Nancy says that "freedom remains incomprehensible as long as it exposes its necessity to the core of a thought that orders it to an infinite necessity of being, and not as a finitude for which being is not the foundation" (The Experience of Freedom, p. 37). I don't quite comprehend his meaning. Does he mean that the necessity of freedom should be thought as a finitude for which being is not the foundation? He adds, "It is not so much that freedom would become 'comprehensible' in the 'more originary thinking,' but the question of freedom would certainly no longer be posed in these terms–unless it were necessary, in order to gain distance from a problematic of 'comprehensibility,' also to gain distance from 'freedom' itself" (ibidem). As far as I can make sense of it, Nancy's reading of Heidegger in this chapter invites us to abandon a metaphysical concept of freedom as a capacity to be a cause of and by oneself. He says "causality belongs to beingness [étantité], not to existence" (p. 38). Now would I want to abandon metaphysical freedom for existential freedom for the sake of comprehensibility, or do I need to gain distance from "comprehensibility" and "freedom"? When I think finititude I don't rush to a conclusion about any kind of abyss of nothingness. Death is less than nothing to me. Am I thus not thinking death, and is freedom therefore incomprehensible to me? Can existence have a hither side without a yon? Is freedom more comprehensible if we grasp existence at the limit between hither and yon? Should freedom be comprehensible?
Labels: causality, existence, finitude, freedom, Nancy
As per Deleuze's advice I'm beginning Difference and Repetition with the conclusion. His exposition of the eternal return (pp. 297 ff.) confounds me because the idea conflicts with some of my basic beliefs, and yet if I examine my beliefs they appear to be contradictory, and perhaps not well suited to the problem of repetition.
In the first place I believe in mortality. Everything that lives also dies, everything that appears also vanishes, everything that goes also stops. I believe this is the way of all things. Everything is finite. I understand that some people don't believe that everything is finite, but as long as a person believes that some things are finite they will be in pretty much the same boat as I am, or at the very least have some way of understanding my predicament. The belief in mortality is hardly exceptional.
I wouldn't necessarily want to believe in eternity; however, my belief in the finality of death entails a notion of eternity. To be dead is to be dead for all time. Preliminarily, there are two ways in which my thinking about eternity diverges from Nietzsche's. Firstly, I don't believe the past is eternal. The Universe and time as we know it has a beginning (about 13.7 billion years ago), and every event that can be verifiably described as an event has taken place within this finite stretch of time since the event of the Universe's inception. Secondly, I am not sure about whether anything like eternity converges in the present moment. The notion of eternity that I must have to have in order to believe in the finality of death is not the kind of thing that can be experienced or that pertains to experience directly. There is no real merger of the present moment into the eternal, but rather a sharp division between two different kinds of temporality: one that is of experience, the other that is purely an abstraction.
Perhaps I jumped to quickly from finality to eternity. When I consider the ultimate fate of the Universe, and ponder that heat death is the most likely hypothesis (be sure to see Dylan Trigg's The Duration of Twilight), it occurs to me that the future too, time as we know it, is finite. What sense does it make then to say that time will cease to exist for all eternity? And yet isn't this exactly what the heat death of the Universe means? It seems as if I want to hold onto a notion of time that exceeds time itself. This can't be completely rational.
Surely there must be a way of thinking mortality that doesn't involve irrational thinking about time. Once I open the door to doubting the eternity of death, however, eternal recurrence, among others, is allowed to slip in. I simply don't know how long death lasts, if it lasts at all. Against these doubts, I could cling to the finitude of existence, relegating infinitude to nonexistence, but I wonder whether this wouldn't represent a failure to think about what I really believe about mortality.
Finally, given my belief in the finitude of all things, I wonder how repetition is possible. Here I am hoping that Deleuze is wrong in suggesting that the conclusions make reading the rest of his book unnecessary (p. xv). I am looking to this book to get some purchase on the possibility of repetition, and also the problem of how to think repetition as such.
Labels: Deleuze, finitude, heat death, mortality, Nietzsche, repetition, Trigg