Tom and Fryer, thanks for the thoughtfull replies to my questions about
consent and community. I'm concerned here with the issues of repetition
and imagination, and don't really have the purchase on these ideas to
express them thoroughly. But I'd like to take another run at it.
Laurence Paul Hemmings writes that I've missed the point [of his earlier
post] and then repeats what I said, using my own argument to answer me.
The question I wanted to raise about Heidegger's take on consensus gets
somehow dramatized in this move, as I believe it has also in the flame
war to which we've all been subjected and for which we are also somehow
all responsible (if only for failing to stop it). Lemme try to see if I
can show how this gets problematized in Heidegger. . .
On p. 3 of _Aristotle's Metaphysics Theta 1-3_ Heidegger writes, re "logos":
"Legein means "to glean" [lesen], that is, to harvest, to gather, to add
one to the other, to include and connect one with the other. Such laying
together is a laying open [Dar-legen] and laying forth [Vor-legen] (a
placing alongside and presenting) a making something accessible in a
gathered an unified way."
I have a problem with this. How does Heidegger get from "gathering" to
the sense of belonging together in "unified"? He is apparently skipping
a big step here -- the logos gathers and lays forth. Okay. But what
about this gathering and laying forth endows the gathered with a unifying
sense that what is gathered in the gathering is gathered because it
somehow belongs (already) together in a unity?
If we try to answer this question by saying "Its the worldhood of the
world," or "its disclosure of what is disclosed in aletheia," we would be
repeating problem as its own answer. We would be mobilizing the language
that Heidegger tried to use to state the problem, not to answer it, and we
would thus be throwing the question back at itself.
I think that in this unspoken "unity" lies the problem of consensus that
I was asking about. The logos doesn't just gather, it somehow brings to
the gathered also this sense -- which we must all share, by definition --
of belonging together. Just beneath this, it seems to me, lies the
question of predication, or as Heidegger puts it in this very passage,
"assertion." The power of the logos to unify lies in its power to assert
(that is, to make shareable to a community) that unity of the gathered.
Isn't this right?
The hammer and analogy of the workshop, then, seem to me to arise out of
this unspoken sense of the unifying power of the logos. We are all
co-implicated in the workshop, whether or not we can plant a nail,
because we dwell in a world where things are nailed together and built in
a certain way (not thatched or woven together or held together with clay,
for example).
When Rousseau decides that _Robinson Crusoe_ will be the one book Emile
can read, his decision is based on a terrible mis-remembering of Defoe's
novel that gets reproduced in all the 19th century "Robinsonades." He
forgets that the original Robinson makes 12 trips out to plunder the hulk
of his sinking ship before it goes down -- he has tools, weapons, the
Bible, and all kinds of other things that implicate him in the cultural
practices and stratagies of Europe. Rousseau's Crusoe has nothing, and
must literally reinvent the wheel. This is the Robinson of the
children's books that Dickens, Austen, the Brontes, George Eliot, Ruskin,
Mill, Carlyle, all read during their formative years; it is the Robinson
of the grand polemic between Marx and Ricardo over the "nature" of Capital.
What I think Rousseau's mis-reading -remembering permits him is precisely
freedom from the co-implication or consensus that I think Heidegger is
trying to get at in the passage I cited above.
I'm sure I haven't got this right, but I hope the problem looks a little
more clear.
Michael
--- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---
consent and community. I'm concerned here with the issues of repetition
and imagination, and don't really have the purchase on these ideas to
express them thoroughly. But I'd like to take another run at it.
Laurence Paul Hemmings writes that I've missed the point [of his earlier
post] and then repeats what I said, using my own argument to answer me.
The question I wanted to raise about Heidegger's take on consensus gets
somehow dramatized in this move, as I believe it has also in the flame
war to which we've all been subjected and for which we are also somehow
all responsible (if only for failing to stop it). Lemme try to see if I
can show how this gets problematized in Heidegger. . .
On p. 3 of _Aristotle's Metaphysics Theta 1-3_ Heidegger writes, re "logos":
"Legein means "to glean" [lesen], that is, to harvest, to gather, to add
one to the other, to include and connect one with the other. Such laying
together is a laying open [Dar-legen] and laying forth [Vor-legen] (a
placing alongside and presenting) a making something accessible in a
gathered an unified way."
I have a problem with this. How does Heidegger get from "gathering" to
the sense of belonging together in "unified"? He is apparently skipping
a big step here -- the logos gathers and lays forth. Okay. But what
about this gathering and laying forth endows the gathered with a unifying
sense that what is gathered in the gathering is gathered because it
somehow belongs (already) together in a unity?
If we try to answer this question by saying "Its the worldhood of the
world," or "its disclosure of what is disclosed in aletheia," we would be
repeating problem as its own answer. We would be mobilizing the language
that Heidegger tried to use to state the problem, not to answer it, and we
would thus be throwing the question back at itself.
I think that in this unspoken "unity" lies the problem of consensus that
I was asking about. The logos doesn't just gather, it somehow brings to
the gathered also this sense -- which we must all share, by definition --
of belonging together. Just beneath this, it seems to me, lies the
question of predication, or as Heidegger puts it in this very passage,
"assertion." The power of the logos to unify lies in its power to assert
(that is, to make shareable to a community) that unity of the gathered.
Isn't this right?
The hammer and analogy of the workshop, then, seem to me to arise out of
this unspoken sense of the unifying power of the logos. We are all
co-implicated in the workshop, whether or not we can plant a nail,
because we dwell in a world where things are nailed together and built in
a certain way (not thatched or woven together or held together with clay,
for example).
When Rousseau decides that _Robinson Crusoe_ will be the one book Emile
can read, his decision is based on a terrible mis-remembering of Defoe's
novel that gets reproduced in all the 19th century "Robinsonades." He
forgets that the original Robinson makes 12 trips out to plunder the hulk
of his sinking ship before it goes down -- he has tools, weapons, the
Bible, and all kinds of other things that implicate him in the cultural
practices and stratagies of Europe. Rousseau's Crusoe has nothing, and
must literally reinvent the wheel. This is the Robinson of the
children's books that Dickens, Austen, the Brontes, George Eliot, Ruskin,
Mill, Carlyle, all read during their formative years; it is the Robinson
of the grand polemic between Marx and Ricardo over the "nature" of Capital.
What I think Rousseau's mis-reading -remembering permits him is precisely
freedom from the co-implication or consensus that I think Heidegger is
trying to get at in the passage I cited above.
I'm sure I haven't got this right, but I hope the problem looks a little
more clear.
Michael
--- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---