The sky is blue and so are blueberries. Blueness ( the “stuff” itself) does not differentiate itself but it “formed” by the “idea” of a sky or a blueberry. This oversimplification is a mere pointer. Not math for the computer in the sky.
Yes, we might say “produced.” It “emerges.” It “happens.”
Put differently, don’t we always have to ask ‘what is this past DOING right now’? How is it working? What is its sense? Doesn’t that necessity make the Hegelian dialectical project of a rational history incoherent?
I’m not a Hegelian ( don’t believe in the end of history), but I do think he captures some of the structure of existence. We want to assimilate our past toward “thus I willed it.” Do all of us want to do this ? I wouldn’t go that far. But those invested in being rational tend to rationalize a constantly updated past toward a self-celebrating autobiography.
Perhaps we could distinguish between those who keep the flame of Hegelian totalizing rationalism burning (Brandom, Mcdowell, Peirce, Davidson) and those who follow Wittgenstein, the hermeneuticists and phenomenology in seeing self-celebration as continual reinvention through a rationality defined anew in accordance with the pursuit of ever changing social purposes.
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Right. And we’d add Rorty to the second camp.
You said they are close. But they are not.
Are you disagreeing with Plato or with what I say about Plato’s Forms?
And this is one reason why the terms space and Chora are not interchangeable. Timaeus says that the Chora, to the extent it is understood, is grasped by:
[quote=“Fooloso4, post:13, topic:1022”]
“… some bastard reasoning with the aid of insensibility …”
[/quote] (52b)
Is this your understanding of “spatial”?
Timaeus is addressing the same question addressed by earlier philosophers, that is, what is the arche? what is fundamental? The problem with answers given in terms of the four elements is that one can turn into another. (49b-d) Gold, however, remains the same no matter what shape it takes. Whatever is fundamental must be like this.
The sky and blueberries are not made out of “blueness”. Blueness is not formed. Colors are discussed at 67d. They are not fundamental. What is at issue here is not:
Categories come and go, through/as “ideas.” We invent dichotomies left and right. But category itself is the enduring articulation of the world. But there is “something” (under erasure) that is articulated. The world is not just category, not just a spectral cobweb of ontologic. The world is a sensory-affective world that is also “conceptual” or “articulated.” This “pre-stuff” can’t be categorized, so it’s a bastard kind of talk to try to point it out. If one names it, one likely forgets that we are aiming at precisely what “exceeds” the One, that “overflows” all conceptuality.
For instance, people have trouble understanding the ontological difference. What is this being that is not a being ?
Even if as fire, it nonetheless appears; it appears, even if never as itself.
The “categorical component” (the One) can’t/shouldn’t be “reduced” to mentality or concept-as-internal. For these themselves are historically generated categories. But what categories have in common is their “unifying action.” “That bird over there” is already a “category” that “unifies” all of the sensory-affective “surplus” that is “formed” into that unified-interpersonal-enduring bird over there. We can’t even communicate without words as categories of sounds that are collected into soundings of the “same” word over time and space. Saussure grasps this when he stresses “form not substance.” The sound-image is a “form” or “idea.” Hence the strange collision of the word “sound” with the static metaphor of “image.”
Note that this is not a history of the generation of the perceived thing. All things are one-and-dyad. Their separation is a mere theoretical pointing at their essential unity.
My interest is in trying to understand the text. I keep pointing to the text. You keep pointing away from it. In my opinion, if we are to discuss a text we should attempt to understand it.
He is talking about the Chora. If it appears as fire that is because it contains fire.
If you are referring to Heidegger’s distinction I too am having trouble understanding how you can construe any of this as the ontological difference.
Sure. Of course. And I agree with Gadamer that this involves projections.
Why does it appear but never as itself ? Does it appear as a container of fire ? Does this container not appear ?
I think the ontological difference is “bigger” than Heidegger. Many thinkers have discussed it, though he made the phrase famous.
I’m talking about the difference between presence itself and what is present. That’s one formal indication. Presence or being is not itself a stuff or a being.
“It is not how the world exists but that it exists that is the mystical.”
Categories and kinds of stuff that exist ( like “mind” and “matter”) aren’t this “existence itself.” The problem with monism, dualism, and really every ingredient ontology is a forgetting of this “presence,” a forgetting or overlooking of “being.” It’s not just what is there (mind, matter, blah blah blah) but that it is there.
What does you mean by projections? Where does he talk about projections?
The chora does not take the shape of anything it receives but is:
“… both moved and thoroughly configured by whatever things come into it; and because of these, it appears different at different times …” (50c)
And how does this relate to the paragraph that precedes it?
As I understand him and Heidegger, existence is thrown projection. We are “constituted by prejudice.” We discover our deep (“invisible”) prejudice through projections on the object that fail.
Here’s one passage from T&M, page 252.
In fact, however, the coordination of all knowing activity with what is known is not based on the fact that they have the same mode of being but draws its significance from the particular nature of the mode of being that is common to them. It consists in the fact that neither the knower nor the known is “present-at-hand” in an “ontic” way, but in a “historical” one—i.e., they both have the mode of being of historicity. Hence, as Yorck says, everything depends on “the generic difference between the ontic and the historical.” The fact that Yorck contrasts “homogeneity” with “belonging” reveals the problem that Heidegger was the first to unfold in its full radicality: that we study history only insofar as we are ourselves “historical” means that the historicity of human Dasein in its expectancy and its forgetting is the condition of our being able to re-present the past.
…
What first seemed simply a barrier, according to the traditional concept of science and method, or a subjective condition of access to historical knowledge, now becomes the center of a fundamental inquiry. “Belonging” is a condition of the original meaning of historical interest not because the choice of theme and inquiry is subject to extrascientific, subjective motivations (then belonging would be no more than a special case of emotional dependence, of the same type as sympathy), but because belonging to traditions belongs just as originally and essentially to the historical finitude of Dasein as does its projectedness toward future possibilities of itself. Heidegger was right to insist that what he called “thrownness” belongs together with projection. Thus there is no understanding or interpretation in which the totality of this existential structure does not function, even if the intention of the knower is simply to read “what is there” and to discover from his sources “how it really was.”
Another good one, page 253:
[I]t would be completely to mistake the significance of what Heidegger calls existential were it thought possible to counter the existential of “care” with another specific ideal of existence, whatever it might be. To do so is to miss the dimension of inquiry that Being and Time opened up. In defending himself against such superficially argued polem- ics, Heidegger could quite legitimately refer to the transcendental intention of his own work, in the same sense that Kant’s inquiry was transcendental. From the start his inquiry transcended all empirical differences and h all ideals based on content. [Whether it fulfilled its intention to rekindle the question of “being” is another matter.] Hence we too are beginning with the transcendental significance of Heidegger’s problematic.
…
The problem of hermeneutics becomes universal in scope, even attaining a new dimension, through his transcendental interpretation of understanding. The interpreter’s belonging to his object, which the historical school was unable to offer any convincing account of, now acquires a concretely demonstrable significance, and it is the task of hermeneutics to demonstrate it. That the structure of Dasein is thrown projection, that in realizing its own being Dasein is understanding, must also be true of the act of understanding in the human sciences. The general structure of understanding is concretized in historical understanding, in that the concrete bonds of custom and tradition and the corresponding possibilities of one’s own future become effective in understanding itself. Dasein that projects itself on its own potentiality-for-being has always already “been.” This is the meaning of the existential of “thrownness.” The main point of the hermeneutics of facticity and its contrast with the transcendental constitution research of Husserl’s phenomenology was that no freely chosen relation toward one’s own being can get behind the facticity of this being. Everything that makes possible and limits Dasein’s projection ineluctably precedes it. This existential structure of Dasein must be expressed in the understanding of historical tradition as well, and so we will start by following Heidegger.
One more, page 269:
A person who is trying to understand a text is always projecting. He projects a meaning for the text as a whole as soon as some initial meaning emerges in the text. Again, the initial meaning emerges only because he is reading the text with particular expectations in regard to a certain meaning. Working out this fore-projection, which is constantly revised in terms of what emerges as he penetrates into the meaning, is understanding what is there. This description is, of course, a rough abbreviation of the whole. The process that Heidegger describes is that every revision of the fore-projection is capable of projecting before itself a new projection of meaning; rival projects can emerge side by side until it becomes clearer what the unity of meaning is; interpretation begins with fore-conceptions that are replaced by more suitable ones. This constant process of new projection constitutes the movement of understanding and interpretation.
As I see it, there are many ways to approach this, but perhaps an investigation of signs is the best. I was thinking about Saussure and Derrida and the problem of meaning when I stumbled on the unwritten doctrine. Then, recently, I found the passage in Timaeus, which fit quite comfortably into an already stable projection. I only offer it as a projection that seems stable and harmonious to me, seeing what others might make of it.
Let’s limit ourselves for a moment to sound. As Saussure saw, a teeming multiplicity of sounds are mapped to a single sound-image. In a singular speaking, there is “quality” in the sense of “auditory presence” that is “more than” the category assigned to it. To hear Charlie say “hello” on a particular morning is to “tame” a singular event into a repetition of a sound-image. So I hear that saying of hello as “articulated (auditory) quality.”
Even in this single linear dimension of sound, the same small set of English phonemes, for instance, appear in different chains to manifest as different sound-images. To me it’s important that these phonemes are just as “ideal” or categorical as sound-images. They are something like the most “atomic” sound-images. Concrete vocalizations of phonemes are singular events. They are “intelligble” and “discussable” only through the categorial grasping of them as repetitions of enduring public things. The fugitive sound event alone, devoid of categorization, is “ineffable.” Even an indexical statement like “that sound right there” already imposes a minimal “idealization” on the singular event that “gives it the transcendence” of every object in the “space of reasons.”
“Remember that crazy scream we heard driving home last night ?”
Even if as fire, it nonetheless appears; it appears, even if never as itself.
In this reduced analogy for the world entire, the “pre-stuff” of “sonic quality” appears but only as the speakable saying of the transcendent (beyond-me, beyond-now) iterable word.
I call it “pre-stuff” in a kind of “bastard saying,” because I am categorizing the “other” of category itself. I “betray it” in my naming it, so I am “thrusting against the limits of language.”
If being is only ever the being of beings, then how are beings “there” ? They are “present in their quality.” But, as namable, present also in their “immediate transcendence” as “enduring entities in the world between us.”
So the river is there before me “as” a “river,” but also in its “ineffable” “quality.” If I name its “smell” and “shimmering,” then I betray this smell and shimmering by the invocation of categories, because I really want to indicate the “way” that the river is “more than” these paltry categories.
Maybe this is also of interest:
Heidegger paraphrases and then quotes in Greek a key passage from the Timaeus, according to which the chōra must be “bare of all manners of outward appearance [Aussehen, Heidegger’s translation of Plato’s εἶδος or ἰδέα]” so that it may receive the imprint of any of these forms without interference or imposition of an outward look of its own…Yet…Heidegger also says that we have scarcely begun to grasp the essence of chōra, and he offers a brief yet significant indication of how we may begin to do this: “Could not χώρα mean: that which removes itself from every particular , that which gets out of the way , that which in this manner admits and ‘makes place’ precisely for another?” Heidegger develops this brief remark—this hint of another chorology—in his lectures on “Heraclitus’ Doctrine of Logos” in the summer semester of 1944, where he writes: “The χώρα is the self-opening expanse which comes to encounter.”
The reference to logos suggests a tweak.
Even if as sound-image, it nonetheless appears; it appears, even if never as itself.
In terms of the ontological difference, the word is “present” or “there” but its “thereness” is usually ignored, not felt explicitly. Instead the “quality” is suppressed toward its significance, toward the word-image. Or the word-ἰδέα. So the being-as-presence and the being-as-quality are both “forgotten” or “overlooked.” This gives rise to a host of ingredient ontologies that miss both. But I read Plato so that all beings have “quality.” There simply is nothing that is “immaterial” in the revised sense of without “quality” or “sensory-affective pre-stuff.” What is called mathematical platonism misses the “life” of numerals, but I’ve said enough already.
Beautiful passage from Derrida:
This interminable theory of exegeses seems to reproduce what, following the discourse of Timaeus, would happen, not with Plato’s text, but with khõra itself/herself, if one could at all speak thus about this X (x or khi) which must not have any proper determination, sensible or intelligible, material or formal, and therefore must not have any identity of its/her own, must not be identical with herself/itself. Everything happens as if the yet-to-come history of the interpretations of khöra were written or even prescribed in advance, in advance reproduced and reflected in a few pages of the Timaeus “on the subject” of khöra "herself” (“itself”).
…
With its ceaseless re-launchings, its failures, its superimpositions, its overwritings and reprintings, this history wipes itself out in advance since it programs itself, reproduces itself, and reflects itself by anticipation. Is a prescribed, programmed, reproductive, reflexive history still a history? Unless the concept of history bears within itself this teleological programming which annuls it while constituting it.
…
In saying, in short, “this is how one can glimpse khõra in a difficult, aporetical way and as if in a dream-,” someone (Timaeus, Plato, etc.) would have said: this is what henceforth all the interpretations, for all eternity, of what I say here will look like. They will resemble what I am saying about khõra; and hence what I am saying about khõra gives a commentary, in advance, and describes the law of the whole history of the hermeneutics and the institutions which will be constructed on this subject, over this subject.
…
There is nothing fortuitous about that. Khöra receives, so as to give place to them, all the determinations, but she/it does not possess any of them as her/its own. She possesses them, she has them, since she receives them, but she does not possess them as properties, she does not possess anything as her own. She “is” nothing other than the sum or the process of what has just been inscribed “on” her, on the subject of her, on her subject, right up against her subject, but she is not the subject or the present support of all these interpretations, even though, nevertheless, she is not reducible to them. Simply this excess is nothing, nothing that may be and be said ontologically.
The key here is replaced by more suitable ones. In class Gadamer would determine more suitable interpretations based on how well they are supported by the language of the text. Those of us who are not proficient in Plato’s Greek are at a disadvantage, but we can begin t close the gap a bit by using reliable translations, commentaries, and some knowledge of important terms.
Note Davis’ references to John Sallis. Perhaps @Paine will move forward with the project of a reading group on Sallis’ Chorology.
I’m all for your appropriating the phrase ‘ontological difference’ for your own approach. Let me take the opportunity to contrast your use of the term with what Heidegger does with it. For Heidegger the ontological difference is the distinction between beings and the Being of beings. For him, Being is not the most general category of beings, presence in itself ( THAT a being exists). It is not what is common to every being (beingness). It is this unquestioning appropriation of the ‘is’ which his entire project is aimed at deconstructing.
Hidden within the ‘is’ structure of presence is the ‘as’ structure. We always see something ‘as’ something , and this ‘as’ transforms what we are looking at. Heidegger turns Leibnitz’s question ‘Why is there something rather than nothing’ on its head. The ontological difference between beigns and the Being of a being is the openness for essential occurrence. Rather than the most general notion, this openness is utterly particular. Being isn’t a thesis, it is an occurence, a happening, an event. Your treatment of Being as presencing remains for Heidegger and Derrida within what they call the metaphysics of presence.
Gadamer takes Heidegger’s existential analytic and transforms it into a universal theory of understanding. In doing so, he misreads Heidegger’s most radical themes, such as the primacy of ontology over interpretation, the destructive critique of tradition, the future-oriented character of historicity, the move beyond transcendental philosophy, and the question of Being itself. From Heidegger’s perspective, Gadamer remains too close to the human sciences
As I read your words here, you are implying that peanut butter is jelly. Being as a most general concept is obviously not the “deeper meaning of being.” Such being is vapor.
Identifying this with what is intended by “presence” —as a mere formal indication — is a serious misreading. From over here, I now think that you are ignoring something crucial.
I don’t generally agree with Polt, but he quotes some relevant passages.
“Being is presence,” writes Heidegger. This “decisive experience of my path of thinking cannot be remembered often enough” (GA 98: 278).
…
It’s now a commonplace that “being” means presence. … But … presence as the basic characteristic of being has nowhere been properly thought …. Why would it have been necessary [for me] to dedicate all [my] reflections to this one point and to think of the “temporal” character of being qua presence?
Being and essence “mean presence, obviously.”—Obviously? I don’t think so! (GA 98: 232-33)
If we ever manage to think what is named in the word “presence” in its entire fullness and breadth, which flowered in the Greek experience of the world, then and only then may we, instead of “presence,” also say: being. Otherwise … the word “being” remains an empty sound.
I’ve more than once said consciousness is being is time is the ongoing disclosure of the world. “Presence” is a fine synonym, if one is shrewd enough to understand signs in terms of their context in a concrete dialogue.
I think you are barking up the wrong tree, accidentally treating our dialogue as a Chess game with eternally present essences. “Because he used the bad word ‘presence,’ he must be doing metaphysics of presence !”
I wish you’d speak for yourself more rather than quote scripture at me. I respect your mind so this is not an attack. I’m just saying that IMV it’s a good thing to take the risk of using phrases — risky committed paraphrases — that I couldn’t get from a chatbot.