Jan speaking of the materialist-nominalist version of a 'tautology':
> For a materialist it is nonsense to say "matter exists as matter" or
> "energy exists as energy", these are empty phrases, even employed
> in didactical settings [my students would laugh their pants off when
> i would claim that 'circles exists as circles' or that 'an integer exists
> as an integer' or that 'the number pi exists as the number pi'].
Hi Jan sorry for butting in, but, I think something other than emptiness is
being conveyed by clauses of the kind:
'X exists as (or in the manner/way of) X' = clause-J
A few thoughts.
1) clause-J is pushing the limits of language especially language in the
form of predication; partly this is to do with a kind of emphasis (a sort of
not-quite-repetition, particularly useful in music and poetry, and a sort of
self-predication that suggests a certain 'depth' of multiple layering of the
signifiers) being put on the very power-cum-impotence of language to deliver
up the utterly unique, the uniqueness of individual beings; words tend to
bring in what purveyors of J-clauses might call (not without irony)
'abstraction', commonnesses, classes/sets, platonic <ideas>, and the like,
thus overriding/transcending the utterly unique; such overriding of the
unique things (entities/objects etc) by the very unique quality of
predicative language in its grasp and deference of the 'experience' such
unique beings tends to obscure what the purveyors of J-clauses mean to
reveal...
2) and related to (1), such J-clauses say two things apart from the
tautological:
they say "X!"
an emphatic declaration of the implacable thatness of X
they say "exists {in the way of}!"
that X is as a way, an emphasis on the "as" (which has no referent and thus
returns us to that which does..., very clever that)
A heideggerian might recognise these as akin to asserting the existentiality
of X, the be-ing of the being X, rather than (as it were) the essence of X.
That the label-X means to convey something the label can not convey as a
label. Such J-clauses pull us into (if we do not assume that they are simple
meaningless tautologies) considering the very isness of X, X's refusal to be
simply caught by the label-X. In this such clauses register emphatically
their anti-platonism.
Both (1) and (2) have resonances in the famous untranslatable clause from
exodus: "Eyeh-Asher-Ehyeh". Allen Scult writes:
[because of the absence of tense in the hebraic verb 'to be' (hyh)] "The
phrase cannot be tied down to any particular time. It evokes a future, but
not a future that will ever become present. Given its placement at the
limits of narrative power, it seems to echo Heidegger's meditation on the
'unthought thought' of metaphysics: the mysterious source of the opening in
which being is displayed." [Scult 'Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger' p86]
Although such J-clauses seem to exhibit a circular tautologous
almost-meaninglessness, I think they rather bring be-ing kicking and
screaming into the opening the clauses linguistically provide an ingress to.
regards
dwarfPeep
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> For a materialist it is nonsense to say "matter exists as matter" or
> "energy exists as energy", these are empty phrases, even employed
> in didactical settings [my students would laugh their pants off when
> i would claim that 'circles exists as circles' or that 'an integer exists
> as an integer' or that 'the number pi exists as the number pi'].
Hi Jan sorry for butting in, but, I think something other than emptiness is
being conveyed by clauses of the kind:
'X exists as (or in the manner/way of) X' = clause-J
A few thoughts.
1) clause-J is pushing the limits of language especially language in the
form of predication; partly this is to do with a kind of emphasis (a sort of
not-quite-repetition, particularly useful in music and poetry, and a sort of
self-predication that suggests a certain 'depth' of multiple layering of the
signifiers) being put on the very power-cum-impotence of language to deliver
up the utterly unique, the uniqueness of individual beings; words tend to
bring in what purveyors of J-clauses might call (not without irony)
'abstraction', commonnesses, classes/sets, platonic <ideas>, and the like,
thus overriding/transcending the utterly unique; such overriding of the
unique things (entities/objects etc) by the very unique quality of
predicative language in its grasp and deference of the 'experience' such
unique beings tends to obscure what the purveyors of J-clauses mean to
reveal...
2) and related to (1), such J-clauses say two things apart from the
tautological:
they say "X!"
an emphatic declaration of the implacable thatness of X
they say "exists {in the way of}!"
that X is as a way, an emphasis on the "as" (which has no referent and thus
returns us to that which does..., very clever that)
A heideggerian might recognise these as akin to asserting the existentiality
of X, the be-ing of the being X, rather than (as it were) the essence of X.
That the label-X means to convey something the label can not convey as a
label. Such J-clauses pull us into (if we do not assume that they are simple
meaningless tautologies) considering the very isness of X, X's refusal to be
simply caught by the label-X. In this such clauses register emphatically
their anti-platonism.
Both (1) and (2) have resonances in the famous untranslatable clause from
exodus: "Eyeh-Asher-Ehyeh". Allen Scult writes:
[because of the absence of tense in the hebraic verb 'to be' (hyh)] "The
phrase cannot be tied down to any particular time. It evokes a future, but
not a future that will ever become present. Given its placement at the
limits of narrative power, it seems to echo Heidegger's meditation on the
'unthought thought' of metaphysics: the mysterious source of the opening in
which being is displayed." [Scult 'Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger' p86]
Although such J-clauses seem to exhibit a circular tautologous
almost-meaninglessness, I think they rather bring be-ing kicking and
screaming into the opening the clauses linguistically provide an ingress to.
regards
dwarfPeep
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