razorsmile :: philosophy//magic //revolution

Category: heidegger

Events without distinction

Notes on Heidegger – ITM (polemos, deinon and the gathering of distinction)

“war is the father of all and the king of all, and it has shown some as gods and others as human beings, made some slaves and others free” (Heraclitus, Fragment 53) – it is also worth noting something similar is said in Fragment 80, though this is not mentioned by Heidegger.

Heideggers’ translation takes this seemingly socio-political statement and reads it in terms of his central problematic of emergence and appearance. “Confrontation is indeed for all (that comes to presence) the sire (who lets emerge), but (also) for all the preserver that holds sway. For it lets some appear as gods, others as human beings, some it produces (sets forth) as slaves, but others as free” (ITM 47[1. References are to the Tale Nota Bene edition and marginal page numbers])

The war, the polemos, Heidegger contends, cannot be a mere socio-political fact since this is merely a human fact and it is necessary for the polemos under question to be prior to the human. To ‘show some as gods and others as human beings’ the polemos to which Heraclitus directs us “must hold sway before everything divine and human” (ibid). Polemos is not mere human war, it is the distinguishing event that brings forth the human as distinct from the divine. Polemos is thus also not mere divine conflict but prior to the divine as much as it is prior to the human. Polemos is the ground of immortal mortality.

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May 16, 2008
bordering on coherence

[NOTE TO ANY READER: this post is a classic example of pinball thought, ricochet rather than writing, a ‘thinking out loud’. Beware of any apparent seriousness and discussion.]

In a recent post on his blog Poetix discusses the ‘object oriented’ philosophy of Graham Harman. I have only recently come across Harmans’ work, primarily because I have only recently returned to work on Heidegger and his various books began appearing in 2002, when I was deeply immersed in Deleuziana. His approach looks fascinating and is one I hope to more familiar with by the end of the year.

Poetix begins his post with the claim that an object cannot be fully understood through relationality because it must maintain an unrelatable element. It must maintain this ‘occult’ aspect of an unrelated element because if it did not then “there would be no object as such, but only the differential field of appearances itself“. The use of the phrase ‘differential field’ here immediately enables a connection to Deleuze’s philosophy (amongst others perhaps), not least because of his Nietzschean inspired claim that an object is nothing but a conjunction of forces (cf NP). For Deleuze, then, an object is nothing but that which is produced by a differential field of forces. It looks like we might have two very different answers to the problem of object-ness at work here, two different answers to a question such as ‘is an object nothing but the relations which constitute it?’ When you can get two clearly different solution vectors to a specific question then there is an opportunity to think a problem (in this case that of the object-ness of objects) through conceptual confrontation, through the tensions of thought.

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February 25, 2008
Hearing Touches

A former undergrad student of mine, now busy in his postgraduate studies, requested a copy of an article I wrote a while ago with a mate and so I’ve scanned this in because it wasn’t previously available in an electronic form. The files are rather large, I’m afraid – I could do with getting a proper copy of Acrobat working on my laptop but in the meantime this is a kind of workaround. The article developed from some discussion I had with Ben regarding deafness, partially resulting from the way in which the ‘worlding’ of Heidegger – and phenomenology generally – takes the sound as something given within an interpretative stance, a position I always found rather difficult to accept, even though the arguments in favour quite often seem strong. My resistance would be framed in a rather different way now, probably by using something like the clear-confused notion of Deleuze, the infinitesimal perceptions of Leibniz and the like, and I think the problem I have with the over-arching interpretative priority that seems central to phenomenology arises from a resistance to idealism. Anyhow, the 2 PDF files are here and here, both of them quite large I’m afraid.

January 2, 2008
Levinas, language and subsumption

In a recent post at Accursed Share, Joshua poses Levinas’ critique of Heidegger as rooted in the limitations of comprehension, even the extended notion of comprehension to be found in Heidegger’s work. His post is based on a reading of Levinas’ essay “Is ontology fundamental?” (Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings: pp1-32 – henceforth BPW). He is clear and concise is his account but, as needs must in a blog post, has to summarise and pose things quite starkly. This, I think, is a major benefit of ‘blog philosophy’, this need to summarise and contrast in a quick and somewhat schematic way, more akin to verbal exchanges than essay work since schema is intended to prompt comments and discussion rather than pretend at an over-arching knowledge. Such ‘simplification’ enables the difference of one way of thinking to another to be posed sharply, though I often find myself doing something rather different in my own posts.

Heidegger and Levinas are counter-posed and to do so a fulcrum point is needed. For Joshua this fulcrum rests on the concept of knowledge, which Heidegger is still beholden to and which Levinas argues necessarily subsumes the individual and difference (particular) in the general and same (universal). For Levinas ontology cannot be fundamental since it is still a logy, a knowing, and the reality or truth or essence or soul of the individual – named as the Other with a big O in Levinas – is lost in any form of knowledge relation. Presumably we would want to say something like, either there is a relation with the Other and thus ontology is not fundamental or else all is lost. There is a relation with the Other in the encounter (not knowledge) with the face and thus ontology is not fundamental.

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October 19, 2007
logos, phusis and appearance/s: notes on reading Heidegger’s ‘Introduction to metaphysics’

This is nothing more than some reading notes – primarily for the students of my Heidegger class at Greenwich University, though they may be of interest to others. They’re not intended to be a thorough interpretation, nor to engage with secondary literature, but were the basis of my lecture given on December 12th. The class had been requested to do a section analysis of this passage and these notes constitute, in effect, the basis of my own. Discussion is of course welcome provided these caveats are understood.

Notes from pages 190-199, Heidegger; Introduction to metaphysics, trans. Fried and Polt, Yale Nota Bene 2000

1) The first move (or, better, position) – that there is a disjunction between phusis and logos, a disjunction that is stated here but the grounds of which would be found elsewhere in the text – for example, pp186-7 and the connection that is drawn there between logos and the Being of the human being/Being (that is, both the way in which we are as well as the individual beings that we are). The claim locates the beginning of a ‘movement’ in the history of Being. At the beginning of the disjunction between logos and phusis, logos is not set against Being, it does not “step up” as a court of justice. Logos initially has no power of determination or judgement when it comes to understanding Being, it cannot – or does not – judge what Being is. We cannot – at the inception of the understanding of Being – simply judge what has Being through using language (that is, we cannot decide what exists, what is real or what is true simply within and through language – although these terms such as ‘real’, ‘exists’ and true’, whilst more easily appealing to a ‘common sense’, hide within themselves a lot of presuppositions). However, one aspect of language – reason, logic, the ‘logy, the ‘science of…’ – begins to assert itself, begins to assert its’ right to judge Being and eventually reinterprets phusis, a reinterpretation we now live within – for example, the opposition between the physical and the psychical arises as a result of the reinterpretation of Being and is not a universal but a specific historical moment in the history of Being. The process of reinterpretation is, in effect, the history of Being and is the movement that is being examined within ITM.

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December 19, 2006
A Heideggerian Critique?

I was reading through Miguel de Beistegui’s ‘Truth and Genesis’ today and noticed this argument, at the beginning of the third section on Deleuze;

Metaphysics is characterised by its emphasis on substance. Modern science, essentially from the development of Quantum theory, has implicitly dumped this Aristotelian ontology in favour of one that is an ‘energetics’. Mathematics is the access route to this ontology. Implicitly, therefore, the ‘new ontology’, of which Deleuze is an instance according to de Beistegui, derives from mathematical insight.

As those who were at the Badiou / Clamour of being reading group will no doubt recognise, this is quite close to the thesis in ‘Being and Event’ that mathematics is ontology.

Now, first of all this is a reconstruction of an argument, not a reading of a text and so I’m not putting this forward as an account of de Beistegui, merely locating the line of argument. I wanted to do so because it struck me today that this emphasis on substance and embrace of mathematics is still highly susceptible to the Heideggerian critique of metaphysics.

For Heidegger, it is not substance ontology istelf that is the problem. Rather, the distortion in substance ontology derives from the emphasis placed on presence (ousia) and this in turn derives from the rise to dominance of a certain attitude of logos, in effect the ‘scientific’ attitude, whereby logos becomes the archetypal ‘…logy’ of Being. Originarily, Heidegger argues (in ITM), logos and phusis are entwined intimately as an unconcealment of Being. Language and the physical are both ways in which we come across Being and are, as it were, co-dependent, neither having any priority. With the end of the originary moment of thought it is logos that rises to the surface and through the concept of ‘idea’ begins to establish itself as the court of determination, claiming the capacity to know Being and determine what has and what hasn’t got a claim to Being.

If, then, the argument is that mathematics is the route of access to Being, in effect this claim would need to respond to Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics since it appears initially that it falls inside that which Heidegger critiqued (whether it be Badiou or de Beistegui’s Deleuze). A ‘scientific’ or mathematical Deleuze (or Badiou) will still be susceptible to a straight-forward Heideggerian rebuttal. In fact, any philosophy still claiming to be doing onto-logy would be susceptible to this Heideggerian critique on the basis of the fact that this critque aims precisely at the …logy aspect of the argument, its sense of possessing ‘right knowledge’ or being a ‘science of Being’.

Anyway, just a thought…

(If you want to comment, please do so over at the Volcanic Lines discussion blog where this was posted)

December 19, 2006