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Date: Mon, 12 Aug 96 23:25 +0100
From: "M.Eldred_artefact" <artefact@xxxxxxxxxxx>
X-Sender: 02219520333-0001@xxxxxxxxxxx (Dr,Michael Eldred)
Subject: Violence and sobriety
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Cologne, 12 August 1996
Robert Scheetz wrote:
" Again, if that's the construction you put on student-hood,
I'm obviously guilty...this is tedious."
I'm not putting any construction on student-hood, far from it (not that I'm a
teacher), but taking exception to the tone of some of your posts.
Robert continues:
" But before your cut sets in concrete, perhaps you could explain
your curious choice of comparatives in the previous exchange:
"calvary charge," "canon shot," "bull-fight,"...in light of your
reluctance to qualify the theme of primal violance. I had thought
there would be a chance to elicit this in course; but the tenor
of the thing...well,.... So anyway, after all, you were being
ironical, paradoxical, pseudo-acerbic...???"
None of these. I was unfolding various aspects of the word "charge" in an
attempt to see what has been worrying me about the moral charge of the issue
of violence (I prefer 'issue' to 'question') that Tom Blancato has introduced.
You know very well yourself what kind of charge the words "Auschwitz" and
"Hiroshima" carry; I think these words should be handled with care and maybe
even humility instead of with accusational undertones.
As far as primal violence goes, the question is: What does this have to do with
philosophy? Let me elucidate. In an earlier post you write:
"The ritual structure progression of attic tragedy is
>from sparagmos to recognition; the central rite of
Western Civ enacts the cannabalising of the god
to overcome death. The premier texts, Bible/Homer,
celebrate the devastation of a people of darkness by
a people of light...and on, and on.... The Heraclitean
fire itself, great Helios, the source of life and light, is
conceived in today's cosmology as a perpetual motion nuclear
mega-bomb. All this is perfectly innocent of "morality",
and as clearly archetypal, i.e. previous to any egoisms
and therefore (if I'm grasping H's idiosyncratic usage),
subjectivity. It is the insight of reflective man, from Euripides to
Shakespeare to Van Gogh and Dostoyevsky,...that violence -
100 proof, sin eupemisms, sin abstractions - is one of
the two basic themes of existence. Add to this the well known sitz im leben, the
stream of life which produced the H-ian text...and: How is it conceivable,
Violence - dynamic, engrossing, Heraclitean Violence, were not the controlling
trope? and does not its mere evocation more lucidly bring
to language the primordial truth of being of his stilted
formal indicators?"
You refer here to Greek tragedy, Homer, the Bible, Christianity, Heraclitean
fire and end up asking whether these lines of violence running through Western
history "bring to language the primordial truth of being more lucidly than his
[Heidegger's] stilted formal indicators?"
If the question is not merely rhetorical (relying on the charged evocation of
violence), then it calls for an answer. And I would say no. Why? Because the
language of thinking is 'stilted', if you like, i.e. sobre, dry, but
nevertheless charged for anyone letting themselves in for the passion of
thinking. None of the texts you refer to, with the exception of Heraclitus,
moves within the ambit of the question of the truth of being. What is truth?
What is the sense of being? are two questions lying in the heartland of
philosophy. Any connections to the other texts you mentioned have to be
demonstrated starting from or finishing in this heartland.
Thus it is wrong to claim, as you write in another post, that Heidegger simply
uses "data from cultural anthropology, art, and natural science (by the way, no
different a thing from what H does with his etymologies, etc.), to build an
argument [in your case] for the primordiality of violence...", for the texts he
takes up are put into relation with the central question of his thinking,
namely, the question of being (or aletheia, if you will). And there is no way,
e.g. for tracing out a line in detail between Heraclitean fire and nuclear
reactors/bombs without entering into the understanding of being and the opening
of the truth of that being that enables techne and then, later, natural science
and technology. Aristotle, that dry thinker, was the one who penetrated most
deeply into thinking the mode of being called techne (Metaphysics. Theta). And
he speaks of doing very innocent things like building a bed or curing an
illness. And yet, in a certain way, the truth of being that allows a bed to be
made is the same truth of being that allows nuclear bombs to be produced. That's
why these "formal indicators", as you call them, free of any moral supercharge,
have to be given attention.
In a recent post you also write, among other things:
"2. We recently had a seeming concensus disquisition on the
virtue for thinking of pre-grammatical, pre-logical,
kindergarten-blocks type, linguistic constructs
of heroic prolixity. P'raps y'all, in your turn,
might discover a little sympathy for how this could
tend, even for the most pious Wagner, to apoplexy."
What's this supposed to mean? What do you mean by apoplexy? It strikes me a bit
as a fear, camouflaged by mockery, of being drawn into some closed, long-winded
hermetic language that can only be rattled off like a rosary chant, thus robbing
one of one's own dearly held standpoint. For me, anyway, the thinking of being
is not an esoteric language that one learns like a gnostic catechism. There is
room for the free movement of thought in it, of critical altercation and a
seeing uncompelled by any conformity or articles of faith (cf. your reference to
"ghetto theology").
Michael
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