Thanks for your response, Rene. Before anything, I was also taken with your original
post, now to be published amongst Jud's Athenia.
Would you characterize this holding -a- mirror -in -front- of
"philosophizing," at least of
a sort? Heidegger points out again and again that factical life
experience "manifests an indifference
with regard to its manner of experiencing." "Subjectivity" as we
experience it is especially persistent in its self-sufficiency and
reckless indifference to any questioning as to its "how." As you
suggest,
it is so totally absorbed in its Da, its surrounding world, that the
how of its being-there-in-that-way
must remain utterly indifferent to it.
*Utterly* indifferent would mean irretrievably lost. But an
indifference, that still feels an Unbehagen, an unease, also
still has a chance. "How the fuck was i supposed to know?" -
Eminem.
An almost perfect restatement of the ambiguity of the situation we're in: Indeed, how the
fuck was i supposed to know?! --but to say that as a way of understanding the ambiguity, such
that by virtue of our indifferences we are able to get along. But because our indifference comes
flavored with Unbehagen, the opportunity for philosophy still presents itself, though , of course,
only to those with a taste for it. And so everyone can be reasonably content with indifference to the how, though the creeping dis-ease-- the sense that they're missing/forgetting something --can get quite distracting at times.
Nobody told you, and you had to find out for yourself.
It turned out that the guy never was a nihilist.
I'll say not!
Look what i read this morning in Nietzsche II, 'ER of the same
and WtP', nr. 6, where total meaninglessness is considered as
the Lichtung-less, and thus is an indication of Lichtung.
"What really happens, is the abandonment by Being of beings:
that Being (das Sein) leaves beings (das Seiende) to itself
and REFUSES itself therein.
Insofar this REFUSAL is noticed (erfahren), already IS happened
(IST geschehen) a Lichtung of Being, for such a refusal is not
Nothing, it is not even a negative, no missing and no break off
(Ab-bruch). It is beginning-like (anfaenglich), first manifestation
of Being in its questionworthiness - as Being." (II, p. 28)
That's why being is, for us, only as a question. Every other grammatical possibility
dissolves the light, rather maintaining it as Lichtung-less--an indication of Lichtung. This from
Blanchot:
"Questioning is the movement wherein being veers and appears as the suspension of being
in its turning"
The problem with analytical or dialectical thinking, even Hegel, is that it constricts the
self-motivating movement of the question by"completing" it in the structure of an answer.
Blanchot again:
"Through the question we give ourselves the thing and we give ourselves the void that
permits us not to have it yet, or to have it as desire. The question is the desire of
thought."
To have and not to have. That is the question!
So how does philosophy begin ?(if in fact it is philosophy you were
talking about)
I wasn't thinking of it.
Beautiful, Rene. Of course you weren't!
The fact that you would never talk this way--say
this--in a normal situation is a generous admission of the
discrepancy that makes philosophy possible. But then you quite
credibly say that somehow a mirror gets held up in front of, and you
get yourself again. The holding up of the mirror, then, would seem
to be a consequence,
I almost want to say effect of, what Heidegger calls the "the
turning around which leads to philosophy."
But philosophy itself continues on in its own "useless" direction to
a place where there are no mirrors.
That may be. I was thinking rather of the Versetztheit, the shifty
displacedness in everydayness, and the trouble to envision this, to
find out, and get moving. Being IN the world, is all we have, or
better: are. And this world knows no longer of the shining of art,
which could point to another world as in Plato, so - and here seems
to be the knot - it's all up to oneself, while the making of
representation is forbidden. How to begin, how to catch (an-fangen)
a trace?
The quote above from 1940 says: Being is in beings, as what is *absent*
in them, so that they 'are' not really. It hides in THEM, in their
exclusive force, and not behind or beyond them!
Then, being-in-the-world would always imply: being-not-at-home.
(das Un-zu-Hause). Only then can there be a *going* home, as in
Novalis' idea of philosophy: the desire to be at home everywhere.
Nothing 'philosophical' at first sight, Heidegger writes in GA29/30.
Maybe one arrives this way at an essential ambiguity. Only then,
to me, it makes sense to read Heidegger. Ambi-guous: two sides
mirrorring into each other. And that reminds me of Rene Char
and the Provence i'm going to one more time this summer:
the meadow says to me: stream
the stream says to me: meadow
Some places are like that. Maybe all places, but the ambiguity is
more difficult to stick with.
But perhaps I am twisting your metpahors here.
good twist
So here I'll stop for the moment.
That's what i said the first time in the Provence,
in a little place called Isles-sur-Sorgues.
It happened to have been the habitat of Rene Char.
Lagnes is close. Heidegger wrote a little piece on
an old woman in Lagnes, who took care of him the times
he was there. I was quite 'myself' there.
I'm going for another bikeride, perhaps also, once again, not yet. . .
I'm glad Heidegger got out of the Black Forest and Freiburg, if only to go
to Provence.
Best regards,
Allen
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