Category Archives: Philosophy

Footnotes From No One to No One but Necessary

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A couple footnotes to the end of this:

On the Coalescence and Convalescence of Power

(1) Error is the impossibility of objective, historical certainty in Kierkegaard. The shifting hermeneutic tide of historical narrative can only lead to profound dread not to concrete absolute. Logic, the faux fatale, the fatal blunder towards reduction while the grass grows under our feet is Error for demand, thought as ‘existing’. For Kierkegaard only the leap from Ethics to act without certainty can justify the act of Abraham. The abandonment of historical site and orientation in the act of the sacrifice of Isaac leaves one naked and without recourse, in hope against hope that in the abandonment of familial will the act of murder find redemption. In this act, passion is pitched to the infinite and the enormous burden of eternity rouses the forsaken soul. The absurd paradox without recourse and stripped of mortal certainty is the elevation from Ethics to the Religious.
(2) Ethics for Levinas is not the leap to the Religious conundrum but the an-archy of the face of the other, the impossibility of a synchronic time of me and him or her. Thus, Ethics is not a prescription of behavior but recognition of the absolute impossibility of ground, of root, of origin. Ethics is the possibility of the impossibility of totality, of summation, of Truth. Instead of abandoning Ethics, Levinas uproots the interpretation of Ethics as morality and exposes it as indebtedness that can never be paid; the for-the-sake-of-which cannot be named but only faced. Murder, the act of eradicating the other, is the ultimate narcissism of retreat from radical alterity. Representation, the violence of light, must continually re-present the other as mediated, as familiar, as taken together in my thought, this thought; a commensurate moment of concern. Even in the radical solitude of Kierkegaard’s faith God has not been abandoned. Even when and as God defies all objectivity God establishes subjectivity. The paganism of hule, matter has been replaced with the paganism of self…yet a still small voice speaks to me from the other. The relentlessness of final absolution from the one who faces me undoes my-self. The caress, the gesture, the voice that speaks breaks through as swells onto the sands of my times from whence these wind: Ethics?

On the Coalescence and Convalescence of Power

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Chris Hayes made an argument on his MSNBC show “Up” that the Occupy movement demonstrates a more effective, inclusive form of government in their nightly town hall type discussions than is demonstrated in the “Super Committee” that was setup to address debt concerns.  He viewed the Super Committee as an example of elitist power broking.  While this apparent opposition certainly has its merit it also invites a more thoughtful analysis of the dynamics at play in this opposition.

To start, let’s think about the Up program.  Chris has guests on for segments and frequently replaces the guest with other guests.  While I am sure that all the guests would like to stay on for the whole program an executive decision is made based on limitation; time and relevancy prescribes the agenda.   In any organization a certain kind of economy must be preserved to maintain the viability of the organism.  Any democracy must harness the focus gained through the congealing of power to prioritize and preordain a practical solution to the problem of diffusion.  Diffusion is the dissolution of power, the breakdown of praxis, the convalescence of action.  Its ultimate political outcome is anarchy, the loss of origin, the opening onto infinity.   It is the potentiality for suspension of power, the pause of reflection, the existential moment (kairos) of suspension.

In any democracy an undercurrent of power must, of necessity, assert itself endlessly.  Democracy and power require a symbiosis, a tension of form (peros) and chaos (aperion) – an economy.  Power preserves the past.  It provides an ever changing narrative for relevance and origin.  It is the sustenance of purpose and affect.  It retains and bounds the infinite.  It scribes and pre-scribes a sophistical system of signs that gather together a pseudo ‘totalism’, a ‘worldhood’ wherein what comes-to-be is allowed or disallowed.

Democracy is the breakup of power.  It seeks to make the other relevant.  It is not a substitution of one kind of power for another but a kind of darkness that limits the circumspection of light.  Power, the virility of sight defines and limits.  It measures and retains.  Democracy breaks and recoils.  It casts dispersions on frame and reference.  It is the kairos that interrupts the succession of chronos (http://mixermuse.com/blog/2010/09/08/the-problem-of-logic/).   Democracy dissolves ‘heterogony’ and hierarchy and as such, is chaos, aperion, infinity.  It must always be taken hostage once again for production and re-assimilated into yet another moment (chronos), an occasion for, a repetition of economy.  Democracy cannot be in itself and power can.  Even as anarchy, power must certainly and inevitably re-inscribe, subjugate and define.   

Education, the sublime ideal preserved as Greek and taken up as enlightenment is the Academy that seeks to once again measure, the good and the sophistical, the better idea, the critical examination of “facts”, the hule of brute materiality, the eternal, the time proven retention of certainty.  Science, the fruit of scientific method, the proven of the profound, the indisputable of knowledge and the inclusion of democratic method has yet to fade from the germinated seed of Greek thought.  Education is the promise of preserved democracy, an economy of the truly true and the eternal beauty of Greek cheerfulness.  It asserts itself on the basis of ‘falsifiability’ as opposed to doxa and dogma.  It holds to the claim that the unaccountable other will be brought to account, settled in its infinity and preserved in its anarchistic totality – thus, the conundrum, the riddle of infinite concern, the passion for the absurd.  Education restores the living beauty that power idolizes and thus corrupts.  It is the good beyond being.  It promises unity in its manifold.  When all can be doubted only what cannot be doubted remains.  An educated electorate is the heroic and final destiny (telos) of democracy. 

The problem with the beatific vision of education is its substantive congealing of meaning.  Every great myth must re-produce itself in its destruction.  It is the gaze of Orpheus.  It must be a fetish-tic fascination for the infinite.  The clay feet of education thought in “Structures of Scientific Revolution” by Thomas Kuhn maintains a perpetual revolution of the same.  Inertia, the resistance to a change in momentum, is no stranger to education as congealing, convalescence and dissolution is the dunamis of power. 

Light can never finally preserve light in a greater light.  Light and the ‘presents’ that presence can only perpetually preserve its founding over and against its nemesis.  The pitched battle of form and chaos, peros and aperion, syntax and semantics can never be resolved into an ultimate unity.  Democracy can never win out against power.  Education cannot end, only promise.  Infinity, the other, cannot show itself as itself.  Truth can never proceed beyond the moment of appropriation, Ereignis.  In this malady of Error(1)* only Ethics(2)* as my responsibility to the other, my indebtedness to not-me, the voice that withdraws from monologue can hold in question the potency of power and the exasperation of light.

*see https://www.mixermuse.com/blog/2011/12/21/footnotes-from-no-one-to-no-one-but-necessary/

Thoughts of Dread

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Re-reading Blanchot’s essay “From Dread to Language” and thinking of Kierkegaard’s concept of Dread there is a feeling I have of self-obsession.  Dread is the ultimate solipsism.  Exteriority abandons oneself in Dread and leaves one in a state of irrecoverable and unsalvageable narcissism.  The impending doom of an absolute immediate moment that cannot be intervened, mediated away and requires the blank death-like stare of Medusa’s face.  Nothing can emerge from Dread and nothing can escape its orbit.  Its event horizon refuses meaning, love, concern…otherness.  It encapsulates and seals in tomb-like devotion.  It is the mark of Death.  Life requires that one escapes and flees in the face of Dread; that one is not swallowed into its catacombs.  In Dread, life dreams. In the face of Dread, life requires awareness, movement away-from, emersion in otherness. 

Dread, while incapable of exteriority, mimics absolute exteriority.  It is as if the gaze of Dread paralyzes and stupefies while only bare consciousness is imprisoned in concretized death.  The eyes cannot even blink only behold the site of Dread in emptiness.  When life is encapsulated in death movement is always from without.  As a marionette, movement is hollow and initiated as pure externality.  When inwardness is raised to the infinite in Dread its absolute emptiness is exposed, raw and abysmally hollow.  The result of absolute inwardness is absolute exteriority, mechanical, Frankenstein-like.  It is the tornado-like act of god that can only consume itself, without ever knowing an end, as pure dread.  Dread is all and in all, unabashed and without form.  Form is the refuge life would take in the face of Dread.  Form flees from formlessness.  Life must always rise from the bog of Dread.  The moment of mechanical exteriority must create a silhouette, a form.  Thus language, meaning and sense must usher one from the gaze of Dread.   The escape must create world, history…a shadow of the mechanical exteriority that faces it.  In this then is the interlocutor, the mediation…the drunkenness of oblivion. 

Oblivion here is not abstract extinction.  It is release from ill y a, the meaningless background noise of existence.  It is the moment of breath, the sacrament of defilement.  It raises the exteriority imposed by Dread into a false god, a simulacrum of its tormentor.  In this way life can ‘face’ Dread, get a handle on it, and make it other than what it is…bare ‘isness’.  With this then is the third person.

The third person is the narrator, the voice of god, the chorus of tragedy.  The third person is not a he or a she but an ‘it’.  It is the oracle that gathers and holds.  It sanctifies by stealing away the moment of Dread.  It is the neuter, the thing.  It truncates the absolute emptiness of dread into an abject object.  As ‘suchness’, the thing resonates and glimmers in effervescent release.   Life therefore becomes the retreat from the stymied death of Dread.

In all this a map is traced of syntax and semantic, infinite orthogonality…the trace the can never be untied from the knot of existence.  It can only be reaffirmed in its obscurity.  This then is oblivion. 

At this point Levinas might take a turn.  Could it be that the gazes of Dread is none other than the face of the other.  The other not as something I know or am familiar with but as the puppeteer the marionette can never know, shed light on, see and perceive.  Why must Dread get its birth from nothingness and self-petrifaction?  If Levinas is right, the absolute alterity of the other that can never be ‘mine’ or even recuperable as in ‘my’ time, a temporal ecstasies, take on the truncated form of a thing, can make Dread the expression of absolute impotency, infinitely more passive than passivity.   The negativity of form yet rests on form.  However, the notion of alterity that Levinas may be hinting at may only show itself as an unnoticed breeze through autumn’s fall, the sadness of my love’s passing, a ghostly clearing in the wood where sun-filled rays go unnoticed.  In the excess, the abundance of this alterity a glimmer of grace eclipses the gaze of Dread, a still small voice that easily goes unnoticed plays around the moment of death…and children play while Dread takes its last breath.

Another Start? (Updated 3/28/11, comments)

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Why must Hegel’s Logic start with freedom? Freedom is not presupposition-less. Freedom means free. Free assumes a move away, a compulsion for dunamis; not dunamis for the sake of dunamis but dunamis as repulsion or attraction. Hegel thinks freedom as immediacy, ‘isness’. Because of freedom, immediacy wants what ‘isness’ isn’t – mediation. Two terms have appeared: freedom, ‘isness’ (immediacy). These two work together to lose themselves, objectify, mediate. ‘Isness’ is a rootedness, a dwelling, a place. As Kant’s monistic subject, we have place, immediacy. Immediacy may be boundless or bounded but it assumes locality and awareness of locality. It is easy to see how things proceed from this ‘there’, the ‘there’ of immediacy. In any case, assumptions are made about ‘isness’ (i.e., ‘isness’ must be free of itself). Since we make this assumption at the start, why not another? Instead of freedom, why not evocation? Instead of ‘isness’, why not other? Why can’t ‘isness’ presuppose other, the evocative that evokes ‘isness’? Why can’t evocation call ‘isness’ to immediacy? Why couldn’t freedom be a misunderstanding of evocation, dunamis from evocation? Certainly immediacy ‘is’ and as such, a start. However, this start may carry with it its logos. Its arche is certainly self-determination, itself. Could self-determination be an assumption given as a determination of immediacy? Are there other determinations that could be made? Would another direction, a logos, be possible from an other determination? Certainly an other does not appear in immediacy but how could it (and still be other in Levinas’ sense)? What determinations could be sustained if immediacy is ‘isness’ or ‘otherness’? Certainly ‘isness’ comes from nothing other than itself in its “pure immediacy” but “nothing other than itself” is already a tautological identity based on the “nothing other”. “Pure immediacy” absolutely negates other. Within this arche the other must fall out as mediated, as ad hoc from immediacy. Immediacy is pure negation. All its conditions reside in itself and thus, fail. Is this what is called ‘freedom’ or the impetus for freedom? What if all the conditions for immediacy reside in the other and ‘isness’ is called to be from what it isn’t? Is this a presupposition or another initial determination? Why presuppose a self-determination based on a ‘sense’ of immediacy? Is this automatically apparent, aprioir, assumed without self-criticism? If the Hegelian start is made by assuming that immediacy is self-determined, feels empty of other, then a decision, a determination, in kairos has been made. It may be that the moment of kairos, thought as immediacy, holds other options that require a very different ‘working out’, another start.

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9/10/10

Does the reification of the immediate reflect a certain kind of privileged, existentiell ‘there’ of being? Isn’t the start of Hegel a certain kind of mode of dasein’s being-in-the-world? Isn’t it when dasein is introspective, aware of nothing other than his or her own stark existence? Immediacy as discussed by Hegel occurs when no one is around, when one is intensely focused on oneself, and dasein is isolated from others. I suppose one could maintain that this stark, isolated, existentiell modality is ‘always’ there in some sense but that is a bit of a stretch.(1) Could it be that this thought is a ‘scientific’ assertion (doxa) of how dasein really is? When dasein is with others (mitsein) the ‘there’ is not dominated by hermetic and hermeneutic isolation (unless one is depressed). In everyday interaction with others, attending plays or sports events and perhaps watching a live entertainment broadcast, dasein is immersed in a kind of shared moment, a communal ‘now’, with others. Ontically, the “I” does not show itself but the “we”. The “I” does not dominate existentielly. The experience is not like anxiety where beings withdraw or instrumentality where dasein is engaged in work and not over and above him/herself. The experience is of a kind of shared ‘I’, a ‘we’, with others, the ‘now’ moment (immediacy) is not mine but ours. It seems to me that the kind of privileged (the beginning of the Logic?) and self-absorbed immediacy of Hegel is reified over and against the other ways that dasein ontically is in-the-world. What is the self-critical justification for this start? Is this a tradition brought about by the hermetic environment of academia? It seems to me that Hegel assumes immediacy is the moment of moments that all other moments get their oxygen from at least in the rarified atmosphere of academia. Has anyone ever even questioned this specifically? Probably but I am not currently aware of it. It seems to me that the start determines the path and the end. Why this start and not another? Is Hegel’s start supposed to be self-evident? (2)

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Notes:

(1) A thought…could the immediacy of Hegel have something in common with the concept of dread in Kierkegaard?

(2) It seems to me, this is yet another example of the sophistry that enters philosophy when philosophers become ‘professional’ and are paid for their ‘career’. It conglomerates and congeals, stupefies and specializes into a lifetime of having a financial stake in the game of apologetics. Sadly, I have seen it ruin the love of philosophy in several people. Could it be argued that this is one example of the alienation that Marx thinks is capitalism?

In Response to a Blog on Tautology…

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“Raw significance is sent to the mind through the senses, through apperception (and what Husserl called ‘the play of fancy’), and also through introspective reflection and contemplation . It is a call to which consciousness of conscious individuals is *called* to (ostensibly) present a conceptually reciprocal and orderly answer to.”

I appreciate the subtlety of your reasoning.  I would only add a tidbit…

Do we ever actually encounter “raw significance”?  Isn’t it always bundled with ‘awareness’, an inextricable web of meaning, of manifold significances?  It may be that ‘raw significance’ is an abstraction.  If so, the questions that press to the fore are political…why would we want to denude the way we find ourselves already engaged in ‘worldhood’ as Heidegger may suggest or Husserl’s horizon?  Why would an abstraction of experience be deemed a suitable substitution for how meaning, sensations, being show themselves?  Perhaps, as Heidegger notes, it is because we are historical beings.  Our truths are never pure and naked tautologies but always clothed in the garbs of circumstance, the accidental, the fullness of the moment (kairos), semblance.  This would make the incidental not circumspect but always already there with, essential to the founding of truth.  To separate tautology from NOT tautology is always already to have never departed from tautology.   It is to re-pronounce the ancient incantation of Parmenides and Plato the one over the many, the eternal over the mortal, mind over body and the other countless ways this has redeemed itself in history.  Yet, the still small voice remains, the voice we think as incidental and unnecessary, the other that has not yet succumbed to tautology.  This is how we find ourselves and ethics is the choice of force or détente.

With regard to a discussion on causality…

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My initial post to a question about causality…

One thing that comes to mind is Schrödinger’s cat. Determinations are made by the act of observation that preclude certain results and determine causal outcomes. Could we think of the “box” as determining the result?…perhaps better to think of the observer as predisposing physics towards his expectations – quite a murky business in any case.

After the deserved critcism of being too “poppy” I expanded the explanation…

Yes, perhaps a bit “poppy” in my brief post but the mystery remains.  Speaking of the observable disorder in molecules Schrodinger writes, “But whether any particular molecule, supposing you could follow, its course, will be among those which have reacted or among those which are still untouched, he [the chemist] could not predict. That is a matter of pure chance. This is not a purely theoretical conjecture. It is not that we can never observe the fate of a single small group of atoms or even of a single atom. We can, occasionally. But whenever we do, we find complete irregularity, co-operating to produce regularity only on the average.”

 “What Is Life”, pdf page 27

http://whatislife.stanford.edu/LoCo_files/What-is-Life.pdf

It is a bit of a wishful leap to suggest that the phenomena that Schrodinger observed on the quantum scale has been “explained”.  His supposition was that order arises out of chaos (peros from aperion) not unlike the thoughts of Plato, I might add.

I would submit that the slit experiment can actually strengthen my rather anemic response.  When individual photons are emitted through two slits (or more) to the photographic film, the apparent simultaneity of the photon passing through both slits introduces an uncertainty that has yet to be explained.   While Schrodinger referred to this “mystery” as entanglement, Heisenberg addressed the wave particle duality in his “uncertainty principle”.  Subatomic particles incessantly pop in and out of existence in a way that disallows determinism and can only be explained statistically with essential and inherent uncertainty.

Forgive the indulgence but according to the Copenhagen Interpretation (not pop) if you never measure the x-spin (box, i.e., Schrodinger) of an electron, it will never jump to an eigenstate of x-spin and thus will have a 100% probability of y-spin (a contradictory state).  The conclusion is that observable results depend on whether the electron is in an indeterminate state or determinate but unknown state.  Indeterminate states are not just determinate states we have no knowledge of.  Physical objects actually behave differently depending on whether their states are unknown or indeterminate.

One need look no further than quantum entanglement, the spooky action at a distance that Einstein despised and tried to refute with his EPR paradox only to end up showing the non-classical characteristics of the measurement process.

A Couple Quotes:

Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.

Niels Bohr

I think that I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.

Richard Feynman

I don’t like it, and I’m sorry I ever had anything to do with it.

Erwin Schrödinger

Responsibility and The Goods

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In the light of multiple narratives that run through the notion of the good, responsibility takes on different necessities.  In Patocka’s notion of orgiastic and Kierkegaard’s notion of hedonism, responsibility is defined in terms of service to self.  Responsibility is not imposed externally but driven by needs.  It adheres to no logic or nothing greater than itself. 

In Plato, the Good is ascertained by logos as the apprehension of the Forms, later into Christianity’s res cogitans of Latin, and modern logic as thing-cognition.  The shadow world of mere passion is not informed by the Good, the true, the real beyond mere appearance.  In Plato a shift to cognition achieves two goals.  It moves responsibility to a more subtle footing of thought, a move towards the internal.  It also has the effect of moving responsibility outside, external, to the mere immediate desires of the self.  This double move of internal and external is the beginning of logic.  As Derrida points out in “The Gift of Death”, this is still the orgiastic. 

The orgiastic is no longer thought in terms of overt passion or need but the organ of cognition is essentially involved in the knowledge of the Good.  A connection to the Good has moved from sensation to apprehension.  Apprehension is towards the alterity of the Forms.  Its movement is towards externality while maintaining its internal locus in thought-feelings.  For Patocka and Derrida this is still orgiastic albeit the beginning of the movement of secret.  As such, it is also the step towards preservation of sanity as Foucault envisions it.  The sane is common to many selves.  It is constancy of purpose; as Nietzsche thinks of it, the freezing of the greatness of the Greeks into logic. 

Responsibility begins with Plato as beyond me, directed towards the Forms.  The Good is beyond being but places a burden on being to rouse itself (themselves) in apprehension.  Each being is responsible before the evocation of the Good whether he or she knows it or not.  The cave of shadows holds prisoners in chains to illusion while outside the cave the sun of the Good shines upon the prison of being.  Plato states this in the Republic,

You and I must first come to an understanding. Let me remind you of what I have mentioned in the course of this discussion, and at many other times.

What?

The old story, that there is many a beautiful and many a good, and so of other things which we describe and define; to all of them the term “many” is implied.

True, he said.

And there is an absolute beauty and an absolute good, and of other things to which the term “many” is applied there is an absolute; for they may be brought under a single idea, which is called the essence of each.

Very true.

The many, as we say, are seen but not known, and the ideas are known but not seen.

Exactly.

And what is the organ with which we see the visible things?

The sight, he said.

And with the hearing, I said, we hear, and with the other senses perceive the other objects of sense?

True.

But have you remarked that sight is by far the most costly and complex piece of workmanship which the artificer of the senses ever contrived?

No, I never have, he said.

Then reflect: has the ear or voice need of any third or additional nature in order that the one may be able to hear and the other to be heard?

Nothing of the sort.

No, indeed, I replied; and the same is true of most, if not all, the other senses — you would not say that any of them requires such an addition?

Certainly not.

But you see that without the addition of some other nature there is no seeing or being seen?

How do you mean?

Sight being, as I conceive, in the eyes, and he who has eyes wanting to see; color being also present in them, still unless there be a third nature specially adapted to the purpose, the owner of the eyes will see nothing and the colors will be invisible.

Of what nature are you speaking?

Of that which you term light, I replied.

True, he said.

Noble, then, is the bond which links together sight and visibility, and great beyond other bonds by no small difference of nature; for light is their bond, and light is no ignoble thing?

Nay, he said, the reverse of ignoble.

And which, I said, of the gods in heaven would you say was the lord of this element? Whose is that light which makes the eye to see perfectly and the visible to appear?

You mean the sun, as you and all mankind say.

May not the relation of sight to this deity be described as follows?

How?

Neither sight nor the eye in which sight resides is the sun?

No.

Yet of all the organs of sense the eye is the most like the sun?

By far the most like.

And the power which the eye possesses is a sort of effluence which is dispensed from the sun?

Exactly.

Then the sun is not sight, but the author of sight who is recognized by sight?

True, he said.

And this is he whom I call the child of the good, whom the good begat in his own likeness, to be in the visible world, in relation to sight and the things of sight, what the good is in the intellectual world in relation to mind and the things of mind:

 

Will you be a little more explicit? he said.

Why, you know, I said, that the eyes, when a person directs them toward objects on which the light of day is no longer shining, but the moon and stars only, see dimly, and are nearly blind; they seem to have no clearness of vision in them?

Very true.

But when they are directed toward objects on which the sun shines, they see clearly and there is sight in them?

Certainly.

And the soul is like the eye: when resting upon that on which truth and being shine, the soul perceives and understands, and is radiant with intelligence; but when turned toward the twilight of becoming and perishing, then she has opinion only, and goes blinking about, and is first of one opinion and then of another, and seems to have no intelligence?

Just so.

Now, that which imparts truth to the known and the power of knowing to the knower is what I would have you term the idea of good, and this you will deem to be the cause of science, and of truth in so far as the latter becomes the subject of knowledge; beautiful too, as are both truth and knowledge, you will be right in esteeming this other nature as more beautiful than either; and, as in the previous instance, light and sight may be truly said to be like the sun, and yet not to be the sun, so in this other sphere, science and truth may be deemed to be like the good, but not the good; the good has a place of honor yet higher.

What a wonder of beauty that must be, he said, which is the author of science and truth, and yet surpasses them in beauty; for you surely cannot mean to say that pleasure is the good?

God forbid, I replied; but may I ask you to consider the image in another point of view?

In what point of view?

You would say, would you not? that the sun is not only the author of visibility in all visible things, but of generation and nourishment and growth, though he himself is not generation?

Certainly.

In like manner the good may be said to be not only the author of knowledge to all things known, but of their being and essence, and yet the good is not essence, but far exceeds essence in dignity and power.

— Plato, Republic 507b-508d

In this discussion Plato begins the tradition of light as a metaphor.  The metaphor of light and sight lets us see the manifold, the many, objects of sense.  In like manner the mind and knowledge is given by the Good.  It allows us access to being and essence, the oneness that holds the many of sensation.  And yet, the Good is beyond mind and knowledge just as the sun is beyond sight and light.  In Plato, the distinction between sensation as sight and knowledge as being and essence is preserved in the metaphor.  Sight and light are not the same as mind and knowledge but inform us about how being and essence are like the sun in relation to the Good.  Plato distinguishes between sensations and mind and this begins the going under of being and essence.  Metaphysics has seemingly lost its chains to its shadow world and freed itself (ourselves) from mutability and change.  The mortal has tasted immortality and responsibility is borne on these wings.  The separation of thought from sensation makes logic possible.  Logic, the logos of being, guides and gives rise to being and essence. 

In Christianity John states, “In the beginning was the word (logos) and the word was with God and the word was God.”  John 1:1.  Jesus states that “no one is good but God alone”.  Mark 10:18.  Isaiah states in Isaiah 64:6 that “your righteousness is as filthy rags” (menstrual rags).  In Christianity the Good is emancipated from being and essence.  Here the Good has become a tautology for God.  The Good and God are equivalent as A = A and being is thought in terms of B.  In this move the secret has become the will of God for Abraham to sacrifice his son.  Ethics has become murder, responsibility has become secret…the will of God.  God and the Good are not beholden to man and apprehension.  A tautology owes no allegiance to contingency.  Logic has become absolute Spirit.  Neutrality has been placed beyond the reach of man and the command of it is the mysterium tremendum, the tremendous mystery (God).  Abraham obeys the will of God over and above his love of Isaac.  From an ethical point of view “Thou Shalt Not Hate” and “Thou Shalt Not Murder”  have been subordinated to the will of God.  Abraham must hate his life to find it.  He must hate his son and murder him for the sake of God.  In the face of the singularity of tautology hate and love have become one.  Responsibility has gone under in the force of secret.  Will to power and will of God have orgiastically merged in an unseen incestuous relationship.  In this history science begins.

What was lost along the way was the openness towards alterity, the Judaic shekinah glory of God, the holy of holies that is preserved in the separation of the people and God that is mediated by the high priest once a year.  The graven image of god is idolatry.  The itness of tautology as the culmination of logic and the great divorce of man and God has come full circle to pre-Socratic, orgiastic hedonism.  Science as beyond being has made the question of being and the concern of philosophy mute.  Truth owes no allegiance to human kind and yet has become the tool of human kind while making human kind its tool.  Logic has completed itself in the external and internal, self-determination and “I willed it thus” and “now man has become like one of us” have completed themselves in the logic of tautology, the history of light, the System of Hegel.  The other has been reduced to a term of it.  The secret absolves responsibility into self.  The absolute external and the absolute internal are now the force of will, the logic of identity.  The he or she, the other, is a step along the way, a faint memory of mythos.  All the while, the neutrality of the secret that commands from down under has reemerged onto the orgiastic Dionysian rite of death.  Totality and tautology, the will of God has become will to power, the it of truth has replaced the he or she of the other and responsibility is the ‘said’ of “I willed it thus”…all the while, on the other side of the mote from the castle, the grass grows under our feet and violence effaces the face of the other.

The gift of death or the face of the other… (Updated 11/5/10)

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11/5/10 – Addition of paragraphs 3 and 4

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Jemeinigkeit, Heidegger’s notion of being-toward-death, is Dasein’s (the ‘there’ of human being) utmost possibility.  The possibility of the impossible is Dasein’s own most.  It cannot be outstripped.  It holds open the possibility of Dasein’s authenticity.  Death is not a he or a she.  Death is mine but it cannot be understood or apprehended.  No light can penetrate my death.  Death cannot be seen.  It cannot be taken hold of.  It even resists the notion of ‘is’.  Death ‘is’ but its final tragic comedy is the erasure of my ‘is’.  As such, death is alien.  It erases my ‘is’ while it writes my ‘is’.  Death is ‘it’.  It is a referent that does not point to another referent but ends, as in the Greek notion of telos, culminates, and gives referential meaning by point backward in the genesis of me as arche and telos, alpha and omega, the circle that has no outside.  Death is singularity; singularity that gives birth to me.  In death the neuter, the ‘it’ that begins and ends in ‘itself’, is identity.  It ‘is’ it…It ‘is not’ it and thus, contradicts itself in tautology…this is the absolute impossibility that nonetheless is possible.  All the notions of linguistics, the laws of physics, betray each other in singularity.  Death is the unmoved mover, the impenetrable ground of being and thus, the history of light.

The history of being is not tangled in the scaffolding of logic, of logos.  It is a retreat from an absolute not, the absolute negation of Being…In the beginning, before God and mortals, there was nothing…the nothing that is my most intimate moment, kairos, the supreme moment of moments from which all in-between moments flow.  The conundrum – this moment is death; it is nothing.  The nothing of death is not some abstract notion of nothing but sunyata, aperion, the fertile void.  It gives life from death, makes possible from impossible.  As the absolute ‘not’ of Being, as thrown from nothing, suspended from the void, there ‘is’ (the there-is) antithesis.  Antithesis is the history of Being, the tragic comedy of light…the logic.  Dasein is the aufhebung, the sublation, the synthesis of thesis – death and antithesis – Being.  The absolute, irrevocable ‘not’, death, reverses the Hegelian direction from thesis to ‘not’ to lifting up to light.

Death is the absolute ‘not’ of me.  It is the end of my freedom.   Death negates me.  Yet, death as the utmost possibility of Dasein that grounds Dasein and is the thrown nullity of Dasein is the antithesis that has become the thesis.  The ‘not’ as the referent that ‘is’ the telos and arche is absolute.  It is not preceded by Being and freedom.  This would be a lapse into the transcendental metaphysics of Hegel’s Logic.  Freedom is made possible by jemeinigkeit, by Dasein’s thrown nullity.  Only a being-towards-death has the possibility for freedom.  The awareness of death makes everydayness inauthentic.  Without jemeinigkeit circumspection would not be rooted in sorge, Care, the temporalizing ecstasies of Dasein.  Such a being would simply be immersed in the necessities of biological life until that being was no more.  The history of light would not be possible for such a being.  A being as this could only be thought in terms of ‘subject to the laws of physics’ from the circumspection of dasein.  Logic as the logos of Plato could only be ‘thought’ to exist from the type of being that is Dasein.  To suggest that the Forms exist or precede existence in a Kantian, categorical fashion for a being without jemeinigkeit is to take the step back into metaphysics.

The reversal of Hegel’s trifecta comes from the contradiction that is tautology, the nonsense of singularity, the moment of death that makes all other moments possible for dasein.  The thesis as the absolute ‘not’ of death and the antithesis as Being are lifted up as dasein.  The thesis is the antithesis and the antithesis is the thesis.  The normalized characteristics of each are reversed. For Hegel the reversibility of thesis and antithesis maintains and preserves the positive and the negation as thesis and antithesis but does allow either to give rise to, have absolute dependence on, the other.  The ‘not master’ is the slave and the ‘not slave’ is the master.  Each negation already asserts what is negated.   However, the formal placeholder of A -> not A = A AND not A is always maintained.  The negation will always assume and posit what is to be negated.  In the reversal A ‘is’ not A and not A ‘is’ A.  The negation, death, does not posit an apriori, a concurrent, contemporaneous Being.  To think death as the telos and arche of dasein that ‘is’ is a conundrum.  Death is not an ‘is’.  When death ‘is’ I am no more.  Death is the absolute denial of ‘is’.  The result of this reversal is the absolute rupture of dasein.  It is the inability to ever be pure Spirit.  It is what will never allow the system to be complete.  It is the trace of the erasure that cannot be summed up or canonized.  It is the narrative that must always essentially have counter narratives.  The tangle of rhizome can never be straightened out and done away with.  The will can never rise above the other as self-determination and self-limiting.  This term of Error refuses, withdraws and conceals and forever denies absolute rest to absolute Spirit.  An other step into this quagmire is posed by Levinas.

Levinas notes the neutrality of death and the evocative of the face of the other and asks, in effect, why neutrality?  Why ‘it’?  Why give precedence, priority, the proper to the unmask-able circle of nothing and light.  Why prefer the repression of the mysterium tremendum, the dreadful night of the soul, the ‘it’ that cannot die but must to the radical alterity of the face of the other?  Why face the totality of eternal light from the abyss of death when the other faces us; the other that is not ‘it’, that does not stand in our logic and fall with our presence?  What choice has history made for us?  What violence are we willing to promulgate to cling to our light?  As Nietzsche wrote of the waning freeze of the heroic Greek in logos, logic so light and ‘its’ logic freeze our dying cry of desperation.  All the while the other stands before us as mother, father, friend, enemy.  The other not as the hermetic seal of logic and neutrality but ‘its’ interruption.  The other is the small still voice, the call that is not of my origin nor of my history but is not alien either.  The caress that cajoles, evokes and washes over me from a time that is not my time.  What if Levinas is correct?  What if jemeinigkeit is the mould of the face of the other, the plastic cast that freezes our infantile narcissism while its cracks beckon us towards the face of the other?

More readings from “The Gift of Death”

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Patocka seems to be an interesting thinker.  On page 30 Derrida is discussing Patocka’s idea of responsibility.  He suggests that Christianity is unknowingly based on Platonic philosophy with which I agree.  He goes on to state that Platonism wants to distinguish the “orgiastic” from responsibility.  For Plato responsibility was for The Good.  However, Patocka wants to suggest that Plato’s responsibility is still orgiastic.  He thinks that Platonic knowledge still sensationalizes The Good.  Christianity’s mysterium tremendum, the unsymmetrical gaze of God is grasped by dread, faith or a ‘relation’ to God.  Because of this, responsibility is mediated, muted or resolved.  Derrida brings up the question of knowledge.  How can one have responsibility without knowledge?  Isn’t that an aporia, a conundrum or a riddle…a paradox for Christianity?   

Perhaps the question could be placed in another setting.  When responsibility is directed towards ‘knowledge” it is directed towards neutrality, the Idea, the Forms, Truth, God, Revelation, etc..  The ‘personal’ relationship to God uses terms of person but the ‘person’ never appears.  The faith appears, the ‘truth’, the ecstatic, orgiastic communion with the Holy Spirit but the Revelation is always deferred, mediated into an economy; the economy of faith.  Therefore, ‘knowledge’ has once again shown itself in the Platonic tradition of light, presence, aletheia. 

In the Hegelian tradition perhaps knowledge could be thought as terminating in the darkness of the ‘Not’, at least, as an intermediate stage before the transformation of synthesis, sublation, aufhebung.  Yet, here again, the tradition of light and the orgiastic prevail.

In Levinas the termination, the telos, is directed towards the face of the other.  Here responsibility does not end in an ‘it’ but a he or a she.  In Levinas knowledge fails in the face of the other.  Light turns in on itself as the tradition of narcissism, totality not because it takes up its own self limiting viz. self-determination but because the other faces me.  The time of the other is not my time, the anachrony of the saying that always stands before the said.  Neutrality as self knowledge, as universal logos, logic, that is always orgiastic cannot answer to the other.  Responsibility has become a he or a she and Ethics is not supplanted by reason but centered by his or her face.  Violence, the primordial retreat from the other into the totality of light, of orgiastic, can never again be rationalized, justified, ethnic-sized as the criterion is no longer a relative construct but the unique singularity of the other, the irrecoverable distance of the one that faces me.

Thoughts while reading Derrida’s work, “The Gift Of Death”

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Disclosure is a showing.  In Husserl and Heidegger phenomena is what shows itself without imputing theoria, specific ways of seeing, in an extraneous manner, in a way that changes, covers over or hides the showing.  Error is induced by not seeing what shows itself in the phenomena.  Thus if science understands space as ether we hide the showing of space as semblance, we re-present phenomena to ourselves with additional, extra-phenomenal appearance.  Heidegger wants to think space without imputing his own ideas but by analyzing various ways in which space shows itself such as space as extension (historically abstract), space as lived (experientially), space as sorge (temporal ecstasies).

When Heidegger refers to the thingness of a thing, he wants to ask us what informs us that such and such is a thing.  Is ‘thing’ a word that is self-evident and as such need not be thought further?  Heidegger thinks that in the showing of the thingness of a thing something else also shows itself, a history.  A ‘thing’ is really a hermeneutic, an interpretation that shows us more about who we are than what ‘it’ is.  He thinks that there is a long history since the Greeks that mistakes and reduces presence to what really is.  So, if we take a ‘thing’ as simply what is there in its ‘pure presence’ what we are really mistaking is our own historicality, as uniquely human, for what is showing itself.  When we see a thing, the presence of phenomena is taken hold of, pre-understood as neutral, as separate and not a subject; an object.  The whole ontology, the historical thinking of being as substance, separate from me, the subject, is already understood in seeing a “thing”.  The phenomenality of a ‘thing’ inseparably brings with it our theoria, our way of seeing as historical beings.

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Hopkins criticizes Heidegger as misunderstanding Husserl because,

“if the ‘phenomena’ of phenomenology lose their phenomenal status as the ‘exhibitive manifestation’ of the matter or matters themselves, and are understood, thereby, to be structurally coincident with that which, prior to their phenomenal (reflective) exhibition, manifest themselves as having been ‘reflexionlos (without reflection).’ This state of affairs can only be understood, from the Husserlian prerogative, in terms of the ‘ontologizing’ of the transcendental Sinn of the essence of intentionality, which misunderstands Sinn to be equivalent with the pre-transcendental, factically determined exemplars that serve as the phenomenal field for the exhibitive manifestation of transcendental Sinn.”1

Thus Hopkins thinks Heidegger transcendentally reifies Being in order to ground his analysis.2

However, Heidegger might suggest that Hopkins makes the opposite mistake, he takes particular beings as the same ‘kind’ as beings as a whole.  This was the fallacy of Antiphon that Aristotle pointed out.  It is a fallacy of equivocation.

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We can look at the argument above as a symmetrical argument that works in either direction?  Could both arguments be true but traverse from opposite directions?  In my discussion here, http://mixermuse.com/blog/2010/09/02/aristotle-and-modern-sciences/, I bring up Dr. Brogan’s discussion of Being and beings, Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle, wherein beings show themselves simultaneously as one and many.  To take the one, Being, as a universal, immutable, static whole in the tradition of Parmenides or the Ideas of Plato is to assign a priority to the pre-given, apriori.  On the other hand, to take transcendental intuition as a phenomenological reduction from facticity is to assign a priority to a particular hermeneutic of ontology.  Aristotle wants to think the one and the many, being and beings, as a co-arising, an essential, interdependent dynamic of their isness.

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Values as third person, as rules given, are given precedence by virtue of their neutrality.  The neutral is “scientific”, apodictic, impartial, omniscient and thus, modernity’s god.  The step away from responsibility as he or she, towards the totalization of an ‘it’, is a step into a transcendental sameness, a valueless objectivity, narcissism     In Nietzsche’s words “that the highest values devalue themselves.”[iii] 

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Neutrality masks what is by what is not.  Neutrality is a forgotten metaphysics in the present.  In the present it is submerged but interprets what shows itself.  Thus, it gives what we see by what is not seen, viz. the history of metaphysics.  Truth as aletheia is inseparable from semblance.  As for Hegel, the ‘not’ is already assumed in any positive idea.  The production of perception is made possible by contrast, opposition and separation.  Polemos, the god of war, is the Sisyphean perpetuity of Being to wrest truth from semblance.  The aristeia of existence is the marriage of triumph and tragedy, the ‘is’ and not, Being and nothingness.  Grace; to hold together the absolute contradiction of existence, the god-man, the call without voice…the voice of god is the Ethics of other.

1 Burt Hopkins, Intentionality in Husserl and Heidegger (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993) p. 201.

2 In Praise of Fire: Responsibility, Manifestation, Polemos, Circumspection, Ian Angus, Department of Humanities

Simon Fraser University, Submitted to The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, Vol. 4 – 2004. Edited by Burt Hopkins and Steven Crowell.

3 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1968) p. 9. Translation slightly altered.