I used to read this “nothingness” in terms of vanity or futility. But I know that De Man knew Heidegger well, and in this new context I can read this nothingness as non-presence or non-being in the terms of not present being.
In the context of this reading, “anthropology, linguistics, psychoanalysis” are examples of demystifying or profaning illuminations that are themselves mystified and sacred at the root, as they must be, to dispense what light they carry from the darkness that carries it.
Here we touch on the mystery of the poetic act.
And here the sober resistance to that act.
If you say so.
What does it look like to act poetically?
I remember a scene from Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. There, as I recall it — not literally — a wandering actor says to his wife: “Can you imagine what I saw this morning? It was an angel, playing with the little Christ, leading him by the hands. Truly, truly. You don’t believe me? But it is the real truth. Not in the literal sense, but in a more truthful one.”
You’ll have to help me out here, if I’m to get satisfaction for my interest, however marginal that may be. How does any of that movie relate to the quote supposed as touching on the mystery of the poetic act on the one hand, and the next quote supposed as resistance to it, on the other?
I don’t see any way to avoid seeing unity and the “what” to make our observations “of”.
Just like I don’t see any way to avoid seeing the diversifying motion that dissolves unity.
I see both, together, at once, always at play. Neither essence nor existence can precede.
“The way up and the way down are the same.” The “same” here, is a diversifying unity.
Or I see neither, and all becomes one, and I wonder why I’m still here - a second one in a universe that is an unbreakable One, and any “parts” become fantasies constructed for the sake of some false reunification. But I am always still here (there is no knowledge that physically moves anything - we have to take that knowledge and implement it - but that’s only possible if there is knowledge).
Do I become a mystic, or a physicist? The philosopher can’t decide.
I meant like Aristotle. You said essence always transcends. Essence of what though? What are we learning when we know essence if not something immanent?
Essence known in me may transcend things from which this essence might be abstracted, but must essence only and always be transcendent?
Plato, it seems, tried to exaggerate this notion of essence, or formal intelligibility, or idea, in order to open our eyes to it, and maybe to avoid the influence of change on formal “things” or knowledge of ideas. Plato made the bottle “change” and led the fly out of the bottle to permanence (sort of inverse Wittgenstein).
Aristotle wasn’t satisfied to ignore the reality of change. He made change itself a permanent, essential feature of being (and I think rightly so). But Aristotle didn’t account for how radical change really is (he did not understand Evolution and assumed man and dog were always informed as such so formal “man” and formal “dog” operated much like a fixed Platonic form, just in a world that includes motion and not merely some transcendent world).
My sense (from Aristotle, but not Aristotle’s) is that we don’t have change without permanence and we don’t have permanence without change. We are trying to reason from one to the other. But they always come together. Fixed form does not come from change; change is not made possible only after there are fixed forms. A fixed form sustains itself in its living, dynamic being. (So the essence, so to speak, of being is becoming). Dynamism sustains itself always at a fixed, present, fully formed moment.
So really, though we conceptualize change and permanence separately, these are not two, but simply the nature of being one thing. Neither change nor permanence is more real; neither the common understanding of Plato (permanence is real) and Heraclitus (change is real) paint the picture. The picture is a movie.
In his works of the 1930’s, Heidegger determines the ground of the truth of Being, the ontological difference between Beings and beings, as a struggle, battle or conflict between unconcealing and concealing. It is this ‘transit’, a transcendence which raises us away into the future, into the possible, the nothing, and then comes back toward us from this future, binding us in the midst of a world which has been rejected from this future. Future, present and having been are simultaneous in this separating and binding movement of time.
Temporalizing does not mean a “succession” of the ecstasies. The future is not later than the having-been, and the having-been is not earlier than the present. “Dasein “occurs out of its future”.“Da-sein, as existing, always already comes toward itself, that is, is futural in its being in general.” Having-been arises from the future in such a way that the future that has-been (or better, is in the process of having-been) releases the present from itself. We call the unified phenomenon of the future that makes present in the process of having been temporality.
The ‘is-ness’ of being, to say something ‘is something, is to see it ‘as’ something. This ‘as’ structure transcendingly projects us away into future possibilities and then comes back toward us, depositing us within its midst as what is actual. The possibility of what is possible and the actuality of what ‘is’, something and nothing, concealing and unconcealing, ‘is’ belong to the same moment of time, as this difference or strife.
“ …this removal that pertains to projecting has the character of raising away into the possible, and indeed, as we must observe into the possible in its possibly being made possible, namely into something possibly actual. Wherever the projection raises us away to, into the possible that is a making-possible, indeed leaves whoever is projecting no rest. Rather what is projected in the projection compels us before what is possibly actual, i.e., the projection binds us, not to what is possible, nor to what is actual, but to making-possible. We must therefore say that this single occurrence of projecting in the unity of its essence raises us away in binding us to what is possible, and this simultaneously means: it expands into a whole, holds this before it. The projection is intrinsically completing in the sense of a casting ahead that is the forming of an ‘as a whole’ into whose realm there is spread out a quite specific dimension of possible actualization. Every projection raises us away into the possible, and in so doing brings us back into the expanded breadth of whatever has been made possible by it.”
Because my being is such that I am out ahead of myself, I must, in order to understand something I encounter, come back from this being-out-ahead to the thing I encounter. Here we can already see an immanent structure of direct understanding qua as-structured comportment, and on closer analysis it turns out to be time.
Time is both the opening of possibilities and the actualizing of possibilities. It is both together, but as strife or difference.
“Truth establishes itself as a strife within a being that is to be brought forth only in such a way that the conflict opens up in this being, that is, this being is itself brought into the rift-design. The rift-design is the drawing together, into a unity, of sketch and basic design, breach and outline.”
“That differentiation alone grants and holds apart the “between,” in which the overwhelming and the arrival are held toward one another, are borne away from and toward each other.”
The temporal structure which grounds Being has three dimensions 1) grounding as establishing ; (2) grounding as taking up a basis; (3) grounding as the grounding of something.
These ways of grounding are equiprimordial and simultaneous, corresponding to the ecstatic structure of time. The transcendence proper to the grounding projection of possibilities returns from the future to lay down a present grounding as an expanse of world, in the midst of which Dasein finds itself and relates to present beings . This is a radical departure from the thinking of past, present and future in terms of entities which exist ‘in the present‘ before they undergo change and become ‘past’ or point toward a future. “a historiographical reckoning …explores, from out of a present, information about a past, and thereby at the same time calculates the future…”(Heidegger 2013). That the threefold grounding of future projection, finding oneself in a present world, and the always already having been of this world is simultaneous means that there is nothing , no substrate, no ‘now’ that precedes change, differing, in-between-ness.
“The occurrence of transcendence as grounding is the forming of a leeway into which there can irrupt the factical self-maintaining of factical Dasein in each case in the midst of beings as a whole…Dasein grounds (establishes) world only as grounding itself in the midst of beings.”
I don’t see Heidegger as a mystic if mysticism implies focusing only on the hidden, the concealed, the nothing, the absent, the transcending. This is precisely what Heidegger does not do. He wants to show the inextricable complicity and equivocality of presence and absence, possibility and actuality, here and gone, something and nothing.
“What is present and at hand counts as a being. Therefore it is difficult for us, wherever we encounter something apparently “negative,” not only to see in it the “positive” but also to conceive something more original, transcending that distinction.” “As beyng, being “is” itself difference and is never a part or a side of the decisively separate, or one of the differentiated.”
Thank you for the detailed reply.
Concerning Heidegger’s “mysticism,” I did not mean mysticism in the doctrinal or religious sense, but rather the manner of his thinking. He often seems to appeal not primarily to pure logic, but to a deep, pre-theoretical and not yet fully articulated experience.
The strife between earth and world is already a large topic in itself, and I agree that it is genuinely Heideggerian. But I would distinguish this from the structure of Being and Time. In Being and Time, there is not yet this language of strife in self-disclosure. Heidegger is still working phenomenologically, trying to show that thinking arises from Dasein’s way of being: from a being that exists temporally, through memory, projection, possibilities, hopes, anxiety, and being-toward-death.
So my point was not that Heidegger lacks concealment or tension, but that the early analysis of Dasein should not be read too quickly through the later vocabulary of earth, world, strife, and the fourfold.
But we could also flip this on its head and argue that ‘pure logic’ , theoretical and objective modes of comportment function implicitly on a basis they dont explicitly understand. Rather than being the pinnacle of clarity and articulation in contrast to some mystical and hidden ineffable ground, logical and objective thought is impoverished and inarticulate in comparison to the explicit understanding of Being.
The most immediate state of affairs is, in fact, that we simply see and take things as they are: board, bench, house, policeman. Yes, of course. However, this taking is always a taking within the context of dealing-with something, and therefore is always a taking-as, but in such a way that the as-character does not become explicit in the act. The non-explicitness of this “as” is precisely what constitutes the act’s so-called directness. Yes, the thing that is understood can be apprehended directly as it is in itself. But this directness regarding the thing apprehended does not inhibit the act from having a developed structure.
Notice that for Heidegger the articulation of the developed structure of meaning is concealed in theoretical and logical compartment.
This is true, but it should be noted that in this later period Heidegger explained that he had not meant the ontological difference as he described it in Being in Time to refer to a static comparison between Being and beings but to an active event of transit. This is consistent with what he later means by ‘strife’.He only regretted that Being in Time did not make clear enough this character of the difference as passage.
But this characterization of “ontological difference” as such, and proceeding from it with the intention of overcoming metaphysics, seems initially to effect the opposite: now the result is getting bogged down even more in “ontology.” One takes this differentiation as a doctrine and key for ontological deliberation and forgets what is crucial, namely, that this differentiation has the character of a passage.
I am speaking only about my personal experience. There are texts that are understood logically, and there are texts that are understood more existentially. Heidegger does not really seem to me like an author with a clear form. For me, some of his arguments are like the perception of, say, Munch’s The Scream: logical references to a not very articulable experience.
Heidegger really does have the motif of unconcealment/concealment, but I cannot perceive him as an author close to Hegelian dialectics, as Derrida, for example, reads him. Purely intuitively, with regard to Heidegger this path does not seem fruitful to me — I mean the attempt to deeply consider concealment/closure through some complex metaphysical mechanics and to build one’s metaphysics on this pair, from which Heidegger was precisely trying to move away, offering a certain non-metaphysical way of thinking.
There’s an aspect of Loop Quantum Gravity (Carlo Rovelli) and Whitehead’s process metaphysics that I can’t grasp. Given a use of the word ‘time’ as change with an associated direction (increasing entropy), the suggestion is that time is derivative – that change is more fundamental than time. Okay, but the Wheeler-deWitt Equations says than nothing changes. And Whitehead says that prehension, concrescence, satisfaction, and perishing are logical operations that don’t involve change.
The problem for me is that the transition from potential to actuality entails change. I can’t see a way around this. If there is no change then what can ‘potential’ even mean? Potential to do what?
Let me say an area can be wholly red, or wholly green. Here we have a simple difference. The transition from red to green does not seem to entail thermal time. It is a simple transition. But it is a transition. A change. I’m quizzical at the suggestion that, at the most fundamental level of reality, there can be no such non-metric clock-less mode of change.
But even here we have sequence – and I’m wary that I may be importing time “through the back door” so to speak. But even here I find the idea of a single isolated transition to be inconceivable. I can’t hold the thought in my mind. I can only conceive of a network of relations, but if the network is to be capable of engendering thermal time then it has to change.
But I’m also wary of the way that physics uses intellectual structures to explain the fundament out of which these structures emerged. There seems to be something of a bootstrap problem here.
Even my intuition that reality is, at base, a changing network of relations leaves me with a sense of unease with at the prospect of making relations into a new substance, so I feel like I’ve been backed into a corner.
“When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.”
In his 1960’s lectures on Heidegger, Derrida takes great pains to contrast Heidegger with any kind of Hegelian dialectical thinking.
There is always a tendency to blame the author’s style for the fact that the ideas they are trying to convey are radically new and complex. You seem to split off ‘logical’ from ‘existential’ exposition as though the latter were some murky, vague, obscurantist or impressionistic version of the former, rather than the direct critique of it that Heidegger intends.
There are many forms of logic, and I read Heidegger as offering a form of logic which is more fundamental, more clarifying and more precise than the conventional version you seem to have in mind. But to get to where Heidegger is you have to follow his many critical analyses of subject-predicate logic and understand what he is claiming is missing from it.
The influence of Hegel on Derrida is very noticeable, although I agree that Derrida thinks rather through a critique of Hegel. What is important for me here is that the direction and manner of Derrida’s thought are very close to Hegel, not that he literally supports Hegel. I read Derrida’s metaphysics as a powerful synthesis of Hegel and Heidegger — their influence is very noticeable. Although the final result is not really similar to either of them.
Rather the opposite: for me, “poetic” — perhaps “mystical” was an unsuccessful word — is closer to praise, while positivism is almost a term of abuse. I understand logic as something formal and reproducible, not simply as a way of thinking.
As I understand Derrida, he transfers Heidegger’s unconcealment/concealment into a Hegelian problematic. But if in Hegel self-negation leads to self-disclosure and movement, then for Derrida there is rather the danger of moving away from truth and becoming enclosed within a fixed totality. Truth as such does not exist; there is, in essence, nothing over which these binary oppositions are constructed. Derrida transfers this structure from Heidegger’s unconcealment/concealment onto text and shows that these oppositions are not neutral.
But the difference from Heidegger is radical, because Heidegger seeks a breakthrough toward Being, which he considers phenomenologically through time. Derrida moves radically away from this and considers it as text, or more broadly, as human culture.
That is, in form he follows Heidegger quite strongly, but in terms of the structure of the world he is practically the opposite.
In terms of the very foundation of their thinking, purely intuitively, it seems to me that Heidegger is closer to Christian apophaticism: Being, for him, is thought not through a direct positive definition, but through its irreducibility to beings, its hiddenness, and its withdrawal. Whereas in Derrida one can sense something close to Lurianic Kabbalah. I do not mean a direct dependence, but rather the Kabbalistic tradition of playing with symbols: tzimtzum, tikkun, shevirat ha-kelim, the gathering of sparks, and the restoration of the broken vessels.
What you characterize as your reflective experience of this matter, I perceive as the inherent logic of the situation itself. One cannot extract asymmetry, for it is internal to all that attains determination, not a structure imported from without but the very horizon beyond which existence is impossible.
The unease regarding relations becoming a new substance dissipates once we recognize that entities are not substances subsequently entering into relations, but are instead constituted by them, held in place by that which they exclude.
The corner is the ground.
You’re alluding to Radical Ontic Structural Realism, “only relations are real,” precisely the kind of reification that makes me uneasy and leaves me feeling like I’m suspended groundless in the fog.
How is Derridean difference a fixed totality, unless you make the mistake of confusing it with a structuralist semiotics?Temporality is key for Derrida just as much as for Heidegger. An event of meaning, of intending to say something, at the same time carries forward an ideal expectation and ends up saying something beyond, other than , different from what was intended.
How does this repetition of self-subverting alterity lead to any kind of totalization? Far from enclosing itself within a centered structure, the movement of the trace decenters structures. This relocates truth to the contextual processes within complex, multiple social fields, rather than totalizing truth as Hegel’s dialectical becoming.
By a “fixed totality,” I meant Derrida’s critique of Hegel. I think he saw it precisely this way. Derrida transferred Heidegger’s method from phenomenology into the field of traces, signs, and cultural references, which makes it look externally similar, but its inner structure is fundamentally different. In Derrida, this is more like a schema, a more closed question. In Heidegger, by contrast, the relation between phenomenology and Being is precisely what is being investigated, whereas in Derrida this relation is encapsulated in the sign or reference.
Text for Derrida is more fundamental than human culture, or the human being. The differential schema of opening-concealing is not that far from Derrida’s trace. But Derrida radicalizes Heidegger by deconstructing the remnants of oppositionality in him (authentic vs inauthentic, proper vs improper, human vs animal).
But referential signification is central for Heidegger. The Care structure deems the world as mattering to Dasein, as always relevant , significant in some way or other on the basis of a referential totality of involvements.
This is precisely where the difference is important. Derrida says: if the world consists of references, we can formalize this. But Heidegger is rather opposed to the very act of fixing metaphysical schemas. What for Derrida is a simple formal structure has, for Heidegger, a fundamental significance.
Heidegger said that people think too much by means of language. In Derrida, text has fundamental significance. For Heidegger, language is also important, but Being is not limited to language. And he does not reduce language to a purely semiotic schema.