Monday, June 22, 2009
"A philosophy of nothingness," Barbaras writes (Being, p. 121), "is still not realized as long as it defines nothingness as pure nothingness. Nothingness is genuinely nothingness only if it is not nothingness through and through." What is it about nothingness that's not like itself, adulterated through and through? Say that silence is a way of experiencing nothingness. Has there ever been in your experience a moment of unadulterated silence? What would you want to say about it?
Labels: Barbaras, nothingness, philosophy, silence
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
Friday, December 28, 2007
Sartre spells out what the imaginary means for an existential phenomenological ontology:
We are now at the point of understanding the sense and value of the imaginary. The imaginary appears 'on the ground of the world', but reciprocally all apprehension of the real as world implies a hidden surpassing towards the imaginary. All imaging consciousness maintains the world as the nihilated ground of the imaginary and reciprocally all consciousness of the world calls and motivates an imaging consciousness as grasping the particular sense of the situation. The apprehension of nothingness cannot occur by an immediate disclosure, it is realized in and by the free succession of consciousnesses, the nothingness is the matter of surpassing the world towards the imaginary. It is as such that it is lived, without ever being posited for itself. There could be no realizing consciousness without imaging consciousness, and vice versa. Thus imagination, far from appearing as an accidental characteristic of consciousness, is disclosed as an essential and transcendental condition of consciousness. It is as absurd to conceive of a consciousness that does not imagine as it is to conceive of a consciousness that cannot effect the cogito.
(The Imaginary p. 188)
If ontology is worth discussing then I too want to talk about how nothingness is lived. It's not that easy. When I examine my own experience of imagination I'm not sure whether I encounter anything like nothingness. Sartre says I don't apprehend it directly, but I'm unsure about the hidden surpassing towards the imaginary and whether that must proceed by a negation of the real world. If I accept that there is something like transcendence, does that really commit me to recognizing such an apprehension of nothingness? Most surpassings towards the imginary in my life are inchoate, and probably my grasp of the real is pretty loose. I desire a beautiful woman, which Sartre says I can't do; I am not routinely nauseated by the real.
A day went by. One of the days as the year dwindles down, neither belonging to the new year nor possessing the feel of the old, neither a holiday nor a workday, neither brilliant nor dismal. Staring out on the horizon, I might have been nauseated had I learned of a tsunami on the other side of the world, or an assassination. But there on that shore on that day I was not nauseated.
Indoors again, I imagined a trawler out on the horizon. In fact I imagined imagining a trawler on the horizon before I sat down and imagined one. I knew I would be confronting this issue of nothingness, trying to apprehend it, or what it means for the trawler as imaged to be absent. So my imagination of the trawler is suspect. And again, my imagination is not static. There is a crew on board the trawlers, characters. One of them is a Jack Kerouac-like figure peeling potatoes. Jack Kerouac was a romantic figure in my youth, yet he was also a real person who wrote stories about his friends and their travels. Everything about my imagination is suspect, infused with snippets of memory, culture, film, psychology, an ethos of compassion for all living things that is hard to live up to. What is the imagination itself? How would that differ from the imagination as it is lived?
I want to agree with Sartre that "the existence of a psychic phenomenon and the meaning it has for consciousness are one" (p. 19), yet I become aware that consciousness is something I must allow to happen, and that if I don't allow it to happen I am not really conscious, my conscious life has no meaning. Should I be nauseated at the discovery of a moment of meaninglessness? I have no reason to believe meaninglessness is benign. To feel its repulsiveness, though, I have to imagine this meaninglessness is Reality, or that the taste of nothing is really the taste of my own death, a death I am morbidly living. Morbidity may be the ultimate Neither/Nor, or the one we learn to live with. What then should we take from convalescence? It should be possible to imagine a meaningless one encounters as other than Real without being Irreal; it should be possible to recognize a situation as not yet having sense without meaning that one is therefore mired in or threatened by morbidity. Is the not-yet-sense of a situation really lived? Is the just-was-sense of a situation lived?
When I say that consciousness must be allowed to happen or that, pace Sartre, an imaginative consciosness may be surprising, while at the same time maintaining the Sartrean position against the existence of an unconscious that would bestow upon consciousness any meaning other than its own, it seems as if I must entertain the thought of a pre-existing morbidity, of a consciousness that is not all there, not healthy, not meaningful. This idea is perplexing because it is hard to fully grasp the truth that the not-yet-sense is pluripotent and senses are plural; we are not fully aware of the many ways we have of allowing consciousness to happen. The free succession of consciousnesses–which must too be allowed, and which also may then have its senses and its non-yet-sense–reveals neither nothingness nor a neither/nor that could be assigned to either morbidity or convalescence; rather it testifies to the abundance of consciousnesses, and that abundance is what's at issue in the as such. (It was a mistake, then, to think that allowance of a consciousness was preceded by a morbid consciousness.) This means that the cogito should not be conflated with the vivo, and one should avoid choosing one type of consciousness as a model for consciousness in general; the model of consciousness as it is lived is the free succession of conscious moments, and there may well be no consciousness in general or consciousness as such. I am taking a stand then against the existence of annihilation as such, and I am doing so on the basis of the abundance of the as such as such. I think we misrecognize the abundance of the as such as annihilation because fundamentally we identify consciousness with our vital existence. Well, to be honest, I would have an attitude about annihilation as such even if I weren't aware of the abundance of the as such. I am curious to know what it means to be conscious. It's still a little mysterious to me.
Labels: imagination, nothingness, Sartre
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Imagine a nothingness that is not negating but intensifying and therefore affirmative. Nancy says that the truth of the abyss and of intensification can be designated as experience (The Experience of Freedom, (p. 84). It is tempting to think that Nancy is thinking freedom completely without foundation. But he is cryptic, and he plays with foundation more than he abandons it. He says, "It is a finite freedom which is the 'foundation of foundation'" (p. 83, Nancy's emphasis). The foundation of foundation is also the abyss, I venture. Can we ask how the abyss is experienced? I have a feeling that inasmuch as Nancy approaches the experience of experience as a thinking, he would say that the abyss is experienced in thought. This isn't quite right, because he might say that thought rather than experiencing nothingness measures itself against nothingness. So presently the question as to how we experience the abyss remains unanswered. Let's see how Nancy plays with the idea of foundation and see what it tells us about experience or the experience of experience which is thinking.
"The act of founding is indeed the act par excellence of experiri, of the attempt to reach the limit, to keep to the limit," Nancy says (p. 84). He argues that where the foundation takes place there is nothing but indeterminable chora (ibidem) and goes on to say:
We have related, through concepts and languages, "experience" to "piracy." But foundation always has something of piracy in it, it pirates the im-propriety and formlessness of a chorā–and piracy always has something of foundation, unrightfully disposing rights and tracking unlocatable limits on the chorā of the sea. In order to think the experience of freedom, one would have to be able ceaselessly to contaminate each notion by the other, and let each free the other, pirating foundation and founding piracy. This game would have nothing to with amusement; its possibility, or rather its necessity, is given with thought itself and by thought's freedom.
(p. 85)
Experience, I take it, as the gesture of founding, pirates the formlessness of the chorā. Does thought take form or does it take formlessness? It will have to be thought at the limit, a sublimely mathematical twilight. "The experience of founding takes place at the limit," Nancy says. "What is founded exists (it is not only projected, but is first thrown, as founded, into existence) and it exists according to the limit's mode of existence, that is, according to the mode of the self-surpassing (overcoming and emancipation, gestures of liberation), which is the very structure of the limit" (ibidem, Nancy's emphasis). Is the thought that takes place in the chora thought as in a dream, something itself wonderous (θαυμαστός)? Nancy wants us to think of neither a founding subject nor founding object, but rather a founding gesture that "carries itself–at once anterior and posterior to the tracing of the limit traces–to the contour, path, and outward aspect of a singularity whose freedom and existence it makes arise simulataneously" (p. 86, Nancy's emphasis).
I'm intrigued that Nancy sees an outward aspect to singularity, but I'll let that pass to get to the meat of the argument here. There is, in thinking in the chora, at the limit, a resonance with Derrida's thinking about the chora, which he says alternates between a logic of participation and of exclusion ("Khōra," in On the Name, p. 89), and with Agamben's thinking about abandonment in Homo Sacer. First Nancy says that "experience does not experience anything, but it experiences the nothing as the real that it tests and as the stroke of luck it offers" (p. 86, Nancy's emphasis). Then he says that "freedom is the foundation that is discovered in the fact that being is essentially abandoned" (p. 92, Nancy's emphasis). Now I might say that the abandonment of being is its haplessness which has nothing to do with luck, having been abandoned by luck. There must be a feeling among those who insist on being of having been marooned by the philosophers. Whose Image is abandonment? I'll revisit Derrida's thinking about the chora later. In the meantime I'll be trying to wrap my head around the chora of the sea and how this might relate to abadnonment or to experience.
The metaphor of piracy is more fun and perhaps truer to thought than the metaphor of founding. As Nancy vacillates between piracy and founding, the word "shipwreck" also springs to mind–which is not say that Nancy's brigantine is foundering. I'm just having trouble finding my sea legs.
Labels: abandonment, Agamben, chora, Derrida, experience, ground, Nancy, nothingness
Saturday, October 13, 2007
Jemeinigkeit, according to Nancy, defines mineness on the basis of an "each time," and he says there is nothing between each time, because being withdraws between each time. Each time "opens itself as relation to other times, to the extent that continuous relation is withdrawn from them" (The Experience of Freedom, p. 67). He says emphatically, "freedom withdraws being and gives relation," and more lightly, "freedom is the discrete play of the interval" (p. 68).
A note on singularity: Nancy sees singularity in the relation given by freedom according to the each time. "Singularity–for this reason distinct from individuality–takes place according to this double alterity of the 'one time,' which installs relation as the withdrawal of communion" (p. 68). And emphatically again, "the ipseity of singularity has as its essence the withdrawal of the aseity of being" ( p. 70). Nancy here begins to think the singular plural in light of a disruption of a continuity of being that might be associated with a self– another ipseity plays here that isn't grounded in itself, not originating in its own continuity.
Nancy says there is no being between existents, not a tissue belonging to all and none (p. 69). Not even freedom fills the space between existents, but rather it spaces the space. He says freedom means "to measure oneself against the nothing," and adds, "Measuring oneself against the nothing does not mean heroically affronting or ecstatically confronting an abyss which is conceived as the plenitude of the nothingness and which would seal itself around the sinking of the subject of heroism or of ecstasy" (p. 71, Nancy's emphasis).
By defining freedom as the play of the interval, and by refusing to see either an ecstatic or heroic confrontation with Nothingness, Nancy leads us towards a critique of humanism.
On the archi-originary register of sharing, which is also that of singularity's "at every moment," there are no "human beings." This means that the relation is not one between human beings, as we might speak of a relation established between two subjects constituted as subjects and as "securing," secondarily, this relation. In this relation, "human beings" are not given–but it is relation alone that can give them "humanity." It is freedom that gives relation by withdrawing being. It is then freedom that gives humanity, and not the inverse.
(p. 73)
When Nancy says, "Free space is opened, freed, by the very fact that it is constituted or instituted as space by the trajectories and outward aspects of singularities that are thrown into existence" (p. 74, Nancy's emphasis), we are not free to think of these singularities as human if we are to take Nancy's meaning. They may be delivered over to humanity, and yet even this proposition may be dubious if freedom gives relations all at once– that would make us, we who are thrown, instant cosmopolites, ecopolitical singularities. I don't think Nancy would say we can't be ecopolitical singularities, but I'm not sure that he means to argue that freedom gives relations all at once. Maybe that's what he does mean. Each time freedom gives all the relations there are, in which case "humanity" is just the tip of the iceberg. All the relations there are: does it make sense to say that there are relations when being is withdrawn? Now, this business of the all or nothing seems to go against the spirit of the play of the interval. If the space between existents doesn't represent a tissue or a plenitude of nothingness, what does measuring oneself against the nothing mean?
When I think about the space instituted by the trajectories of thrown singularities it occurs to me that randomness may be an exceedingly improbable description of the movements of things that are born. The question is, Does the aleatory have something to play with (something from which we could induce grounds for a field of probabilities), or does it just push or drag around a space of nothing? It's unclear to me whether the field I am wondering about would be given by the systematic movements of lifeforms or by Karma. In either case it would be outside the ken of Nancy's inquiry. I'm risking a grave misunderstanding of what Nancy means, especially what he means by "birth." I will be giving it some more thought.
Labels: freedom, Jemeinigkeit, Nancy, nothingness, singularity
Monday, June 11, 2007
How can we experience nothingness? Or, better, perhaps, in what way is nothingness available to experience? Marion says that profound boredom is a way to experience nothingness. Trigg points to silence as a way nothingness can be experienced. Both Marion and Trigg, each in their own way, are reacting to Heidegger. Barbaras' discussion of nothingness confronts Husserl directly, drawing on Merleau-Ponty, Patoĉka, Granel, and Bergson (informed by Deleuze). Now, Barbaras says that "to desire is to focus on reality as absent, and it is therefore to refer to nonbeing as such" (Desire and Distance, p. 55); yet it is not altogether clear to me that Barbaras is saying that desire is a way to experience nothingness. He may be saying that nothingness can be felt and thought in ordinary perception, but not directly experienced. Or he may be saying something altogether different. Before I unpack this, I want to look at Barbaras' critique of Husserl.
Barbaras argues that Husserl's idea of the époché is undermined by a principle of sufficient reason, which, following Bergson, he views as a false problem. Asking why something exists rather than nothing, Barbaras says, presupposes "that nothingness can precede something, that being can emerge on the basis of nothingness, which is tantamount . . . to reversing purely and simply the respective ontological status of being and nothingness" (p. 48). This, according to Barbaras, is the root of essentialist thinking, which he regards as non-phenomenological.
The natural attitude is situated on a deeper level that Husserl himself understood it to be; it consists not in the thesis of "unique spatio-temporal reality" so much as in the implicit positing of a positive nothingness that leads one inevitably to conceive of this unique reality as an ensemble of objects. Therefore the époché, whose function is to clarify the status of the thesis of existence characteristic of the natural attitude, to elucidate the true meaning of the being of this unique reality, can consist only in a suspension of this naïve idea, which is to say, the positive thesis of nothingness. Otherwise stated, what makes the thesis of existence problematic is not the thesis of the existence of a world so much as the determination of this world as an object. The naïveté does not reside in one thinking that there is a world there, but rather in admitting that it is governed by a principle of absolute determinability and that it can therefore be attained as it is in itself. It is in the objectivist characterization of the world that the naïve opposition between the in-itself and for-itself, between being and appearance, is rooted. Furthermore, the purpose of the époché is to rejoin the thesis of the world in its purity, precisely as a thesis of existence; it is meant to grasp spontaneously the event of appearance before it is concealed by the appearing, to capture the the pure burst of "there is." This is why it must suspend what gives rise tot he degradation of this "there is" in in-self (or in object), namely the thesis of positive nothingness; it does not consist in suspension of thesis of existence but in suspension of what compromises the access to the meaning of this thesis of existence
(pp. 56-57, emphases Barbaras')
The nothingness of sufficient reason, Barbaras argues, "can in no way proceed from an experience" (p. 51). Again, he says that the idea of nothingness "can in no way be based on an experience, because there is always something, the flux of things, because fullness always follows upon fullness" (p. 52). And furthermore, "all experiences are experiences of something; the essence of experience implies the meeting with something real, however simple or indeterminate it may be, so that an experience that could refer to something other than what there is (to nonbeing) would not be an experience (it would unquestionably be something like a thought)" (p. 52). This isn't altogether unqeustionable in my mind. It's possible that thought is a subset of experience, rather than being something completely distinct. (And I note in passing that intentionality is indeed an aspect of Barbaras' phenomenology, though he is talking about experience instead of consciousness).
Citing Bergson, Barbaras breaks the idea of nothingness into two parts: an idea of substitution, and a feeling of desire or regret (p. 52). But, he says, "[n]othingness is in reality a mirage, in triparite sense that it assumes the horizon of perception, represents a reverse image of the real, and is the expression of a desire at the heart of reality that does not lend itself to it. It vanishes therefore when consciousness seeks to approach and thematize it" (p. 53). So far, he seems to be saying that desire refers to nonbeing as such, but that nonbeing cannot be thematized, and cannot be directly experienced. Does this make sense? Barbaras says, further, that "[i]f desire can indeed be reduced immediately to the confrontation between a positive feeling and a full reality, then taking into consideration desire's meaning reveals precisely a mode of negativity within things that does not provide an alternative to their presence" (p. 56). This brings us back to the idea of perception being given in adumbrations.
In Husserl's phenomenology, "givenness by adumbrations is like the arrested image of the very emergence of being against the backdrop of nothingness, the threat to being by nothingness. Adumbrations are located in an extremely rigorous way between being and nothingness" (p. 58, emphasis Barbaras'). Barabaras, however, gives a different reading to givenness by adumbrations. "In reality, the fact the adumbrations are situated between being and nothingness can be interpreted in an entirely different way: the adumbrations would reveal an original mode of being, one more profound than the crude distinction between positive being and negative nothingness, a being-at-a-distance" (p. 58).
So then, I'm unclear. Does desire point to nonbeing as such, an idea that comes from Barbaras' reading of Bergson, of does desire point to being-at-a-distance?
Labels: Barbaras, desire, Marion, nothingness, ontology, phenomenology, Trigg