Event is precisely the word. Kisiel finds this term known from later Heidegger in a crucial 1919 lecture. Es gibt. The world worlds furiously. Kisiel locates the breakthrough, the deep theme, the molten but sturdy topic, more or less in this “war emergency semester.”
Another word is appropriation as a taking place. Not just time but time situated. Existence is appropriation is taking place is event or eventing. Just my “take,” my “taking place.”
Penetration to essence, yes. With Hegel we get perhaps the penetration to inner contradictions as the revelation of the finitude on unreality of every finite object as us, so that the flowering whole alone can shine in its self-affirmed and self-articulated truth, attaining perfect self-presence, so that ontotheology becomes ( reveals and constructs itself as ) the final form of god-being-reality, which called forth this very process as latent in the beginning.
On the second point, yes, being is always the being of an entity. But what is the being of the whole without remainder ? What of the nothingness that makes being being ? I say this to encourage your advance along the vector you explore.
I’ve tried — perhaps not successfully — to approach from the object and the subject. As object, the being always hides being itself. As subject, my vision is always also and even primarily blindness. My comportment is hopelessly and helplessly kinetic. I hurtle forth, primarily blind to my own blindness. The being that hides behind itself hides also this very hiding.
I quoted this elsewhere ( maybe in this thread ? ) but I think it suits the fleeing-arriving moment.
In § 65 the picture that SZ had been drawing for some 350 pages finally begins to become clear, and as it does, we see the utter radicalness of what Heidegger was driving at. At this point—not even a third of the way through SZ as originally projected and long before Part II, which was to take on the history of being—Heidegger has already destroyed traditional ontology. He has dismantled being as it was imagined at the origins of Western philosophy: static, firmly grounded, identical to itself—all the characteristics (other than its correlation with minding) that Parmenides had established.38 He has shown that we understand—and cannot not understand—everything in terms of our groundless, asymptotic becoming. There is no founding reason for that: we’re simply thrown into doing it ineluctably. In a way that is analogous (but only analogous) to Nietzsche, Heidegger has stamped being with the characteristics of becoming. He has done Nietzsche’s homework for him.39
Heraclitus famously said that you cannot step into the same river twice.40 Some fifty years later Cratylus did him one better by saying that you can’t step into the same river once.41 Heidegger agrees with Cratylus and tells us why he is right. You can’t step into the same river once because there is no bank from which to step into the river. You are the river.
Above I suggested existence as a torrent of naked reality. His name was Mr. Torrents.
Perhaps the existence of an object “in itself” is fundamentally impossible. Existence may be possible only through interaction. Even the vacuum is not simple emptiness: it is a field of fluctuations, where virtual particles appear and disappear.
In physics, energy can be understood, very roughly, as the capacity or potential to bring about change. And energy can also manifest itself as mass. This may be physically imprecise, but it conveys the intuition I am trying to express: being is not a static self-contained presence, but something that occurs through relation, interaction, and the possibility of transformation.
Indeed indeed. As I understand Heidegger, he’s a nondual thinker. Being-in-the-world is not a subject meeting an object. It is the shimmering presence of “world face.” As “consciousness” I am the presence or being of the subject-object. As consciousness, I am "eject. " Consciousness is not stuff for picturing but being itself taking place, the river that tries to step into itself.
Just for context ( as we haven’t really dug into this issue much ), I am very far indeed from the doctrine of an independently existing world, which (speaking of rivers) is like dehydrated water.
My position is “ontocubism” ( a false coin foolishly self-forged) or “ontoperspectivism.” It’s close to Wittgenstein’s “pure realism” in the TLP and Mach’s pluralistic phenomenalism in The Analysis of Sensations. But it is very influenced, predictably, by Heidegger, who I take to be a nondual thinker. As I mentioned, I lately found Bakhtin’s dialogical insights more than worthy of addition to my radium-and-motor-oil ontological stew.
Right. And we might even say ( especially me as an updated post-Mill immaterialist ) just “nonsense.” But, dialogically self-aware, this is “non-sense” from the mouth of a situated witness, not “non-sense” in the ear of the god of logic-in-itself. The problem with early positivism was its unwitting adhesive to an unseen metaphysics of substance that hit itself in a theory of perfectly present universal meaning. The forbidden metaphysics is concealed analytic statements ( for the ears of “god.”) What they couldn’t remember to forget was their faith in the easy static presence of meaning.
For me, this is one way to say “it.” In other words, I might translate this as being is not in time but time itself, for being, as such, when it comes out of hiding, has temporal depth, lingering on while never arriving. Being is timing. The -ing on be- is the trying of time.
(You know I love Finnegans Wake, so forgive me this fun with language.)
I think Heidegger’s darkness and concealment are not dialectic and not a game, but rather a way of describing his own thinking — somewhat like Plato describing thinking as recollection of the Ideas.
Heidegger is deeply mystical in his mode of thought, but he tries to legitimize this thought by philosophical means.
Above I prevented the first, dominant ontological frame, the aptly named picture frame. Continuing with a visual metaphorics, I give you the aspect frame.
Note the strangeness please in calling it the aspect frame when it is precisely opposed to the picture metaphor.
The aspect “frame” is “doomed” to be misunderstood at first by those who enact the “picture frame” without understanding it as a frame.
To be less confusing, I will perhaps call it the aspect theory. Even this is tricky, because ‘theory’ etymologically refers to seeing, and within aspect theory the seeing and the seen are one.
For aspect theory, reality is the (open) “collection” of its aspects and it is nothing more than these aspects.
The “picture” in “picture theory” that is between the internal-subject and external-reality is now understood as an aspect of a reality that is no more external than internal. The internal-subject and the external-reality are abolished, discarded.
In picture theory we had a plurality of subjects each with their own picture between them and a single external reality.
In aspect theory we have no subjects and no pictures but still and only a single reality.
In aspect theory, perceptions are not pictures of objects but pieces or aspects of objects themselves.
Just as reality is the unity or synthesis of its aspects, none of them “true” and none of the “false,” so objects are the ideal manifolds of their aspects. In a more accurate metaphor, that leaps out of this snapshot approach, these aspects are moments of the objects.
The objects are not more than or other than these aspects, but the unity of the object is open. The object continues to show itself as new aspects.
Reality continues to show itself as new aspects. But “show” is misleading here.
Reality — as or through its aspects, that each hide all the others to in order to be present and luminous themselves — shines without a witness.
The apparent witness, the false witness, is one more object in the world, also having its being only as an open synthesis of aspects or moments.
Instead of subjects we have “ejects” who are “faces” or “aspects” of world.
The so-called witness is given in what is no longer to be called the witnessed.
There is only world — as a entangled system of faces or aspects or sides or profiles.
The world hides behind itself, as the being or presence of any single face is the non-being or absence of all the others.
I respect your own appropriation of Heidegger, and I’ve enjoyed the call and response of our dialogue, though I surmise a dissonance that I did not forsee — such was my blindly hopeful comporment. The judge in Blood Meridian calls war the ultimate game, and Heidegger’s “strife” can also be read as “play.”
In case I haven’t found the right signs to say so, of course I agree that darkness and concealment are indeed his primary topic, but of course darkness in strife with light, and concealment in strife with revelation. At this level of generality ( and with the invocation of ancient themes), there is plenty of room for us to not understand one another — which only testifies to darkness and concealment and the strife to reveal what is withdrawn.
As I see it, language was central for Heidegger, for “language is the house of being.” His early work can be read as a deepening of Hegel, a radicalization of Hegel, in his disclosure of the radical ( to-the-root-indeed ) situated historicity of the radiance/withdrawal of signs in their most concretely self-effacing contexture.
You might find this fascinating, but of course I present nothing as authoritative, nothing that conquers time by constraining the play or strife of concealing-disclosure.
Despite these characteristics of the assertion, Heidegger does not see the assertion as the locus in which the essence of λόγος becomes most effective. For him, it is in a knowledge of producing (ἐπιστήμη ποιητική) that the relation of unity and multiplicity is developed in a more decisive form. Here, λόγος is to grasp as the reason why the form—Heidegger says: “outward appearance”—of the work to be produced not only can be regarded as end and completion of producing, but, in the actualization of production, also can be related to that which essentially “lies over and against.”23 According to this interpretation, producing is tantamount to “forging something into its boundaries, so much so that this being-enclosed is already in view in advance,”24 and this being-enclosed forms itself in the “unbounded” standing over and against it, lying opposite of it. That is, the εἶδος becomes effective in the material that, taken on its own, is unbounded, and it becomes effective by becoming form (μορφή). Heidegger summarizes his considerations: “Because this proximity of εἶδος and ὕλη lies in the essence of producing, producing necessarily, at each step along the way, is constantly excluding and enjoining, fitting in and, at the same time, leaving out.”25 And since the relation of the enclosed unity of εἶδος that has the effect of enclosing and the boundlessness of the unformed are brought together in λόγος, Heidegger can say that "the being-gathered-together of production is at play in the gathering [λέγειν] of the discussion and of the cognizance.26 If the εἶδος regulating producing is given in λόγος, so that it has to be understood as λόγος, and if the forming of εἶδος in the material is to be understood as fitting in and excluding in terms of λέγειν, producing can indeed be characterized as “a talking to oneself and letting oneself talk.”27
…
For Heidegger, λόγος is therefore now the essence of human existence; in the terms from Being and Time, it is its disclosedness and that which has to be comprehended philosophically against the very tendency of self-concealment. But this no longer amounts to rendering effective against language a “hermeneutical intuition.” The attempt to bring Dasein into language originates from language itself. Correspondingly, philosophy can be attentiveness toward language—articulation of the essence of language that neither reveals itself in each discourse nor eludes discourse altogether.
…
Heidegger can claim the concept “hermeneutics” not only for the interpretation and communication of Dasein to be grasped intuitively, but also for this very manifest attentiveness toward language, since it is as far from the reification of its matter as Heidegger had insisted it is for the hermeneutics of facticity. The manifestation of the attentiveness toward language belongs to language itself; it does not deal with what-is-the-case, but, in Heidegger’s later formulation, it is itself “what-is-the-case,”30 in which a case fore-gives the possibility of comportment, a “relation”31 that has no enclosed and bounded opposite, but rather is the adopting of a giving-itself. This giving-itself is the possibility of discourse in and out of language experienced as such, the non-objective fore-given that is not reached with any naming of a particular, but is already experienced in each as play-space of the relational. It can be explored only hermeneutically since it is as the “hermeneutic”32 already “the bearing of message and tidings.”33 Language as the play-space of the relational founds also the relation to itself. It is the very mediation that mediates itself in a discourse open for its own being-possible.
This is perhaps a more poetic than philosophical answer, but it is the one closest to me.
Heidegger is one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century, but almost everyone who relied on him was worse than him. Heidegger was reduced to the dialectic of self-contradiction, to language, semiology, psychology, existentialism.
But for me, the statement that genuine thought is essentially dark does not require any further clarification. This thought is, for me, a hopeful lantern in the darkness of chaos and doubt — a unity within solitude.
Heidegger’s dark style often does not need to be illuminated. It is dark exactly to the degree it needs to be. Additional illumination weakens it rather than strengthens it.
I’m down with that, and really I don’t believe in the difference between philosophy and poetry. Philosophy is what happens when poetry is bled of its strangeness.
I find this to be a fascinating approach, with an internal coherence that I didn’t anticipate. Leaving the darkness dark. And this way of putting it is strangely illuminating, at least for me in relation to your sense of his work.
There is something I can relate to in additional illumination weakens it rather than strengthens it. It is perhaps related to what I darkly mean when I suggest that all seeing is also and even primarily blindness. It may be that the very brightness of an object conceals its darkness and lures us into a faith in presence.
I am not ready to agree with this completely. There is a line by a poet: “A thought once uttered is a lie.” I think this motif appears quite often.
But to say that “all seeing is also and even primarily blindness” sounds too reconciliatory to me, as if it implied that everyone is wrong in the same way.
A thinker is also a fighter. And this means that his blindness is not simply equal to the blindness of others. His blindness may be more precise.
Oh but everyone is wrong ( and right ) at the same time in the same act in their own singular way.
This can be read as forgiving and conciliatory, I suppose, but it’s not intended as some “all beliefs are equally good” ( and therefore incoherent ) relativism. Far from it, just for clarity.
To go East is to not go West. To approach the stranger as a friend is to not approach the stranger as a foe. Likewise the text shows it to me one way by not showing itself to me in many others. Darkness is the light itself in this special sense. If darkness is the exclusion of light, then light is likewise the exclusion of darkness, the contraction of an infinite temporal depth into a fugitive point of bright presence.
I should clarify that I did not write this as an argument against you, but only to make my own position more precise.
I appreciate your saying so. I wasn’t offended, just also wanted to clarify.
Yes. So there is heroic hope that “this” vision is less blind in some crucial sense. I write in such a hope, helplessly and blindly and ecstatically and believingly trying to illuminate the blindness in seeing, enacting what I caution against and celebrate as heroic folly, but with a background sense of the nothingness of human things, that all is vapor. The last man playing as the first, or the first man playing as the last.
Paul De Man wrote “Blindness and Insight” on this kind of thing.
When modern critics think they are demystifying literature, they are in fact being demystified by it. But since this necessarily occurs in the form of a crisis, they are blind to what takes place within themselves. What they call anthropology, linguistics, psychoanalysis, is nothing but literature reappearing like the hydra’s head in the very spot where it had been suppressed. The human mind will go through amazing feats to avoid facing ‘the nothingness of human matters’.
We might read these modes of illumination as functioning by leaping from and as the very darkness they hope to unveil.
“Literature” is a rich term here. De Man’s own life was that of a “secret agent,” telling the secrets of secrets, escaping or released before his own caught up with him.
Not a riddle, an antinomy, reason in conflict with itself:
“….. For alongside such a lawless faculty of freedom, nature could hardly be thought any longer, because the laws of the latter would be ceaselessly modified by the former, and this would render the play of appearances, which in accordance with mere nature would be regular and uniform, confused and disconnected….” (A451/B479)
Spontaneity belongs to understanding and has empirical connotations with respect to the synthesis of phenomena with conceptions; freedom belongs to reason and has transcendental connotations with respect to a formal deliverance from the necessity of uncaused causes. Independence from the laws of Nature, which just is freedom itself, is “….indeed a liberation from coercion, but also from the guidance of all rules…..”.
So this beautiful line occurred to me as I was watching this beloved performance. I do not want the English translation of what she sings. For that might weaken rather than strengthen what she says by not saying to me.
