Tag Archives: Levinas

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

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

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9/10/10

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

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Notes:

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

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

Responsibility and The Goods

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

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

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

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

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

What?

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

True, he said.

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

Very true.

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

Exactly.

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

The sight, he said.

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

True.

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

No, I never have, he said.

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

Nothing of the sort.

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

Certainly not.

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

How do you mean?

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

Of what nature are you speaking?

Of that which you term light, I replied.

True, he said.

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

Nay, he said, the reverse of ignoble.

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

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

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

How?

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

No.

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

By far the most like.

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

Exactly.

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

True, he said.

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

 

Will you be a little more explicit? he said.

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

Very true.

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

Certainly.

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

Just so.

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

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

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

In what point of view?

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

Certainly.

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

— Plato, Republic 507b-508d

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More readings from “The Gift of Death”

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

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

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

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

The Problem of Logic

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Foundationalism is always at work in conjunction with logic. By foundationalism I mean philosophical necessity. For example, in Heidegger’s view, Aristotle’s ontology is derived from phenomenological observation. According to Heidegger, Aristotle is astutely observing what shows itself as it is without trying to bring a previous theory (theoria) of what shows itself in the observation. Aristotle argues against Antiphon, heavily influenced by Plato and the Eleatic school founded by Parmenides, as forcing the thought of being into the one (hen) at the expense of the many (polumeres). Thus, the immutable and eternal are thought as being while change and multiplicity are relegated to the accidental and as such, non-being (see http://mixermuse.com/blog/2010/09/02/aristotle-and-modern-sciences/). Aristotle sees multiplicity and unity (hen) in the dynamic (dunamis), potentiality and actuality, of being (1). Rather than insist on a preconceived idea, Aristotle wants to observe beings and try to think being. For Heidegger, Aristotle escapes the charge of foundationalism because he is not insisting based on dogma (doxa) that being is this way or that but only what he sees in the showing of what Heidegger states is commonly and mundanely thought as being. Foundationalism is brought about when philosophy is thought as terms of tautology.

Tautology is what is necessarily true. The simplest tautology is A = A. This is the principle of identity. If the universal is thought as an identity then the particular is also thought as ‘not’ universal. Thus, if A = A and A is the category of the universal then everything that is not universal is thought as the particular. If the universal means not contingent on anything then the particular, as contingent, ‘is’, by definition, not universal. The ‘is’ in this case, called the copula, denotes equivalence. Equivalence gives identity. Thus, the universal holds itself in its identity as not particular. The critique of foundationalism cannot rest on the attempt to invalidate tautology as this would be a fool’s errand. Nevertheless, foundationalism can be legitimately criticized when it takes a step from logic to forcing its terms on what does not belong to it as Antiphon tries to do in his argument with Aristotle. The subtlety that gets introduced comes about by creating the categorical identity. If the universal is thought as being then the particular necessarily is not being. Thus, beings are not universal and therefore not being. The error occurs because the identity of the universal gets enmeshed with being. The necessity of the tautology of identity which cannot be denied is then taken up in the thought of being and beings. However the thought of being and beings is not necessarily the same as the thought of the universal and the particular. In this case, there is an added equivalence of identity added into the argument between the universal and being and therefore, the particular and beings. The additional identity is precisely where the fallacy gets introduced and philosophy gets conflated with mere assertion or opinion (doxa). This example serves as a model of how logic gets conflated with philosophy and results in foundationalism as history.

The charge of foundationalism does not refer to all history or all philosophy. It refers to a logical necessity that gets conflated with a historical, canonical narrative. There are many aspects of how this conflation occurs that inevitably refer to power structures in history. These power structures show themselves in economic, religious, political/nationalistic and scientific histories. It seems that it would be hard to deny foundationalism in history as evidenced by the violence of history. When extreme nationalism is tied to the purity of the Aryan race, purity and nationalism are conflated with the logic of identity and the result is the inevitable holocaust of the ‘impure’. This is what I refer to as the violence of light.

Light shows, it illuminates. Light is a unity of perception. It is the necessary condition for seeing. What shows itself (aletheia) is made possible by light, the clearing (lichtung). Light is neumena, concept, unity and potential. Seeing is phenomenal, particular, manifold and actual. Light arranges what it illuminates. It orders, makes sense of, holds together. Logic gets introduced as ‘not’ light. ‘Not’ light is thought as darkness. It is thought as the absence of light. As such darkness, thought in terms of the identity of light, is falsely thought as nonsensical, chaotic, without any order and therefore, without value. In this case, ‘not’ light is the depleted form of light. The darkness gets its identity as the ‘not’ of light. It gets defined by what it is ‘not’. The attempt to define by negation, what it is not, is really only light as what it isn’t, the absolute depletion of light, its negation. Darkness, as a necessary result of the identity of light, is the narcissistic love of light. It is the love of Medusa that cannot turn its gaze. This conflation, the violence of light, is the history of foundationalism. The ‘leap’ from tautology to the phenomenon of light associates adjectives that do not necessarily belong to the negation of the category.

When light is considered as an ideal then we can state that Light = Light therefore Darkness = Not Light AND Light = Not Darkness. We have established a reversible relationship. The reversal can occur in either direction without violating the ideal tautology. The problem comes about when phenomena are brought into the tautology.

For example, we know that different lights show different orderings. Visible colors are reflected light in the electromagnetic range of 400THz (Terahertz) to 790THz (for the human eye). Opacity is the degree of visible light that is reflected. Transparency is when no light is reflected Infrared’s electromagnetic range is 1THz to 430THz. What shows itself with visible light is very different that what shows itself with infrared. In the foundationalism of the Occident, visible light shows us ‘objects’ (of which we are one). The ‘not’ of visible light is ‘thought’ as invisible but actually it is not. Infrared shows various degrees of heat. It is not nothing but something, it is just different. It has adjectives associated with it that cannot be contained by nothing, invisible or the ‘not’ of objects. The ‘not’ of infrared light isn’t equivalent to visible light. The relationship is not reversible. When the other of visible light is thought in terms of its ‘not’ it is not really “the other” but the same merely absolutely depleted. The absolute depletion of the identity of the same is still only the same. This is what Levinas refers to as totalitarianism.

Totalitarianism is an ideal that functions as a theoria. It functions as a grid that is cast in advance of our ‘seeing’. It orders and arranges in advance how beings show themselves. It does not arise spontaneously every time we perceive but preconditions perception. It sets up in advance what is possible to ‘see’. This is what is meant by humans are historical. We have the capacity to ‘see’ what has already been gathered or ordered by language, history. When we take this gathering as identity, as the logic of necessity, we become foundationalists. In this case, tautology gets mistakenly substituted as what ‘is’. Being gets taken as theoria, a way of seeing.

If ‘not’ is given in terms of tautological identity it is no wonder that the original term only rediscovers itself in its nemesis. The rediscovery is not a transformation but a trans-fixation. As Medusa, the gaze is fascination that turns to stone. When theoria only sees itself, it becomes a cataract to sight. Its total opacity petrifies itself in its own terms. This is the ‘not’ of foundationalism. It’s essential characteristic is reversibility. When the ‘not’ is only given in tautological terms it leaves out the in-between, the adjectives that do not quite fit, the kairos.

Kairos and chronos are two notions of time in Greek thinking. The chronos is chronological time, the succession of now moments that chronologically proceed from a past to a future. The chronos is given by discrete ‘now’ moments. The current moment negates the past moment and the next moment. The ‘now’ moment relegates the past and the future to non-being (me on). Chronos depends on its absolute opposition to the past and the future. It depends on them, in tautological terms, as what it is not. The ‘now’ moment is no longer ‘now’ when it is past or when it is to come. Its identity depends on its ‘not’ to be what it is. The kairos is the in-between that has no duration but rather a quality. It is the quality that requires the supreme moment of decision from privation, steresis.

“Heidegger says that the basic category of steresis dominates Aristotle’s ontology. Steresis means lack, privation. It can also mean loss or deprivation of something, as in the example of blindness, which is a loss of sight in one who by nature sees. Steresis can also mean confiscation, the violent appropriation of something for oneself that belongs to another (Met. 1022 b33). Finally, Aristotle often calls that which is held as other in an opposition of contraries a privation. Heidegger will point out in his later essay on Physics B1 that Aristotle understands this deprivation as itself a kind of eidos. Thus, steresis is the lack that belongs intrinsically to being. According to Heidegger, with the notion of steresis Aristotle reaches the pinnacle of his thinking about being. Heidegger even remarks that Hegel’s notion of negation needs to be returned to its dependency on Aristotle’s more primordial conception of the not.”(2)

The moment of decision is the supreme moment, the moment of moments, the being of beings. It is based on obligation to what it is not, to what it lacks. In this case, what is needed is the double ‘not’, the ‘not’s not’.

There are two ways of thinking about not’s not. The first is based on chronos. It is reversible. Specifically, the ‘now’ moment negates the past and the future AND the past and future negates the ‘now’ moment. This gives way to sublation. What gets lifted up out of this dialectic is the concept, the concept of time. The concept unifies the apparent opposition; it erases the appearance of the absolute other, the negation of each term for the other. The other as real is eradicated by the concept. The concept holds the other together and as such, shows them as unity. Unity, the one (hen), is without otherness. The second thinking about not’s not is based on kairos. It is not reversible. It allows for differences that are not totally subsumed by the categories of ‘now’ and not ‘now’. It recognizes the middle way (middle voice in Greek thought) AND adjectives that are not logically temporal. However, the recognition is not based on concept but decision. Decision is forced by lack. The fullness of the moment lacks its sublation, the ground for its resolution. It cannot return to light and not light. This is not due to the inevitability of the concept but to actualizing the possibility of decision. The moment of decision holds open the possibility of Ethics for Levinas.

For decision, the ‘not’ that ‘nots’ itself can release its hold on light and its deprivation in the actuality of Ethics or it can narcissistically cast its gaze to the light and its deprivation, the concept. It can disallow its own terminus and therefore hold itself in check. In this case, its telos is not determinate (viz. the concept) but opened by actualizing the supreme moment of choice, the encounter with the other. By understanding how logic gets conflated with ‘isness’, the immediacy of ‘now’, we resist the narcissism of light, the resolution of concept. We impose limits on the bounds of ‘seeing’ and are opened to what does not show itself in ‘theoria’, in light. Our gaze is not to confirm (re-confirm), sublate, our logical categories but to leave open what we cannot see, not as a ‘not’ but as not’s not, the other that is not reversible. To the degree that a philosophy universalizes identity in history is the degree that it becomes foundationalism. The resolution of concept (eidos) is not necessarily given by tautology when bound with what is seen in ‘now’ and not ‘now’. The sublation is a conflation. It sacrifices steresis to gain the ground of reversibility and the supreme resolve of concept, the eternity of self-determination. It violently appropriates the moment of decisionin privation (steresis), to deny otherness.

“Not’s not” is not neuter, an ‘it’. An ‘it’ is already a way of seeing. The ‘it’ here is understood in terms of what is not a ‘he’ or a ‘she’. The categories are built into the theoria of the Occident, the history of essence, substance. Other histories such as animism did not make that ‘leap’. An ‘it’ reflects a generic reduction to what is seen in the exclusive categories of ‘now’ and not ‘now’. The ‘it’ is a historical abbreviation for the concept. The semblance of the other is now lifted up into the ‘it’ of concept. As such, ‘it’ is no longer determined by the other but self-determined. Self-determination is pure ‘isness’. Pure ‘isness’ has become ‘itness’. Decision is lost to neutrality and as such, passivity. The lack of decision has become the passive resolution of ‘itness’. This is foundationalism in the form of totalitarianism. The totality, the universal, the unity, the ‘it’ is being. In its completion the he or she is a moment, a stage, and ethics, an addition to what has already been completed. Ethics is founded on concept and unity not he or she and steresis. Thus Hegel’s system is complete, almost.

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Notes:

(1) Heraclitus says at the beginning of Greek philosophy:
potamoisi toisin autoisin embainousin hetera kai hetera hudata epirrei.
B12. On those stepping into rivers staying the same other and other waters flow. (Cleanthes from Arius Didymus from Eusebius) (see http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heraclitus/ and http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Heraclitus)

This is from the famous fragment thought as ‘never stepping into the same river twice’. However, the original fragment has an intentional ambiguity regarding what is the same and what is changing, those stepping into rivers or the rivers. If the rivers (plural in the fragment) are changing they remain what they are by changing. One the other hand, if those stepping into rivers are changing then it is as if the flowing, changing environment constitutes those stepping into rivers as the same. The unity, the same, is given by change or flux.

Plato interprets this as:
Panta chōrei kai ouden menei
“Everything changes and nothing remains still”
Plato changes the word flow to choros, change.
The assertions of flow are coupled in many fragments with the enigmatic river File:[33]
“We both step and do not step in the same rivers. We are and are not.”

B88. As the same thing in us are living and dead, waking and sleeping, young and old. For these things having changed around are those, and those in turn having changed around are these.

(2) Heidegger and Aristotle The Twofoldness of Being, Walter A. Brogan, State University of New York Press, Albany© 2005 State University of New York, page 19