Poetry, the Work of Life, and the World Thinking Itself

"The poet must reunite words and things, give things the names that express their nature as speech, give words the sensible potential that links them to the movement of life. This task of naming is not a work of art. It is not a matter of happy invention. It is the work of life. The poet names things in the way that things name and symbolize themselves: 'This expression or nomination is not an art; it is a second nature born from the first like a leaf from a tree.'"
Ranciere

Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art with a quotation from Emerson's "The Poet".


"The Greek interpretation of existence remains within existence, and this interpretation is this existence becoming explicit through the explication."
Heidegger 

Introduction to Phenomenological Research


"The empowering experiencing of living experience that takes itself along is the understanding intuition, the hermeneutical intuition, the originary phenomenological back-and-forth formation of the recepts and precepts from which all theoretical objectification, indeed every transcendent positing, falls out. Universality of word meanings primarily indicates something originary: wordliness of experienced experiencing."
Heidegger

The Idea of Philosophy and the Problem of Worldview in Towards the Definition of Philosophy

Graham Harman's "Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy"

I recently read Graham Harman's new book Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy, published by Zero Books, and would like to share a few thoughts concerning the book. Let me say first that it is very enjoyable. Lovecraft and phenomenology? Why the heck not! Of course the book represents what seems to be an exceptionally idiosyncratic project, arguing that a position similar to the one Hölderlin fills for Heideggerian phenomenology should be occupied by H. P. Lovecraft for thinkers of Speculative Realism. I am a passionate fan of Lovecraft but even I found the project at first audacious. Being the type of thinker I am, however, I also found this very audacity amusing and intriguing, an affect I suspect Harman intended. There is, in and of itself, a philosophically important performative force in placing Lovecraft beside accepted standard bearers of high art who have become central figures for philosophy such as Hölderlin, Mallarmé or Beckett. What would it be for Lovecraft to occupy a position of world historical importance in the manner that Heidegger thought Hölderlin did? 

Heidegger's Bremen Lectures and the Erroneous Path

I recently finished reading Andrew Mitchell's new translation of Heidegger's Bremen and Freiburg lectures of 1949 and 1957 respectively. Let me first say that the Bremen lectures in particular, from which the much better known "The Question Concerning Technology" takes its origin, are a breathtaking text both in terms of poetic beauty and powerful philosophical suggestions. I have no doubt that a portion of the text's surprising force comes from Mitchell's translation which has managed to capture the singing in Heidegger's at times oracular speech. Students of Heidegger's thought are clearly in Mitchell's debt for this much needed translation.

Updates

Sorry for me recent silence. I have been adding finishing touches to my book on Heidegger in preparation for shopping it around to publishers as well as finishing a paper or two. I have also almost finished reading Zizek's new book Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism while engaged in a reading group for the book involving a few philosophy colleagues and a practicing Lacanian psychoanalyst. I may be sharing some thoughts on the book soon. I may also get back to some posts concerning both the Heidegger Circle and the Ancient Philosophy Society.

On a totally non-philosophical topic, a good friend of mine just self-published his first fiction book in collaboration with a friend of his, entitled Captain James Hook and the Curse of Peter Pan. It is a retelling of the story of Peter Pan from the perspective of Captain Hook. Should any of my readers be interested, and have some spare time aside from philosophical labors, it is available on Amazon as an e-book and through Lulu as a paper back.

Heidegger Circle, Third Post: The "Inner Truth and Greatness" Scandal

Julia Ireland: Heidegger and the "Inner Truth of National Socialism": A New Archival Discovery

As I had suggested previously, there was a moment during this year's meeting of the Heidegger Circle that I believe is historically important. This is the case not simply because the work presented by Julia Ireland carries important implications for the study of Heidegger's thought generally but more because it is also an intercession into a larger debate concerning the status of Heidegger's thought within world historical events generally.

On Zizek on Heidegger on Hegel

I recently read a new paper by Zizek on Heidegger's criticism of Hegel. The pdf can be downloaded here. Like much of Zizek's work, it is an impressive and exciting paper particularly in the way it clarifies and presents Lacan in relation to both Heidegger and Meillassoux. I suspect this paper is something of an opening volley in the battle to come with Zizek's publication of his magnum opus, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, in April of this year. Zizek has claimed that this century will come to be known as the Hegelian century and he no doubt hopes his book will be a major step in philosophy's recognition of this fact. It may be that one of the major things standing in the way of Zizek's Hegelian Return, at least on the Continental side of the issue, is the ongoing influence of Heidegger. Heidegger himself oriented his work, as he put it, on the front in opposition to Hegel and, I would claim, this opposition continued in one form or another throughout his career.

On the Edge of the History of Being: Assessing the Terrain

I apologize for my absence but life does intrude from time to time and I have been rather busy developing several of the projects I am juggling. For the outcome of one such project, check out Existentia 2011 Volume XXI in which my paper "Discourses of Excess and the Excess of Discourse: On Georges Bataille's Lasting Influence Upon Foucault" was just recently published. Most of my time, however, has been focused on rewriting and expanding my book in preparation for sending it out to potential publishers. 

I want to take the time to fill you in on where some of my recent thought has been gravitating, specifically towards proposals that seek to reveal the limits of Heidegger's History of Being. This had already been an overt interest of mine, one that I pursued in my paper "What Homer Can Teach Us About Seynsgeschichte" which I presented at the 2011 meeting of the Heidegger Circle. In this paper I offered my own suggestion for how Heidegger's project might be extended through the resources made available to us in a focus on the transition from orality to literacy in Ancient Greece. It is a work I am still developing. Recently, however, I have been looking at often more critical engagements with his project that suggest either ways to correct and expand the project or ways to reveal its supposedly fatal inadequacies. It is this terrain I would like to begin mapping for you now in preparation for later posts in which I intend to consider more fully some of the hints or attacks I will mention here. I would like, then, to discuss (often small) parts of five books; Levinas' Totality and Infinity, Derrida's Specters of Marx, Marion's Being Given, Agamben's Homo Sacer and the collaborative work of Vattimo and Zabala Hermeneutic Communism.   

Engaging Heidegger

Here is a lovely moment from Richard Capobianco's impressive book Engaging Heidegger:

"In the final session of his lecture course The Principle of Reason in 1955-6, Heidegger, reflecting on Heraclitus' Fragment 52, likened Being to a child's play (Spiel). Being, understood originarily and fundamentally, is simply the 'play' of presencing, of emerging, a play without 'why'. 'It remains simply play,' he observes, 'but this "simply" is everything, the one, the only.' Similarly, we may say that Being is the 'clearing' that simply clears. We are cleared in the clearing. And in releasing ourselves to the clearing, we see through to the utter simplicity of our existence." (Engaging Heidegger p. 122)

On the Ontic and Ontological

I was recently accused, in a very kind manner, of confusing the ontic and ontological levels of Heidegger's perspective when I relate Ereignis to the "opening up of a world" which Heidegger claims art can bring about in the Origin of the Work of Art. I tend to take the most extreme versions of what it would be for art to open a world to be cases in which an originary event in the form of art brings into existence entirely new disclosive practices. The counter claim was that what Heidegger discusses in the Origin of the Work of Art is ontic world change while Ereignis is ontological. This would ground the idea, which I disagree with, that speaking of "originary events" on the scale of Ereignis in the plural is a mistake.

How should we conceive of the ontic-ontological distinction? For those educated in a Kant dominated philosophical context the tendency is certainly to think of it in terms of the empirical-transcendental distinction. I feel, however, that we would be much closer to Heidegger's own thoughts on the issue if we focus instead upon Emil Lask's matter-form distinction. Recognizing the difference between these two models is useful because the Kantian distinction is absolute. Transcendental structures always remain transcendental, and according to most readings of Kant they are not open to change because of events on the empirical level. Lask's matter-form distinction, however, is not absolute. What is formal on one level counts as matter on another and so on. Furthermore, these distinctions are not epistemic but rather constitute distinct ontological levels of reality. When we add Lask's principle of the material determination of form to this theory Kant's priorities are reversed. Ontologically the material level determines the formal level, thus opening up the formal to historical change. Lask, for example, discusses the formal as arising from the "involvements" or "activities" of the material. We might consider, then, the ontic level to concern what something is and the ontological level to concern how something is i.e. what mode of Being grounds the particular entity in question. Lask's theory provides the inspiration for Heidegger's concept of formal indication which functions on both the ontological (used in a common sense) and methodological level. In other words, attention to the phenomenon-matter of interest indicates the formal-ontological level which makes its existence possible, while phenomenon-matter can also indicate/give-rise-to new formal structures.

As should be clear from what I have just suggested, despite its transcendental rhetoric I take Heidegger's Being and Time to be a step in Heidegger's life long project to think the ontological level in a way which opens it up to the possibility of historical change. This is a commitment, I believe, which Heidegger developed very early on under the influence of both Lask and Dilthey. This is also what is occurring in Heidegger's analysis of Ereignis and art's opening of a world. In each case we have the seemingly material-ontic, for example concrete historical art events, giving rise to the formal-ontological, for example basic practices which open up new modes of Being which allow for new types of entities. This is very much in line with Lask's principle of the material determination of form.

In following Lask, however, the categories of ontic and ontological will not be absolute and stable. Things will be ontic on one level and ontological on another, this is part of what it means for the ontological to be open to historical change. This also means that some things are "more" ontological than others. Certain practices will be more fundamental than others. The same goes for originary events. They will be more or less fundamental, which makes it true that many, perhaps most, cases of art opening a world will not be anywhere near as basic as the event Heidegger discusses in terms of Ereignis. However, that does not mean that all such events are necessarily less basic.

On Heidegger's Realist Historicism

As previously promised, I would like to say a word or two about my claim that Heidegger can be read as a Realist Historicist. My conception of Realist Historicism is drawn from Heidegger's early engagements with the problem of the origin of concepts and meaning. Rather than explain in detail what I take Realist Historicism to be and what its origins are, both explanations I present at length elsewhere, I will allow my discussion of realism and historicism generally to make clear the outlines of my own position.

Let me say first that there are absolutely legitimate reasons to be wary of calling Heidegger a historicist or realist. Heidegger follows his teacher Husserl in explicitly rejecting historicism. He is also very clear about his rejection of the idealism/realism debate, although he spends more time rejecting idealism than realism. The reason he rejects talk of idealism and realism, and one of the reasons he rejects historicism, is because all three theoretical positions are based upon the understanding of humanity as minds relating to objects. Insofar as Heidegger rejects mentalism and the subjectivism which he claims is inherent in the subject/object epistemic view of the human condition, he also rejects the theoretical positions that grow out of it. I do not dispute any of this, rather it is at the heart of my conception of realist historicism. Despite this fact, however, it is not at all unusual to find Heidegger discussed as a Linguistic Idealist, Transcendental Idealist or Transcendental Historicist. It is largely in contrast with these positions that I have developed my discussion of Realist Historicism. Insofar as I agree with the rejection of the subject/object distinction in understanding Heidegger it would be inadequate to call Heidegger just a realist or just a historicist. The conjunction of elements of the two positions creates, I believe, a third position that is not subjectivist or dependent upon a subject/object model. Let me make clear how this is so through an attempt to define the key terms in this discussion. In each case I will offer a traditional definition, the Realist Historicist definition and at the end I will explain the added element which unites the individually incomplete conceptions of realism and historicism to form the unified position.

Traditional Historicism: The view that (1) all human knowledge is historical in nature and structured-by/relative-to the historical era in which it is found and (2) historical eras are disjunctive and unconnected. Comment: This view is a form of dogmatism and amounts to a seemingly self-contradictory claim that we can have no a-historical knowledge except for the dogmatic assertion that knowledge is relative to historical eras and historical eras are independent of each other.

Historicism in Realist Historicism: The view that (1) all human knowledge as far as we can tell and based on what we have reason to believe is structured-by/relative-to the historical era in which it occurs, (2) as of now we have no reason to believe that we have access to a-historical knowledge that would apply to all historical eras and (3) it is as possible for eras to be disjunctive as conjunctive but we have no reason to think that it is necessary or universally the case that eras share elements. Comment: This position is a form of limited skepticism, specifically a Hermeneutic skepticism which finds no reason to believe that a-historical knowledge is possible and finds no model or conception of what such knowledge would be like.

Traditional Realism: The view that (1) there is an unchanging reality independent of the human mind (Ontological Realism) and/or (2) we are able to have access to this reality (Epistemic Realism). Comment: This position is only meaningful through reference to the divide between the human mind and what is outside of that mind, even when the goal is to show that the divide can be bridged.

Realism in Realist Historicism: The view that (1) what is presumed in traditional realism to be mental or subjective arises from Reality and so there is no "mind" or "consciousness" independent from Reality. (This is captured in Heidegger's insistence that the problems of modern epistemology are, generally, theoretical conceits and distortions. Since the being investigating reality is part of the being under investigation there is no gap to be overcome.) This ontological claim, reversing ontological realism, goes together with another ontological claim relating to epistemic realism. Specifically (2) all disclosure is disclosure of Reality, so we can know Reality, but (3) all disclosure is finite, so we never know all of Reality. In other words, Reality is always more than what we have actually said or thought of it at any given time ("Language is the language of Being, as clouds are the clouds of the sky." Heidegger "The Letter on Humanism"). This may, but need not, mean that Reality is independent at points from language or human practice (if the phrase "at points" is even meaningful in this context). We can't, however, say what this this would mean even as we can't say what history without time, or Dasein without history, would mean even though the skepticism we encountered in our discussion of historicism requires us to admit such things may be possible if not imaginable.

The Added Element: As I mentioned earlier, I believe that the new definitions of both historicism and realism are incomplete without the other. Specifically, our definition of historicism leaves undetermined what it means for something to be "historical" or why/how something can be "relative to a historical era". Similarly, our definition of realism fails to address what realism actually looks like when we have taken out those problematic terms "mind", "consciousness" or "subjectivity" which is necessary if realism is to have any meaning in a Heideggerian context. The completion of both definitions rests in an understanding of practices as the being of history and the being of the investigating entity which is mistakenly thought of as mind divided from reality. This shows up, for example, in Heidegger's conception of historicity i.e. the way in which humans are a carrying forward of inheritances and a projecting of these into the future so that things come to disclosure as meaningful within the "light" of the inherited project. History is made possible by these ongoing temporal events which, for short, we could call practices.

Realist Historicism: The view that (1) as far as we can tell and based on what we have reason to believe everything we know or experience shows up within human practices. Indeed, it is unclear what something would be without the mediation of practices. This is also the case for "subjectivity" or the "mind". This leads to two possible conclusions (2) either Reality just is ongoing practices or gives rise to practices as its mode of appearance. (As a side note, this allows for two types of Realist Historicism. There is what I sometimes call Practice Ontology which holds to the first option, and Heidegger's position which holds to the second as I shall discuss.) Heidegger's belief in origins and originary events (Ereignis) suggests that he held the second view since originary events arise independent of previously existing practices. In other words, the event ontology which is Heidegger's brand of Realist Historicism allows for two distinct types of events. Practices (i.e. ongoing events with origins) and Originary Events from which practices take their origin. The addition of practices as the ontological ground of our previous discussion of realism and historicism is clarified by a distinct characteristic of practices which ties into Heidegger's teleological world-holism. Specifically, practices are like words in that the existence of one word requires the existence of many words. This leads to the claim that (3) practices (as far as we have reason to believe) are interconnected and interdependent. Similarly, the temporal nature of practices means they (4) are historical and indeed, as Heidegger argues, the ontological ground of history.

When one combines 1, 3, and 4 from above one sees clearly that everything we know or experience depends upon the total complex of practices within which it arises and this complex is historical (i.e. temporally changing and tied to the coming-to-be and passing-away of practices and/or Originary Events in the past). This is Historicism. When one combines 1 and 2 we get our Realism.

Heidegger's "Evening Conversation"

As tends to happen, the SPEP discounts led to an influx of new books at my home. Amongst them are Tracy Colony's translation of Heidegger's 1920 lecture course Phenomenology of Intuition and Expression, Richard Capobianco's Engaging Heidegger, and Bret Davis' translation of Heidegger's Country Path Conversations. It is this last text I would like to briefly discuss now.

I had heard Davis discuss the process of translating the Country Path Conversations while at the meeting of the Heidegger Circle this past May and so had been looking forward to getting my hands on the book. As Davis tells us in his Afterword, Heidegger wrote these dialogues in the winter of 1944-45 when World War II was drawing to its end. We are familiar in translation with the nature of these dialogues primarily from "Conversations on a Country Path" which appears in the Discourse on Thinking and consists of a portion of the larger "Triadic Conversation" which is the first of the three dialogues in Davis' translation.

When I received the book I went immediate to the final dialogue entitled "Evening Conversation: In a Prisoner of War Camp in Russian, between a Younger and an Older Man". Although these dialogues represent an essential move in the changes in Heidegger's thought which occurred throughout the 30s and 40s, I have to admit that what drew me to this last dialogue was more of a historical and biographical than a strictly philosophical interest. Heidegger's sons were held in a Russian prisoner of war camp and were, I believe, still being so held at the time when he wrote this dialogue. If ever there was to be an insight into Heidegger's feelings towards the catastrophic events through which the world passed during the 30s and 40s it would, I felt, be found here. I was not, I feel, disappointed. This dialogue, which is born from a sudden feeling of healing experienced by a younger prisoner, becomes a meditation upon healing, waiting, devastation, malice and rage as well as the question of the identity of a people and the problem of nationalism. In the course of it Heidegger, although not in his own voice, offers us some of the most direct expressions of his feelings towards Nazis Germany I have seen (the places where he claimed to have struggled in thought against the Nazis during the 1930s, for example in his Nietzsche lectures and his Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), tend to be far less transparent.) If, however, we want to mention some elements of philosophical import I was particularly struck by the way in which the dialogue identifies the concept of a nation and the connected nationalism with subjectivism and the dominance of an interest in "work for the sake of increased possibility of work".

Here then are a few striking moments, without further comment on my part, from the dialogue:

"Older Man: ...And what is not all wounded and torn apart in us? - us, for whom a blinded leading-astray of our own people is too deplorable to permit wasting a complaint on, despite the devastation that covers our native soil and its helplessly perplexed humans."

"Older Man: This waiting people would - especially during a time when its essence still eludes it, and precisely because of this still unexperienced waiting essence - be endangered like no other.
Younger Man: And indeed, this people would be endangered not by threats from outside, but rather by the fact that it would tyrannize itself with its own ignorant impatience, and so would spur itself on to continual mistakes.
Older Man: And it would even do all this in the opinion that it is thereby following its essence, which would have to finally fight to win recognition from the side of other peoples.
Younger Man: While in fact this rash pseudo-essence remains a perpetually maldroit imitation of the foreign.
Older Man: It this people were to ever become a people that waits, then it would have to remain indifferent to whether others listen to it or not.
Younger Man: This people could also never, so long as it would know its essence, insist on its waiting essence as on a special calling and distinction.
...
Older Man: You mean that by becoming those who wait, we first become German?
Younger Man: Not only is this what I mean - since early this morning, it is what I know. Yet we will not become German so long as we plan to find 'the German' by means of analyzing our supposed 'nature'. Entangled in such intentions we merely chase after what is national, which, after all, as the word says, insists on what is naturally given.
Older Man: Why do you speak so severely against the national?
...
Younger Man: The idea of the nation is that representation in whose circle-of-vision a people bases itself on itself as a foundation given from somewhere, and makes itself into a subject. And to this subject everything then appears as what is objective, which means that everything appears only in the light of its subjectivity.
Older Man: Nationality is nothing other than the pure subjectivity of a people that purports to rely on its 'nature' as what is actual, from out of which and back to which all effecting is supposed to go.
Younger Man: Subjectivity has its essence in that the human - the individual, groups, and the realms of humanity - rises up to base itself on himself and to assert himself as the ground and measure of what is actual. With this rebellious uprising into subjectivity emerges the uprising into work as that form of achieving by means of which the devastation of the earth is everywhere prepared for and ultimately established as unconditional.
...
Young Man: The national and international are so decidedly the selfsame that both, by basing themselves on subjectivity and insisting on what is actual, know just as little - and above all can know just as little - whose business it is that they are incessantly conducting.
Older Man: The business of the devastation, and that means of work for the sake of increased possibilities for work. Thus we cannot become German - which means those who poetize and think, that is, those who wait - so long as we chase after the German in the sense of something national."

"Younger Man: And for a long time this may perhaps be the sole content of our teaching: the need and the necessity of the unnecessary."

Objectification, Representional Thought and Enframing

"If modern physics must resign itself ever increasingly to the fact that its realm of representation remains inscrutable and incapable of being visualized, this resignation is not dictated by any committee of researchers. It is challenged forth by the rule of enframing which demands that nature be orderable as standing-reserve. Hence physics, in its retreat from the kind of representation that turns only to objects, which has been the sole standard until recently, will never be able to renounce this one thing: that nature report itself in some way or other that is identifiable through calculation and that it remain orderable as a system of information. This system is then determined by a causality that has changed once again. Causality now displays neither the character of the occasioning that brings forth nor the nature of the causa efficiens, let alone that of the causa formalis. It seems as though causality is shrinking into a reporting - a reporting challenged forth - of standing-reserve that must be guaranteed either simultaneously or in sequence."

I would like to give some thought to this quotation from Heidegger's "Question Concerning Technology". Much of Heidegger's work expresses concern over the distortive epistemic picture which occurs when we conceive of humans primarily as isolated minds interacting with independent objects. It is a rejection of this subject/object model of the human condition which is at the heart of Heidegger's critique of Descartes and his ongoing concern with the dominance of subjectivism in much Neo-Kantian philosophy and aesthetics as well as in Husserl's post-Logical Investigations work. Indeed it was the overcoming of the modern epistemic picture which Heidegger saw in Husserl's categorial intuition and which first drew Heidegger to the work of Husserl.

Related to the rejection of the subject/object epistemic picture is also Heidegger's rejection of the conception of knowledge as primarily representational. Indeed both his presentation of understanding in Being and Time and his conception of truth as most primordially aletheia or unconcealment are attempts to phenomenologically describe a space of shared lived involvement out of which subjects and objects arise as secondary abstractions. We see this same strategy in Heidegger's non-representational conception of the connection between truth and art found in "The Origin of the Work of Art". On this note it is particularly instructive to recognize that the truth revealed by the example of Van Gogh's painting of shoes is precisely what is not represented within the painting, specifically the world of the shoes' owner.

It is easy, therefore, to fall into the interpretation of the late Heidegger's conception of enframing which understands enframing's transformation of everything into standing-reserve, i.e. raw material, as a process of objectification. For example, when we contemplate the process whereby people become "human resources" it is very easy to consider this an example of objectification. There is also a sense in which this is not wrong. Enframing does indeed seem to first show up as the dominance of a certain type of purely representational thought which moves back and forth between a radical subjectivism in which man is the measure of all things and the connected radical objectification in which all things become simply objects for use. But part of Heidegger's larger point is that the epistemic world view which finds its most extreme manifestation in enframing is self-defeating. The triumph of the subject/object model of reality ends up doing away with both subjects and objects. Let us say more about what this might mean and how it relates to suggestions I have made concerning science and Speculative Realism in previous blog posts, for example here and here.

The rise of enframing is intimately connected with the role played by calculation in the birth of modern science. Specifically, with Galileo's division of primary from secondary qualities, whether something can be mathematically measured becomes the ultimate ontological standard. On the one hand, this ontological revolution limits the 'really real' to what is secure in the sense of remaining inter-subjectively constant. This dependability gets conceptualized as objectivity. Secondary qualities are rejected precisely because their is something unreliable about them, and this insecurity is translated into their being subjective. On the other hand, the mathematical standard of reality makes the mark of objectivity and reality non-experiential characteristics which depend upon specific human practices of abstraction. The implications of this historical development and the paradox I have attempt to gesture towards was already investigated by Husserl in his Crisis of the European Sciences. Indeed Husserl's conception of the crisis has several useful connections with Heidegger's own later conception of enframing.

The interesting point for us right now is that the abstract nature of mathematical characteristics suggests that a totally mathematical conception of reality would precisely not be representational or objectifying. This is so insofar as totally mathematical entities are not experiential. For example, we can symbolize 'one' or 'triangle' but we can not make representations of them insofar as representations require shared characteristics and we do not experience any such characteristics. This means that mathematics can not, strictly speaking, represent if by representation we mean something that can be experienced, or entertained in the mind, as a picture or model of something else. Of course we speak of mathematical models, but according to this view the phrase "mathematical model" is inaccurate. We have symbols of supposedly mathematical realities, but we don't have models consisting of mathematical characteristics which represent realities.

The entire previous discussion only follows if one entertains a certain nominalist conception of abstraction to which Husserl would object but, I have argued elsewhere, Heidegger likely would not. From this nominalist perspective, the reality underlying supposedly abstract characteristics or entities are specific practices of naming, discussing or thinking about concrete entities as organized into various groups. (Wittgenstein at times presents the view I have in mind, as briefly discussed here.) The abstract mathematical entity 'one' is, then, the practice of talking about, for example, a single coffee cup, a single book, a single dream, and a single dog as occupying the same group. There is, then, no mental entity 'one' and no real worldly entity 'one' but there is a social entity made out of a vast web of social practices which constitutes 'one'.

Putting aside this rather messy topic, the important point is that grasping something like mathematical truths amounts to being able to perform concrete worldly actions in a way which is in line with the standard mathematical practice. When we extend this view to a mathematical symbolization of reality we see that the "accuracy" of a symbolization will rest in its predictive power even as my grasp of a mathematical concept rests in my behaving predictably in line with the standard mathematical practice. When, then, we turn to those sciences which deal often exclusively with mathematical symbolizations of reality, such as theoretical physics, we are no longer dealing with any objectification or representation. Rather, everything is seen in terms of secured usability since to accurately mathematically symbolize simply means to make something predictable and manipulable without the need of coming into contact with any experience or model of the thing in question at all. This lines up with my rejection of the realist reading of cosmology on the part of some speculative realists. What much science offers us is not a story, model, or representation of nature but rather a symbolization tool securing future concrete outcomes. In these cases prediction is not an application of theory it is the meaning and being of theory. We see this nicely when Popper describes a good scientific hypothesis in purely futural terms. A hypothesis is a negative prediction insofar as it forbids something to happen, this is its meaning and the test of its value even if it is couched in terms of a story about what happened in the past.

To return to our opening quotation, physics for Heidegger eschews representation and objectification insofar as it translates reality into a mathematical symbolization whose meaning is the prediction of events. In other words, far from a representation, what physics offers us is a list of information about what will happen either unconditionally or if various events or actions occur. In this sense, then, these types of sciences are no longer in the business of offering accurate descriptions of nature but rather in the business of structuring and securing the use of nature.

Words, The Fossils of Concepts?

Check out the exceptionally enjoyable and interesting essay by the Leibniz scholar Justin E. H. Smith over at the great site 3 Quarks Daily.

Aside from offering a fascinating explanation for why the phrase "cheap whore" is an oxymoron and how the word "whore" is related to the word "charity", Professor Smith also calls for the creation of a paleontological branch of concept analysis which takes the study of etymology as a compliment to the study of concepts proper. This, of course, is based on the assumption that concepts are something more, less, or other than the words which express them.

In the course of calling for an etymological paleontology Professor Smith touches upon both Heidegger and Foucault. In supposed disagreement with Heidegger, whom he claims thought that the etymology of words directly provides access to what people who used those words were actually thinking, Smith calls for a practice that "takes the analysis of etymologies seriously not because they tell you what word-users are thinking, as Heidegger seems to have supposed in his reflections on the exceptional profundity of the Greek language, but rather what they have forgotten, what must have been at least dimly present to some speaker's mind at some point, even if the idea has receded so far into the past that the word once associated with it can now be expressed without implicating the idea at all."

Interestingly, at least for Heidegger scholars, Heidegger's analysis of truth as aletheia very often suggests precisely what Smith's paleontology would assume, namely that the etymology of the word directs our attention to how the concept in its early formation must have been thought even if later users of the word no longer thought in that way. It is precisely truth as unconcealment which Heidegger believes was mostly forgotten by the time philosophy proper got off the ground in Ancient Greece. Heidegger's etymology very often moves in the direction of clarifying what thought thinks in the mode of forgottenness. This alone might suggest that Heidegger's history of being is none too far from Smith's etymological paleontology. (It may also be the case that there is a shift from Heidegger's early involvement with Greek philosophy during which he does think Aristotle, for example, fully thought truth as unconcealment and his later work when he sees clearly that even the pre-Socratic philosophers are dealing with an insight that has been mostly forgotten but preserved in the language.)

In attempting to assess how close Heidegger, or contemporary Heideggarians, are to the analysis Smith is calling for the key point would likely rest on what we are to make of the idea that concept and word can be, at least in the course of analysis, somehow disconnected. Perhaps a Heideggerian, who might want to avoid the mentalistic implications of focusing too extensively upon concepts as something like meanings entertained in the mind, can make a similar distinction in terms of a word and what comes to unconcealment through the use of the word. It is fairly easy to see how the way that a word, or way of speaking, lights up the world during the course of everyday use is not necessarily the same as the etymological history of that word although the two things are very importantly, and unavoidably, connected. I do think a good Heideggerian would probably have to insist that it is not possible to have a complete and clear grasp of what a word causes to show up for us (i.e. its concept/meaning) without looking at the word's history and etymology. The Heideggerian view of meaning seems to necessitate that any meaning disconnected from the history of the meaning's development will fall prey to obscurities, contradictions and a general lack of clarity. But this is not to say that what I currently mean by a word, and what that word causes to show up for us, is the full richness of its etymological history or what that word meant at a time closer to its origin. It seems that this is clearly not the case both for us and for Heidegger.

How should we think the History of Being?

I have been having a wonderful conversation in the comments section of my most recent post with the author of the blog Seynsgeschichte. Our conversation there had finally wandered into territory a little remote from the original blog post so I figured I would move it into a new blog post and come up with an excuse to continue the conversation and invite/encourage any other readers of this blog to join in. In his last comment Pseudonoma stated:

"As far as Seynsgeschichte itself, however, I am against all amorphous "loose" descriptions, and am equally dissatified by "narrative" accounts --which is why what you are saying, being neither one of these --is of great interest to me. For my own part I have a very particular reading of Seynsgeschichte, one which claims SG to elude all Niezschean or Foucalutian genealogy, while not simply refering to transhistorical universals, or any other for of seiendenheit."

I agree that Heidegger's conception of the history of Being is different from the histories of both Nietzsche and Foucault and also not concerned with the trans-historical. Let me say a little about the issue of Nietzsche and Foucault. I think that in Nietzsche's case, the concept of truth and a true history has been so problematized that his genealogies are to be thought primarily in strategic or (non-Heideggerian) poetic terms. They are re-descriptions which seek to shift the dominant metaphors through which we think key concepts. This isn't exhaustive of Nietzsche's history but it does make clear the sense in which history is always a history of the present, i.e. it is always a working over and working upon of current issues with the goal of bringing about future changes. In this sense history is strategic and not representational of "what actually happened" (an ontological entity whose very existence Nietzsche would call into question). I believe that Foucault's histories are similarly strategic histories of the present which refuse any belief in an "accurate" account but which general, nonetheless, follow the strategy of deriving historical change from within the micro power-structures which pre-exist the change in question. Some thinkers have claimed Heidegger must also hold such a view, i.e. that changes in the nature of the totality of practices for a life-world must derive from the practices which were in existence before the change occurred. I have called this, from time to time, the causal conception of history which understands historical events as caused by things which came before them. This seems an entirely inadequate way to conceptualize Heidegger's understanding of "ereignis", which I will generally translate as an "originary event". Heidegger's conception of history is not purely strategic, as he has not given up on the idea of truth but has rather altered the conception of it, and it is not causal insofar as originary events need not be understood as derived from what came temporally before them. I could say a lot more here but I will stop at these very brief suggestions for now.

I would like to hear more about how precisely Pseudonoma understands a "loose" description and a "narrative" account of the History of Being. I suspect I know what he means but I don't want to assume too much.

The introductory gesture having been made, then, I would like to offer two Heidegger quotations to get us on our way. Both are drawn from Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism" as it appears in Krell's Martin Heidegger Basic Writings. The first quotation is a bit of a side issue, as it glances back towards the relation of Sartre to history as well as Sartre's ability to relate to Marx, but I feel it suggests that some of what I had previously suggested about Sartre's a-historicality was also on Heidegger's mind:

"But since neither Husserl nor - so far as I have seen till now - Sartre recognizes the essential importance of the historical in Being, neither phenomenology nor existentialism enters that dimension within which a productive dialogue with Marxism first becomes possible." (p. 243)

The next quotation will be lengthy but I think it provides us with some starting material for a consideration of the History of Being:

"When philosophy attends to its essence it does not make forward strides at all. It remains where it is in order constantly to think the Same. Progression, that is, progression forward from this place, is a mistake that follows thinking as the shadow that thinking itself casts. Because Being is still unthought, Being and Time too says of it, "there is/it gives." Yet one cannot speculate about this il y a precipitately and without a foothold. This "there is/it gives" rules as the destiny of Being. Its history comes to language in the words of essential thinkers. Therefore the thinking that thinks into the truth of Being is, as thinking, historical. There is not a 'systematic' thinking and next to it an illustrative history of past opinions. Nor is there, as Hegel thought, only a systematics that can fashion the law of its thinking into the law of history and simultaneously subsume history into the system. Thought in a more primordial way, there is the history of Being to which thinking belongs as recollection of this history, propriated by it. Such recollective thought differs essentially from the subsequent presentation of history in the sense of an evanescent past. History does not take place primarily as a happening. And its happening is not evanescence. The happening of history occurs essentially as the destiny of the truth of Being and from it. Being comes to destiny in that It, Being, gives itself. But thought in terms of such destiny this says: its gives itself and refuses itself simultaneously. Nonetheless, Hegel's definition of history as the development of 'Spirit' is not untrue. Neither is it partly correct and partly false. It is as true as metaphysics, which through Hegel first brings to language its essence - thought in terms of the absolute - in the system. Absolute metaphysics, with its Marxian and Nietzschean inversions, belongs to the history of the truth of Being. Whatever stems from it cannot be countered or even cast aside by refutations. It can only be taken up in such a way that its truth is more primordially sheltered in Being itself and removed from the domain of mere human opinion. All refutation in the field of essential thinking is foolish. Strife among thinkers is the 'lovers' quarrel' concerning the matter itself. It assists them mutually toward a simple belonging to the Same, from which they find what is fitting for them in the destiny of Being." (p. 238-239)

From Nietzsche and the One to Heidegger and the Nothing

"The impasse of the Parmenides is that of establishing that both the one and the others [i.e. the many or multiple] do and do not possess all thinkable determinations, that they are totally everything and that they are not so. We are thus led to a general ruin of thought as such by the entire dialectic of the one." Alain Badiou Being and Event

One could assert that a major element in the history of philosophy stretches from Plato's dizzying Parmenides to a moment in Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols. Although Nietzsche is not directly invoked, Badiou certainly sees his work as taking off from a realization that the thinking of the one and the many has been at the very heart of philosophy since its appearance in Plato as inspired by the Pre-Socratics and that, generally, we have not escaped from the manner in which Plato presented the problem in the course of his works. It is this escape that Badiou wants to stage drawing, fundamentally, upon a failure in the way that the Parmenides conceived of the problem.

The reason I suggest the history of the problem could be read as stretching from Plato to Nietzsche is because Nietzsche's unparalleled assault upon the two world dualism, which he sees as the heart of almost all metaphysics, can be read as a version of this same problem of the one and the many. Indeed, there is a way to read the conclusion of both Plato and Nietzsche's grappling with this problem as indicating, against each of their conscious wills, the way to jump out of the dialectic. It is, I would argue, precisely this point which Heidegger sees when he suggests that the challenge for philosophy now is to think the Nothing.

The Parmenides ends with an exhausting attempt to think out the speculative implications of positing the existence of The One and The Many. The conclusions, roughly, are that if The One exists it must be the only thing which can be thought to exist and all difference and plurality must be illusion. One of the main ideas here is that similarity and difference between things, such that we could compare The One to others, requires that parts or elements be discernible within The One and thus present or lacking in the others. However, if The One is truly one it has no parts and no elements, no characteristics which can be divided from its oneness. So, if The One exists we do away with similarity and difference, and thus with plurality. But, if this is the case, then oneness becomes meaningless and unthinkable.

"Thus if one is, the one is all things and is not even one, both in relation to itself and, likewise, in relation to the others." Plato's Parmenides

On the other hand, if The One does not exist we are left with an unthinkable multiplicity. This multiplicity is unthinkable because, again, similarity requires some level of oneness which is, in some sense, not total oneness. In other words, for the multiplicity to be a multiplicity of things we need a way to think the oneness of a thing and the oneness implied in sharing something with other things. The communion required for similarity itself requires oneness. This leads us to the ultimate conclusion of the dialogue:

"If one is not, nothing is."

It is possible to read the dialogue as a defense of the Parmenidean point that the ultimate truth of reality must be that change and difference are illusions. The one must be, but if the one is it must be all. However, as Badiou reads it for example, the dialogue actually demonstrates that the relation between the one and the many is the reef upon which the ship of thought is ruined. But, as our discussion should suggest, this reef is really the problem of similarity and it is this reef, I would claim, upon which Nietzsche built his entire life's work. (Think I mixed metaphors there? I rather think I didn't. If ever there was a thinker who willfully sought to build a perpetually changing and endangered edifice upon shifting submerged reefs of thought it was Nietzsche.)

If we look at some of Nietzche's early work we find a thread that continues throughout the course of the rest of his work. This thread is found, for example, in Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense when we are told that similarity and, eventually, truth are built out of the basic "lies" created through the limiting nature of our senses and the metaphoric nature of thought and language. All sameness, unity, stability and generality are constructed, artificially, through basic illusions overlaid on an actual flux of change and difference. Reality, then, is the unthinkable multiplicity without similarity or continuity and all else is a poetic creation. This same point is repeated throughout Nietzsche's work surfacing, for example, in The Gay Science and finally in Twilight of the Idols. If we look at the section "'Reason' in Philosophy" in Twilight of the Idols we see very clearly the presentation of reason as precisely this lie, or metaphor, constructing collection of instincts. However, it becomes clear that the drive to posit similarity goes beyond the construction of our everyday experience of the world. It eventually gives rise to the complete rejection of this world precisely because we STILL find, after all our processes of falsification of experience, too much change in the world. This leads to the positing of another world, the Real world, which is stable, unchanging and in comparison with which the world of experience and multiplicity must be rejected. We can see as well, here, the connection between this artificial origin of similarity/relation and the positing of a final, ultimate, singular perspective which would count as the Truth about any given subject. To achieve Truth is to see things from that perspective from which all difference and change disappears as illusory. From the rejection of this view we get Nietzsche's perspectivalism.

There is, however, a problem with the very chain of ideas I have just presented for Nietzsche. The problem is that the original insight that similarity is artificial arises from a Real World vs. Illusion dichotomy and, indeed, in Truth and Lies in an Extramoral Sense Nietzsche is at his most Schopenhauerian and metaphysical. For him, at that time, there sometimes seems to be a hidden ultimate reality, a thing in itself, which is something like chaos, flux or Will to Power. I believe Nietzsche ultimately does not hold to this commitment, but it is necessary in order to get into the viewpoint I have been presenting. The rejection of two world dualism, then, originates from a two world dualism.

It is precisely this point, in a lovely echo of Plato's Parmenides, that Nietzsche presents so clearly in the section of Twilight of the Idols entitled "How the 'Real World' at last Became a Myth". There we see how the two world dualism of Plato eventually leads to its own overcoming, just as the positing of either The One or The Many eventually lead to the collapse of both. The end of the story, likewise, is the same as the end of the Parmenides. Specifically, we end with a very troubling paradox.

"We have abolished the real world: what world is left? the apparent world perhaps? ... But no! with the real world we have also abolished the apparent world!"

This same paradox leads both Nietzsche and the characters in the Parmenides to the same conclusion:

"If one is not, nothing is." Plato

"The characteristics which have been assigned to the 'real being' of things are the characteristics of non-being, of nothingess -" Nietzsche

Although not seemingly the intended meaning, both moments in the history of metaphysics point us to the necessity of thinking the Nothing and its relation to being. What would it mean to reject the One, and thus the Many, and instead assert Nothingness? What does it mean to say that the characteristics of being are precisely those of the Nothing? This is the question which Heidegger believed could get us beyond nihilism and which Badiou, in a totally different manner from Heidegger, also seeks to answer.

The Limits of Thought and the Histories of Madness and Being

My recent posts touching on Meillassoux and Wittgenstein led me to contemplate the concept of the unthinkable. It seems worth asking what the limits of thought, if there are any, really tell us.

The idea of the unthinkable in one form or another crops up in many philosophical contexts. As we have seen, for Meillassoux the fact that the contingency of any given state of affairs is thinkable is a particularly important point. The distinction between the thinkable and unthinkable, then, clearly carries a lot of weight here. In a very different context, John McDowell in Mind and World presents the Kantian view that a thought without representational content would not be a thought at all: "For a thought to be empty would be for there to be nothing that one thinks when one thinks it; that is, for it to lack what I am calling 'representational content'. That would be for it not really to be a thought at all, and that is surely Kant's point..." Our discussion of the unthinkable, then, includes the question of what is required for something to actually be a thought such that anything lacking this bare requirement would not be possible as thought at all. This subject has traditionally also come up, for example within logical positivism, as the distinction between the meaningful and the meaningless. You could, for example, state a meaningless sentence but if thought deals with something like bringing to consciousness various meanings, whether this means representations or something else, then a meaningless sentence can not be thought even if it can be said or written. We might also recall the absolute idealist as presented by Meillassoux who claims that being without consciousness is unthinkable. From this perspective I can state something like "The world can exist independent of all consciousness" but I can not imagine or bring to consciousness what the world would be or would be like independent of consciousness, and so I can not think the world without a consciousness that is aware of it. Elsewhere I have also suggested that we might want to distinguish the unthinkable from the unimaginable.

I had offered a Wittgenstein quotation in a previous post in order to suggest that the limit of thought, that which determines the thinkable and unthinkable, need not be a characteristic internal to thought in the sense of logical laws or formal characteristics. In fact the limits of thought need have nothing to do with some natural or supernatural faculty of the mind called reason or the internal capabilities of the mind. Rather, the limit of thought could be determined by the way of life and history within which one is thinking. In order to make this point Wittgenstein unifies thought and speech/action. This should come as no surprise for someone who suggests that meaning is use, and specifically use in social practices involving others, and not the possession of an inner mental entity. This unification of thought with speech and action allows Wittgenstein to suggest that the limits of thought are derived from what one can or cannot say or do in a social context and still achieve one's goals. The limits of thought are found, then, in social practices and traditions. What is unthinkable tells us about "how we do things around here" and not about the ontological truths of the universe.

The last sentence of my last paragraph is overstated, however. If we read Wittgenstein as a naturalist (which, I admit, I don't often like to do) we see that the limits of a way of life tell us about the environmental conditions in which that way of life developed and the setting in which it still lives. A way of life is not arbitrarily structured, but rather tells us something about the world. In this sense, then, we have simply complicated the way in which the limits of thought tell us about the world. The unthinkable is not absolutely-unthinkable but it is also not without meaning and importance. In many cases it may be unthinkable for a reason.

As I considered this interpretation of Wittgenstein it struck me that the needed addition to this story is Foucault, particularly Foucault's History of Madness which talks about the shifting formation of the limits of thought through a social-political history. What is unthinkable, then, tells us something about the power structures of inclusion and exclusion which have constituted western rationality. This shift to Foucault also serves to present us with the vast body of text which constitutes the record of the unthinkable/unsayable. By this I, of course, mean the collective documentation of the speech and writing of the mad or insane.

It is those originary moments when society formulated or shifted the exclusionary boundary between the mad and non-mad that Foucault is concerned with. About the event of the constitution of a fundamental exclusion Foucault states:

"That is not yet madness, but the first caesura from which the division of madness became possible. That division is its repetition and intensification, its organization in the tight unity of the present; the perception that Western man has of his own time and space allows a structure of refusal to appear, on the basis of which a discourse is denounced as not being language, a gesture as not being a oeuvre, a figure as having no rightful place in history. This structure is constitutive of what is sense and nonsense, or rather of that reciprocity through which the one is bound to the other..." (History of Madness p. xxxii).

In an appendix added to the text in 1972 Foucault will point out that exclusion and transgression of exclusionary boundaries can occur through action or through speech/writing. He further suggests that the history of madness involves a movement from a focus upon transgression through action, in the medieval and Renaissance period, towards a focus on transgression through language in the rise of the modern concept of insanity and especially in the appearance of psychoanalysis. He also points out that these two forms of transgression are not direct reflections of each other. Rather, "that which must not appear on the level of speech is not necessarily that which is forbidden in the order of acts. The Zuni, who forbid the incest of the brother and a sister nevertheless narrate it, and the Greeks told the legend of Oedipus. Inversely, the 1808 code abolished the old penal laws against sodomy, but the language of the nineteenth century was far more intolerant of homosexuality (at least in its masculine form) than the language of previous ages had been." (History of Madness p. 544-545)

The exclusionary decisions, then, which constitute the limits of speech and thus the limits of thought are organized, Foucault suggests, into four groups. First there are the laws of the grammar of the language in question. Here a failure to conform most overtly appears as a failure to achieve meaning. Next we have cases of blasphemy, where something can be grammatically said but is considered taboo. Following this we have the class of things which are not obviously blasphemous, and are also not grammatical failures, but which remain excluded from general discourse. This is the realm of censorship, where something may not be taboo but it may be political or socially repressed. Finally is the realm which seems to interest Foucault the most, specifically those forms of language which appear to conform to the first three requirements and yet which also can be read on a self-constituted register of meaning of their own. This is a speech which constitutes a surplus of meaning, and often an entirely different realm of meaning, which endangers the realm of the meaningful constituted by previous exclusions.

In this way, then, Foucault provides us with strategies for analyzing the constitution of the limits of thought in terms of important political events while a certain reading of Wittgenstein pushes us in the direction of seeing the limits of thought and, arguably, political structures as naturalistic outgrowths of environments. These two positions, of course, need not be exclusive but Foucault's work does problematize what access we could ever have to the "naturalistic lesson" of political structures and changes insofar as we are always caught within, and limited by, the political structures which have come about because of these changes. The "natural" becomes very problematic here to say the least.

It is at this point that it seems necessary to look to Heidegger's project of the History of Being which attempts to trace the various ways in which it has been historically possible to speak the nature of Being. What each of our previous considerations reveals, when viewed from the lens of Heidegger's History of Being, is that ontology is the study of the ways in which the ultimate nature of being has been able to be spoken/thought. This study, however, reveals an epochal structure through which different exclusionary realms of the sayable-thinkable have been constituted and closed off. Granted, I have been painting with an exceptionally broad brush throughout this blog post and I will now do so even more, but we might hazard to say that contrary to naturalistic hopes there is no single unified foundational story to tell about the truth of being, but rather a shifting diverging history, and yet the study of the political history of the thinkable is ontology. (This is one reason I get annoyed when people fail to see Foucault as a profoundly ontological thinker. I believe he saw this last point, under the influence of Heidegger, perfectly well.)

This would mean as well, as an aside, that Meillassoux's presentation of the realm of the arch-fossil and the attempted absolutization of facticity are ontologically important but, as historically constituted and contextualized, not the absolute truth of Being.

Heidegger and Sartre in the 1930s

I just found out another interesting historical tid-bit about the philosophical environment of the 1930s, this time having to do with the movement of Heidegger's work into France.

I enjoy the work of Sartre but when looked at as a reading of Heidegger, which is obviously not the only way to look at Sartre, it always struck me as an attempt to import Descartes into Heidegger's overt attempt to decidedly move away from Descartes. Sartre is individualist and, arguably, from a Heideggerian perspective his obsession with radical freedom is just misguided. However, if you read my previous post about Heidegger in the 1930s, you will recall that I do believe Heidegger went through an overly individualist phase in which he too was obsessed with what, both before and after the 30s, he would consider a philosophically mistaken conception of freedom.

Now the historical tid-bit. The first work of Heidegger's Sartre read was Henry Corbin's translation of Heidegger's "What is Metaphysics". He read it in 1931, and it was given as a lecture by Heidegger in 1929. For a discussion of this fact see Ethan Kleinberg's Generation Existential from which I am drawing this information about Sartre. Not only is it fascinating that in "What is Metaphysics" Heidegger more directly questions the Nothing, which will become so central to Sartre, but for me it is interesting to note that this was the start of what I consider Heidegger's individualist period of the early and mid 30s, with an odd focus on individual freedom occupying a portion of the text.

Granted, I have not yet decided where "What is Metaphysics" falls in my interpretation of Heidegger's thought in the 1930s. I am going to go back and reread the work to clarify my own position on it. But if it fits Heidegger's more individualist freedom oriented position of, say, Introduction to Metaphysics or the Origin of the Work of Art lectures, rather than the final published form the work takes, then it is possible to say not that Sartre radically misconstrued Heidegger but rather that he read Heidegger at what I would consider to be his worst. Of course this wasn't helped by problems in the translation of Heidegger into French.

Heidegger in the 1930s

In 1935 Heidegger taught the lecture course "Introduction to Metaphysics". In it he included a discussion of a chorus from the second act of Sophocles' Antigone and his own translation of this chorus. Heidegger had prepared, however, two different translations of the chorus. I find it absolutely fascinating that the tensions, and I would say mistakes, with which Heidegger was struggling in this terrible period are captured in the vast distance between the translations of the opening lines of the chorus. Here are the two translations in English, taken from a footnote in Letters 1925-1975: Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger edited by Ursula Ludz and translated by Andrew Shields:

"Manifold uncanniness reigns/ and nothing uncannier than man"

"Manifold the uncanny, nothing but / above and beyond man something more uncanny moves itself, moving"

The first translation is also the one which appears in Heidegger's later book version of the course Introduction to Metaphysics as translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt.

Clearly the tension between these translations rests in the question of whether there is anything uncannier than man beyond him, or whether man is what is ultimately uncanny. The first translation is consistent with the view, offered by Heidegger in Introduction to Metaphysics, that humanity is uncanny in two senses. First, it finds itself within an overpowering force (the Abiding Sway) which is other than it and determines it and, second, it is capable of a contradictory violence in the face of the abiding sway which pushes back against this determination and allows humanity to go beyond the boundaries of what is determined by nature and, perhaps, history. This also goes hand in hand with a focus on the power of individual poets, thinkers and political leaders as manifestations of the violent force of humanity which can push back against the abiding sway.

The second translation, I would argue, hearkens back to Being and Time and Heidegger's pre-Being and Time commitments as well as forward to the final published version of The Origin of the Work of Art. First, human possibilities are always the possibilities opened up by human history and language such that we can attempt to get a clearer and more honest grasp on history and language so that that we may more authentically understand it and take it up but we can never do anything like "push back" against it except insofar as history itself offers us, on its own accord, a new beginning. Second, specific individual humans do not represent an essential element of the struggle, strife or violence through which history develops and changes but rather it is the world and earth, the unconcealed and concealed of a cultural context, which are engaged in a play or strife within which any given history moment, individual, or people is constituted. Art can change worlds, but art understood as a larger historical event which alone makes possible the existence of individual art works or artists. In short, the first translation is individualist and decisionist while the second is historicist and anti-humanist. It is this first translation, I would claim, that is in sharp tension with Heidegger's work before and after the terrible period of the early and mid-1930s.

Quotation for the Day

"We must convert facticity into the real property whereby everything and every world is without reason. We must grasp how the ultimate absence of reason, which we will refer to as 'unreason', is an absolute ontological property, and not the mark of the finitude of our knowledge."

Meillassoux again. That is quite a task! I am still trying to decide what I think of his attempt and his reading of Heidegger. I will post more of a discussion soon. Also some comments about this years meeting of the Heidegger Circle will appear soon.

Heidegger Circle

I will be attending the Heidegger Circle at Stony Brook University in Manhattan this weekend. Sadly I am not presenting a paper but I will be chairing a session. If anything particularly blog worthy strikes me I will be sure to share it.