At this point I would clarify the place where we seem to diverge.
For me, the conviction that there is no final assembly of the world is a constraint, but not the main principle. I think it is impossible to move forward without the conviction that the final assembly of the world does exist after all.
It’s almost like they respond to a same-enough vision of temporal depth in terms of differring fundamental attunements. It’s hard to imagine Derrida using “mortals” and “gods” as basic terms in a work earnestly offered to others. This is part of the fascinating edge of the later Heidegger, who didn’t seem worried about those who would mock him. Overall his work is more numinous. Some of that comes from his more serious tone. Some have noted that he doesn’t include any humor in his work, while Derrida is a joker.
I sort-of agree, in that our charging comportment “forgets or denies” its blindness. Can the philosopher accept at a gut level the impossibility of a total vision ? Maybe not. In some ways, Heidegger’s work expresses a paradoxical/mystical total vision of the impossibility of a total vision.
I like the phrase “final assembly.”
Humor, as is well known, is a disguised attack. My reading of Heidegger sees the darkest places as the most important ones. Derrida discards this depth and takes into account only the form of early Heidegger.
The very essence of philosophy is the recklessness of the conviction that finding a final answer is possible. The philosopher does not need to accept impossibility, but, on the contrary, to overcome it.
Bloom would probably diagnose Derrida as the son trying to kill the father, trying to out-Herod Herod. But I wouldn’t want to ignore how important darkness or temporal depth is in the work of Derrida.
A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game. A text remains, moreover, forever imperceptible. Its law and its rules are not, however, harbored in the inaccessibility of a secret; it is simply that they can never be booked, in the present, into anything that could rigorously be called a perception. And hence, perpetually and essentially, they run the risk of being definitively lost. Who will ever know of such disappearances?
He says “not a secret” but emphasizes a darkness ( a perpetual non-presence) anyway. So why is “secret” a bad metaphor ? He is reminding of us of the secrets that hide in the text.
I at least agree that there’s a heroic charging toward something. For me ( as prejudiced subject) the goal shines more in terms of an opportunity for creativity. The philosopher, like Milton, wants to write a poem that the world will not willingly forget.
This process of substitution, which thus functions as a pure play of traces or supplements or, again, operates within the order of the pure signifier which no reality, no absolutely external ref erence, no transcendental signified, can come to limit, bound, or control; this substitution, which could be judged “mad” since it can go on infinitely in the element of the linguistic permutation of substitutes, of substitutes for substitutes; this unleashed chain is nevertheless not lacking in violence. One would not have understood anything of this “linguistic” “immanence’” if one saw it as the peaceful milieu of a merely fictional war, an inoffensive word-play, in contrast to some raging polemos in "reality. " It is not in any reality foreign to the “play of words” that Thoth also frequently participates in plots, perfidious intrigues, conspiracies to usurp the throne. He helps the sons do away with the father, the brothers do away with the brother that has become king.
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For it goes without saying that the god of writing must also be the god of death. We should not forget that, in the Phaedrus, another thing held against the invention of the pharmakon is that it substitutes the breathless sign for the living voice, claims to do without the father (who is both living and life-giving) of logos, and can no more answer for itself than a sculpture or inanimate painting, etc. In all the cycles of Egyptian mythology, Thoth presides over the organization of death. The master of writing, numbers, and calculation does not merely write down the weight of dead souls; he first counts out the days of life, enumerates history. His arithmetic thus covers the events of divine biography. He is “the one who measures the length of the lives of gods and men..” He behaves like a chief of funereal protocol, charged in particular with the dressing of the dead.
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Thoth extends or opposes by repeating or replacing. By the same token, the figure of Thoth takes shape and takes its shape from the very thing it resists and substitutes for. But it thereby opposes itself, passes into its other, and this messenger-god is truly a god of the absolute passage between opposites. If he had any identity-but he is precisely the god of non identity-he would be that coincitientia oppositorum to which we will soon have recourse again. In distinguishing himself from his opposite, Thoth also imitates it, becomes its sign and representative, obeys it and con forms to it, replaces it, by violence if need be. He is thus the father’s other, the father, and the subversive movement of replacement. The god of writing is thus at onCe his father, his son, and himself. He cannot be assigned a fixed spot in the play of differences. Sly, slippery, and masked , an intriguer and a card, like Hermes, he is neither king nor jack, but rather a sort of joker, a floating signifier, a wild card, one who puts play into play.
from Dissemination
Nothingness and darkness are not a final and universal form. Nothingness can be fuller than something.
The scientific approach separates the pre-scientific and the positivist view of the world, but one can also regard science as one myth among others; and myths and gods may be fundamentally different.
I think Heidegger did not see the Nothing as the end of philosophy, but as the opening through which philosophy must truly begin.
I agree. The “nonbeing” in entities is something like their unpredictable future. The “nonbeing” of the object, as darkly “futural,” is more “real” than the “being-as-static-presence” of the object. The future is likewise “more real” than the past. This is how I understand Peirce’s “realism.”
How does the Future bear upon conduct? The answer is that future facts are the only facts that we can, in a measure, control; and whatever there may be in the Future that is not amenable to control are the things that we shall be able to infer, or should be able to infer under favorable circumstances.
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It cannot be denied that acritical inferences may refer to the Past in its capacity as past; but according to Pragmaticism, the conclusion of a Reasoning proper must refer to the Future.
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For its meaning refers to conduct, and since it is a reasoned conclusion must refer to deliberate conduct, which is controllable conduct. But the only controllable conduct is Future conduct.
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Thus, a belief that Christopher Columbus discovered America really refers to the Future.
If I suggest that we read Heidegger as giving us a final vision of being as time with its darkness, then I just mean that he gives us this “structure” as itself enduring. Gadamer likewise discusses “what cannot be destroyed.” This would be the collision of expectation-defying experience with expectant knowledge. Peirce nails the fundamental future-oriented-ness of existence and knowledge. In terms of the OP, Peirce was a “realist” about forms because they are how we meet the future. He uses the expectation that a ball will drop from his hand. So “gravity” is a kind of “form” that links moments.
I’m with you there. Or rather it’s all a gallery of gods with a difference in the organ music. Even Popper would grant, I think, that scientific beliefs are a kind of myth. Newton took absolute space for granted.
I can only guess what you mean above by “gods” though.
Would it be something like a recurrent return to the beginning that cannot be exhausted ? His readings of Parmenides and Heraclitus, for instance. The beginning is the moment of might. Is all “getting beyond this beginning” a kind of fall or forgetting ?
I do see the situation as more open than closed.
To put it simply, the main difference between religion and philosophy is dogmatism: dispute and clarification are not really possible. But religious traditions often have no less developed an ontology, metaphysics, and, of course, ethics. And these concepts differ from one another no less than philosophical ideas do. So there are many concepts of gods.
As far as I understand, Heidegger was not claiming to offer a final vision. Rather, he saw himself in the role of a great prophet announcing the coming of a new messiah — metaphorically speaking. He explicitly wrote that he was awaiting Ereignis — the passing-by of the Last God — something that could be endured.
I don’t know the later stuff as well, but my take is that he was trying for a post-metaphysical thinking, which indeed a new beginning. Have you read Caputo’s The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought ? I found it pretty great.
Heidegger’s take on this mystical poem is part of that book.
Die Ros ist ohn warum; sie blühet weil sie blühet, sie acht nicht ihrer selbst, fragt nicht, ob man sie siehet.
One translation into English:
The rose is without ‘why’; it blooms simply because it blooms. It pays no attention to itself, nor does it ask whether anyone sees it.
Heidegger talks about Leibniz and the Western lust for some “Ground” or “Because” for all that is — the principle of sufficient reason, the endless digging for reasons under reasons. If one slips outside of this demand for a moment, it looks like an acquisitive, neurotic madness. We are controlled by our desire to control, mad in our quest for a sanitizing sanity.
I connect with this Wittgenstein, who saw that piling up scientific explanations doesn’t answer the “the” question, which isn’t really a question at all but a lyrical cry of wonder.
In my view, philosophy is first of all a way of thinking, and Heidegger’s philosophy is a proposal of such a way — one that may perhaps create a new philosophy. His followers more often turned Heidegger’s darkness into a new schema, which is precisely what he tried to avoid. Thank you for the reference to Caputo — I will take a look at his interpretation.
That is indeed the problem with followers. I’m inclined to think that it’s hard to appreciate philosophy “properly” without being a philosopher. One takes the risk of being more than a spectator, which is something like taking off the spectator mask. I think you and I share the mad ambition to add something worthy, however differently we may understand that goal.
I am glad to share the Caputo recommendation. My paperback has an excellent dark typesetting.
Philosophy differs from religion or art in that genuine study is not a matter of following, but an invitation into dispute. One cannot study philosophy without being a philosopher, at least to some extent.
I largely agree, especially about the not following, but I wouldn’t personally be so quick to distance art and philosophy. The language of painting is arguably full of dispute and “implicit theory.” To me anyway, there’s an aesthetic component in every great philosopher. Consider Wittgenstein’s TLP. It’s a severe poem.
True. I only meant that one can understand art without being an artist. But to understand philosophy, one must already be something of a philosopher.
But this is a dialogical structure in name only — one that has been absorbed and ultimately dissolved by the maximalist ontocubism into which it has been submerged. There is no room for the dialogical under the maxim “it’s all real”.
That’s a fair correction, but I don’t think it completely overturns the fault-line I identified. It’s not so much that you eschew the Given as that you relocate it. Here, the Given is not the possession of any individual but is the temporal concatenation of all possible experience. For you the world is not an achievement, it’s an amalgam.
Yes, and this is part of the symptomology I previously identified. If we collapse truth into utility and actuality into possibility we lose the world along the way.
Here I favor Peirce, Lonergan and McDowell.
I agree. This problem doesn’t go away by changing the idea of coherentism from an intellectual/rational one to a matter of what satisfies.
Peirce and Lonergan, yes. (I wish Lonergan was more widely read, but his Thomistic language is understandably daunting. There’s an awful lot there, though, Thomist or not.)
McDowell sets up the problem beautifully but I’m still wrestling with his proposed solution. I don’t know if you’ve followed any of my conversations with @Pierre-Normand on the “Placement Problems” and “Question about a philosophical sentence” threads? I’d be interested in your thoughts.
Sorry, @j_j , I’m diverting from your OP! Back to you . . .