likely for thought to operate contrary to the essence of the nothing before operating contrary to itself? (Our ideas about the nature of thought may not be compatible.) Yet the thinking of nothing is not so simple. We need something like a temporal horizon to interpret the way thought brings itself into the thinking of the nothing; the nothing appears as the residue of what thought accomplished just now, reflects upon it, sums it up–no, that's not quite it. It responds. In negation it's as if everything that had come before possibly to affirm the present moment had been posed in the form of a question and then answered in the negative. Here it's not a matter of negation revealing the primacy of a question, but one of negation simply unfolding in the horizon of a questioning, or indeed, a culture of questioning.
Does questioning, when directed at the nothing or at anything, ever operate contrary to its essence? Would only being able to address the already given be more in keeping with the essence of an answer than a question? How would we know when a question had violated itself? Obviously we may see questioning operate contrary to the way we feel questioning should operate. It can operate contrary to its ideal. But how much do we really know about the operation of the question? Or should I say the "carrying through" of the question? What do we already know about how a question is carried through? How do we begin to study it? I'll keep you posted.
Labels: Heidegger, intentionality, nothingness, questions
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Corradi Fiumara insists that we should want to be able to find time for listening. We should not merely listen to others, but to our own inner voice. Exploring this idea, Corradi Fiumara says some interesting things about time. To begin with, she puts forward an idea of biological time in order to criticize a concept of time defined by a rationality that does not know how to listen.
With the technology of informatics and the achievement of 'real time', which constitutes precisely the annulment of the time spent in waiting, we move ever further away biological time, undeniably contained within the limits of birth and death and scanned by such rhythms as sleeping and waking, diastole and systole. Structured by a sequence of rhythms that are in evidence as early as in pre-natal life, biological time is conspicuously different from the concept of time created by western rationality: a time, that is, which has lost all rhythmical flow and only speeds up in a planar, uniform and unhalting way. It is a notion of time that can be integrated more easily with a technology of treatment than with the prevention of pathological states; two different views of time, linked to horizons that seem to diverge ever more and that render one another both alien and alienated.
(The Other Side of Language, p. 134)
Corradi Fiumara considers Heidegger's idea that time, as the basis of the possibility of selfhood, enables the mind to be what it is (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 196-197). She comments as follows:
An number of queries thus emerge: first and foremost whether selfhood represents an indisputable fact or a simple possibility of realization. And if it is really the function of time to make the mind what it is how can we know whether time fulfils its role and whether the mind exists as such; we must ask, therefore, if time is 'alive', if it works. Time, which can not be seen, touched or controlled by following it as we choose, is nevertheless capable of paralysing humans with boredom or disintegrating them with haste. If we actually believe that time 'enables the mind to be what it is', it is only fair to ask ourselves how we can have experience of it. And it, in our haste, our boredom, or other forms of deterioration, time fails us, the mind might cease to be what it is. And what might a mind be when it is no longer what it is?
(pp. 140-141)
It occurs to me as I write that I have an inner voice that holds me back and never urges me forward. It is the voice of an editor. Obviously I can tune it out. It can become boring, and if it sounds boring maybe that's because it's bored. Dreadfully bored. Other times it's much too hasty, to quick to edit. Well, I can't be sure. Is it me or my inner voice that's too hasty? Probably both. There's a reciprocity even in our deterioration, our getting down, which may or may not be getting down for real. Do I long to have an inner voice that wouldn't be mine? Would such an other voice be a disintegration, or a deeper integration? If I say I am mindless, it is only in the sense of not having a mind. My mindspace is shared with another voice. I mind it, and I don't mind it. I mind it, though I feel minding it doesn't completely block our getting down. But Corradi Fiumara has a point. If I'm going to get down with my inner voice, the last thing I want to be is arhythmical.
Labels: Corradi Fiumara, Heidegger, listening, psyche, Socrates, temporality
Thursday, October 04, 2007
A theme of surprise has surfaced in my recent readings. Nancy talks of the surprise of freedom, Tengelyi of the surprise of new sense, and now Corradi Fiumara speaks of the emergence of something with an "almost unhoped-for spontaneity" when we properly listen to the philosophical tradition (The Other Side of Language, p. 76). I think that something is meaning. All three authors discuss meaning in some way, but whereas Nancy and Tengelyi thematize experience as the opening onto meaning, Corradi Fiumara's discussion of experience (pp. 120-123) connects the surprise of the experienced event to an attitude of not listening, rather than aligning listening directly with the unexpected. In Corradi Fiumara's existential hermeneutics the "almost" is key.
Something "speaks," in Corradi Fiumara's opinion, if it is listened for, rather than their being something said that one would subsequently listen to (p. 72). Does her thinking take us beyond the hermeneutic circle? It's not an easy question. She speaks of a "connubial listening propensity" (p. 75) and a "propensity for conjunctions, possibly similar to Heidegger's concept of 'dwelling by something'" (p. 78). I feel that "dwelling by something" is not the best guide for the problem of coexistence Corradi Fiumara's work poses. The idea of the connubial, if wed to an idea of the experience of listening as that which surprises, might offer an alternative to a paradigm of meaning according to which an interpreter constructs meaning out of an engagement that requires a prior understanding of the whole of the engaged. That is, while Corradi Fiumara takes notice of coexistence, and will thematize dialogue, I'm not sure she fully appreciates plurality as it relates to meanings. Perhaps she almost does. Perhaps she will surprise me.
Labels: Corradi Fiumara, experience, Heidegger, listening, meaning, Nancy, surprise, Tengelyi
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
I don't want to be an administrator of concepts, so it is always with some sense of relief that I find an attempt to administer a concept has failed. Neither do I want to sink into trepidation. How then should I share with you Corradi Fiumara's concept of listening?
There are two voices to Corradi Fiumara's thinking about listening: resistence to a logocentric cultural system, and "generative listening," a capability of response and questioning that is not dictated by the said, and does not conform to the style of a deaf logos (The Other Side of Language, p. 22). The two voices are a madrigal. An attitude of genuine listening does not discount attitudes stemming from divergent Weltanschuungen; it occupies no space but "in a paradoxical sense creates ever new spaces in the very 'place' in which it is carried out" (p. 19). Modern rationalism, Corradi Fiumara argues, is "sustained by an unknowing frenzy in the sense that it is not limited to the pursuit of new ways of its thinking but also tends to deny that earlier, minor or unsuccessful traditions ever existed. And, in order to avoid the labor of listening–a labour comparable to the germination of any real dialogue–a single tradition is recognized in which everything alien is considered irrelevant: the product of intellectual blindness or of an unwillingness to evolve" (p. 26). I'd like to say that no Italian humanist is alien to me without putting Corradi Fiumara in such neat little boxes. I feel that her philosophy of listening is speaking to me even though I don't concern myself much with stridently rationalist discourses.
An aversion–almost–towards listening to the rich multiplicity of 'reality' seems to be linked with a background of profound fears and to the resulting defensive postures that express themselves in a tendency to reduce knowledge in general to a set of principles from which nothing can escape. A relentless battle is waged as an attempt is made to organize everything in the light, or shadow, or the 'best' principles of knowledge: a chronic struggle of territorial conquest where the 'territory' is the set of notions and principles for constructing reality. Listening thus comes to be an essential function in the attempt to indentify and monitor possible predatory aspects of our knowledge, no longer even capable of rememorizing or imagining the Parmenidean function of the 'shepherds of being'.
(p. 21)
It was of course Heidegger who said that the human being is the shephard of being (Letter on Humanism). On reflection, Corradi Fiumara is deeply indebted to Heidegger for her ecological thinking and perhaps her ideas of the spaces opened up by listening. This is not without irony when one considers the many voices that were silenced and the many voices that were sent into exile by Heidegger's National Socialism.
Labels: Corradi Fiumara, Heidegger, listening
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
Deleuze says:
Being is also non-being, but non-being is not the being of the negative; rather it is the being of the problematic, the being of problem and question. Difference is not the negative; on the contrary, non-being is Difference: heteron, not enantion. For this reason non-being should rather be written (non)-being or, better still, ?-being.
(Difference and Repetition, p. 64, emphasis Deleuze's)
Deleuze himself opts for "(non)-being" instead of "?-being" right through to his conclusions. This is precisely ironic ("Irony consists in treating things and beings as so many responses to hidden questions, so many cases for problems yet to be resolved," p. 63), pointedly so given that Deleuze faults Heidegger for encouraging misunderstandings by his treatment of nothingness (p. 66).
Deleuze's reading of Heidegger deserves special notice. He says, "Ontological Difference corresponds to questioning. It is the being of questions, which become problems, marking out the determinant fields of existence" (p.65). I hadn't quite thought of ontological difference that way, though it does have the ring of the familiar. This leads me to ask some questions of my own.
One set of questions concerns the nature of Deleuze's discourse on difference. I wonder whether, ironically, Deleuze isn't pursuing an idealism. This idealism would have to be understood as radically divergent from Plato's idealism, which Deleuze seeks to overturn. Deleuze says that "the difficulty facing everything is to become its own simulacrum, to attain the status of a sign in the coherence of the eternal return" (p. 67). For Deleuze, simulacra are not less real than the things themselves, so to speak; rather, they point to "the lived reality of a sub-representative domain" (p.69). Ideas are not grounding in Deleuze's thinking. However, the question of how we relate to the real involves a semiotics that covers much the same ground as an idealism by passing through a terrain of consciousness for whom things are real or, more fundamentally, for whom things are so many problems and questions. The ground that isn't covered is the domain of representation. The question for me is, if we allow for Deleuze's overturning of representation, are we still left with something like a world of ideas, or a world of ideation?
This brings me to another set of questions concerning the horizon of questioning, which may also be thought of as the horizon of difficulty. Who or what occupies this horizon? Deleuze thinks that the cogito is a stupidity. He says:
The subject of the Cartesian Cogito does not think: it only has the possibility of thinking, and remains stupid at the heart of that possibility. It lacks the form of the determinable: not a specificity, not a specific form informing a matter, not a memory informing a present, but the pure and empty form of time. It is the empty form of time which introduces and constitutes Difference in thought, on the basis of which it thinks, in the form of the difference between the indeterminate and determination. It is this form of thought which distributes throughout itself an I fractured by the abstract line, a passive self produced by a groundlessness that it contemplates. It is this which engenders thought within thought, for thought thinks only by means of difference, around this point of ungrounding.
(p. 276)
There is room in Deleuze's philosophy for a (fractured) subject who thinks, indeed a demand for it, while more primordially there is repetition and difference, a being-in-question and its conduct. Is it possible to ask in Deleuze's philosophy who this being-in-qeustion really is? Does (non)-being here stand for the guy behind the guy behind the guy? And is this the reason why Deleuze prefers to say "(non)-being" instead of "?-being"?.
Labels: Deleuze, egology, Heidegger, ontology
Sunday, January 07, 2007
How can nothingness be described phenomenologically? For Heidegger, nothingness is revealed by anxiety. For Marion, taking a cue from Heidegger, nothingness is revealed by profound boredom. We can inquire into these existential moods, but it is unclear (to me at least) whether we can see nothingness phenomenologically by way of such an existential detour. Dylan Trigg (The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia and the Absence of Reason), on the other hand, proposes that nothingness is revealed in the phenomonon of silence which we can directly experience in a way that lends itself to phenomenological description. In his words, "The presensce of silence, when sufficiently forceful to recall its origin, is, I will seek to prove, the interceding agent between pure experience and pure nothingness" (p. 12).
How is Trigg imagining silence? "For silence to be rendered visible," he writes (p. 13), "it must rely upon a dynamic stasis between violence and the deserted space that violence leaves." Is this a more spectacular way of talking about attack and decay? I reckon Trigg is describing a second order of dynamics, but I point to attack and decay because I wonder if Trigg's description isn't consistent with the way we experience auditory phenomena–albeit silence is something we usually think of hearing rather than seeing.
Trigg's emphasis on "the ontological value of aesthetics" (p. 19) reminds me of Lyotard (I have in mind the essays collected in The Inhuman, and also the essay "Anima Minima" in Postmodern Fables). The turn towards aesthetics appeals to me because and insofar as it feels concrete, rooted in experience. If that's my yardstick, I should be able to see the value in existential approaches. In fact I do. However, on the question of nothingness, the existential approaches of Heidegger and his followers risk being lost in lifeless abstractions. It's far better I think to explore nothingness concretely as far as possible.
Labels: aesthetics, experience, Heidegger, Lyotard, Marion, phenomenology, silence, Trigg
Friday, January 05, 2007
Reduction and Givenness never establishes why a second, existential reduction is needed or, much less, why such a reduction needs to be Heideggerian. Nonetheless, I followed Marion through to his third reduction, the reduction to the interloqué which is also Heideggerian in that it responds to the "call." The most surprising moment came from his (Heideggerian) analysis of boredom (pp. 186ff.). To mean what he wants it to mean, I think there would have to be (beyond a general acceptance of Heideggerian philosophy) an equivalence between the "other than being" of the transcendental ego and the metaphysical "nothing" of Heidegger's Was ist Metaphysik?. I didn't quite follow Marion on that point, though I found it interesting to think that boredom deprives the I of being, that it hates what is and makes the I abandon itself.
Labels: boredom, Heidegger, Marion, phenomenology
Wednesday, January 03, 2007
Marion sums up Heidegger's critique of the ego cogito:
There where the ego gives to be thought, or rather to make itself be thought (or even to make itself simple thought) without ever giving Being in a determinate and determining sense, Dasein gives Being by determining the way of Being of the other beings, because it itself, in advance and according to its privilege, determines itself to be according to its own way of Being. To be sure, the ego is, but it is without thinking about it, since it thinks only about thinking its thinkable things, whose respective ways of Being it does not establish any more than it is itself determinied in its own way of Being; in thinking itself as being only through and for the exercise of the cogitatio, it masks, through the epistemic evidence of its nevertheless ontologically loose existence, and then through the certitude of the other subsistent truths, the total absence of decision concerning the Being of beings, which are reduced to the level of pure and simple cogitata.
(Reduction and Givenness, p. 93)
Marion says "the total absence of decision concerning the Being of beings" like that's a bad thing. I'm yet to be convinced. The real crux of the issue is how or whether the ego cogito thinks about its own existence. It's obviously not unthinkable fullstop. How is it unthinkable then for the ego cogito? Or why would the thinking of its existence not be a cogitatum?
Labels: cogito, Descartes, Heidegger, Marion, phenomenology
Friday, December 29, 2006
Marion asks, "Would the displacement of phenomenology from beings to (the) Being (of beings) coincide with its displacement from the 'mere phenomena' to their phenomenality?" (Reduction and Givenness, p. 46). Marion puts off answering the question immediately, but already it seems he has tipped the scales by asking whether ontology is about being (Husserl) or the Being of being and its mode of encounter (Heidegger). I'm not totally following Marion on this point. Supposing ontology could be about the mode of encounter with being, does it then necessarily follow that one must speak of the Being of beings? Is the ontological difference at all warranted by phenomenology? I myself have already spoken against the ontological difference so the scales here are not perfectly balanced; nonetheless my prejudice could be poorly grounded, so I'd like to set it aside while I look into what kind of ontology if any is called for by the phenomenological reduction.
From the outset phenomelogy sets aside the problem of being. Instead of questioning whether phenomena really exist in some way other than phenomenally, phenomenology focuses on their manner of appearing. Surely there is a kind of existence claim being made for phenomena, but it is not clear that phenomena merit the name of being. If we were to call objects that appear to conciousness from within the epoché "beings," it would have to be understood in a special sense, as a specifically phenomenological ontology. The claim of phenomenological ontology in this sense would be weaker than the claim made by ontology proper because it is only to or for consciousness that phenomenology posits the existence of something.
Phenomenology also entails another kind of existence claim: the transcendental ego must necessarily exist. The transendental ego is not apparent in the same way that the objects of consciousness are apparent. Therefore, if one wishes to speak phenomenologically of the being of the transcendental ego and one has already spoken of the being of phenomena, another designation, "Being," seems to be warranted. Furthermore, the expression "Being of beings" captures the essence of the relationship between the two designations of being.
Against this line of reasoning I wonder whether it was necessary to identify phenomena with being in the first place. That leaves open the question of the mode of encounter with being. Can this be pursued phenomologically without introducing an ontological difference? I'm not sure. What do we make of the existence of the transcendental ego, and how we do begin to describe the encounter with being?
Labels: existence, Heidegger, Husserl, Marion, ontology, phenomenology
Sunday, December 10, 2006
Nancy says:
Language is essentially in the with. Every spoken word is the simultaneity of at least two different modes of the spoken word; even when I am by myself, there is the one that is said and the one that is heard, that is, the one that is resaid. As soon as a word is spoken, it is resaid. As such, meaning does not consist in the transmission from a speaker to a receiver, but in the simultaneity of (at least) two origins of meaning: that of the saying and that of its resaying.
(Being Singular Plural, p. 86).
In these passages on language Nancy is principally in dialogue with Heidegger. I don't know the source of his dialogism, if any. It does feel like a resaying–a singular resaying to be sure. Again, Nancy touches on meaning:
Meaning is the exhibition of the foundation without foundation, which is not an abyss but simply the with of things that are, insofar as they are. Logos is dialogue, but the end of dialogue is not to overcome itself in "consensus"; its reason is to offer, and only to offer (giving it tone and intensity), the cum-, the with of meaning, the plurality of its springing forth.
(pp. 86-87).
"Not an abyss but simply the with of things that are." I recall my troubles leaping over the abyss with Grassi. Though Grassi is not without courage (and elegance), Nancy strikes me as the more courageous reader of Heidegger, at least by the measure of his willingness to contradict him.
It is not enough, then, to set idle chatter in opposition to the authenticity of the spoken word, understood as being replete with meaning. On the contrary, it is necessary to discern the conversation (and sustaining) of being-with as such within chatter: it is in "conversing," in the sense of discussion, that being-with "sustains itself," in the sense of the perseverance in Being. Speaking-with exposes the conatus of being-with, or better, it exposes being-with as conatus, exposes it as the effort and desire to maintain oneself as "with" and, as a consequence, to maintain something which, in itself, is not a stable and permanent substance, but rather a sharing and a crossing through. In this conversation (and sustaining) of being-with, one must discern how language, at each moment, with each signification, from the highest to the lowest–right down to those "phantic," insignificant remarks ("hello," "hi," "good" ...) which only sustain the conversation itself–exposes the with, exposes itself as the with, inscribes and ex-scribes itself in the with until it is exhausted, emptied of signification.
(p. 87).
Personally, I prefer the term "phatic," which has the advantage of being in my English dictionaries. If "phantic" is to be allowed, it shouldn't be on etymological grounds ("phatic" already does the job), but only because Nancy is setting up a play on the Heideggerian apophantic.
Labels: dialogism, Grassi, Heidegger, language, meaning, Nancy, phatic communion
Saturday, October 14, 2006
At several points Patočka distances his work from existentialism, by which he means chiefly Heideggerian existentialism. He has two basic critiques: (a) Heidegger's analysis of Mitsein (being-with) is too shallow, and (b) Heidegger's conception of movement into the world as "falling" is negative. Otherwise Patočka does understand his ideas about the personal structure of experience as being ontological in the full sense, as describing the conditions of possibility for forming judgements about what is and what is not. In my view Patočka does qualify as an existentialist on the face of it, but his disagreements with Heidegger are worth exploring.
Patočka's first objection needs little amplification. Many thinkers who have followed Heidegger's path have, while still doing existential phenomenology, placed a greater emphasis on being with others than Heidegger did. Both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, for instance. Levinas would present an extreme case. However, Patočka doesn't go so far as Levinas, or, in a sense, he goes farther with his phenomenological analysis and isn't inclined to reject the whole of existential phenomenology on the grounds of this problem of co-existence.
Patočka's second objection seems to be exclusively a problem with Heidegger in particular rather than existentialism, though many thinkers who have been influenced by Heidegger have followed this path. Grassi's "abyss," for example, clearly derives from the theme of groundlessness in Heidegger, though Grassi sees this abyss as having both a positive and a negative aspect.
In Patočka's view, all postures, including postures of repose, relaxation, and meditation require an effort of the same kind that is required to stand upright or to physically move from point A to point B. All are equally efforts. This intuition is one basis of his rejection of the world as fallen according to Heidegger, the other being his strong sense that what is common with others is in actuality integral to what existence does. Does Patočka's view hold water? It seems to be true that, for example, some effort is required to relax, that this too is an orientation rather than a state that we might simply fall into. I'm curious though, what would Patočka make of a phenomenon like the hypnagogic jerk. Isn't this a sign that we do carry with us a fear of falling? Here I'm thinking of Ludwig Binswanger more than Heidegger. Anyway, I'm not sure existence works properly without this possibility of falling. I agree with Patočka's rejection of Heidegger's bias against what is common, but I aslo feel that Binswanger in particular had a keen insight into the negative pole of everything that is implied by the upright posture. This groundless horizon, I'll call it, does it accompany our every movement? Is it negative in itself, or is it too structured with a negative aspect, namely falling, and a positive aspect, say flying. Or what about floating? Have you ever dreamed that you walked on air? I have. What's that about?
Labels: Binswanger, existentialism, falling, Grassi, Heidegger, ontology, Patočka