Category Archives: Philosophy

Thoughts on Heidegger and Levinas

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A few comments from this thread…

“The Other is not constituted by the self, as Levinas haves it, but the inverse.”

There is no ‘constitution’ of the self from the Other in Levinas. The self is a historical and/or personal retreat from the absolute alterity of the other. The self is a kind of violence that totalizes the other into a representation (ex., from the self), a plastic cast of the face of the other, and thus, brings the Other into the light of rational (ratio), conceptual relatedness that ‘is’, ontologizes, the Other (the tyranny of the same). Levinas wants to think otherwise than being. Being is the archaic violence that effaces the other. Levinas thinks that ontology imagines that the time of the other and my time are commensurate and therefore, levels the Other off into the same – not as identity but as kind, i.e., differences are certainly allowed but the essence of the difference assumes a prior basis for comparison, the ratio of nous, an archical (originary) temporalizing that I and Other exist and move and have our being in. Levinas thought the Other was anachronous to my time, a time not my time, not commensurate in any way to me. He thought that retreat from the face of the other was history and why metaphysics failed. It failed because it lost the Other, transcendence, it made the other into the said, the idolatry of the image and the word.

“Now it is silly to argue that ethics is ontologically prior to ontology (because then ethics simply becomes ontology by another name). Levinas should have argued for the ethical priority of ethics.”

For Levinas ethics is the interruption of ontology. Ethics cannot be a prior ontology to ontology. Ontology is a sort of prison that can only ‘see’ within itself – the originary narcissus. If the Other is a moment of Being or circumscribed in the light of Being then ethics will always, already be pre-understood as a positive relation among beings, an authentic mode of being-with. This ‘already understood’ levels off beings as equal in an essential way, as ontologically identical, known and understood in essence (arche). What gets lost in this is radical difference, perhaps in the direction of Derrida’s ‘differance’ but with an important exception – leveling off favors the neutral. ‘It’ ‘is’ already understood. Essence as ontologically identical reduces the radical alterity of the ‘he’ or ‘she’ into an ‘it’.

Signs, semiology, as endlessly referential, must essentially, undo the knot they tie as they tie it – thus the trace of ‘differance’. The time of signs as Blanchot (Levinas’ mentor) thought is il ya, the there is, it is dead time – it neutralizes the other as another sign, an it, and therefore, loses radical alterity of him or her – it makes the saying the said. All the while the Dread, from an ontological point of view, that must be retreated from is the non-being of the Other, the other than being.

I do not think that you can ‘arrive at Levinas’ as ‘saying the same thing as Heidegger’ (as ‘without being aware of it’). I think that would be an equivalence that would totally miss the direction of Levinas’ thought. Perhaps you may think he is wrong but his work will not allow a similarity to Heideggerian mitsein or an elevation of Heideggerian ethics (whatever that would be).

“The Other is an eternal Fuhrer.”

The Fuhrer controls within the same, it is the System, light, ontology – it is the reduction of the other to the same. To think the same as identical to the Other is to do exactly what Levinas tells us that ontology does. The violence of the pure race is based on absolute, unquestioned knowing of the kind of being of the ‘pure’ and the ‘impure’. This kind of knowing can never be possible in Levinas’ notion of the Other without totalizing the Other under the tyranny of the same.

 

Postmodern Rationalism

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“Throughout his writings, Foucault valorizes figures such as Hölderlin, Artaud, and others for subverting the hegemony of modern reason and its norms and he frequently empathized with the mad, criminals, aesthetes, and marginalized types of all kinds.”

http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/pomo/ch2.html

Isn’t this a new form of rationalism? How does it appeal to the ‘other’ of rationality without itself being implicated in rationality – is this the hyper-modernism in post-modernism? Could this be the work of another canon in the margins of a canon? It seems to me that a total rejection of the tradition can only do so in the tradition. The polar oppositions of the holy and the profane, the proper and improper can only perpetually reinvigorate themselves symbiotically. Derrida seemed to understand this and showed his discomfort with ‘deconstruction’ as the nuevo canon. Postmodernism must, from within the tradition, continually bring out its a-situated-ness, its inability to dwell, its ear for the strange and unsettled to hint at impoverishment. Otherwise, it certainly is another name for modernism. It must show the kairos, the supreme moment of indecision that must decide in privation (steresis), the in-between and the middle voice that cannot settle in the new-become-old. Being as suspended between rootedness and uprootedness, its arche as indeterminate, not as matter (hule) and form (morphe) that has its origin within itself OR as hule and morphe that gives itself over to an origin not within itself in techne – this is anarchy. The rootedness and the up-rootedness necessarily results in aufhebung (synthesis, lifting up) not abhebung, the thrown from within, with the emphasis on the violence of ‘thrown’; torn without relief not raised (aufhebung) as transformational, together-with, oppositions. Certainly, oppositions essentially belong together; they find their uniformity in their difference but ‘differance’ does not rest – it disturbs as radical alterity without recourse, adrift in violence without even the nothingness of anxiety – dread which cannot lose itself or cease to be. In this then the work of a new Greek beginning arouses.

Language as Power

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Postmodernism would argue that language is power. On the surface this is just as ludicrous as suggesting that money is speech. However, what they mean is that any use of language is a use of power. Language always aims at ends such as influence, persuasion, domination. When a bird tweets it may be to effect some form of power in their own environment (or perhaps not) but for us power is a meaningless concept in the case of a bird tweeting. When postmodernism thinks of language as power they mean that the dynamics of power and powerlessness are always at work in the use of language. Power must preserve itself through powerlessness. Power is symbiotic. If power could destroy everything not deemed powerful, power itself could not exist. Powerlessness must be in order for power to be. Any philosophy of power is just as indebted to its negative content as its positive content. As such, power is essentially indebted to its nemesis. Even more, power is itself produced by what it isn’t. If language is power this does not only refer to its positive content but to what it is not as well. In a similar manner, morality is also inseparable from immorality as Nietzsche points out in “Beyond Good and Evil”. This is the source of neutrality in the thought of power.

Language as power focuses on force. Force cannot be thought about without equal and opposite forces. There is no pure, singular force that can be thought in some hermetically sealed environment – force always occurs with other forces. Other forces can work against or for another force or have no relevance to each other. Likewise, language as force will always contain themes that work against or for the dominant theme or have no relevance to the dominant theme. An obvious example of this for many non-academic philosophers is the Bible. The Bible is full of themes. Religious denominations are all about how these themes can be refashioned, contradictory and complementary. Postmodernists do not see this as a problem with certain people not understanding the Bible correctly or not knowing God but they see this as a problem intrinsic to any use of language. Truth itself as a construct of language necessarily contains all the themes that overturn it.

However, the subtleties many postmodernists get trapped by seem to be:
1) Identification of power with a metaphysic of individualism or community
2) Identification of power as essence or origin
3) Identification of power as neutrality; in the order of ‘thingness’
4) Identification of power with presence and absence

I am not going to delve into these issues here but many have and I have to some extent. What I would suggest is that postmodernism is not about making positive statements or about answers but about the ‘nots’ of any statement and raising questions to the level of disturbing and strange. If postmodernism stops before any and every possible thematic disturbance, postmodernism falls back into historical metaphysics. This does not suggest that historical metaphysics is the ‘not’ of postmodernism but that if postmodernism sets up or establishes dominant narratives whether intentional or not, it has effectively repelled and attracted disparate themes. This attraction and repulsion is a leveling off of thematic differences. When difference is sorted according to similarity and dissimilarity a simulacra of difference is preserved but difference itself is lost. The simulacrum is sameness. Sameness here is not meant as identity as that would be pure nonsense. Sameness has to do with reversibility as opposed to rupture. Sameness brings with it a predisposition, a working agenda that is not explicitly thought out but guides the agenda nonetheless. While sameness certainly allows comparison it also misses differences that it deems irrelevant. What gets lost is difference itself in the service of thematic preference.

Certainly difference can be thought as reversible where themes are held apart in the tension of valuations (i.e., true or false, relevant of irrelevant, good or bad, etc.). However, this difference is for the sake of leveling off and sameness. This difference holds together variants, moments of dissimilars. Moments of dissimilars already holds fast to the notion of presence. It prefers reduction to kind and necessarily pushes rupture to absence. Derrida uses the misspelled word ‘differance’ to indicate rupture. Rupture is nonsense for difference. Difference totalizes. It makes sense of, takes hold of, finds form and limit (peros). Differance tears apart in its not able to, its absolute passivity in the face of, incommensurate to the point of disturbing, formless and limitless (aperion).

However, differance as postmodernists tend to think it, stills holds together the theme of neutrality, a play of forces, an ‘itness’. If differance is thought in terms of neutrality, its other must be the other, the ‘he’ or ‘she’. This moves into the thought of Levinas. If the he or she is retained as the opposite of neutrality then rupture is once again leveled off as the same. Radical alterity (otherness) is:

“The Other is radical only if the desire for it is not the possibility for anticipating it as the desirable or of thinking it out beforehand but if it comes aimlessly as an absolute alterity, like death.”
John Heaton ‘The Other and Psychotherapy’ in Provocation of Levinas

Radical alterity does not lift up or transform. It is all too easy to reject it as nonsense and actually it is – it evades but not defies sense. It is not nonsense in the typical meaning of the word as it tangentially returns. For Levinas, metaphysics is the tangential return of the radical alterity of the other. It is as waves that wash up on the beach breaking through every notion of a ‘setting’. It reoccurs but not as the same; the river that cannot be stepped into twice. The same, as our notion of death, intensifies the strangeness of the thought of my death. Somehow the two do not link up – they fall apart. This is what radical alterity does. It is incommensurate in a way that resists measure and boundary. It always returns as exceeding itself; as not resting in an ‘it’ as ‘he’ or ‘she’ resists ‘it’. This resistance is not of kind but of radical otherness.

Something I blogged on the Huffington Post…

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“Class warfare has been going on for decades. Republicans are really good at propaganda. However, they have finally deconstructed themselves. They could only talk generally for so long about cutting the size of the Federal government before their rhetoric caught up to them. Now that their own people are demanding that they walk the talk, the folks that are in the “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” syndrome will find that their leaders have been picking their pocket to sell them their own watch. The Republicans must put up or shut up and this will be their demise. Yes, they would love the Democrats to do the fate fatale for them so they could sophistically blame that on the Democrats as well (as they try to blame their failed economics on the Democrats) but Obama has caught the fox in his own trap – His populism actually works and helps the middle class (Proof: https://www.mixermuse.com/blog/2012/01/06/all-you-need-to-know-about-politics-1-6-12-2/) while their populism, as is typical, does exactly what they condemn the Democrats for – split the American public (religious, crush the middle class, attack immigrants, destroy the government they say the love, change the constitution they say they want to uphold the ‘original’ intent of, etc.) . The ‘populism’ of Obama as understood by the right is finally the courage that brings into the daylight the right’s own secret class warfare against the non-elite. As is typical, the right does the damage and blames it on the Democrats (i.e., lose of AAA rating). As a an ardent socialist in the industrial revolution (corporatism on steroids), Orwell is falsely revered by the right for “Animal Farm” but Orwell would have been much more sympathetic to this, https://www.mixermuse.com/blog/2012/01/06/the-fox-and-the-hen-house/, than the unmitigated proponents of capitalism.”

After a little more thought…

There has been a ‘secret war’ going on for decades on the middle class that every economic study has shown for many years. The latest census data tells us 1 out of every 2 Americans is in poverty. Yet, we get the right’s self-righteous shrill proclamations about the newly formed class warfare project from President Obama. Republicans really merit study for the copulas conjunction of the subject, President Obama and the predicate, class warfare. Republicans have well understood “The Little Prince” and the war of all against all. The best war is the invisible war; the war that takes the moral high ground while simultaneously erasing the enemy all the while producing its dominance. In this case, policies that prefer the rich and impoverish everyone else, are ‘capitalism’, the aspiration that any old fool could be rich too and corporatism would be their self-crafted philosophy, the philosophy that reifies the exception and punishes the accidental. If the old fool was rich he would be a king and the bourgeois jester of the noble would speak with Republican lips. The drama of the fool is more powerful than his poverty. Now, these new leftists come along and tell the fool that he is dreaming; that the jester lies as sirens sing. How dare the leftist disturb the fools slumber, let him dream. The leftist is the true enemy. These nag flies get in the way of baseless dreams, the opium of truth. I must say that it is ingenious along the lines of Nietzsche’s idea of Christianity. The truly powerful is never seen. It never becomes obvious. It hides in un-thought hermeneutics. It is the only proper language. It is the language that establishes and maintains truth and excludes madness (“Madness and Civilization”). Without the proper, the fool will fail but the fool fails anyway. Here resides the aporia, the riddle. When the riddle, the conundrum, the paradox is solved it loses its passion. In this therefore, existence loses. The end of the proper announces the beginning of anarchy, the victory of chaos – but how could anarchy have a beginning – can a circle be a square? When riddles multiply, mystification abounds and canon subverts its undoing. The past is lifted into the future as revised, continually re-established in service to unseen manipulation. The horror is the actual life I live and the sacred is the one I aspire to. The taboo is my inability to buy bread and the totem is the feasts I will have when I am rich. To understand what it means to be human must think the desire for fantasy. The elite Republicans know this well and count their riches on it. Truth in a void that can only endlessly turn on itself, eat itself, to obtain its ends must hide the producer at all costs. Obama is the evil Marxist spokesman of class warfare not because he did it (class warfare) but because he said it. He spoke the profane, the improper and therefore must die in his sin…and we wonder why there was a need for postmodernism?

Footnote To – Language: Animism and Illusion

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“…transcendence as the erasure of the other”

I realize this last phrase resists the notion that Levinas has of transcendence. Levinas wants to reconstitute metaphysics. He wants to re-think transcendence along the lines of Descartes’ idea of infinity. It is as if he wants to find the authenticity of metaphysics. For Levinas, metaphysics was always the thinking of the other. “The metaphysical desire tends towards something else entirely, toward the absolute other.” (Totality and Infinity, page 33, paperback) I understand his intentions here but I have always had some reservations concerning Levinas and metaphysics.

Metaphysics comes to post-modernity as historical, a canon. It has certainly taken radical turns from the Greeks, to Neo-Platonism, to Augustine, to Descartes, to Hegel, to Nietzsche and post-modernism. All these and others that have touched Metaphysics have moved it towards post-modernity. We, as historical beings have received this history in many ways that are pre-cognitive in Heidegger’s terms. Worldhood is certainly forged through the furnace of Metaphysics.

Post-modernity has looked upon metaphysics suspiciously as ‘logocentrism’, the canonical reading of power, the evil genius of Nietzsche’s Christianity and the alienation of labor. Levinas, as an anarchist communist understood these difficulties and yet was able to see beyond the barriers of historical narrative. In validating metaphysics as the residue of radical alterity he also takes up the historical burden placed upon metaphysics.

Certainly the reflections of metaphysics as power and the end of metaphysics want us to hear the all too human refrain of transcendence, the lack of anything that Levinas would want to hold to as radical alterity. To some extent this burden of metaphysics has been handed over to us. For some God still stands as the heir of metaphysics. However, the stand is defensive. Any Christian today will take up the cross of mistrust and suspicion. True, this also happened at the beginning of Christianity but starting with Roman Christendom onwards through the 19th century Christians were mainstream for much of the West and heresy or worse was reserved for the few that questioned its supremacy. The metaphysics of Christianity had been thought by a majority as the ‘science’ of the Dark and Middle Ages. Its truth was absolutely certain and informed culture.

The death of God that Nietzsche discussed and the end of metaphysics is not something imputed to it but something observed from it. Its power has been reduced to ‘personal relationship with Jesus’ as opposed to state religion. It no longer divines truth; science has taken its place. This does mean that Christians are not still under the spell of Christianity but it does point to their need to defend God over and against science. The post-modern who would be Christian is on guard, reclusive from the state. Evolution and global warming are denied. ‘Life’ is not taken in a biological sense but in a metaphysical sense as in the anti-abortionists who call themselves ‘pro-life’. This defensive stance would have been foreign to the average peasant in the dark ages. At the end of metaphysics we understand the darkness of God, the horrific violence of God, the human subjugation of God. Even Christians that would defend God from these assaults feel like they must defend the ‘true’ God from the weight of these accusations.

Even with all this Levinas peered deeply into metaphysics and saw the other. He felt the wonder of what metaphysics had always aimed at, the infinity that made metaphysics possible. However, as post-modern don’t we carry the ‘sameness’, the totalizing, the appeal to origin (arche’), the sin of presence, the effacement of radical alterity in our horizons that is said in the essence of metaphysics? The ‘saying’ that is otherwise than being is a still small voice but fraught with historical noise.

For us science has become the surrogate of metaphysics. It has taken careful steps to avoid the pitfalls of metaphysics. However, in so doing it has asked us to lower our horizons, our expectations. We are asked to relegate the questions of metaphysics to the junk pile of history. All the while, science has carried the banner of truth it has also left a gaping hole where metaphysics once stood. We, who live in the aftermath of this clash, even if not Christian, feel the crush of meaning, the cry of existentialism, the gasp of godlessness. The reduction to mere human has replaced the metaphysical drama of the titans, the gods and the eternal stakes that surround us. Here in this smallness we live and move and have our being.

Levinas wants to bring value again to metaphysics as what he gleams to be its kernel, the other. The other here does not mean to ‘set man on the throne’ or some such nonsense. At the same time that Levinas reconstitutes metaphysics as the radical alterity of the face of the other he also want to dethrone ‘man’ as a product of sameness, totality, tyranny. ‘Man’ as taken into metaphysics is understood, devalued and leveled off. Man is ‘enframed’ as standing reserve, thought in the manner of things, reduced to one among many of what is already known. ‘Man’ already marks the loss of human being. Levinas in thinking of the other wants to lose that ‘plastic cast’ of the face of the other. He wants to re-think the other as what can never enter into the light of being but casts off rays as history and language. Instead of a phenomenology of what shows itself he finds an absolute refusal to show, to be taken up in thought – except as retreat, as a darkness not shown in light. Paul Valery along with Hegel might say. “…but in order to render the light, you need a somber moiety of shade.” Levinas would content that as there is a real difference in ‘shade’ and death there is a real difference in ‘closedness’ and the face of the other. This difference is more than one of kind, it is not temporally commensurate, it is dia-chrony, a time not mine – not one kind among other kinds – but an-archical, without origin. This reminds us of the chaos of Hesiod but without the neutrality – the he or she that faces me. In this, Levinas wants to situate the history of metaphysics.

However, from post-modernity can we reconstitute metaphysics radically? Can we purge it of its madness and set it on an ‘other’ setting. Can we find another start from the Greeks? There are many starts in the Greeks. Do we have the choice to lay aside metaphysics? -Probably not. As the snake in Zarathustra don’t we need to bite of the head to grow another tail? The snake is mortally wounded but eternal recurrence has made sublime in-ways as trace, as radical alterity, tangential but not neutral, an-archical but not nothing, dia-chronos but not a-temporal. The eternal God of metaphysics has been dethroned but the spirit doggedly remains. I am not sure we can re-constitute metaphysics but we must. We face a recent turn towards heterogeny. Can we ignore science, the new unconscious, the m-verse, the God-particle? Has science surpassed the ‘mere’ of correctness and mathematical projects? Can we ignore difference, the trace, the spoiling of opposites, the deposition of dualities – the middle way of Greek thought – the kairos the interrupts chrony? Post-modernism thinks difference as before opposition, as before thesis/antithesis/aufhebung. This difference does not ‘lift up’ or sublate. This difference does not transform or transport. This difference cannot reduce to neutrality and the light and darkness that produce it. This anachronism is laid upon us reluctantly by the corpse of metaphysics that we are. Transcendence as the erasure of the other nonetheless preserves the other in its erasure – in this we bear our post-modernity.

Chaos

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Tell me all of this, you Muses who have your homes on Olympus, from the beginning, tell who first of them (the gods) came-to-be.

First of all Chaos came-to-be; but then afterwards Broad-breasted earth, a secure dwelling place forever for all (the immortals who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and misty Tartara in the depths under the wide-wayed grounds and Eros who, handsomest among the deathless gods a looser of limbs, in all the gods and in all human beings overpowers in their breasts their intelligence and careful planning. And from Chaos came-to-be both Erebos and dark night, and from night, in turn, came-to-be both Aither and day, whom she conceived and bore after joining in love with Erebos. But earth first begat, as an equal to herself, starry sky, so that he might cover her on all sides, in order to be a secure dwelling place forever for all the blessed gods, and she begat the tall mountains, pleasing haunts of the goddess-nymphs who make their homes in the forested hills, and also she bore the barren main with its raging swell, the sea, all without any sweet act of love; but then next, having lain with sky, she bore deep-swirling ocean.

Hesiod, “Theogony”

From:

Drew A. Hyland;John Panteleimon Manoussakis. Heidegger and the Greeks: Interpretive Essays (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 9). Kindle Edition.

Language: Animism and Illusion

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When Nietzsche writes of ‘going under’ he does not refer to some sort of Buddhist extinction, sunyata. He refers to Zarathustra’s descent. From the coldest of heights Zarathustra, drawn by compassion, over-rich with pity, descends into mortality, the all too human. From beyond good and evil and nursed from the nausea of eternal recurrence of the same, Zarathustra goes under with the weight of gravity.

In “The Gaze of Orpheus” Maurice Blanchot’s essay “The Narrative Voice” tells us,

“What Kafka teaches us – even if this expression cannot directly be attributed to him – is that storytelling brings the neuter into play. Narration governed by the neuter is kept in the custody of the “he”, the third person that is neither the third person, nor the simple cloak of impersonality. The “he” of narration in which the neuter speaks is not content to take the place usually occupied by the subject, whether the latter is a stated or implied “I” or whether it is the event as it takes place in its impersonal signification. The narrative “he” dismisses all subjects, just as it removes every transitive action or every objective possibility. It does this in two forms:

1) the speech of the tale always let us feel that what is being told is not being told by anyone: it speaks in the neuter;
2) in the neuter space of the tale, the bearers of speech, the subjects of the action- who used to take the place of characters – fall into relationship of non-identification with themselves: something happens to them, something they cannot recapture except by relinquishing their power to say “I” and what happens to them has always happened already: they can only account for it indirectly, as self-forgetfulness, the forgetfulness that introduces them into the present without memory that is the present of narrating speech.” (page 140, paperback)

What Saussure tells us is that language referentially turns in on itself. Language can only refer to itself; semantic is nothing other than syntax. What is present in language is pure signification. Signifiers do not signify ‘things’; signifiers only signify other signifiers. Presence, as one signifier among many, is the rustle of il ya (there is), the neutrality of a-temporality, Platonic recollection without forgetfulness. Perhaps this could be thought as the physics of eternal reoccurrence; the sub-atomic particles the never rest, never die, only exist and not-exist, be and not-be without temporal reference: perhaps a neo-Kierkegaardian kenosis, the new genesis of God and man, the absurd paradox that incites the passion of dread. From these cold and desolate heights that only the noble can endure we only have one choice – to go under.

To act as if action has meaning is a Beginning. To separate the firmament from the void, to “become like one of us”, marks retreat from no-thingness and fall towards density. The God-particle gives mass to emptiness, writes from noise; the appropriating event. The precipice from which we stare into the void and blink is façade and truth – all the while the void stares back. The “he” or “she” of narrative which only masks the unbearable lightness of neutrality and the choice – the choice that must act to choose forgetfulness for Truth, put other before dialectical process. The ‘uber’ of going under is simultaneously animism and illusion, Being and beings, death as the impossible depths of life and transcendence as the erasure of the other*.

*see https://www.mixermuse.com/blog/2012/01/05/footnote-to-language-animism-and-illusion/

What is a “Postmodern Conservative”?

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There used to be a conservative website, some of its content is still around, called “The Postmodern Conservative”. I read a little content from this site as I am a little intrigued how one could maintain the conjecture of a ‘postmodern conservative’. On the surface, this is an oxymoron. Perhaps it is intended ironically. It is tantamount to thinking of Nietzsche’s nihilism and Christianity together in positive terms. Postmodern thinking seeks to overturn constructionism and its resulting epistemological result, structuralism. Postmoderism cannot be thought as a coherent, autonomous and positive philosophy. It is a symbiotic philosophy. It preys on structure and narrative. It is a methodology that deconstructs structure based on the specific structure’s own content, its counter narratives that contradict and undermine its canonical determinations. No philosophical system of thought is immune from the oxidizing effect of its most ardent iron. Deconstruction is the tool of the nihilist. In light of this, how would a ‘conservative’ postmodernists be thought except as ironically?

Their claim is further confused in their assertion that a ‘conservative’ postmodernist is more coherent that a ‘liberal’ postmodernist. This is like thinking that a Lucifer is more Christ-like than an Antichrist. What would one ‘conserve’ as a postmodernist? Why would the content of their conservation be immune from their own devices? How could a postmodern recommend ‘conservative’ content over ‘liberal’ content? Haven’t we established a canon, a ‘logocentrism’, by maintaining conservatism? If the thought is one of a sort of Darwinian mind-beating as opposed to the more conventional chest-beating in the belief that survival of the fittest is established, these folks should re-read Derrida’s essay on “Force and Signification” in “Writing and Difference”. Derrida writes, “To comprehend the structure of a becoming, the form of a force, is to lose meaning by gaining it.” 1) If the structure of ‘conservatism’ is meaningful and is to be recommended over ‘liberalism’ then, for deconstruction, its meaning is lost at the same time that it is achieved.

If, on the other hand, ‘conservatism’ here is meant to designate brute force, mystification of raw power, then power becomes that text that Derrida writes of when he states, “To say that force is the origin of the phenomenon is to say nothing” 2) He goes on to state that Hegel clearly demonstrates that force is a tautology. Force can only assert itself. Force and language amount to the same thing, the same identity. Nothing new or different is added in thinking either word. To rejoin this notion to conservatism is reminiscent of Ayn Rand and her elitist dogma; a tautology of power makes right, history IS the narrative of the conqueror. Without regard to any moral or ethical disjoins, this assertion merely redundantly marks itself. Its only claim is to force or the structuralism that it establishes. To deconstruct its specific narrative is the task of postmodernism. To deconstruct deconstructionism is to revert to constructionism and thus re-establish (or never have de-established) its myopic insistence, its force. In other words, it is to say nothing using a lot of words. While this trend has certainly not been alien to philosophy it seems to rise to the level of infinite nonsense in the thought of a “Postmodern Conservative”.

 
1) Writing and Difference, Force and Signification, page 26 (paperback)
2) Ibid, page 26 (bottom)

Thoughts Concerning Being and Other

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The Other is radical only if the desire for it is not the possibility for anticipating it as the desirable or of thinking it out beforehand but if it comes aimlessly as an absolute alterity, like death.

John Heaton ‘The Other and Psychotherapy’ in Provocation of Levinas

New research on the unconsciousness is reviving discussions of Freud and his relevance. Some researchers have talked about the unconscious as “background processors” as threads of tasks that run in background mode set off by sensations, historical associations and future-oriented stress and anxiety. These ‘threads’ constantly provide alternative vias for consciousness. They texture and fill out the tenure of conscious behavior. Many areas of the brain are ‘lit up’ by unconscious activity and consciousness appears to unite these various internal ‘dialogs’.

In Heidegger’s discussion of the thing he wants to, in true phenomenological fashion, get away from ‘theorizing’ about Being from a pre-ordained, ‘mathematical’ project and let the thing show itself from itself. So, for example, when we think about spatiality instead of thinking about it as empty space with physical dimension he would have us think about regionality. To say that the chair we are looking at is geometrically further from us in terms of feet and inches than the spectacles we are using to look at them is surely correct mathematically but when we are focused on the chair, the region we inhabit in that lived experience is much closer to the chair than the spectacles on our face we are viewing it with. Heidegger called this lived space. Thus, for the case of space we can see that the traditional, historical way we think about it obscures the way we actually ‘experience’ space. This is how Heidegger lets the thing, space in this case, show itself as itself.

The showing of phenomena gets more interesting when Heidegger starts discussing the “closedness” of things. Dr. Wendell Kisner makes this point:

“However, if “closedness” or the withdrawing of being into concealment is the crucial point at which the possibility of truth as such is first opened, then the elimination of all closedness in the mathematical project does not indicate what things are as such, but rather how things are manifest within that project. Phenomenologically speaking, things are manifest in the mathematical project as nothing more than what they show themselves to be in its terms. But it can readily be seen that such a mode of disclosure presents a profound challenge to any attempt to thinking about things outside of this horizon insofar as, in its banishment of any and all closedness, it mitigates against any other possibility of disclosure. Things are just this and nothing more.” 1)

One way of thinking about the mathematical project might be in terms of the history of physics. Physics has certainly formulated theories about motion and space in such paradigms as Newtonian physics. Newtonian physics demonstrates a certain ‘correctness’ about things. It provides a predictive model for understanding the motion of cannon balls and planets. Thus, a ‘mathematical project’ has consistency within itself; it is not random ravings of a madman. It also has a kind of correlation with the thing it abstracts from. Heidegger referred to this as correctness. However, when thought from the perspective of Einstein’s space-time, quantum mechanics or dark matter and dark energy, we see a kind of scientific evolution that layers the earlier mathematical enterprise with radically different and uprooting understandings such as absolute time and space with relative time and space. Quantum mechanics has not found a way of resolving itself with the macro-physics of Newton and yet, integrated chips would not be possible without it. The search for dark matter and dark energy which is thought to comprise most of the universe and even more, keeps the universe from collapsing in on itself, would make Newton’s critique of spooky action at a distance seems mundane in comparison.

What all this indicates is that the mathematical project has consistency, correlation (visa vie predictability) but never captures the thing itself, the closedness and refusal of the thing to final resolution or disclosure. When one adds in the notion of spatiality as Heidegger discusses or Freud’s discussion of regression (as a form a spatiality) we can see that while the thing can lend itself to disclosure, finality is always lacking. The inability of things to ultimately disclose themselves in light, the mathematical project, is a phenomenal showing of refusal or closedness. This caught Heidegger’s attention and ultimately was rooted in Aristotle.

It would be difficult to make the claim that the mathematical project is simply a kind of narcissistic, mental and purely individuated process as some idealists might claim. There is an opening up of things, an invitation that participates in our mathematical projects but the thing can never be taken to account in its entirety. Its presence is always together with its absence, its refusal, its closedness. This uniformity and manifold plurality was the direction of thought for Aristotle. In this, the ontological distinction of Being and beings is thought by Heidegger.

Dr. Kisner writes,

In the mathematical project Heidegger asserts that, as opposed to the Aristotelian account in which natural bodies had a telos or an inner goal-oriented impetus, what now constitutes a natural body has no hidden interior: “Bodies have no concealed qualities, powers, and capacities. Natural bodies are now only what they show themselves as, within this projected realm.” 2)

Later thinking about Aristotle made telos a kind of animism, another property of a thing but that sifts the thinking of things through a retrospective, historical reduction. This becomes evident when one reflects on one of Aristotle’s mentor. In the Anaximander fragment, Heraclitus maintains that one cannot step into the same river twice. The river as ‘the same’, transformed as a property, does not show the river of Heraclitus but covers it up. It mediates the river as a repeatable, truncated concept. This kind of historical turn came at the same time as Hegel thought Christianity first announced subjectivity and reflection and Heidegger criticized the objectification of Being that frames (Gestell) beings as a property, a substance, an abstract thing. Properties in this sense came through the historical notion of static substance, of stasis that underlies things. A kind of dualism results from the substance/not-substance distinction; thus, the Cartesian split of mind/body, subject/object, natura/artifice.

Anaximander thought that all things rose from apeiron translated as limitless or indeterminate. Simplicius, writing of Anaximander’s notion of apeiron, states “Things perish into those things out of which they have their being, according to necessity.” (Phys. 24. 13) 3) Being is given by necessity standing out from indeterminacy and limitlessness. ‘Necessity’ here is not explained or named as in ‘God’ as that would come way too late and as an afterthought for the delicacy of this thought. Things originate (arche’) of necessity but not from immutability and sameness such as substance. Things stand out in their unity given from necessity but born from no-thing. No-thing here is not given merely as the negation of thing but as not yet determinable. Heidegger writes in “What is Metaphysics”,

But are we entirely sure what we are presupposing here? Is it really the case that “is-not,” negatedness, and thus negation, are the category into which the nothing fits as a specific case of “the negated”? It might be the other way around. Maybe the occurrence of the nothing does not depend on the “is-not” and the act of negating. Maybe the act of negation and its “is-not” can occur only if the nothing first occurs. This point has never even been explicitly raised as a question, much less decided. 4)

Heidegger goes on to think of no-thing in terms of the phenomenal experiences of boredom, anxiety and dread and in so doing step away from a more Kantian reference of the thing-in-itself. He also wishes to distinguish his ontology from onto-theology, the thing from which all things proceed. In this tactic Heidegger tries to uproot the common notion a thing as known and reduced to property and think from a more Greek ground to re-awaken the question of beings and non-being. On this more sure footing Heidegger would later reflect on the fourfold: earth, sky, divinities and mortals.

In Heidegger’s discussion of the bridge we are not ‘be-thinged’ by pre-cognitive notions of things as substance. We step away from a kind of Hegelian master-slave dichotomy wherein we (the master) ‘thing’ ourselves (become the slave) in our hasty reduction of ontology to things. Dr. Kisner points this duality out in his discussion of natura and artifice in which artifice has become natura and natura cannot be distinguished from artifice. In “Building Dwelling Thinking” things are confluent. They flow together in what I perceive as a kind of musicality. They do not arise from static eternal notes that play through the Latinized, Aristotelian potentiality and actuality, the dunamis of existence. They co-arise spontaneously and gracefully from apeiron, indeterminacy and limitlessness.

This is not to imply randomness and disconcert. Things necessitate, set bounds and measure. They co-relate and mingle with purpose that open themselves to science and mathematical projects all the while maintaining their suspension from no-thing, their concealment, their withdrawal from beings. This way towards thinking is reminiscent of current discussion of unconsciousness and the relation to consciousness.

“The New Unconscious” 5) explores recent studies in the unconscious mind. Scans of the brain indicate various parts of the brain are continually running threads of pre-conscious assimilation and differentiation in the background. These threads may be initiated by sensations, regressions to personal histories and language cues. However, much of the initiators are still shrouded in mystery. Consciousness is thought to occur as communication ripples throughout the brain texturing disparate and autonomous threads of pre-cognitive, syntactic and semantic content. Some psychological maladies and pathologies such as dissociative personality disorder, multiple personalities, narcissism, regression, repression and depression seem to occur more when the neural networking pathways that ripple through the brain break down.

In opposition to a hierarchy of agency, consciousness seems to bubble up from a ‘low-arche’, a cauldron of independent, non-synchronized, contradictory background ‘noise’ in the brain. The appearance of consciousness is a posteriori and ad hoc. Research has shown that will and causality is a ‘magical illusion’ that can be manipulated experiementally 6). Consciousness shows itself as a unified necessity from a concealed plurality which might be thought in the notion of apeiron. These non-synchronous nodes of content do not exist in a vacuum but are played as the cacophony of confluent initiators such as sight, taste, auditory, kinesthetic memory, etc. Since many of these initiators appear as shared in environment (umwelt and horizon) and what is more co-arise as phusis of beings, they have the appearance of shared coherence and correlation. The logic of identity, agency and causation seems to be an assent to the effacement of radicalize alterity. The proper notion of Being as noun rooted in non-changing, immutable substance arises without proper agency from the background noise of the disparate, pre-synchronized (anachrony) unconscious. The semblance of sameness given ad hoc in unity as peros, limit and boundary ecstatically stands out in apeiron. What get lost in sameness is the ‘other-poor’ as thought with Heidegger’s notion of ‘world-poor’, anachrony of the many, the self as radical passivity. The negation of other becomes me.

If consciousness is not rooted in an absolute identity then the other can only be mediated as an object of consciousness, a moment of self-determination and hypostatic, auto arousal 7) fascination. However, the erection of the sanctum of self is built on the shifting sands of unconscious confluences, incommensurate and uncorrelated ‘manifold pluralities’ (polumeres). The self in this case is not a moment of identity but a step away from our own dissolution, the intolerance of radical homelessness, no place.

In view of this refusal for disclosure, what faces us when we face the other, look in their eyes, when they speak to us? When the other faces us we gaze upon our sheer nakedness, “it comes aimlessly as an absolute alterity, like death”. The other in this case is not no-thing but the erasure that ever faces me and undoes me.

This is a work in progress… https://www.mixermuse.com/blog/2011/12/28/about-this-blog/

1) “The Fourfold Revisited: Heideggerian Ecological Practice and the Ontology of Things”
The Trumpeter ISSN: 0832-6193 Volume 24, Number 3 (2008), Page 7

2) “The Fourfold Revisited: Heideggerian Ecological Practice and the Ontology of Things”
The Trumpeter ISSN: 0832-6193 Volume 24, Number 3 (2008), Page 6

3) http://www.abu.nb.ca/Courses/GrPhil/Anaximander.htm

4) What is Metaphysics? In Basic Writings, ed. David Krell. San Francisco: Harper. Page 99

5) The New Unconscious
Edited by Ran R. Hassin, James S. Uleman and John A. Bargh
Oxford University Press, Inc.
ISBN13: 9780195307696ISBN10: 0195307690Paperback, 608 pages
2005

6) The New Unconscious
Edited by Ran R. Hassin, James S. Uleman and John A. Bargh
Oxford University Press, Inc.
ISBN13: 9780195307696ISBN10: 0195307690Paperback, “The Illusion of Conscious Control”
2005

7) http://www.pnas.org/content/101/17/6333.full.pdf

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?