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.   

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)

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.