Re: BT, Section 45

I've been lurking for a few weeks and I hope you don't mind if I jump in.
(BTW, I want to compliment you all on the quality of this discussion and
especially for its mood, all-too rare on the net, in my experience.)

I'm really fascinated by this question being raised regarding
authenticity-inauthenticity, what "precipitates" one or the other, etc.
Would you allow me some thoughts on this? I hope I might contribute...

Picking up on Phil's thread, what allows us to "exist" both modes
(auth.-inauth.), and the idea that our being constituted by discourse is a
way of having a foot always already in both camps, so to speak, brings to
mind a bunch of literary-philosophical themes that may be interesting here.
Emerson said somewhere that every word was once a poem: here it seems to me
we have a distinction along discourse lines that runs very much parallel to
that authentic-inauthentic time-consciousness distinction. You can speak
with origin-ality (note the temporal connotation, of course!), poetically,
or you can speak in the mode of das Man, that is, not with one's "own" voice
but with others'. But even the most poetic of us are using a language that
is not 100% "our own"; even the most herdlike innovates to some extent, if
only casting a well-worn discourse net over a novel situation. We can still
say, though (I think!), that the one is more of a poet than the other.

What's the analogy, then? I'm thinking of poets like Wallace Stevens (see,
too, Martha Nussbaum's wonderful chapter on Lucretius and mortality from her
new book on Hellenism, where she draws on Stevens), and also Borges (there's
a whole tradition of this), where it's understood that so much of the stuff
that makes life worthwhile is evanescent, its sweetness is bound up in some
inextricable way with its contingency, its mortality. Let me try to tie
this up some with Phil's suggestion: Borges has this beautiful and
challenging story "The Immortal," where per impossibile the questing
protagonist encounters Homer and a sort of colony of immortals. They're all
sort of unkempt wildmen, life has grown grey and dull, etc. Now there's a
lot going on in this story and it bears a close-reading unto itself, but for
here I'm thinking of it as a sort of counterfactual, where we imagine what
it would be like not to be mortal, and we see what vanishes: everything
involving finitude, basically all of the stuff that makes life worthwhile,
from parenting, to teaching to making and enjoying a fine meal with friends,
and on and on. (This exercise Nussbaum in her book levels as a criticism at
the Epicureans, who wanted to withdraw from commitments involving temporal
extension, to find ataraxia, "untroubledness"). All of these things involve
finitude, and their loveliness would vanish if they were not finite. (Cf.
also Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, where H. reconstructs Kant's great
questions (What can I know?, etc.) as all questions about finitude, Dasein).
The connection with Homer is caught up with what sociologists call "symbolic
immortality," that is a cultural innovation that lives on, a discursive
stream that at once precedes you and that you may also step into and become
"part" of. Authentic time consciousness is caught up with something like
art, poetizing, creativity, then. (Foreshadows of late H. here?) That's
what authenticity would be about, then, paradoxically grasping finitude and
immortality both at once. As for what precipitates it all, why you "have"
it and not me, etc., what a question! what a mystery...

Could I quote Borges to conclude? From "The Immortal" story: "Death (or
its allusion) makes men precious and pathetic. They are moving because of
their phantom condition; every act they execute may be their last; there is
not a face that is not on the verge of dissolving like a face in a dream.
Everything among the mortals has the value of the irretrievable and the
perilous. Among the Immortals, on the other hand, every act (and every
thought) is the echo of others that preceded it in the past, with no visible
beginning, or the other faithful presage of others that in the future will
repeat it to a vertiginous degree. There is nothing that is not as if lost
in a maze of indefatigable mirrors. Nothing can happen only once, nothing
is preciously precarious. The elegaical, the serious, the ceremonial, do
not hold for the Immortals. Homer and I separated at the gates of Tangier;
I think we did not even say goodbye." (from LABYRINTHS)

Thanks for listening. Is this suggestive at all? David




+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
David Blacker
Illinois State University
djblacke@xxxxxxxxx



--- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---

------------------

Partial thread listing: