Liberals think that the title of Jonah Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism is an oxymoron.  They’re wrong.  Goldberg himself writes:

“For more than sixty years, liberals have insisted that the bacillus of fascism lies semi-dormant in the bloodstream of the political right.  And yet with the notable and complicated exceptions of Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom, no top-tier American conservative intellectual was a devotee of Nietzsche or a serious admirer of Heidegger.  All major conservative schools of thought trace themselves back to the champions of the Enlightenment–John Locke, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Burke–and none of them have any direct intellectual link to Nazism or Nietzsche, to existentialism, nihilism, or even, for the most part, Pragmatism.  Meanwhile, the ranks of the leftwing intellectuals are infested with ideas and thinkers squarely in the fascist tradition.  And yet all it takes is the abracadabra word “Marxist” to absolve most of them of any affinity with these currents.  The rest get off the hook merely by attacking bourgeois morality and American values–even though such attacks are themselves little better than a reprise of fascist arguments” [page 175].

“Foucault’s “enterprise of Unreason,” Derrida’s tyrannical logocentrism, Hitler’s “revolt against reason.”  All fed into a movement that believes action is more important than ideas.  Deconstructionism, existentialism, postmodernism, Pragmatism, relativism: all these ideas had the same purpose–to erode the iron chains of tradition, dissolve the concrete foundations of truth, and firebomb the bunkers where the defenders of the ancient regime still fought and persevered.  These were ideologies of the “movement.”  The late Richard Rorty admitted as much, conflating Nietzsche and Heidegger with James and Dewey as part of the same grand project” [Goldberg, Liberal Fascism, page 176].

It turns out that most of the moral and philosophical assumptions of liberalism have been shared by not only the Marxists, but the Nazis as well.  NAZI stood for “National Socialist German Workers Party,” and was merely a rival brand of the clearly leftist political ideology of socialism.  And given the fact that Marxism was in fact every bit as totalitarian and murderous as Nazism, in hindsight it seems rather bizarre that “Marxist” was ever an abracadabra word that the American left was willing to bear to begin with.

The purpose of this article is to explore how the foundational ideas that liberals uphold as being the opposite of fascism in fact actually fed the monster of fascist Nazism, and how the modern American left continue to fall prey to fascist premises and outcomes to this very day.

It is particularly interesting that the supposedly highly individualistic and influential school of thought known as “existentialism” became so ensnared by fascism and Nazism.  On the surface, existentialism would seem to be the very polar opposite of fascism and Nazism.  After all, a philosophy of radical freedom centered in the individual would surely be incompatible with a totalitarian social system that denies political liberty in the name of the community.  One would assume that existentialism would be a philosophy of rebellion against all such external authority.  And yet the Nazis quoted Frederich Nietzsche at great length in support of their ideology (see also here).  Martin Heidegger, one of the foremost existentialist thinkers in history, turned out to have been a proud member of the Nazi Party.  And even famed existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre – who fought to resist fascism in his Nazi-occupied France during WWII – ultimately merely chose another totalitarian ideology in its place (Sartre identified himself as a Marxist and a Maoist).

Georg Lukács observed (in The Destruction of Reason, 1954, page 5) that tracing a path to Hitler involved the name of nearly every major German philosopher since Hegel: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Dilthy, Simmel, Scheler, Heidegger, Jaspers, Weber.  Rather than merely being amoral monsters, the Nazis emerged out of a distinguished liberal secular humanist intellectual tradition.

Max Weinreich documented in Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes against the Jewish People, an exhaustive study of the complicity of German intellectuals with the Nazi regime.  Far from opposing the Nazi regime, we find that German academia actively provided the intellectual justification for Nazi fascism as well as the conceptual framework for the Holocaust.  Weinreich does not claim that German scholars intended the Holocaust, but he argues that the Holocaust would not have been possible without them.

He asks, “Did they administer the poison?  By no means; they only wrote the prescription.”

How could such a thing happen?

Very easily, it turns out.

The existentialists (along with the secular humanists and the liberals), deny the transcendent, deny objective truth, and deny the objective morality that derive from transcendence and objective truth.  Rather than any preordained system – whether moral or theological – existentialist anchored meaning not to any ideals or abstractions, but in the individual’s personal existence.  Life has no ultimate meaning; meaning is personal; and human beings must therefore create their own meaning for themselves.

One should already begin to see the problem: since existentialism, by its very nature, refuses to give objective answers to moral or ideological questions, a particular existentialist might choose to follow either a democrat or totalitarian ideology – and it frankly doesn’t matter which.  All that matters is that the choice be a genuine choice.

Existentialists didn’t merely acknowledge this abandonment of transcendent morality, they positively reveled in it.  In his book St. Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre celebrated the life of a criminal.  Genet was a robber, a drug dealer, and a sexual deviant.  By all conventional moral standards, Genet was an evil man.  But for Sartre, even ostensibly evil actions could be moral if they were performed in “good faith.”  And since Sartre’s Genet consciously chose to do what he did, and took responsibility for his choices and his actions, he was a saint in existentialist terms.

And the problem becomes even worse: by rejecting the concepts of transcendence, objective meaning, truth, and moral law, and by investing ultimate authority in the human will (i.e. Nietzsche’s “will to power”, Hitler’s “triumph of the will”), existentialism played directly into the hands of fascism — which preached the SAME doctrines.  If fascism can be defined as “violent and practical resistance against the process of transcendence,” as Ernst Nolte defined it, then it’s affinities with existentialism are crystal clear.  The two movements became part of the same stream of thought.

Modern Nietzsche followers argue that Nietzsche was not a racial anti-Semite.  For the sake of argument maybe he wasn’t; but he was without any question an intellectual anti-Semite, who attacked the Jews for their ideas and their ethics — particularly as they contributed to Western civilization and to Christianity (which he also actively despised).  And in addition to Nietzsche’s intellectual anti-Semitism was his utter contempt for any form of abstractions — particularly as they related to the transcendental categories of morality and reason.  Nietzsche maintained that abstraction of life resulted from abstraction of thought.  And he blamed Christianity – which he rightly blamed as a creation of the Jews – for the denial of life manifested in Christian morality.

And, unlike most pseudo-intellectuals of today, Nietzsche was consistent: in his attack against Christianity, he attacked Judeo-Christian morality.  He attacked the Christian value of other-centered love, and argued that notions of compassion and mercy favored the weak and the unfit, thereby breeding more weakness.  Don’t you dare think for a single nanosecond that Hitler didn’t take the arguments of this beloved-by-liberals philosopher and run down the field with them toward the death camps.

The Nazis aligned themselves not only against the Jews but against the the Judeo-Christian God and the Judeo-Christian morality the Jews represented.  A transcendent lawgiving God, who reveals His moral law on real tablets of stone for mankind to follow, was anathema to the fascists.  They argued that such transcendence alienates human beings from nature and from themselves (i.e., from their own genuine choices).  The fascist intellectuals sought to forge a new spirituality of immanence, focused upon nature, on human emotions, and on the community.  The fascists sought to restore the ancient pre-Christian consciousness, the ancient mythic sensibility in the form of the land and the blood, in which individuals experience unity with nature, with each other, and with their own deepest impulses.

Gene Edward Veith in his book Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian worldview writes:

The fascist rebellion against transcendence restored the ancient pagan consciousness.  With it came barbarism, a barbarism armed with modern technology and intellectual sophistication.  The liquidation of the transcendent moral law and “Jewish” conscience allowed the resurgence of the most primitive and destructive emotions, the unleashing of original sin (page 14).

Nietzsche argued that God is dead, and Hitler tried to finish Him off by eradicating the Jews.  What is less known is that he also planned to solve the “church problem” after the war.  Hitler himself  said:

“The war is going to be over.  The last great task of our age will be to solve the church problem.  It is only then that the nation will be wholly secure” [From Hitler's Tabletalk (December 1941), quoted in The Nazi Years: A Documentary History, ed. Joachim Remak, 1990, page 105].

Hitler boasted that “I have six divisions of SS composed of men absolutely indifferent in matters of religion.  It doesn’t prevent them from going to their deaths with serenity in their souls.”  And Himmler said, “Men who can’t divest themselves of manners of previous centuries, and scoff and sling mud at things which are ‘holy’ and matters of belief to others, once and for all do not belong in the SS.”

With the creed “God is dead” and the resulting “death of God,” Nietzsche predicted that energizing conflict and revolution would reemerge in a great wave of nihilism.  Human beings would continue to evolve, he said, nodding to Darwinism.  And man would ultimately give way to Superman.  And Nietzsche said that this Superman would not accept the anachronistic abstract, transcendental meanings imposed by disembodied Judeo-Christian rationalism or by a life-denying religion.  Rather, this Superman would CREATE meaning for himself and for the world as a whole.

The Superman, according to Nietzsche, would be an artist who could shape the human race – no longer bound by putrefying and stultifying and stupefying transcendence – to his will.  “Man is for him an un-form, a material, an ugly stone that needs a sculptor,” he wrote.  Such a statement did not merely anticipate the Darwinist-based Nazi eugenics movement.  It demonstrated how the exaltation of the human will could and would lead not to general liberty, as one might have expected, but to the control of the many by the elite — with those of the weaker in will being subjugated to the will of the Supermen.

Nietzsche’s new ethic became the rationale for all the Nazi atrocities that would follow.  As Nietzsche himself put it, “The weak and the failures shall perish: the first principle of OUR love of man.  And they shall even be given every possible assistance.  What is more harmful than any vice? Active pity for all the failures and the weak: Christianity” (in “The Anti-Christ” in Portable Nietzsche, p. 570).  We see here also the exemplification of yet another legacy left behind by Nietzsche that was picked up by the Nazi and afterward by secular humanist atheists today: the Nietzschean attitude of flippant, sarcastic contempt for all the ordinary human values that had resulted from Judeo-Christianity.

One of the ordinary human values that had resulted from Judeo-Christianity was the fundamental sanctity of human life.  But the Nazis had their own concept – Lebensunwertes Leben (“life unworthy of life”).  And nearly fifty million of the most innocent and helpless human beings have perished as a result of an existentialist philosophy that survived the fall of the Nazis in liberal thought, which celebrates pro-existentialist “pro-choice” above human life.

Nietzsche’s philosophy underlies the thought of all the later existentialists, and the darker implications of his thought proved impossible to ignore.

And Martin Heidegger, in his own personal choice to commit himself to National Socialism, did not ignore them.

There is more that needs to be understood.

Martin Heidegger invoked Nietzsche in his 1933 Rectoral Address, in his speech entitled, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” in which he articulated his commitment to the integration of academia with National Socialism.  He began by asking, if Nietzsche is correct in saying that God is dead, what are the implications for knowledge?

As Heidegger explained, if God is dead, there is no longer a transcendent authority or reference point for objective truth.  Whereas classical thought, exemplified by the Greeks, could confidently search for objective truth, today, after the death of God, truth becomes intrinsically “hidden and uncertain.”  Today the process of questioning is “no longer a preliminary step that is surmounted on the way to the answer and thus to knowing; rather, questioning itself becomes the highest form of knowing.”

Heidegger’s conclusion became accepted to the point of becoming a commonplace of contemporary liberal thought: that knowledge is a matter of process, not content.  With the death of God, there is no longer any set of absolutes or abstract ideals by which existence must be ordered.  Such “essentialism” is an illusion; and knowledge in the sense of objective, absolute truth must be challenged.  The scholar is not one who knows or searches for some absolute truth, but the one who questions everything that pretends to be true.

Again, one would think that such a skeptical methodology would be highly incompatible with fascism, with its practice of subjecting people to an absolute human authority.  And yet this betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of fascism.  In fact, Heidegger’s Rectoral Address was warmly endorsed by the National Socialists for a very good reason: the fascists saw themselves as iconoclasts, interrogating the old order and boldly challenging all transcendent absolutes.

We find that in this same address in which Heidegger asserts that “questioning itself becomes the highest form of knowing,” Heidegger went on to advocate expelling academic freedom from the university:

“To give oneself the law is the highest freedom.  The much-lauded ‘academic freedom’ will be expelled from the university.”

Heidegger argued that the traditional canons of academic freedom were not genuine but only negative, encouraging “lack of concern” and “arbitrariness.”  Scholars must become unified with each other and devote themselves to service.  In doing so, he stated, “the concept of the freedom of German students is now brought back to it’s truth.”

Now, the claim that freedom would somehow emerge when academic freedom is eliminated might be sophistry of the worst kind, but it is not mere rhetorical doublespeak.  Why?  Because Heidegger was speaking existentially, calling not for blind obedience, but for a genuine commitment of the will.  Freedom was preserved because “to give oneself the law” was a voluntary, freely chosen commitment.  Academic freedom as the disinterested pursuit of truth shows “arbitrariness,” parking of the old essentialist view that truth is objective and transcendent.  The essentialist scholar is detached and disengaged, showing “lack of concern,” missing the sense in which truth is ultimately personal, a matter of the will, demanding personal responsibility and choice.  In the new order, the scholar will be fully engaged in service to the community.  Academic freedom is alienating, a function of the old commitment to moral and intellectual absolutes.

And what this meant in practice could be seen in the Bavarian Minister of Culture’s directive to professors in Munich, that they were no longer to determine whether something “is true, but whether it is in keeping with the direction of the National Socialist revolution” (Hans Schemm, quoted in Hermann Glaser, The Cultural Roots of National Socialism, tr. Ernest A. Menze, 1978, p. 99).

I point all of the above out to now say that it is happening all over again, by intellectuals who unknowingly share most of the same tenets that made the horror possible the last time.

We live in a time and in a country in which the all-too modern left has virtually purged the university of conservatives and conservative thought.  This is simply a fact that is routinely confirmed.  And as a mater of routine, conservative speakers need not apply at universities.  If they are actually invited to speak, they are frequently shouted down by a relative few liberal activists.  And leftwing censorship is commonplace.  Free speech is largely gone, in a process that simply quashes unwanted views.  We have a process today in which a professor who is himself employing fascist tactics calls a student “a fascist bastard.”  And why did he do so?  Because the student gave a speech in a speech class choosing a side on a topic that the professor did not like.

We live in a society in which too many of our judges have despised a system of objective laws from an objective Constitution and have imposed their own will upon both.  Judicial activist judges have largely driven transcendent religion and the transcendent God who gives objective moral laws out of the public sphere.

Today, we live in a society that will not post the Ten Commandments – the epitome of transcendent divinely-ordained moral law – in public schools.  And why not?  Because judges ruled that:

“If the posted copies of the Ten Commandments are to have any effect at all, it will be to induce the schoolchildren to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and obey, the Commandments,” which, the Court said, is “not a permissible state objective under the Establishment Clause.”

One can only marvel that such justices so cynically debauched the thought of the founding fathers whose ideas they professed to be upholding.

Justices of the Supreme Court agreed with this fallacious ruling even as the figure of Moses holding the Ten Commandments rules atop the very building in which they betrayed our nation’s founding principles.

And thus the left has stripped the United States of America bare of transcendent moral law, just as their intellectual forebears did prior to WWII in Nazi Germany.   And thus the intellectual left has largely stripped the United States of America from free debate within academia largely by pursuing the same line of reasoning that Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger employed to do the same in Nazi Germany.  We saw this very feature evidenced by leftist scientists who threw aside their scientific ethics in order to purge climatologists who came to a different conclusion.

The climate that led to fascism and to Nazism in Germany did not occur overnight, even though the final plunge may have appeared to be such to an uninformed observer.  It occurred over a period of a half a dozen decades or so, with the transcendent and objective moral foundations having been systematically torn away.  And after that degree of cancer had been reached, it only took the right leader or the right event to plunge the world into madness.

This is my attempt at being a philosopher. I was currently surfing and downloading porn when this ringing thought failed to get out of my mind. I just realized this a while ago. I do not know if any other person already realized this and published it and stuff. But, as Martin Heidegger wrote, being a philosopher is to strive to be attuned to what was permanently lost–which is the harmony of man to the totality of being. I would not try to discuss Heidegger’s arguments but I recommend that you read Being and Time.

Anyway, here is my what my correspondence with the Being revealed.

The assumption here is that objects that I consider to be existents are those who occupy (at least) the four dimensions–length, width, depth and time. This discussion will not touch upon that of things which exist in our minds, as a way of simplification. I consider here the geometric point of view, which states that three-dimensional objects consists of an infinite number of points. Each of these points occupy and infinitely small space but it occupies space nonetheless. Therefore, if an object consists of infinite units of these points, with each occupying and infinitesimal portion of space, then the object occupies an infinite amount of space! This means that, in essence, there are no boundaries for objects. An object cannot be limited in space.

But it can also be said that points are entities which have no dimension. This means that they do not exist in the three-dimensional world. But if points do not exist, then there would be no three-dimensional object at all. All objects, in some way then are figments of our imagination. Everything that we see the n are falsehoods. Their mere existence is a contradiction.

–posted by me on my blogspot account on 2 July 2009, at 8.55 pm.

http://newsfornoobs.blogspot.com/2009/07/of-points-and-infinites.html

It’s not a trick, it’s not a Zonie, it‘ a Heidegger:
Ab jetzt und hier, in Bild und Schrift

Auch dieses Jahr soll es wieder einen Weihnachts- und Neujahrsspaß geben. Und so ruft dieser Blog, inspiriert durch einen Kommentar vom Nörgler, dazu auf, an einem Heidegger-Ähnlichkeitswettbewerb teilzunehmen. Einzureichen bei „Aisthesis“ ist ein Text, der 9000 Zeichen (mit Leerzeichen) nicht überschreiten soll. Erlaubt ist Prosa und Poesie, jede Form von Text. Es darf auch eine ins Kritische gewendete Fundamentalontologie sein. Die Marcuse-Schüler und, falls vorhanden,  -Schülerinnen unter meinen Lesern und Leserinnen werden hier sicherlich etwas zu schreiben wissen. Heidegger-Parodien, die mit einem direkten Zitat aus einem Heidegger Text erzeugt wurden, sind natürlich auch erlaubt, werden aber nicht prämiert, wenn ich das Abschreiben entdecken sollte. Besser ist es also, das Eigene zu produzieren und diesem eine heideggerische Wendung zu geben, die ich für tricky, witzig oder gut erachte. Wie gesagt: erlaubt ist alles. 

Als Zusatzaufgabe zu diesem eigentlich leichten Unterfangen wäre es gut, ein Bild einzureichen, das einen Bezug zu Heidegger herstellt. Es kann ein Portrait sein, auf dem der Schreiber oder die Schreiberin des Textes seine/ihre Ähnlichkeit mit Heidegger dokumentiert. Es darf aber auch etwas anderes sein. Einzige Bedingung: Es muß ein Bezug zu Heidegger vorhanden sein. (Um den Witz gleich vorwegzunehmen: Bilder von A. Hitler werde ich nicht veröffentlichen, ausgenommen, sie sind eminent kosmischer, nee komischer Natur.) Diese Bild-Aufgabe ist kein „muß“; es geht natürlich auch ohne Bild, doch wenn sie gut erfüllt wird, ergäben sich in der Wertung freilich Bonuspunkte, die ausschlaggebend sein könnten. 

Warum um alles in der Welt sollten die Leserin oder der Leser diese Arbeit auf sich nehmen? Gibt es einen Preis? Nein, eigentlich nicht. Außer daß die besten Beiträge auf meinem Blog veröffentlicht werden. Gibt es zu viele gute Heidegger-think-alike-look-alike-Einsendungen, was ich aber eher nicht glaube, muß eine Auswahl durch die Sowjetische Kommandatur Berlin-Karlshorst getroffen werden. Der Sieger dieses fröhlichen Wettbewerbs erhält zudem die Möglichkeit, über ein Thema nach seiner Wahl auf meinem bescheidenen Blog zu schreiben. (Vielleicht überlege ich es mir aber auch anders, und dann gibt es, neben der Veröffentlichung eines Textes, trotzdem einen Preis. 

Denn: Leistung muß sich wieder lohnen: Also, auf, auf!) 

Ach ja: Einsendeschluß für die Beiträge ist der 31.12.2009. Alle Beiträge sind zu senden an Bersarin11@aol.com oder schneepart71@aol.com, Bilder sind als Anhang im jpg-Format zu senden, Texte so, daß ich die Dateien öffnen und lesen kann. Alles klar? 

So wünsche ich nun viel Erfolg und gutes Gelingen.

The origin of this little essay is a conversation I had a few nights ago when I was asked, quite unexpectedly, what books I might recommend to students seeking a deeper understanding of the world. Without much thinking, I pointed to Heidegger. Reflecting afterward, I realized that for most people Heidegger is merely “difficult” and that for many analytical philosophers (Ayer comes to mind) his writing is “rubbish.” In the right hands however, Heidegger can change minds and change lives.

Martin Heidegger is never an easy read, but he becomes more difficult with every new claim to offer a proprietary interpretation of his thought. In 1947 Heidegger published his Brief ueber den Humanismus (“Letter on Humanism”) in which he sorts through some of the tangles left behind in his 1927 opus, Being and Time and a treatise usually translated as What is Metaphysics? To come at this essay without some notion of Heidegger’s technical vocabulary, especially his complex views on metaphysics, is quickly to sink into linguistic mud. It’s equally difficult to sort through the later work without approaching it problematically. By that I mean that for all its emulsion, Heidegger was working through a very specific set of problems and a level of despair that has occasionally occupied philosophers to such an extent that paradox, aphorism and obscurity have seemed the only way to express the intractability of the problems themselves. Nietzsche comes immediately to mind, but there are tempting if imperfect analogies between Heidegger’s views and those of the negative theologians Gregory of Nyssa, Catherine of Sienna and Meister Eckhart.

The style he preferred in responding to his admirers—like Sartre–as well as his critics, such as Hannah Arendt—was never unconditionally generous, leaving the impression that Heidegger saw his particular mode of expression as appropriate to the subjects he tackled and most interpretation as being either reductionist, or erroneous.

He was not unaware of the power of double-speak as a tool in both political and philosophical discourse. In a 1966 Der Spiegel interview concerning his alleged Nazi sympathies (which finally cost him his teaching career and diminished his reputation in Germany), Heidegger said that in 1935 he had counted on the power of words to convey different meanings to two constituencies (his cleverest students and determined Nazi informants) when he praised the “inner truth and greatness of our movement.”

Hannah Arendt

His sense of how words shape reality and can thus misshape perception and meaning is a constant prickle for anyone who wants to “interpret” Heidegger. It makes equally difficult the task of determining his influence on other thinkers, especially the French philosophers in whose eyes he found grace after 1967.

What makes the “Letter on Humanism” worth discussing is that he pulls no punches about his agenda: to locate in history the source of modernity’s ills. In the politically charged climate of postwar Europe, the easy answers focused on economic, religious, technological and social evils. The cure, it was often proposed, was to restore meaning to the term “humanism” as a category that rises above the particular expressions of modern culture.

In an important article, Gail Soffer notes that “What is peculiar to Heidegger and really questionable in his critique is his diagnosis of the cause of modernity’s ills: not capitalism and its greed; not Protestant religious beliefs; not even runaway technology or the Gestalt of the worker; but rather the humanism of the Western philosophical tradition. For Heidegger, “humanism lies at the root of the reification, technologization, and secularization characteristic of the modern world” (“Heidegger, Humanism and the Destruction of History,” Review of Metaphysics (49) 1996).

Heidegger was not, of course, unaware of the history of the term humanism in early Renaissance thought or even earlier glimmerings in Christian thinkers such as Abelard and Pico della Mirandola. But he was not especially interested in this history of discussion, or at least such discussion could only be useful in deconstruction (Destruktion).

In a strictly connative sense, humanism is that philosophy which either assigns a defined universal essence to man as “a rational animal,” characterized primarily by voluntary action, or it is the denial of essence—a position leading ultimately to Sartre’s conclusion that existentialism is a pure form of humanism. Man is what he is through choice and action. The political appeal of the latter position is that a non-essentialist view of humanism leaves open the possibility for human beings to create worthy social institutions, human rights, Bildung in the humanities and “true” sciences (as opposed to mere technological expertise), and also to reject unworthy ones—such as Nazism.

In none of his writings, however, does Heidegger suggest that “man has no essence.” His message in the “Letter” is that this essence has been misconstrued: that to say “Man is a rational animal” is to predetermine what the nature of man is at a metaphysical level, and that to do so shuts off discussion of the relationship between Being and being human.

To be a knowing subject in relation to known objects is, for Heidegger, to determine the essence of man “downward.” Out of a range of possible definitions, we have chosen the ones that equate science and reason with the sufficient definition—the essence—of humanity. In historical context, we have taken the historical determinants of humanism, which Heidegger sees as a set of familiar phenomena, as being the same as the underlying essence of these phenomena. Heidegger rejects the idea that humanism as we understand the term can provide an understanding of what it means to be thrown into a world of possibilities and others. It does not provide an “analytic” that can help us to understand authenticity, mortality, responsibility. Humanism can provide no escape from the “vulgarity of calculation” or a sense of the temporality of existence.

This leads to the question of God and the matter of Heidegger’s atheism. To an extent, we are playing with language in a way Heidegger would, approvingly, have found amusing. The a-theism he subscribes to is a rejection of God–literally being without the God of history and tradition–and a quest for a non-metaphysical God. It is this aspect of Heidegger’s thought and the subject of die Kehre or “turning” (biographical or procedural?) in his thinking about Dasein that frustrates interrogation—in spite of a small embarrassment of new sources published since his death.

Bultmann

In the world of poetry and technology, God remains the subliminal (literally, beneath the limit) problem. Theologians since Ebeling and Bultmann have exploited this aspect of Heidegger’s almost mystical argot on the topic, and Stuart Elden has analyzed the subject in a useful article (“To Say Nothing of God”, Heythrop Journal, 45/3, 2004, 344-48.). It has been frustrating to students of Heidegger that this “refusal of a theological voice” (Laurence Paul Hemming, 2002) tweaks the nose of theology rather than encourages theological speculation. But, as with humanism, any unconcealed definition of God would be trivialization, and it has been the role of historical theology to offer familiar formulas and definitions in place of concealment.

Thus Heidegger has theology precisely where he wants it: trying to figure him out. His challenge to humanism: that we cannot employ it to address questions of meaning, value and authenticity. His challenge to theology, that the discovery of God cannot be something as simple as forming objective images from subjective data, mainly historical. The possibility of a God without being must be considered. Aquinas considered it. But the axiom “There is no God” cannot be derived from the possibility.

Todos los discursos de pronto valen. Entre Derridá y Foucault todo vale, junto con Baudrillard que ve todos los límites de las disciplinas como difusos. No hay verdad ¿qué duda cabe? Todo es transeconómico, transexual, transpolítico. El pensamiento decente debe ser débil ¡venir a afirmar algo a estas alturas es una falta de respeto! ¡Todos los discursos son válidos!  ¡Cada quien tiene su verdad! Aquello que comenzó como un sano cuestionamiento de las instituciones del siglo XX ha venido a dar en un caos en el que todo SE permite. La Filosofía ha entrado en uno de esos momentos en que se cuestiona a sí misma y no parece tener respuestas.

No es casualidad que en estos momentos de duda sean precisamente los científicos quienes saquen la cara por la realidad, sin pretensiones tan grandes como la verdad, desde sus laboratorios, talleres y mesas de trabajo responden simplemente que hay ciertas cuestiones improbables y que su posibilidad es casi igual a cero, así como también otras derechamente imposibles. Más que la verdad, descubren por oposición el error y la mentira. No es raro: si mezclan mal los químicos no obtienen la reacción deseada, si el circuito no se conecta la máquina no funciona, si los números no calzan la ecuación no se completa.

A ellos toca demostrar e interpretar los hechos y si bien los hechos pueden explicarse de muchas maneras, no pueden explicarse de maneras infinitas. Sencillamente hay maneras que no corresponden, interpretaciones que no se ajustan. El vulgo quiere creer que ahora  las certezas de la modernidad se han caído y que sus propias verdades vulgares tienen el mismo valor que miles de años de acumulación de conocimiento. Después de todo, aquellos edificios no eran más que formas de dominación, microfísicas de poder. Pero el técnico, el ingeniero y el científico y algún pensador están ahí para decir que no cuadra, que no funciona, que así simplemente no es.

Quienes han querido ver en la caída de la Ontología anunciada por Heidegger el comienzo de una era de negación del conocimiento en donde la opinión puede reemplazar al buen juicio informado del pensador o del científico, se enfrentan a que tal fin no era sino un cambio de enfoque y acento anunciado de manera algo exagerada. NO SE TRATABA DE ESO. Se trataba precisamente de recuperar la verdad de la crisis denunciada por Nietzsche, quien descubrió precisamente el valor absoluto, moral e ignorante del tiempo que la filosofía tomista le asignaba al convertirla en idéntica al bien, por una mera interpretación a pie forzado de una escritura sin sentido.

La mera experiencia cotidiana puede dar cuenta de que los juicios y los hechos son cosas diferentes: aquella piedra que se acerca volando a mi cabeza la golpeará independientemente de mi juicio, por mucho que yo juzgue que no quiero que me golpee. Sólo puedo juzgar que no es bueno que venga, pero si quiero evitar el golpe debo quitarme de su trayectoria.  No se trata de valoraciones, se trata de hechos y los hechos tienen la porfía de ser a pesar de que los juzguemos poco halagüeños. El tsunami se levanta y se acerca a la costa, lo aplastará todo… mis juicios podrán dotar de sentido a los hechos, pero ahora es mejor que corra… Pero la experiencia cotidiana normalmente se muestra ya demasiado blanda: el agua corriente, la medicina, los derechos humanos. Esas conquistas que fueron a sangre y a fuego hoy parecen naturaleza, pero no son naturaleza. Fueron el resultado del pensamiento de científicos y pensadores, del trabajo de técnicos y obreros, de la lucha de revolucionarios y de verdaderos mártires.

En la comodidad de las conquistas modernas nuestro juicio se olvida de que la vida es difícil y de que la naturaleza del mundo muchas veces no tolera los errores de juicio y los castiga con la muerte.  En este entorno amable con el hombre creemos que la Verdad y el Error son tan subjetivos y poco interesantes como la preferencia de un vino sobre otro, pero nos olvidamos de que fue precisamente la capacidad de hacer dicha distinción el arma que nos permitió ser la especie dominante para bien y para mal… y de paso sobrevivir.

Los derechos humanos no son derechos naturales, son conquistas políticas que están bajo amenaza de fuerzas egoístas, el librepensamiento se ve siempre amenazado por aquellos que quieren dominarnos por medio de la irracionalidad. Osama Bin Laden no es un hombre malvado, es un hombre de fe convencido de que hace el bien, pero que juzga con el cristal de la fe.

La fe no es simplemente privativa de la religión. La religión tuvo la responsabilidad de hacerla pasar como fuente de conocimiento de manera malintencionada. Ahora se pretende valorar por la fe cualquier cosa, cualquier posición, desde fascismos hasta las supercherías de la nueva era. Si son convicciones lo suficientemente fuertes, es una falta de respeto querer cuestionarlas. Pero todo este mundo amable con nosotros se basa en la libertad de distinguir clara y distintamente. La fe oscurece al disfrazarse de luz. Esta opinión es verdad porque es mi creencia: soy delgado, lo que pasa es que me veo gordo, pero esta verdad es inescrutable porque es mi dogma de fe… además de su misterio. Pero la opinión nunca es nada más que opinión y por mucho que esta sea una era de opinólogos en la televisión, la opinión nunca será otra cosa que un prejuicio y el prejuicio es el verdadero peligro, porque nos previene de formarnos de un verdadero juicio informado, que es la única arma realmente revolucionaria.

Christians are hearing about the Manhattan Declaration with great excitement.  It is a tremendous document with tremendous support from some tremendous Christian figures.

The actual declaration (linked to above) is some 4,000 plus words long, and is available to read at the link above.  But here is the nutshell version:

Christians, when they have lived up to the highest ideals of their faith, have defended the weak and vulnerable and worked tirelessly to protect and strengthen vital institutions of civil society, beginning with the family.

We are Orthodox, Catholic, and evangelical Christians who have united at this hour to reaffirm fundamental truths about justice and the common good, and to call upon our fellow citizens, believers and non-believers alike, to join us in defending them. These truths are:

1. the sanctity of human life
2. the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife
3. the rights of conscience and religious liberty.

Inasmuch as these truths are foundational to human dignity and the well-being of society, they are inviolable and non-negotiable. Because they are increasingly under assault from powerful forces in our culture, we are compelled today to speak out forcefully in their defense, and to commit ourselves to honoring them fully no matter what pressures are brought upon us and our institutions to abandon or compromise them. We make this commitment not as partisans of any political group but as followers of Jesus Christ, the crucified and risen Lord, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

I hope you stand with me – and with (at last count as of November 24, 2009) 106,738 other believers – and sign this declaration.

It reminds me of another time, and another declaration: the Barmen Declaration of 1934, which was a point-by-point denunciation of the fascist and racist ideological doctrines of Nazism and a positive expression of true Christian faith against a government and a culture that had become evil.

Adolf Hitler attempted to redefine – or “Nazify” – the Church and transform it into a component of his ideological agenda.  At one point in its history Germany had been the seat of the Protestant Reformation, and while Germany had since become the most secular humanist nation in Europe, there was still a vestige of Christianity remaining.  And Hitler wanted to harness that still-influential vestige toward his own ends.  The government thus passed resolutions to limit the influence or dictate the agenda of the church.  One demanded the purging of all pastors who rejected “the spirit of National Socialism.”  Another resolution categorically rejected the very foundations of Judeo-Christian transcendent morality even as it tried to conflate “being a German” with “being a Christian”:

“We expect that our nation’s church as a German People’s Church should free itself from all things not German in its services and confession, especially from the Old Testament with its Jewish system of quid pro quo morality.”

The German Confessing Movement was a reaction against the German government’s attempt to impose its agenda upon the Christian Church in Germany.  As Gene Edward Veith put it in his book Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian Worldview:

The Barmen Declaration thus sets itself against not only the German Christian aberration but against the whole tradition of modernist syncretism that made it possible.

[Article 1 affirmed Christ as the transcendent authority and source of values (as opposed to the German race, the Nazi revolution, or the person of Adolf Hitler)].  Article 2 asserts the sovereignty of Christ over all of life.  Article 3 asserts Christ’s lordship over the church and rejects “the false doctrine, as though the Church were permitted to abandon the form of its message and order to its own pleasure or to changes in prevailing ideological and political conventions.”  That is to say, the world does not set the agenda for the church.  Article 4 teaches that church offices are for mutual service and ministry, not for the exercise of raw power.  Article 5 acknowledges the divine appointment of the state, but rejects the pretensions of the state to “become the single and totalitarian order of human life, thus fulfilling the Church’s vocation as well.”  Article 6 affirms the church’s commission to proclaim the free grace of God to everyone by means of the Word and the sacraments.  “We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church in human arrogance could place the Word and work of the Lord in the service of any arbitrarily chosen desires, purposes, and plans [pp. 60-61].

One article, entitled “Hitler’s Theologians: The Genesis of Genocide,” takes time to describe how various key German liberal theologians systematically tore apart the Bible and orthodox Christianity – and in so doing systematically undermined the ethics and morality of the German people in preparation for the hell to come.  The author begins with Friedrich Schleiermacher, called “the founder of Liberal Protestantism,” and profiles the “contributions” of Friedrich Nietzsche, Julius Wellhausen, and Adolf von Harnack.

Georg Lukacs has observed that tracing the path to Hitler involved the name of nearly every major German philosopher since Hegel: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Dilthy, Simmel, Scheler, Heidegger, Jaspers, and Weber [page 5, The Destruction of Reason].  And Max Weinreich produced an exhaustive study detailing the complicity of German intellectuals with the Nazi regime entitled Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes Against the Jewish People.  Ideas have consequences, and it was the ideas of these liberal theologians, philosophers and scholars who provided the intellectual justification and conceptual framework for the Holocaust.  Thus Nazism did not merely emerge from a liberal theological system, but from a distinguished secular humanist intellectual tradition as well — a distinguished intellectual tradition that had repudiated all the moral and spiritual values inherent to the orthodox Christianity of the Confessing Church.

Josef Hromadka wrote that:

“The liberal theology in Germany and in her orbit utterly failed.  It was willing to compromise on the essential points of divine law and of “the law of nature”; to dispose of the Old Testament and to accept the law of the Nordic race instead; and to replace the “Jewish” law of the Old Testament by the autonomous law of each race and nation, respectively.  It had made all the necessary preparation for the “Germanization of Christianity” and for a racial Church.”

Veith subsequently says, “in deciding whether or not to sign the Barmen Declaration … the dividing line was clear.”  And he states, “The German Christian theologians predictably denounced the confessional movement as being ‘narrow’ and ‘fundamentalist.’”  He rightly described the opponents of the Barmen Declaration as being “modernists,” “existentialists,” and “dialectical” in their thinking.  The theologians who rejected Barmen were men like Emanuel Hirsch, who taught that the resurrection of Christ was only a spiritual vision, and that the idea of a physical resurrection distorted Christianity by focusing attention to the hereafter rather than to the culture and community of the present.

In short, it was Christians who thought like the evangelicals and fundamentalists of today who signed the Barmen Declaration and openly opposed Nazism, and it was “Christians” who thought like the mainline liberals of today who stood for the German Christian Nazification of Christianity and for the resulting Nazification of German ethics and morality.

Confessing Church pastors and priests who resisted this Nazification of the church paid dearly.  Thousands of clergymen were hauled away to the concentration camps.  According to the Niemoller archives, 2,579 clergymen were sent to Dachau alone – and 1,034 of them died in the camp.  And that only refers to the priests and pastors – not the untold thousands of devout Christians such as the Ten Booms who perished in the death camps for their opposition to Nazism.

An article entitled “Asking ‘Why Nazism?’” reviewing a book by Dr. Karla Poewe has this:

“One of the dangers of liberal Christianity, where all sorts of interpretations are permitted, is that it can easily slip into becoming a new religion,” Poewe says. “This is what happened. In a bid to rid Germany of what it saw as Jewish Christianity, several home-grown practices sprang up, including some that incorporated Icelandic and pre-Christian sagas, as well as ideas from German Idealism.”

Although initially these new religions were separate and disorganized entities, they eventually came under the umbrella of what was known as the German Faith Movement. Hitler saw in it a mechanism for transmitting and reinforcing the National Socialist worldview. “He shaped its followers into a disciplined political force but dismissed its leaders later when they were no longer needed,” Poewe says.

We’re clearly not to the point where Jews, or Christians, or anyone else are being gathered by the thousands and placed in death camps.  But we’re beginning to see a trend that is frightening, as government, with the assistance of liberal “Christian” churches and organizations, are trying to impose their will upon the church and its agenda.

We’ve had a “hate crimes” law imposed upon us that makes homosexuality a protected behavior.  And one evangelical expresses the Confessing Church position in a nutshell:

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, said in a written statement the bill “is part of a radical social agenda that could ultimately silence Christians and use the force of government to marginalize anyone whose faith is at odds with homosexuality.”

In another recent case, a Christian mother who has homeschooled her child is being forced to put her ten-year old child in public school, not to improve her academic education, but to limit her exposure to Christianity and forcibly expose her to a government-approved “public” point of view:

According to the court order, the guardian concluded that Amanda’s “interests, and particularly her intellectual and emotional development, would be best served by exposure to a public school setting in which she would be challenged to solve problems presented by a group learning situation and…Amanda would be best served by exposure to different points of view at a time in her life when she must begin to critically evaluate multiple systems of belief and behavior.”

This is a shocking case, in which the government is usurping both parental and religious freedoms.  And there are many similar usurpations today, in which our government is actively opposing Christian values.

Nearly fifty million babies have been killed in this country by a government-sanctioned “pro-choice” system.  Gene Edward Veith addresses the “pro-choice” movement and its philosophical underpinnings:

Existential ethics brackets the objective issues on abortion entirely.  At issue is not some transcendent moral law, nor medical evidence, nor a logical analysis.  The content of that choice makes no difference.  If the mother chooses to have the baby, her action is moral.  If she chooses not to have the baby, her action is still moral.  If she bears a child against her will or aborts a child against her will — then and only then is the action evil.  Those who believe that abortion should be legal do not consider themselves “pro-abortion.”  They are “pro-choice.”  The term is not only a rhetorical euphemism but a precise definition of existential ethics.

Existentialism is also reflected in those who are “pro-choice” but personally oppose abortion.  They do not believe in abortion for themselves, but refuse to impose their beliefs on others.  In this view, a belief has no validity outside the private, personal realm of each individual.  Moral and religious beliefs are no more than personal constructions, important in giving meaning to an individual’s life, but not universally valid.  Or, to use another commonly accepted axiom, “what’s true for you may not be true for me.”

Such a view of truth flies in the face of all classical metaphysics, which sees truth as objective, universal, and applicable to all” (page 96, Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian Worldview).

We can return to the historical analysis of Nazism presented by Karla Poewe, and what happened when such “anything goes” belief systems were allowed to rule.  [I am writing an article describing how existentialism became a primary component of Nazism, and will link to it here when I am finished writing it].

Before we leave the issue of abortion as a vile violation of Christian ethics and morality, let us consider one more voice:

“But I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child – a direct killing of the innocent child – murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?” — Mother Teresa

Christians should fight for life.  And allowing a human being to live should not be a “choice,” but a duty.

In 2003 one David Allen Black wrote an article bearing the question, “Do We Need A New Barmen Declaration?“  No Christian with a knowledge of history can answer any other way than, “YES!“

The Barmen Declaration was written in 1934, but in many ways it was already too late: The Nazis were already in power.  Hitler was in his second year of power; and the ideas of the liberal theologians, the existentialist philosophers, and the amoral intellectuals were already firmly in place.

It is my fervent hope that we finally have that “New Barmen Declaration” to answer the evils of our own day.  If we already should have written one, then every day that passes is one more day wasted; if we are acting pro-actively, then let us thank God that we acting before it is too late.

From the UK Telegraph:

At last, Christians draw a line in the sand against their PC secularist persecutors

By Gerald Warner UK Last updated: November 24th, 2009

At long last, Christian leaders have faced up to their persecutors in the secularist, socialist, One-World, PC, UN-promoted axis of evil and said: No more. In the popular metaphor, they have drawn a line in the sand. For harassed, demoralised faithful in the pews it will come as the long-awaited call to resistance and an earnest that their leaders are no longer willing to lie down supinely to be run over by the anti-Christian juggernaut. This statement of principle and intent is called The Manhattan Declaration, published last Friday in Washington DC.

It is difficult to believe that so firm an assertion of Christian intransigence in the face of persecution will not have some beneficial effects even here. For this Declaration is no minor affirmation by a few committed activists: on the contrary, it is signed by the most important leaders of three mainstream Christian traditions – the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church and Evangelical Protestants. For an ecumenical document it is heroically devoid of fudge, euphemism and compromise.

The Manhattan Declaration states that “the lives of the unborn, the disabled, and the elderly are severely threatened; that the institution of marriage, already buffeted by promiscuity, infidelity and divorce, is in jeopardy of being redefined to accommodate fashionable ideologies; that freedom of religion and the rights of conscience are gravely jeopardized by those who would use the instruments of coercion to compel persons of faith to compromise their deepest convictions”.

For Barack Obama, the PC lobby, the “hate crime” fascists and, by implication, their opposite numbers in Britain, the signatories have an uncompromising message: “We pledge to each other, and to our fellow believers, that no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence.” That is plain speaking, in the face of anti-Christian aggression by governments. The signatories spelled it out even more unequivocally: “We will fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, but we will under no circumstances render to Caesar what is God’s.”

In a world where a Swedish pastor has been jailed for preaching that sodomy is sinful, similar prosecutions have taken place in Canada, the European Court of Human Rights (sic) has tried to ban crucifixes in Italian classrooms, Brazil has passed totalitarian legislation imposing heavy prison sentences for criticism of homosexual lifestyles, Amnesty International is championing abortion, David Cameron has voted for the enforced closure of Catholic adoption agencies, and Gordon Brown’s government has just been defeated in its fourth attempt to abolish the Waddington Clause guaranteeing free speech – this robust defiance is more than timely.

The signatories are unambiguously expressing their willingness to go to prison rather than deny any part of their religious beliefs. Those signatories are heavyweight. On the Catholic side they include Justin Cardinal Rigali, Archbishop of Philadelphia; Adam Cardinal Maida, Archbishop Emeritus of Detroit; the Archbishops of Denver, New York, Washington DC, Newark, Saint Paul and Minneapolis, Kansas City, and Louisville; and other Bishops. The Orthodox include the Primate of the Orthodox Church in America and the Archpriest of St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary. There are also the Anglican Primates of America and Nigeria, as well as a host of senior Evangelical Protestants.

In terms of influence on votes and public opinion, this is a formidable coalition. It has served notice on the US government that further anti-Christian legislation will provoke cultural trench warfare and even civil disobedience. As regards the sudden stiffening of resistance among the usually spineless Catholic leadership, it is impossible not to detect the influence of Benedict XVI.

We need more declarations like this, on a global scale, and the requisite confrontational follow-up. This is Clint Eastwood, make-my-day Christianity – and not before time. From now on, any governments that are planning further persecution of Christians had better make sure they have a large pride of lions available for mastication duties. The worm has turned.

As a young Christian, I was inspired by the music, lyrics, and album cover of Keith Green’s album, No Compromise.  The cover says it all:

The Manhattan Declaration – like the Barmen Declaration – calls for Christians who are willing to stand up and be singled out even in the face of persecution or punishment.

I hope you are willing to be one of those Christians.

This article on Paul Celan in today’s Die Zeit begins, ‘It’s a bad joke that Germany at least won the philosophical war, with help from its secret weapon concealed in the Black Forest.” I couldn’t possibly comment on the author’s consideration of why the many “heideggernden Sprachmystikern” might have warmed to something in Celan’s poetry which was “dunkel, hermetisch oder monologisch“. Heidegger as we all know was a wholly dialogical thinker; it’s just his preferred dialogical partner was a local farmer sat smoking a pipe in the ski hut’s Herrgottswinkel.

This might be a li’l out of sync with the class since we are way past phenomenology and into semiotics now.  Nevertheless,  I’m excited  that I got to see this video on the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Ponty.  It seems to be an old talk show (70s or 80s )  with  Professor Hubert Dreyfus as the guest who explains the history of Phenomenology  from Husserl and Heidegger to Sartre and Ponty, how they differed and evolved, with huge emphasis on Husserl’s technical intentionality and Heidegger’s Dasein.  I wanted to share it with you all.

Note that the video has 5 parts. I see it as a more elaborate version of the paper we read for class [I think it is Dourish's Embodiment paper (?)] but it does not go deep into Embodiment.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

In the chapter entitled “The Critique of the Subject” in the volume Who Comes After the Subject (edited by Cadava, Connor, and Nancy), Michel Henry embarks on a critical history of the philosophy of the subject. While he claims that the history of the critique of the subject has “numerous convergent formulations” from which a detailed tome could be assembled, for the sake of space he limits his chapter to brief analyses of Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, and Freud. Acknowledging the diversity of these thinkers, he nevertheless draws on a convergent point in the four; namely, what they have in common is the “critique of man conceived as a specific and autonomous reality” (157).

It is this specificity and autonomy that Henry claims must be understood. Accordingly, in the philosophy of the subject, man is identified as the subject “granted an exorbitant privilege in that there is in the end no Being nor being except in relation to him, for him and through him, and this insofar as he constitutes the a priori condition of possibility for all experience and thus for all that is and can be, at least for us” (157). Henry refers to this subject as a “super being,” one who has all beings at his disposal – as they are subjugated to him. As he goes on to remark, “These descriptions are those of our world – of the ravaging of Earth by Technology [... which] consists in the unconditional subjugation of the Whole of being, which becomes the Ob-ject, to man, who becomes the Subject” (158). Henry is not here concerned with how such a view of subjective-subjugation of the world can have power, although he does imply that this view of mastery over the world based on subjectivity is an illusion that needs to be addressed. Rather, his immediate concern lies elsewhere; namely that the philosophy of subjectivity does not know anything about the being of this subject. He poses two questions to begin his essay:

1. What is the Being of this subject that has to be eliminated, “evacuated,” from the problematic?
2. Who, contesting at once the right and the existence of such a subject – the right of man to identify with it – goes about its elimination?

At this point he deems it necessary to focus on the philosophies of the two greatest philosophers of the subject: Descartes and Kant – although he chooses to address them historically backward. His attentions swings first to Kant because Henry wishes to show how the Kantian paradigm is the pre-eminent philosophy of the groundless subject. In other words, the moment philosophy “sees itself clearly as a philosophy of the subject… the foundation on which it explicitly and thematically bases itself… escapes it and, slipping from its grasp, tips over into the void of inanity” (158). “Inane” because essentially what occurs is that the Being of the subject becomes understood as representation. Thus, “I think” is equal to “I represent to myself that I think.” As Henry elaborates,

“[This] means that the Being of the subject is classed as the object of a representation, an object that, on the one hand, presupposes this subject and, on the other, never contains by itself, insofar as it is represented any reality – just as to represent to oneself a thaler does not imply that one has one in one’s pocket. Thus the foundation of any conceivable Being is stricken with a profound ontological indigence that prevents us from attributing to Being itself and kind of Being. Like it or not, it is the philosophy of the subject itself that has raised the most serious objection to the subject, to the point of rendering its very existence problematic” (159).

Returning to the two questions above, Henry then asks, “which subject finds itself thrown out of existence, and by whom?” His answer is the subject of representation, and by itself. This is so because the subject-as-representation draws its essence, its Being, from representation, which thus prevents Being from being conferred upon it. According to Kant, because the structure of representation is intuition and concept – and because we have no intuition or concept of the “I think” – we cannot know anything about it. Thus, the subject-as-representation is not a phenomenon for us, nor can it be. In other words, the essence of Being itself cannot consist in representation because representation does not rest upon itself and cannot ground itself in itself – as it is always referential. Thus, “to be” does not mean “to be represented” (160).

For Descartes, the problematic takes a different form. Henry notes that in the Meditations two decisive traits emerge: (1) The Being of the subject is contested, unsettled and denied. The Being of the subject and hence Being itself is the issue; and (2) The foundation of the Being of the subject presupposes that representation be ruled out – this means all that is or can be represented and the very structure of representation itself. By doubting all things – all representations and the structure of representation – Descartes’ remaining inquiry was regarding what might “sub-sist, that is to say, what can still be when representation in its entirety has been blocked”? What can still be when being is not through representation? Descartes’ answer is the “anti-essence of representation” as being “precisely the essence of the ‘subject’” (161).

Henry then briefly describes Descartes’ epoche as found in the Passions of the Soul. In this text, Descartes imagines himself dreaming. As such, all that is represented to himself in his dream is understood as illusory – is not. However, if the dreamer happens to experience emotions of sadness or grief or the like, even though still in a dream, even thought the representation(s) are false, the feelings themselves are absolute. Thus, he concludes: this feeling does not occur through representation but independent of it. How does it then occur? Henry notes, “In and through its affectivity” (161, emphasis his). Accordingly, this affectivity of the subject, this “auto-affectivity”, is the self’s immediate and undistanced experience of itself. And as such, it is to be understood as the essence of the subject and of all possible Being. As Henry thus remarks at the conclusion of his brief discussion of Descartes: “It is only when, as happens at one moment in Descartes, the philosophy of the subject returns to this original essence of subjectivity and Being that the ‘subject’ can become the theme of a philosophical discussion” (162).

Leaving behind Descartes and Kant, Henry turns his attention to his favorite philosophical punching bag. As he states, “The most striking misunderstanding is Heidegger’s, who explicitly and repeatedly identifies the ‘I think’ as an ‘I represent myself to myself’” (162). This non-ground of subjectivity is the resultant model of most critiques of the subject post-Heidegger. With this being the case, as far as Henry is concerned, the Being of the subject has “lost… all possible philosophical meaning” (162). Although Heidegger’s critique of the essence of Being was assumed to be something different, according to Henry, all that really occurred in Heidegger’s problematic was a new schematic of representation-as-essence.

The one bright spot that Henry notes in the history of the critique of the subject is located in the thought of Freud. Although not completely endorsed, Henry claims that the Freudian subject is “capable of opening up new paths” in the history of the critique. Freud’s critique was aimed directly at the subject of representation, which he identified as “consciousness.” As Henry mentions, Freud was not concerned with redefining consciousness, but rather took the stock meaning as employed by common philosophical jargon: “Let us call ‘conscious’ the representation which is present to our consciousness and of which we are aware, and let this be the only meaning of the term ‘conscious.’”

As noted above, for Freud, consciousness was equal to representation. It is this level – the level of consciousness – that would become the ground of his study of the unconscious; for there are memories that we “possess” which are not immediately accessible in the consciousness, as representation. Therefore, the subject cannot be understood in terms of “I represent myself to myself” because the unconscious, which is unrepresented, is integral in the constitution of the subject. However, whatever is not conscious is capable of becoming conscious. This is the task of the psychoanalytic therapist: to bring to the “actuality of representation something nonconscious that is secretly homogeneous with representation and that can, for this reason, change into it – an unconscious constituted by ‘unconscious representations.’ i.e., those that are not yet represented and that, ontologically if not existentially, are only asking to be” (164). Thus,  according to Henry, “Classical thought calls out for the coming of psychoanalysis” (164).

It is therefore “anther subject that comes to light with the idea that the unrepresented is also representable, that the original Being of this subject is no longer represented but its anti-essence” (164). Henry continues:

“Freud in his turn runs up against such a subject, half perceived by Descartes, when he finds himself in the presence of an unconscious that is no longer provisional, no longer one phase in the history of representation, capable of completing itself in itself, in the actualization of it full essence. The history of our representations refers back to a force that allows them precisely to actualize themselves or that forbids them to do so. It is only this force itself that is irreducible to any representation. This force collapses in on itself in an immediation that is so radical, and in this immediation is submerged into itself in such a way that there is no room in it for any Difference, no distantiation thanks to which it would be possible for it to perceive itself, to represent itself – to be conscious in the mode of representation” (164-65, emphasis his).

However, all is not well in Henry’s eyes. At this point, right when Freud is divulging the most original dimension of Being – the unrepresented and unrepresentable force that directs all representations – that Freud “succumbs” to the presuppositions of this metaphysics and that force and affect fall back to the unconscious. Thus, the subject is led to its true Being, only to find itself removed from such Being.

In the final lines of the chapter, Henry focuses once again on Descartes and asks whether Descartes had perceived (or half-perceived) the Being of the subject as an anti-essence of representation, and that if such is the case why did consequent critiques of the subject so badly misunderstand the cogito in terms of representation? Well, Descartes is partly to blame for this. In the Meditations, Descartes does not completely disavow the subject as representation. In fact, it could be concluded that even after bracketing off all representations, the cogito that remains does so only as a representation to itself. Thus, the cogito is the “first truth and at the same time the prototype for all truth” (165). In this case, the cogito has nothing to do with the actual process of thought or with thought itself. Rather, the cogito is the subjective condition (understood as affectivity, as noted above), without which no appearing of the world would appear.

With that said, it is hence claimed that Descartes draws back at precisely this moment and states that affectivity, as the original essence of subjectivity, is a “disturbance brought into subjectivity by some foreign agent. Why? Because thought is light, the light of representation, the light of the world, the light in which things and their geometric shapes shine – Greek light” (166). It is here, according to Henry, where the problem of the philosophy of the subject lies: “absolute objectivism, whether it be the naive objectivism of the sciences, notably the human sciences, or the ek stasis of Being that, unbeknownst to them, serves as their foundation” (166).

While not setting out to resolve the problematic of the history of the critique of the subject in this chapter, Henry concludes the article by remarking that there is no past in the critique, there is no model that ought to be resurrected or restored. Rather, there is only the possibility of a “first coming”…

Der Philosoph Walter Hoeres hat einen kleinen Onlineartikel für das Magazin Cicero geschrieben. Thema ist die gemeinsame kulturkritische Haltung der Vertreter der Frankfurter Schule (Adorno, etc.) und konservativer Denker wie Heidegger. Sie beschreibe heute mehr denn je unsere Zeit der Rationalisierung. Hier ein Ausschnitt – großartig:

“Nun besteht der langwierige Prozess der Aufklärung darin, dass sich diese Vernunft immer mehr aus ihren gewachsenen Bindungen emanzipiert. Aus ihnen herausgerissen, ist sie nicht mehr eingebettet in das konkrete Leben, die natürlichen Bedürfnisse und die geschichtliche Tradition. Vielmehr folgt sie jetzt nur noch dem Gesetz ihrer eigenen Rationalität. Sie dient nun nicht mehr dem Menschen, dessen Organ sie war, sondern er dient nun ihr. Dieser Prozess war notwendig, um den Kampf gegen die Natur und die Not schließlich zu gewinnen. Aber in ihm sind Heil und Unheil untrennbar verquickt. Dem Zauberlehrling gleich gibt diese losgelöste Vernunft keine Ruhe, bis sie alles vollends reglementiert, organisiert und rationalisiert hat.”
Link: http://www.cicero.de/97.php?ress_id=1&item=4348

In Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, the quest for a fundamental ontology and an existential analytic of Dasein traverses through and covers multiple areas of philosophy. Ontology and metaphysics are central to Heidegger’s investigation of Dasein, but the investigation of Truth, typically a primordial philosophical investigation, extremely condensed (compared to the turgidity of the rest of the work). Truth, as presented in Being and Time, is vague, but it is tightly wound and highly concentrated; the resonance of Heideggerian truth exists in the implications and application. Truth is not a super ordinate concept that exists independent of Dasein; there is no Truth without Dasein. Truth is only determined phenomenologically, by its uncovering. The agreement of assertion and object, a standard accepted definition of truth among Heidegger’s philosophical lineage and his contemporaries, is superfluous to the phenomenon of Truth. Heidegger is unequivocally one of the most important figures in 20th Century Continental philosophy. Unfortunately his theories and fundamental ontology have been misappropriated by radical Post-Modernists, who cite and Heidegger (Along with Nietzsche) as a major influence. François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard are two of the preeminent Post-Modern theorists and are also the most culpable of using bastardized applications of Heideggerian philosophy. In this paper I will briefly orient the reader with some of the more controversial claims in Post-Modern theory, explain Heidegger’s interpretation of truth and refute the logic behind the bastardization of Heideggerian truth as applied in radical Post-Modern constructivist theories.
Lyotard first coined the term Post-Modernism in his book: The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. In the essay “The Post-Modern Condition”, Lyotard aims to “[abolish] the idea of unitary end of history and of a subject” (Brooker 1992). Lyotard’s historical aims are admirable; he only wishes to view history from multiple vantage points. His mission to abolish the subject is not only frivolous, but wholly unscientific. Lyotard recently published a book on Heidegger: Heidegger and the Jew, in which he discusses Heidegger’s relationship with a Jewish student in the years immediately preceding the Jewish genocide in Germany during the Second World War. Baudrillard is the first theorist credited with “the loss of the real” (Barry 1995). Baudrillard consistently holds the view that because of the contemporary world’s reliance on and immersion in simulative reality, that reality no longer exists. (Brooker 1992) Baudrillard denies objectivity and constructs a completely subjective world. After the first Gulf War, Baudrillard denied that it had even happened, claiming that since we only experienced in a televisual reality, there is no proof that it actually took place. Baudrillard also cites Heidegger in his work, more importantly he uses Heideggerian truth to attempt to edify his theory of the existence of only simulacral reality and subjectivity.
Heidegger begins the discussion of Truth by pointing out the flaws in the traditional conception of philosophical truth.Heidgegger gives a brief history of the western philosophical quest for truth. He begins with Aristotle and arrives at the definition of truth commonly held in the late 19th and early 20th century: Truth is the agreement of knowledge with its object. Heidegger found this definition of truth insufficient. He does however; consider the Greek philosophers closer to the phenomenal clarification of truth than his contemporaries and immediate predecessors. The word “agreement” is a relational term; relation itself is colored by subjectivity. Furthermore, even the concept of a relationship between two separate entities is flawed. How can the res (thing) and the intellectus (thought) define one another, or moreover how can one give any validity to the other. Thought and object are distinct entities and characterizing the relationship between disparate species with the word “truth” overlooks the ontological relevance of truth. The nature of truth must reside somewhere beside the relational agreement.
According to Heidegger, the general epistemological conceit is that “what is true is knowledge” (Heidegger 215). The problem with knowledge is that it is a judgment. Heidegger distinguishes between the act of judging and the object being judged. The act of judging is a psychological process and the object is an ideal. The ideal is what is considered to be true without examining the process in which it is deemed true. The nature of truth is the agreement between the judgment and the judged. Heidegger remarks that either the psychological process (the Psychical Real) is present-at-hand or it is not. The statement begs the question. The investigation of “Truth” leads to an examination of the duality of thought and objects, and the resulting notion that the “agreement” of the relationship is the determinate factor in the disclosing of truth.
Heidegger accepts the general epistemological notion that what is knowledge is true. Ontologically, Heidegger wants to investigate the type of Being in which thought can phenomenally determine itself as knowledge, e.g. that it is true. He posits that truth is indeterminate until the entity about which an assertion is being made is “uncovered” Heidegger uses a very accessible example to demonstrate his definition of truth as disclosedness in opposition to the interpretation of truth as the agreement between subject and object. His example is as follows, a picture is hanging askew on a wall and a man is standing in front the wall with his back turned so that he cannot see the picture. Before seeing the picture, the man states aloud that the picture is hanging awkwardly. His psychological representation of the picture is consistent with the actual picture. But, according to Heidegger, the man’s statement can not be true or false without the disclosedness of the entity in its present-at-hand state. Truth cannot be determined by merely an agreement between assertion and the object. Although the man’s speculative statement turns out to be true, it becomes “true” only after an unveiling of the entity within-the world. Conversely, if the man states that the picture is hanging correctly, the assertion is just as empty and meaningless prior to the disclosure as the ultimately “true” statement. Heidegger’s argument so far is striking, but he also acknowledges in the text that the Greeks were mostly responsible for his ontic definition of truth and he proceeds to develop an ontological equprimordial argument for truth as disclosedness.
“Being-true as Being uncovering is only possible in Being in the world” (Heidegger 220). Heidegger follows the trail of truth and grounds it as a primordial foundation for being in the world. Being in the world is a basic state of Dasein “Being true is being uncovering” (Heidegger 219). That statement taken out of context holds the potential for abuse and misappropriation in various forms. Heidegger’s discourse on truth, if egregiously misinterpreted might lead one to believe that Being and Time rejects objective reality and the aforementioned introductory sentence to his explanation of truth’s primordial could possibly edify such a view. Heidegger’s role as a seminal figure in the destruction of objectivity is based on such statements as the prior. Baudrillard relies on statements similar to the aforementioned in his denial of objective reality. The mediums of television and the internet present only simulations of the real, in essence they contribute to an uncovering but they are uncovering simulacra, signs that signify non-existent entities. Baudrillard uses the same faulty logic based on Heidegger’s ontology to argue for the “loss of the real” (Barry 87). However, Heidegger immediately acknowledges the implications of an arbitrary definition of truth and explains what he means by the statement. He writes “By such drastic ways of defining this concept we succeed in eliminating the idea of agreement from the conception of truth.” (Heidegger 220) Heidegger is not stripping the object from its correspondence with the subject. Mental representations or thoughts are not the groundwork for truth, the unhiddeness of the object, once experienced by Dasein, is the essence of truth.
The specter of Descartes looms over Heidegger’s explanation of the pre-phenomenological explanation of truth. Heidegger follows Cartesian logic in determining that Dasein is the basis of truth: Dasein is in the truth. As mentioned above, truth is dependent on Being-in-the-world, which is a basic state of Dasein. Truth is unhiddeness or uncoveredness, and disclosedness (the act of uncovering or disclosing) is only available to Dasein. Dasein’s disclosedness is an existential constituent, and in Dasein’s disclosedness exists truth (as well as untruth). Heidegger begins with the only thing that cannot be disputed in his mind, Dasein. A basic state of Dasein is Being-in-the world and in the world exist entities that are either concealed or unconcealed. Truth resides in the uncovered and untruth in the covered or hidden. Because truth is a constituent of Dasein’s primordial state, disclosedness, the search for truth ultimate begins with Dasein. Dasein is not the progenitor of truth; Dasein uncovers entities within the world. The integral part of truth in Dasein’s makeup leads Heidegger to the conclusion that the existence of Dasein, which cannot be doubted, is the foundation for all truth. Because he cannot doubt his existence, truth by-proxy is undeniably a part of the worldhood of the world. Heidegger’s verification and primordial and pre-phenomenological analysis of truth is a more complex version of Descartes’ evil demon argument. Whereas Descartes could not deny his existence because even if an evil demon were manipulating every sense experience he was having and was substituting true perceptions with false ones, Descartes cannot deny his existence. Heidegger, whose existence is determined by the fact that he is a being for which being is an issue, builds his argument for truth in the same manner that Descartes argues for his own existence. Because Dasein exists, and truth is necessarily a constituent of Dasein’s ontological disclosedness, and Being in the World is an undeniable state for Dasein, then truth as uncoveredness in the world, necessarily exists for Dasein.
Truth does not need to be explicitly revealed to Dasein; Much of Dasein’s Being-in the World is based on hearsay truths or tangentially revealed truths based on Dasein’s falleness into the “they”. Simply because Dasein has not undertaken the mathematical machinations to uncover the largest know prime number does no mean that the largest prime is uncovered or not been proven true nor false. Dasein’s involvement in the public theyness allows for truths to be disseminated from experts in fields which have no connection with an individual factical Dasein. Baudrillard and Lyotard seem to have either not-read or misinterpreted this section of Being and Time. Heidegger explicitly and cogently elaborates on the idea that hearsay of disclosed truth does not desiccate its veracity. Mass communication mediums are hearsay and tertiary methods of disseminating truth, but just because events (The Gulf War, The Holocaust, and The World Series) are not witnessed by first-person experience, does NOT mean that they are false simulations of reality. Heidegger does not mention the consensual acceptance of truth, he allots for mistakenness which is inconsistent with uncoveredness. Many historical epochs have as central thematic “truths” that were ultimately proven false. Madness and insanity were once thought to be of supernatural origin; demons, spirits, and devils were blamed for the afflicted’s break with reality. They were consequently exorcised or prayed for or burned at the stake. With the rise of modern medicine and psychology, supernatural or religious causes were replaced by biochemical and physiological causes for insanity, and the religious hysteria that surrounded schizophrenic states has all but evaporated today. Heidegger considers the historical accepted “truth” as neither true nor false; the truth simply remained hidden, the falsity of past beliefs was only established once the actual uncovering took place. The belief was neither true not false until the actual entity was uncovered and then only in hindsight can the false notion of spirit possession be considered false. The phenomenon of truth is its uncoveredness. Phenomenally, the actual cause of the madness or disconnection with reality had not been elucidated, it was a false belief based on a lack of phenomenological evidence; it therefore was not false until a phenomenological manifestation of truth was uncovered.

From the ontologically meaning of truth, disclosedness, which is an intrinsic quality of authentic Dasein, Heidegger posits a controversial and counterintuitive argument:
There is truth only in so far as Dasein is and as long as Dasein is. Entities are uncovered only when Dasein is; and only as long as Dasein is, are they disclosed. Newton’s laws, the principle of contradiction, any truth whatever—these are true only as long as Dasein is. Before there was any Dasein there was no truth; nor will there be any after Dasein is no more.

Heidegger 227

Heidegger is not denying that certain laws, e.g. Newtonian Physics, did not govern terrestrial entities prior to their disclosedness. Newtonian physics were made true, or disclosed, through Newton and only through the accessibility to the veracity of the laws by Dasein are the laws of physics true. Truth is inextricably dependent on Dasein; Dasein is the arbiter of disclosedness. Truth is a construct of Dasein, but not in any way subjective. The quest to abolish the subject, by Lyotard and the denial of the real or objective reality by Baudrillard, are not only contradictory (Although Post-Modern philosophy revels in contradiction, contradictions in the role of Post Modernism by two of its most influential proponents is suspect) but wholly inconsistent with any Heideggerian interpretation of truth and reality. Heidegger’s statement on the subjectivity of truth belies his actual intention. Truth is not arbitrary or decided my Dasein, truth is subjective in that it only has relevance to Dasein. Prior to the evolution of hominids, water’s chemical makeup was H2O, but because there was no existent being for which being was an issue, the chemical constitution of water was uninvestigated and non-consequential to the entities which were dependent on it. Only after the analysis and disclosedness of the two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom was the truth of the atomic makeup of water phenomenologically revealed. However, because Dasein is essentially and ontologically in the truth, truth cannot be subjective. The subjectivity of truth does not imply that nothing and everything is true and all assertions if phenomenologically validated by individual Daseins are applicable. Heidegger is not endorsing such an illogical argument. If I assert that when little invisible fairies copulate, tree branches sway and leaves dance and float and if I look outside and phenomenologically perceive the branches of a tree moving and leaves capriciously floating, my assertion agrees with the evidence and I determine that the wind is symptomatic of the invisible fairies mating season. The assertion is patently false but a fatuous interpretation of Heideggerian truth might lead to my determining that little invisible fairies exist because truth is a subjective present –at-hand thought of which Dasein is the sole determinate. Nature as an entity in which Dasein exists is governed by laws that are wholly independent of Dasein’s disclosing of them. As an entity whose absorption in the world is a primordial state, Dasein uncovers “truths” in the world and the categorization of truth and falsity is a construct of Dasein. Nature, before and after the tenure of Dasein, will continue to be governed by its own laws. More importantly is the non-existence of falsity. Whereas Dasein’s uncovering and disclosedness reveals truth, falsity does not exist independent of Dasein at all. Natural or truths of scientific laws that govern the universe are independent and continue long past Dasein. But falsity is a result of assertions that obfuscate and cover the truth. Falsehood is entirely dependent on Dasein and had no place in the world before nor will it exist after Dasein. The existence of truth, though only discoverable through Dasein, is a non issue for nature, just as existence is the ontological primordial phenomena of Dasein, Dasein’s categorization of truths in the natural world is irrelevant to the workings and schema of the natural world.
Heidegger proclaims “ Because the kind of Being that is essential to truth is of the character of Dasein, all truth is relative to Dasein’s being” (Heidegger 229). Contrary to the uncontextualized interpretation of the sentence, he is not espousing the notion of wholly subjective truth. Dasein does not determine what is true simply because it is in the truth. Dasein’s ontological construction is intrinsically and irrevocably enmeshed with truth. Truth is only relative and relevant to Dasein; it is not subjectively determined by Dasein. The following statement is undeniably valid: the earth orbits the sun. The assertion was true only after the earth’s orbit was confirmed (disclosed). If I wake tomorrow and decide that the sun orbits the earth, that does not in any way entail that the assertion I have made is true, and Heidegger is patently denying that type of interpretation. Post-Modern misappropriations that rely on unsubstantiated interpretation of Heideggerian truth and reality are not only preposterous but counter-productive. If a veteran of a war reads that because the only portrayal of the war was through a televisual representation that it did not happen, the psychological damage to the veteran could be irrevocable. Baudrillard’s incogitant and ludicrous pontifications on the loss of reality are a danger to all schools of philosophical thought.
Truth is only an issue for Dasein, just as Dasein is a being for which its existence is an issue for itself, Truth is an issue only for Dasein, not only because they are ineluctably bound together, but because without Dasein truths are of no relevance. Falsehoods and falsities are the progeny of truth. Because Dasein is in itself an entity that has Being in the world as another primordial state, truth becomes relevant to Dasein, Heidegger does not allow liberal or fatuous interpretations of truth, either an entity is uncovered or it is hidden or obscured. In the uncovering of the entity, only then can an agreement or relational value of truth be determined. If the uncovering reveals to Dasein some quality inconsistent with an assertion made, then the assertion is false, but only after the uncovering reveals the entity in its presence-at-hand.
Heidegger rhetorically asks “Why must we presuppose truth?” Skeptics argue that there is no grounds are axiom that mandates a presupposition of truth. Post Modern philosophy wholly denies an existent objective reality and objective truths. Theorists such as Baudrillard and Lyotard refuse to presuppose truth and according to Heidegger one cannot refuse to presuppose truth. Any attempt to deny truth’s presupposition is contradicted by ontological constitution of the individual Dasein that is doing the denying. The presupposing of truth is not a teleological decision. Because Dasein is equiprimordially entwined with truth, the presupposition of truth is Dasein’s existence.

Works Cited
Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. (Manchester University Press. 1995).

Brooker, Peter, ed. Modernism/Postmodernism. (Longman Press, London 1992).

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. (Robinson and Macquarrie translation. Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, UK, 1962.)

POST ALTERADO NO DIA 23/11/2009, POIS OPTEI PELA ADIÇÃO DE MAIS UM TEXTO COLABORATIVO SOBRE A INTERFERÊNCIA PÚBLICA #2. SEGUINDO O TEXTO DO AMIGO THIAGO GOMES, ADICIONEI UM SEGUNDO, DESTA VEZ ESCRITO PELO COLABORADOR DANIEL FIGUEIREDO. A PARTIR DESSES DOIS TEXTOS ACHO QUE POSSO, DE FORMA MAIS EFETIVA, FALAR SOBRE ESSE EXPERIMENTO REALIZADO NO FESTIVAL PANORAMA DE DANÇA 2009.

ESSE POST MARCA A ABERTURA DAS DISCUSSÕES SOBRE O PRIMEIRO PERÍODO DA PESQUISA QUE “SE ENCERRA” NO MÊS DE NOVEMBRO. PARTICIPEM ATRAVÉS DOS COMENTÁRIOS.

Desde o último post, quando anunciei as minhas participações do Festival Panorama, venho tentando encontrar palavras que expressem o momento no qual a pesquisa se encontra. Após a “estratégica” leitura da obra de Martin Heidegger – sobre a questão da Metafísica e o referente Nada -, na intenção de apresentar uma relação, digamos, “irônica pós-moderna” a partir dos seus conceitos sobre a existência, ingressei em uma nova leitura: David Harvey – Condição Pós-moderna.

Apesar de estar profundamente interessado e afetado pelas abordagens do autor sobre a passagem da modernidade para a pós-modernidade cultural, através de argumentações sobre a arquitetura e o projeto urbano, a política econômica capitalista e as novas relações espaço-temporais, me sinto em um período de introspecção onde muitas dificuldades de apresentação das novas sensações se fazem presentes.

Por vários dias tentei clarificar textos que pudessem organizar minhas idéias e, conseqüentemente, me fazer entender nas novas postagens do blog. Tentativas em vão; cheguei à conclusão de que o mais interessante e apropriado seria falar exatamente sobre a dificuldade em que me encontro neste período de finalização da primeira etapa da pesquisa.

Após quase três meses de leituras, experimentações, discussões, postagens, etc., a passagem para a segunda etapa da pesquisa será marcada pela criação do “Plano de demonstração”, a ser enviado ao Itaú Cultural, no fim do mês de Novembro. Nesse plano estarão contidos todos os métodos aplicados na investigação, bem como os “meios” provisoriamente alcançados – nesta pesquisa, devo insistir em esclarecer tanto para mim quanto para as pessoas que colaboram ou acompanham o processo que, fins não serão alcançados: “não há respostas para as perguntas do ‘corpo urbano’” -, a fim de se obter um campo consistente de estudo para futuras criações ou evoluções do processo investigativo.

Seguindo a criação do “Plano de demonstração”, mais um encontro público deverá ser realizado; dessa vez, intitulado de “Conferência #1”, que caracterizar-se-á pelo convite a artistas que possam contribuir criticamente no processo, através de uma estrutura de discussões organizada a partir das experiências demonstradas. Essa conferência marca o encerramento de um primeiro ciclo que pode ser etiquetado como IMAGEM; ainda falaremos bastante de outras duas “linguagens do corpo urbano”: TEMPO e ESPAÇO.

Mas agora retornemos às atividades da pesquisa. Uma pergunta me vem sendo feita há algum tempo: “Interferência pública?!” Pessoas que acompanham, se relacionam ou apenas colidem, de certa forma, com certas atividades da pesquisa costumam questionar a intenção dessa interferência. É uma intervenção? Urbano? Um espetáculo? Você faz uma pesquisa?

Na primeira vez que fui questionado sobre a idéia de interferência pública, a resposta mais rápida que surgiu me pareceu a mais apropriada para definir as motivações dessas atividades, dentro do processo de pesquisa: “Algumas coisas são mais interessantes quando são experimentadas em público, ‘ao vivo’. Por isso, às vezes, saio do ‘estúdio’ para investigar junto com o público”.

Nas duas interferências que foram propostas nesse período da pesquisa, atentei para certos cuidados que podem se fazer necessários na justificação desse interesse de investigar junto (em conjunto) com o público. É possível que no primeiro encontro, realizado no dia 16 de Outubro – Sarau de professores CMDC -, o uso do termo “a gente” – “(…) a gente veio apresentar o experimento de uma pesquisa (…)” – tenha sido inteiramente apropriado, pelo fato de eu estar dividindo a cena com um dos colaboradores, Daniel Figueiredo. O termo que me motivou mais neste encontro, talvez tenha sido “verdade”, termo este que fora repetido de forma casual, porém insistente, durante a explanação; “verdade” foi um termo que guiou de maneira interessante o experimento que fora apresentado ao público, como eu mesmo afirmei.

No dia 10 de Novembro, na Mostra Universitária do Festival Panorama de Dança 2009, realizamos (a gente realizou) a segunda interferência pública da pesquisa, após a contemplação no programa Rumos. É importante lembrar que propostas cênicas relacionadas ao surgimento dos campos de investigação das dinâmicas do corpo urbano foram realizadas em outros três momentos, antes da confirmação dos selecionados no Rumos Dança 2009/2010.

Desta vez, o palco estava ocupado apenas por mim, mas, arrisco dizer que a cena estava ocupada por todos que compartilhavam daquele momento, em suas cadeiras, nas coxias, nos bastidores, etc. É a partir dessa idéia que reitero o termo “a gente” – “A gente vai fazer um experimento (…)”. Não houve apresentação, a gente experimentou juntos; vimos os “meios” se cruzarem no mesmo instante. Não houve preparação para além da iniciativa base da interferência. Acredito encontrar-se aí uma importante frente de investigação do “corpo urbano” e suas reflexões sobre corpo e mentalidade – já falamos anteriormente sobre o que podemos entender de “corpo urbano” após certo tempo de pesquisa desenvolvida.

Se na primeira interferência podemos dizer que, basicamente projetamos, de forma literal e apelativa, uma “farsa” do imaginário do homem urbano pós-moderno através da reprodução do discurso, da contenção do corpo que se apresenta como especial e sua heroificação, nesta segunda investida sobre a questão do imaginário e a construção de seus valores, a responsabilidade de projeção foi entregue ao público – se é que devemos nomeá-lo assim.

Um grande amigo me solicitou permissão para que ele pudesse escrever sobre o experimento. Portanto, inicialmente, não escrevei nada, não adicionarei fotos ou vídeos.

Interferência Pública #2 – por Thiago Gomes

Interferência pública #2. Esse é o nome do segundo experimento do meu amigo Bernardo Stumpf a respeito de sua pesquisa intitulada “Dinâmicas do Corpo Urbano”. Estive nos dois experimentos e tenho acompanhado sua pesquisa de perto, seja aqui pelo blog, ou em conversas na faculdade. Não quero com esse post estabelecer uma discussão sobre a interferência, mas sim, deixar registrado minhas impressões sobre a mesma e suas circunstâncias.

Mostra Universitária do prestigiado Festival Panorama de Dança 2009. Esperava uma outra postura dos espectadores (a grande maioria de estudantes dos três únicos cursos de dança do Rio de Janeiro: UniverCidade, Faculdade Angel Vianna e UFRJ), que a cada anúncio de coreografia, no qual era citado o nome do trabalho, o respectivo criador e/ou intérprete e ao curso a que era vinculado, gritavam o nome da instituição que faziam parte, como se defendessem a academia de dança num festival competitivo. Fiquei bem decepcionado. Achei que fosse conhecer novas pessoas, que fosse discutir trabalhos e pontos de vista. Frustrei-me.

Mas, por outro lado não podia ter sido um ambiente melhor para o experimento de Bernardo. Vou agora descrevê-lo, para assim melhor explicitar minhas considerações. Bernardo entra em cena e menciona o motivo da sua presença ali: o experimento Interferência pública #2, e a sua pesquisa contemplada no edital do Rumos Itaú Cultural 2009/2010. Em seguida, Bernardo, que está vestindo uma camisa branca, tira do bolso uma caneta, e começa desenhar o contorno de sua musculatura da caixa torácica. Peitoral, abdômen, serrátil… Todos esses músculos que em proporções específicas, são o sonho de imagem que muitos homens gostariam de ter. Afinal esse é o estereotipo clássico de um corpo belo. Durante essa cena, a platéia descrita no parágrafo anterior delira, todos os tipos de adjetivo são usados, e os assobios de “fiu-fiu” são inevitáveis. Nesse momento Bernardo que mantinha uma postura neutra diante daquilo, abre um leve e discreto sorriso, que a meu ver o deixou na corda bamba do experimento. O agente da cena foi de encontro ao público, ou seja, ele permitiu que seu experimento se tornasse um fracasso, perdendo o controle da relação performer/espectador. Não que esteja errado ou certo que a platéia se manifeste do jeito que estava, mas por um instante o experimento pode perder a validade, por conta dessa “aprovação” que Bernardo deu a platéia. Bernardo, com esse ato de sorrir, permitiu que o espectador invadisse a sua obra. Continuando… Ao terminar de pintar esses contornos, Bernardo se aproxima da platéia e de costas para o espectador, saca a caneta do bolso. Prontamente dois espectadores, saíram de sua cadeira e começaram a fazer o mesmo na parte de traz da camisa. Cada uma delas (eram duas moças) pintou o que achou melhor. Derramaram na camisa, toda a imagem que gostariam que o Bernardo tivesse, ou a imagem que faziam dele. O restante do público, por sua vez, não ficou de fora, ajudavam as duas moças com idéias: Pinta isso! Pinta aquilo! Gritavam todos. Projetando suas vontades e anseios na camisa de Bernardo.

Fiquei pensando. Se fosse eu com a caneta, o que teria pintado? Será que somos honestos consigo? Será que sempre projetamos aos outros a imagem do que gostaríamos de ser, e não de nós mesmos? Será que selecionamos os nossos nichos através dessas projeções? Se for assim, somos falsos consigo mesmo? E o corpo em tudo isso? Ele é só um divisor de alteridades? Se a existência se realiza no corpo, como posso simplesmente existir, e não querer comunicar algo com ele? No momento em que escrevo esse post, percebo como esse experimento me afetou. Como essas questões que levantei são preocupantes para mim. A condição pós-moderna me parece ingrata aos entes. Escravos obrigados a procurar sua própria sobrevivência.

Interferência Pública #2 – por Daniel Figueiredo

Olá a todos os seguidores do blog da pesquisa “Dinâmicas do Corpo Urbano”. Sou Daniel Figueiredo. Apresento-me, pois há muito colaboro com a pesquisa, junto ao Bernardo, e nunca fiz se quer um comentário sobre o que ele escreve aqui. Pois bem, aproveitando a bem vinda oportunidade e minha vontade de dizer algo a todos que se interessam por essa pesquisa ou pelo Bernardo e sua trajetória profissional, dedico esse tempo para as minhas impressões sobre o andamento do trabalho.

Para não me tornar muito alongado, não vou entrar em detalhes dos experimentos e sim, no que surgiu para mim após o acontecimento deles.

Este período da pesquisa na qual estamos mergulhados pode-se rotular de IMAGEM. Nesta fase, conseguimos entrar em algumas facetas deste polígono mutável. Primeiro projetamos uma imagem que só existiu na cabeça das pessoas. A “verdade” é que nada foi projetado pelo artista que produzisse, de fato, uma imagem existente. Não houve texto, nem fala, nem dança ritmada, fisicalidade, habilidade técnica ou qualquer artifício que fizesse o artista projetar alguma coisa. Ele apenas induziu o público a esperar alguma coisa que já estava dentro de cada espectador. Inclusive os que estavam esperando menos. Houve comentários diversos e adversos à pesquisa. No segundo experimento, mudamos o foco da pesquisa, mas o estimulo foi bem parecido. Na verdade, em minha opinião, o segundo experimento só vem para corrigir os erros do primeiro e reforçar a “verdade”. Nesta Interferência Pública #2, o artista continuou a não projetar nada além da própria imagem, mesmo usando uma caneta para desenhar seu próprio contorno monocromático. Quem estava presente continuou a enxergar aquilo que viu. Se viram um belo corpo que caracteriza o status de um homem bonito ou saudável, ou desejável, ou sexy, ou exibido, ou pretensioso; cada um viu o que quis projetar naquela tela branca. Este experimento ficou tão marcado para o público, que projetava não só na camisa branca como também na mão das senhoritas que desenhavam de fato naquela tela, que esqueceram de lembrar do único movimento que ele faz durante todo o experimento. O que era? O êxtase da possibilidade de responsabilizar outra pessoa pelo que pensaram fez o público se livrar da culpa de pensar aquilo que queriam. E se riram, qual é o problema? E se o artista riu, qual é o problema? Qual é o problema da “verdade”? Por que não queremos nos responsabilizar pelo que projetamos? Será que vivemos realmente livremente?

Não existe problema na projeção de uma imagem. O problema está em algum lugar que exista? Talvez o problema seja que tudo tenha que existir. Ser rotulado, classificado e julgado. A imagem por ela mesma, já não é material.

Se chegaram até aqui, obrigado e até o próximo post.

« Le sens de la recherche herméneutique est de dévoiler le miracle de la compréhension et non pas la communication mystérieuse des âmes ».

Hans Georg GADAMER, Le problème de la conscience historique

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GRILLE DE LECTURE

L’objectif que Gadamer assigne à son herméneutique est le comprendre en tant que tel. En passant, nous pouvons dire que Gadamer est tributaire de l’herméneutique existentiale du Dasein qu’avait élaborée Heidegger. Il suit l’analyse heideggérienne de la temporalité du Dasein, et souligne que comprendre n’est pas un mode de comportement d’un sujet parmi d’autres, mais un mode d’être du Dasein lui-même. Dans le même sens, on pourrait dire que l’herméneutique qui, pour Gadamer, est synonyme de compréhension est le mode d’être par excellence du Dasein.

En suivant Heidegger, l’herméneutique gadamérienne se démarque de l’herméneutique subjectivo-psychologique de Schleiermacher où il s’agit d’un acte divinatoire, de la communion mystérieuse des âmes. Pour Schleiermacher l’esprit dans son dynamisme créateur recèle toujours une marge inattendue. Et c’est ce qui doit orienter la tâche de l’herméneute. C’est en cela qu’il appelle à l’herméneute ou l’interprète d’une œuvre à s’identifier à la vie intérieure et extérieure de l’auteur de celle-ci par une approche quasiment divinatoire.

Gadamer fidèle disciple de Martin Heidegger jusqu’à un moment donné pense que la compréhension d’un texte est déterminée par la pré-compréhension de l’interprète. C’est pour cela qu’il considère que l’anticipation du sens qui nous amène à comprendre un texte n’est pas un acte subjectif, mais elle est déterminée par le lien commun avec la tradition. C’est en ce sens qu’il affirme que « Le sens de la recherche herméneutique est de dévoiler le miracle de la compréhension et non pas la communication mystérieuse des âmes ».

Mervy Monsoleil AMADI, op

In my previous post I experimented with a tetrad-fourfold hybrid analysis of media and discovered that the tetrad could be used to look at non-human specific media. Laws of Media (LOM) was a fascinating read that has encouraged me to seek out some more McLuhan. This post brings together insights from The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media, of which I can report that there is a lot more to  them than this simple tetrad. This article aims to outline many of the arguments from LOM towards a questioning consideration of Heidegger and technology.

One of the many surprises from reading the McLuhan’s LOM, is their reading of Heidegger and the phenomenological tradition. Firstly, they are aware of the importance of the ground/figure relationship for Heidegger and the limitations of his approach. The McLuhan’s want to not only recognize the ground/figure dif-ference, but the figure is the ground and visa versa: ‘[Heidegger] has not noted that the ground is formed as a mosaic, structured acoustically, nor that its structure is entirely due to its interface with figures’ (LOM, p.63). Essentially, the McLuhan’s critique the notion of thinking being beyond beings. For the McLuhan’s, Graham Harman and Levinas, this is impossible.

LOM is not the only place the McLuhan (senior) has commented on Heidegger. In The Gutemberg Galaxy (TGG), he makes the claim that “Heidegger surf-boards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave” (TGG, p.248). Heidegger claims that technology is a mode of enframing, which as the McLuhan’s explain “is not a batch of concepts, but a special technique of perception that reveals the ground” (LOM, p.63). Heidegger understands this in the negative as ‘fleeing from the question of being’. It is in the notion of ‘question’ that we must question. If we no longer question being, then we no longer respond to the absent gods as they beacon us to wonder at being. Put simply, if there is no longer an absence that brings us to question the relation with beings, we have lost the RTH and have become PAH automatons. Thus, Heidegger’s favourite philosophical demon (not daimon), Descartes, whose mechanical and mathematical metaphysics of presence, is the main culprit for our modern ontologically degenerate forgetting of the question. Or so he thinks.

Descartes championed the mechanical which was then repeated by Newton. McLuhan comments with wonderfully dry whit in Understanding Media that Newton “in an age of clocks, managed to present the physical universe in the image of a clock”. Whilst “Blake spoke of the need to be delivered “from single vision and Newton’s sleep,” knowing very well that Newton’s response to the challenge of the new mechanism was itself merely a mechanical repetition of the challenge”. Concurrent to Blake, it would be an understatement to say that Heidegger was not fond of mechanization. However, McLuhan notes that Heidegger champions the electrical. McLuhan makes the claim that Heidegger has a non-literate bias in his philosophy and language. Heidegger wants to ‘turn’ the being of Dasein towards the ground of being, the RTH withdrawn essence in contradistinction to the PAH revealed relations of scientific and mathematical representation. In LOM we learn that media which focus to the figures of visual space are conceptual, while acoustic space brings focus to the ground. It is in this acoustic space that Heidegger sees the no-thing which characterizes Eastern oral traditions of the non-literate. This turning towards the acoustic is hampered by the medium Heidegger’s work circulates within: the phonetic [orthographic] alphabet.

‘The interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world.’ (TGG, p.21). The manner of his work is abstract and visual, even though he is trying to ‘explore the occult (hidden) area’ of beings (LOM, p.63). In McLuhan’s terms, Heidegger’s concern for the essence and saving power of technology is a response to the ‘left brained’ visual/conceptual logos interpreted as logic which characterized western philosophy since the instantiation of metaphysics with Plato amplified by Descartes and culminating with Nietzsche. Graphocentricism followed in the 17th century, which is why Heidegger re-enacts the pre-Socratic logos of Heraclitus, a logos of the oral tradition of beings gathered by speech. Heidegger’s turn towards poetry exemplifies the ‘right brained’ acoustic/perceptual spiritual line of flight away from the PAH, towards a ‘hearkening’, a hearing beyond sound and tone, that indicates a deeper dense of perception of an openness to the simultaneous withdrawing and the taking place (On the Essence of Language, p.88).It is this ‘hearkening’ to acoustic space that Heidegger’s ideas can ‘’surf’ along the electronic technological revolution commanded by the mosaic image of the television and visual display unit, while simultaneously, his message is replicated through the medium of the printed page, the flat visual space Heidegger despises. To compromise, he turns to poetry.

The poetry of Trakl, Holderlin and Rilke (and Heidegger himself) is a ‘cool’ medium that requires participation. Like Nietzschian aphorisms, which signal an incomplete reasoning, poetry presents a gap which forces the reader to think instead of swallowing a complete package or method of thought. This is in contrast to Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’ (B&T), which is hot in it’s attempt at an exhaustive deconstruction of the meaning of being. The fact that B&T was never finished, party shows the movement from hot prose to cool poetry that would characterize his later work. Although, in essence, his tool analysis fourfold was present as early as 1919, B&T was a product of the hot medium of phenomenological analysis, whose practice of the epoché created mountains of paper analysis in the name of phenomenological ’seeing’. Thus the momentum and style of Husserlian phenomenology was still in top gear as Heidegger was writing B&T, only later to ease off the accelerator and take the fourfold’s cool structure seriously.

There is no essence of Dasein that needs protecting and saving through the poetic return of the gods: McLuhan stresses that “the acoustic power available to the poetic establishment that Plato warned against was puny by comparison to the sensory stress exerted by any one of our technologies and its grounds” (LOM, p64). The human essence is always already a fluctuating media-being through the facticity of worldly equipmentality. There is no ‘clearing’ (lichtung) which sets the horizon of meaning, as human Dasein’s worlded horizon changes according to newly acquired media practices. Heidegger fails to notice that new media all always demonized before they are normalized. As McLuhan observes in TGG, there was ‘considerable alarm and revulsion’ at the mounting use of of books in the late 17th century which contrasts with the modern concern for the ‘end of the book’. Technology itself does not have a moral dimension, but provokes a moral response because of its transformative powers: technology is not itself a disaster, only the myopia of being unprepared for the fundamental changes to human perceptions, habits, values they could bring.

NB – Heidegger’s logocentricism was deconstructed by Derrida, who, through McLuhan’s eyes, was responding the hypocrisy of Heidegger surfing the electric (i.e. the visual space of writing) while promoting the acoustic space of speaking. Heidegger was in neglect of the arch-writing that makes speech possible and thus Heidegger remains committed to a metaphysics of presence: as writing involves the absence of the speaker, whereas the speaker is always present to the listener. Derrida’s archi-writing seems to not only recognize speech and writing as modes of signification, but that neither is subordinate to the other when seeking being qua being. McLuhan knowingly  deconstructs himself when he notes that contained in the fourfold structure of the self proclaimed amazing revolutionary thought of the tetrad itself is its reversal into ‘the external logical method’: hardware (the physical stuff of the world) becomes software (word), “thereby losing their murky, non-linguistic materiality” as Harman writes in his article ‘Phenomenology and the tetrad’. He wants to make us aware of the acute workings and transformations of media, just as Derrida wants to engage in inter-textual deconstruction while making us aware of the impossibility of the end of his task.

This is a particularly interesting clip of Heidegger’s. Most people use TV’s and Radio’s yet have no idea how they work, except for a few technically minded people,  in the same way, most people think they are thinking, yet only a few people actually know what it means to think. For Heidegger. what we think is thought is the message which hides a medium which enframes how we think. This analytic visual space prioritizes being expressed through its presence in visual space. Thus, beings forget the acoustic space of being.

1. Into the question: Conf. 10.10

What is a question? and what is questioning?

At Confessions 10.10, Augustine cites a common rhetorical trope: ‘I hear that there are three kinds of questions: whether a thing is, what it is, of what sort it is’. He accepts this division—indeed, sees in it an instance of mental, i.e. non-empirical truth.   Augustine has heard the words that signify this schema but, he insists, it is not these sounds that he has recognized as true—it is the things themselves (res vero ipsas), these three types of question, that he recognizes as true. He examines the portals of his flesh: signifying sounds have come to him in hearing, but whence has come to him the truth of these things? Not, he says, by hearing—because ‘I was not trusting some other man’s mind, but recognized’ the truth ‘in my own’. Nor, surely, did the truth of these things come to him by touch or sight, as odor or as color. Thus, the truth of these things must have been in his mind before he heard them—what he now recognizes as true must have been in his memory.

Yes—the truth that there are three types of questions must have been in his memory. ‘Very well then,’ he asks, ‘whence and how did they get into my memory? I do not know.’

Two things are important for us to note here: 1. that Augustine, in analyzing the truth of this scheme, has undermined it. Here, in his perplexity, he asks not whether (an) he has this knowledge, what (quid) it is or what kind (quale) it is—though as to ‘what’ he would say that it is true, and as to ‘what kind’ he would say that it is mental and remembered. He asks, rather—and here he surpasses the rhetorical schema—where-from (unde) and how (quomodo) this knowledge has come to him. We will call these the original and modal questions.

To read the rest of this essay, please visit:

http://dvandusen.wordpress.com/augustine-and-the-question-of-being/

Chris Fynsk. Ferran Adrià, elBulli & l’Image en Cuisine. 2009

Chris Fynsk speaking to the European Graduate School (EGS) about the chef Ferran Adrià of the restaurant El Bulli in Catalonia, Spain and about how the cuisine relates to the thought of Jean Luc Nancy, Heidegger and the question of taste. Fynsk spoke about the Nancy’s idea of gastronomic affirmation as well as the concept of the image of art revealing itself through the distended time of the meal. Referencing Mallarme, Roland Barthes and others, Fynsk attempted to draw a sketch of the “coming forth” of food into a play of revelation and withdrawal. Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School (EGS).

Chris Fynsk has been the Director of the Centre for Modern Thought as well as the head of the School of Language and Literature at the University of Aberdeen since 2005. He also currently holds the Maurice Blanchot Chair for Continental Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Previously he taught at SUNY Binghamton where he was co-director and founder of the Philosophy, Literature and Theory of Criticism department.

Internationally recognized as a Heidegger scholar and literary theorist, Chris Fynsk has worked extensively with Philipe Lacou-labarthe and Jean Luc Nancy as well as others over the course of his career. In his book Heidegger; Thought and Historicity (1986), Fynsk examined Heidegger’s notions of human finitude and difference, especially through an examination of the role of mitsein in Being and Time. In later works, Fynsk has taken up the idea of language (that there is language) and its relation to being. His book Infant Figures: The Death of the Infans and Other Scenes of Origin (2000) continues this engagement with language. A meditation on death and language using the texts of Jacques Lacan and Maurice Blanchot, as well as the images of Francis Bacon, Infant Figures describes “ an emergent figuration that attends a human subject’s birth to language.”

Amongst Chris Fynsk’s published works are Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy (1989), Heidegger: Thought and Historicity (1986), Politics Language and Relation: …that there is language (1996), Infant Figures: The Death of the Infans and Other Scenes of Origin (2000), The Claim of Language: A Case for the Humanities (2004).

The Unfinished Harman Theory of Causation

[click on picture for larger image]

Another Derrida?

Coincidently, what Harman thinks of Derrida: “Personally, I never had much time for Derrida, and see him instead as a self-indulgent wanker adrift in a sea of signs and boring high-culture collage.”

The discussion on the merits of Harman’s Husserl/Heideggerian Speculation has continued over at Perverse Egalitarianism in the comments section of Jon’s Points. Plenty of opinions abound, and software is distributing comments haphazardly so it makes a kind of grab-bag of objection and counterpoint. But one thing emerged that should be reposted here, Bryan’s limpid response to the passing suggestion that all this talk about the nonsense of Harman’s theory reminds us of the claims of nonsense about Derrida (some of which persist). It allowed a momentary conflation of Graham Harman the speculating philosophy book whisperer, and Derrida, radical critic of philosophy, culture, politics and literature. Bryan’s comments in response are worth reposting because the give context to the kind of sober check needed when philosophy simply has become Speculation:

1) First, I want to briefly cover an intellectual historical issue that has some bearing on this debate: the Anglo-Saxon philosophical-academic reception of Jacques Derrida’s ideas. As pretty much everybody knows, Derridean thought and deconstruction were seen as deliberately obscurantist, particularly by more analytically-inclined philosophers of the day. One might say the rejection of deconstruction in a wide array of philosophy departments is what opened up the field of comparative literature, which became a new critical space to do *real* theory.

I think this historical legacy of conservative skepticism towards the new and obscure is in some ways important, but not entirely relevant in the way that supporters or fellow-travellers of speculative realism view it to be. For one, I am not of the opinion—nor are many of us that are in some ways against OOP—that philosophy should be concerned entirely with examining “the canon,” as so many variations on textual interpretation and so on, the kind of thing that Levi is always ranting about from his bully pulpit at Larval Subjects. I am all for radical new systems, inventiveness, and a spirit of a return to metaphysics and ontology and all of the things that textual traditionalism and deconstruction alike swore off of, considered *Denkverbot*.

But that’s not a real substantive difference, the difference lies elsewhere: even when Derrida was under the fiercest of attacks by his conservative-minded critics, who charged him with nihilism and all the other litany of anathemas and what have you, there was still a large contingent of people who not only took Derrida seriously, but understood many of his most complex ideas. While it is, I think, an open question as to what degree Harman has made a genuine contribution to the field of philosophy (personally, I don’t view his critique of anthropocentrism as entirely convincing nor original, and the same goes for his depoliticized ontological universe of withdrawn objects), not a single person has claimed that they understand Harman’s theory of causation: neither Levi, nor even Latour, the Prince of Networks himself. This is astonishing, and absolutely underemphasized: as Kvond argued, Levi has dedicated his life towards unknotting some of the most
complicated thinkers who have ever lived, including Lacan and Deleuze. So, even though this might not count as direct evidence of Harman’s disingenuousness, it *should* (normatively speaking) elicit some degree of skepticism on our part.

2) Now I’d like to turn to the issue of the initial “faith” when approaching a philosophy for the first time. I am wholeheartedly in favor of this, principally because I reject the alternatives (skepticism, relativism, historicism, empiricism), and also because, at a basic ethical level, we owe it to others to grant them a modicum of respect when assessing their work: to treat it *as if* it has some inherent worth prior to determining whether this be the case or not. If we presuppose from the outset that the philosophical work is not sincere, then all end up doing is confirming our own hypotheses, which—although it often works for the sciences—is not necessarily an effective hermeneutical practice.

Personally, I was excited by Graham’s blog when it was first introduced, as I think were most in the philosophy blogosphere. I would also praise the speculative realist movement as a whole for breaking away from the dominant trends in continental philosophy associated with textual analysis, turning their efforts towards constructing new systems. But this is precisely where we need to distinguish that initial faith with a dose of skepticism. While many have continued their fidelity to the Truth-Event known as Graham Harman, it has become increasingly clear to me and others that his most central, core ideas do not seem to hold weight. This is suggested not only by Levi and Latour’s bafflement with his theory of vicarious causation—a sentiment which is shared just as well by Harman’s vocal critics—but also the extent to which Harman’s very own advice on how to write philosophy reveals a degree of cynicism about giving your work a sense of “shock value” and focusing on “One Great Idea,” painting a “philosophical landscape” using a pastiche of Classical and Contemporary, exotic and canonical, baroque and antique. This “mid-western ethic” of revealing how the game is played suggest a greater awareness on his part of using theories more as a means to an end, rather than as an end in themselves: it is less about the substance of the idea, than about creating networks and assemblages of power, authority, influence, and the “sizzle” of a brand name/identity. This, I think, is somewhat frightening, given that object-oriented philosophy claims to be investigating the question of BEING QUA BEING.

All I can say is that this is something I find myself in complete agreement with, and that my criticism of Harman is something that also grew out of my sincere desire to take him seriously as a thinker (which few seem to have wanted to do). I came to him with a tremendous sense of good faith, and put the long hours into ferreting out what all the claims were apart from his metaphors and allusions. I was genuinely excited, at first, to find as much common ground as possible, something I discovered which actually threatened Harman’s driving aim to be “original”. This need for originality, combined with the One Great Idea/Exaggeration approach, although it has generated interest, has proven to make of his “philosophy” an in-communication. No one understands it, but no one is supposed to critique it because it “is not finished” (and Harman only retreats into Husserl and Heidegger when pressed for clarity). It seems that one can only applaud it and not enter into dialogue with it.

Playing The Churl: Orientalism Good?

In this vein, Tim over at Violent Signs appears to find my questioning of the substance of Harman’s thinking both needed, but also a bit “churlish” (in particular my criticism of Harman’s self-admitted and embraced Orientalism):

The influence of Deleuze upon the principal OOO and SR writers appears marked, and a fuller post in this connection will follow. But in the meantime I want to add a word on what might be going overlooked in the rush to celebrate a (‘novel’) post-Deleuzian philosophy. Largely a blogospheric phenomenon, to suggest that the SR ‘movement’ conceals a sort of problematic Orientalism, and moreover, might amount to an exotic re-packaging of other object-oriented philosophies (something that many would still accuse Deleuzism of) seems nothing short of churlish, particularly given how exciting much of this thinking appears to be and how deeply amenable such materialisms are to ecocriticism, ecosophy or ecophilosophy. But these are thought-provoking and deeply ‘political’ criticisms nevertheless.

Whilst a fuller distinction between relational and object-oriented philosophies will have to remain forthcoming, I’d nevertheless agree wholeheartedly with Kvond that there’s a sort of “blogged responsibility” to comment on such insights/objections, “if only to triangulate and encourage more to post themselves”.

While I share Tim’s passion for an “ecophilosophy” (of which I read all of Spinoza to be), simply whether a movement of thought is friendly to ecocriticism is not the measure by which it should be criticized. And particularly in the issue of Orientalization (Harman’s desire to create a Sensuous, exotic mediating realm, and a cold, isolated “real” real) I am willing to play the Churl, since I find this one of the deepest problems with Harman’s regression back into Representationalist pictures of what makes human beings and what they do possible. And I think it is precisely on the question of Orientalization that ecophilosophy needs to get its ground. It is no more helpful to Orientalize Nature than it is to Orientalize causal relations, as Harman does.

Harman the Arch Critic: Real Objects Like Monkeys and Tornados

In this continuing vein of critique, there is another really well-written and well-pointed assessment of the substance of Harman’s appraisals, appraisals not only of philosophy, but of thinkers and their worth, the way in which he aestheticizes his authority. This is found in the comments section of my post  Harman’s Commodification of Paper Writing. Eli writes:

I think the point Bryan makes about how philosophy for Harman is all about painting pretty canvases is also absolutely spot on. Harman’s attitude toward just about everything is an “aesthetic” one, and he even says that we should regard aesthetics as “first philosophy”. But note that he means nothing remotely sophisticated by “aesthetics” here. Philosophy for him is about liking and disliking things – quite literally – and he views it as a purely aesthetic pursuit – not because he has some theory about how aesthetics judgement supplants all others or what have you; there’s no judgment, no cognitive dimension whatsoever involved: it’s literally as primitive as “x feels good”, “I like x”: hence his love of travelogue, catalogues, lists, photographs with pretty colours: the world is a vast aesthetic sensorium featuring the pleasing and the displeasing and philosophy is the catalogue and guide.

Go and listen, for example, to the lecture he gave in Dublin last year, most of which quite literally consists of him saying “so I like that” and “so I don´t like that”. Consider also all his “advice” posts in which says that bad arguments and non sequiturs are “the most trivial mistakes in philosophy” and that what really matters is that one writes with “style” and uses “vivid” language.

One of the ironies about all this of course is that he then accuses anyone who would base their ontological commitments upon the results of the empirical sciences of “crude reductionism”! Thus, reducing everything to aesthetics and fashion is fine, but it is “reductionism” to concern oneself with actual empirical knowledge. Indeed his whole attitude towards science is also a purely aesthetic one and the value of science for him purely comes down to what kinds of “pictures” it can give us. Amusingly, when accused of ignoring the sciences his response is always to say “I love all the sciences and in fact spend more time in bookshops in the popular science section than in the philosophy section” – flicking through looking at the pictures, presumably, or looking for vivid, colorful descriptions and metaphors.

Thus notice that in one post in which he was attempting to explain why he never draws upon science and yet nevertheless is “a great lover of all the sciences” he says “I love Dawkins for the vast landscapes he paints, populated with weird creatures” – note, not because he might actually learn something about such creatures, or about evolution or biology, but because he finds it aesthetically pleasing! However, he of course goes on to say that he “detests” Dawkins “arrogant scientism”.

Equally amusingly, in the same post he claimed that he wants “to increase exponentially the amount of attention we pay to comets and neutrinos”. But how exactly does he intend to do this? How on earth is one supposed to say anything whatsoever about such things without actually learning some science? – something that Harman informs us in the very same post he is not interesting in doing because “I simply do not have the head for it” and because he has “a remarkable inability to remember anything” he reads in science books (hardly surprising given that he limits this to flicking through them when in his local bookshop!). By “exponentially increasing the amount of attention we pay to comets and neutrinos” does that mean anything more than he will try to remember to include such items on his random lists of middle-sized dry-goods?

He also says that he rejects science because it does not fit in with his intuitive picture of how things are: “I just don’t feel on solid footing with the sciences. I can’t pretend to myself that I feel we’re in a safely solid domain when we talk about physics, for instance, because all sorts of non-physical entities immediately start leaking into the picture for me, and I can’t shut them out.”

What puzzles me most when he gives papers saying how philosophy should forget about epistemology and should instead concern itself directly with fire and cotton, monkeys, tornadoes and quarks, is why no-one just asks him straight out: “Could you give me an example of what a philosopher might have to say about monkeys or comets or neutrinos that’s not covered by the sciences?” What would he have to say? “Errm, well … when a monkey eats a banana, there is actually no interaction between the monkey and the banana, because monkeys and bananas are vacuum-sealed objects which forever infinitely withdraw from one another. No-one has ever seen a monkey or a banana in the purity of their individual essences, and they can only interact on the inside of an intention, and all objects relate to each other by means of intentions”. Why don’t people just start howling with laughter and derision when he says such things?

He also always puts the differences between himself and other “Speculative Realists” (a label that none of the others have ever actually used, by the way) down to purely aesthetic considerations: “My friend Brassier is temperamentally inclined towards eliminativism, but that’s not for me … Grant likes to think of the world as a ceaseless flux that somehow gets retarded to produce individual objects, but my intuition is that the world is carved up into individual objects, so I base my metaphysics on that …” This is not a direct quote but there have been plenty of posts like that, in which he characterises the four positions as if they were alternative pictures of the universe, something like choosing between various pre-Socratic worldviews according to one’s personal aesthetic tastes. For example:

 “When I read my friend Brassier, he’s too much of an eliminativist for my tastes. I don’t want to eliminate Popeye from the subject matter of philosophy, nor do I find it possible to do so” – presumably because whenever he tries to think about the world in terms of physics, pictures of Popeye keep leaking in to the picture and he can’t shut them out!

However, he does like some things in Brassier: namely, some of the vivid language he uses:

 “However, what I really passionately love in Brassier’s work is his fierce poetry of the insignificance of human being. Not the pessimism of it so much, because I am temperamentally an optimist and have a quasi-libidinal investment in even the most trivial objects that pass through my field of vision, and do not enjoy the thought of burnt-out husks of stars and the heat-death of the universe, which Brassier almost seems to viscerally enjoy”.

And ditto for Dawkins:

 “It’s for similar reasons that I often like reading Dawkins, even though I find his anti-fundamentalist tirades to be tedious and condescending …. But his vast landscapes of strange animal ancestors and archaic geological events … this I find highly appealing …”

 Thus, the entire ‘argument’ for his metaphysics goes something like this:

“Is reality divided up into chunks or is it a ceaseless flux? Well, which do you prefer? Which one appeals to you? I like the former. Why? Because my teachers likes all the relational stuff, and I got bored with that. I don’t like monism. Some people do, but my inclinations are different. Some people base their ontology on empirical sciences, but I like Popeye too much to go down that road. Anyway, I can’t remember anything I read in science books, and there aren’t any pretty pictures to look at there – except in astronomy, of course: I love stars and comets! I also love all the landscapes of weird and wonderful animals painted by Dawkins. But it puzzles me why some people prefer to think of gold in purely physical terms, thus giving up its shiny appearance. I find that when I think of gold all that comes to mind is its glittery shiny appearance, so my claim is that gold is metaphysically torn between its appearance and its inscrutable inner core. I guess those eliminativist types just have more austere aesthetic tastes than I do.”

The fact is, of course, that this stuff only appeals to overly impressionable students in the humanities for whom analytic philosophy is just too damn hard and who are constantly on the look out for the next new thing in continental philosophy: something abstract but user-friendly, undemanding, sexy, perfectly pliable for whatever ends they might require (geography, social theory, literary studies, cultural studies, film, business studies …). For such types, reading Harman is an absolute godsend: It’s easy and pleasant to read (lots of metaphors and imagery), deep- and lofty-sounding, doesn’t require them to do any thinking (thus saving unnecessary wear and tear on the brain tissues), it chimes perfectly with commonsense (albeit with some ‘weird’ twists’, which is cool), doesn’t require them to be able to evaluate arguments or learn anything technical, gives them a further alibi for continuing to ignore science and epistemology, gives them license to commit as many non sequiturs as they like (“arguments are the superficial skin of philosophy”, “logical errors are the most trivial mistakes in philosophy”), tells them that the only important thing about writing philosophy is to cultivate a literary “style”, to write “vividly” in bold and eye-catching colors, tells them that poetry is a greater cognitive tool than empirical inquiry, promises a direct revelation of Truth without having to acquire any knowledge … and, in general, it’s ‘fresh’ and ‘bold’ and ‘exciting’ … It’s irresistable!

To my ear Eli’s criticism is devastating to the very form of Harman’s expression, his modes of dismissal and assertion, and the supposed “logic” of his call to objects. The blued paragraph especially strikes me as precisely marking the absurdity of Harman’s call to “objects” as if he is getting us philosophy-minded type back onto the firm ground (as Wittgenstein liked to say).

Grouping Criticism

Lastly in this compendium of contemporary objections it is probably good to put all together the history of my critical objections to Harman. This involves not just criticism, but also my initial repeated attempts to actually UNDERSTAND what Harman was trying to say. The path then alternates between a genuine good faith excitement, and the realization that there is more allure than substance here. Finally I came to see that my objections to Harman operated on several levels, some of them reaching back into the branch of philosophy he attempts to work from, some of them found in his theory and his methodology itself. These thirty posts, presented largely in temporal order, clearly form the most serious engagement with the substance of Harman’s theorizing on the planet (conditioned by the absence of any other such engagement), the significant attempt to both understand and find common ground with the “allure” of his theory, as it positions itself. Any serious embrace of a thinker involves I believe a necessary criticism of that thinker’s ideas, at least the striving to assess just what is being claimed and what is its merit.  I actually consider the pass given to Harman by the halo of people who find him interesting a bit disrespectful.

 The “Picture” behind Intention: What Lies at the Center of Perception

The Bounce of the Being of Beings

Harman Brings Central Clarity to the Issue (wink, nod)

Downunder: Central Clarity Consciousness (CCC)

The Harmanic Impassibilty of Monism…Spinoza Sails Through

Heidegger: He Who Doesn’t Enjoy God

Graham Harman’s “Evil Twin”, The Quality-Loving Positor

The Coldness of Spinoza: Was He Really a Spock?

How the PSR lifts OOP out of Occasionalism

Graham Harman’s “essence” contra DeLanda, à la Campanella

Dealing Specifically With Harman’s Theory of Causation, including a critique of its Orientalism:

How Do the Molten Centers of Objects Touch?

The “sensuous vicar” of Causation

More on Harmanian Causation: The Proposed Marriage of Malebranche and Hume

Taking the “God” out of the 17th Century

Spinoza says, “Individual things are nothing more than…”

Vicarious Causation Diagrammed

The White and the Colored In Heidegger (and Harman)

The Allure of Graham Harman’s Orientalism and Flaubert

Binaries, Orientalism and Harman on the Exotic

Observations on Harman’s methodology and presumptions about philosophy:

The Coming Medieval Scholasticism of SR

Heidegger “Never says…” and Harman says…

Human Competence: Achilles On the Mend

Harman Wants to Know: How Does Lovecraft “Get Away with Racism?”

Its “objects” All the Way Down

The Centers of Sensuous Gravity, and Their Relations: Shaviro and Harman

The Initial “Brilliant” Exaggeration: The Mongering of Brilliance

Throwing A-causal Stones From Theoretical Glass Houses

In Praise of Aesthetics over Philosophy? The Metaphors of Projection

Harman’s Speculative Bubble: The Runaway Capitalism of OOP

Harman’s Commodification of Paper Writing

An associated critique of Latour:

Is Latour an Under-Expressed Spinozist?

The Flatness of Latour’s Concept of Origin and Holbein’s The Ambassadors

The Copiousness of Copies

An associated critique of Heidegger:

Heidegger’s Confusion Over “Truth”

Checking Heidegger’s Hammer: The Pleasure and Direction of the Whirr

Richard Rorty: If you don't understand him, you probably don't understand "post-modernism" either...

Perhaps you have had an experience like this one:  You are talking with someone about your personal beliefs.   After explaining your story and worldview they respond with something to the effect of, “that is so good for you,” or “I am glad you have that.”

Perhaps you have had another experience like this one:  You are at a church, or a conference, or some other Christian meeting and the speaker has talked about the importance of understanding “post-modernism.”  I have heard some form of this talk probably a dozen times and never has the speaker ever hit the nail on the head.

This blog post will attempt to sort out Evangelicalism’s imprecise analysis of culture and philosophy on the matter of “post-modernism”

Post-modernism “explained”

Post-modernism is a reaction against the arrogance of modernism and the Enlightenment Project.  Modernism and the Enlightenment Project attempted to create a perfect worldview through pure reason alone.  Suffice to say this project was a dismal failure and imploded in the late 19th century.  This created an intellectual vacuum in Western thinking and the main thing that replaced it was an equal and opposite reaction to modernisms’s hubris.  Post-modern thought rejects foundations;  it is skeptical of overarching stories and worldviews; it says that truths are merely local and not universal.  The problem with post-modernism and defining the term is that  post-modernity rejects definitions, rejects categories, rejects foundations, and rejects Truth.  Hence, the philosophy is best understood as a reaction against modernism and requires modernism to exist in the same way a tick requires a host.

All to common example

One such example was a kind 70+ year old professor during my time at seminary.  The man had incredible ministry experience yet was sorely off in his cultural and philosophical analysis.  For several weeks he used modern categories and terms to describe post-modern thought.  The underlying irony was that he was attempting to explain as a slightly modernistic outside observer what an entire class of slightly post-modern inside participants had experienced their whole lives.

What is wrong with the analysis [Besides the face that almost every time anyone says, "Post-modernism is ________," they are being reductionistic... ]

I do not believe we are in a post-modern culture!

I have talked to hundreds of people who have many different worldviews.  I have talked to people in several countries, on three continents (including Western Europe).  Christians love to label “Post-modern” as some kind of catch all.  It is dangerous to assume that post-modernism can be considered a “worldview.”   It is dangerous because it can be best seen as a rejection of worldviews, even though Christians continue to call it a worldview.  Lots of people I talk to are scientific rationalists.  Lots of people I talk to are pragmatists.  Lots of people I talk to are inspired by Eastern thought.  Some of the people I talk to borrow from all of the above – these are the people that we have incorrectly labeled “post-moderns.”  Let me repeat:

Post-modernism is not a stand alone philosophy. Christians have completely mislabeled and misunderstood this philosophical undercurrent.

What you need to be studying is the philosophy of Richard Rorty.

Post-modernism is a critique of modernism and is not a standalone worldview.  However, Richard Rorty took the post-modern skepticism and married it to another philosophy:  pragmatism.  Rorty was a philosophy professor at Yale (1956-57), Army (57-58), Wellesley (58-61), Princeton (61-82), Virginia (82-98), and Stanford (98-2005).  Here is a brief outline of Rorty’s thought:

1.  Propositions are true if they are helpful, and not because they have a one-to-one relationship with facts.

2.  Language is a game, because words are defined by other words, which are defined by other words, which are often defined by the original word in question (heavily borrowing from later Wittgenstein and post-structuralism)

3.  All language is contingent.  There is no link between language and reality.

4.  Therefore, Truth is incoherent and pointless.  No Final Vocabulary exists (Rorty’s way of denying the existence of absolute truth)

5.  The ideal person is the ironist – a person who:  1. skeptical of final vocabulary  2. Argument within ones current vocabulary cannot dissolve such skepticism  3.  As they philosophize about their situation they do not think that their vocabulary is somehow closer to reality than others.  People that have exhibited these traits according to Rorty – Nietzsche, Foucault, Heidegger, Proust, and Derrida.

6.  Final vocabulary leads to cruelty, therefore it must be rejected.

7.  What is true is what works.  What works is what is true.

Richard Rorty has blended post-modernism with pragmatism, in what I call post-modern-pragmatism.    This is what well-meaning Christians have been trying to explain but been unable to have the correct taxonomy.  Is everyone in America a post-modern-pragmatist?  absolutely not (and I am not sure why so many call ‘our culture’ post-modern).  Is there a trend towards the ideas of Rorty in Western Europe and the United States?  In my view, yes.

The tricky thing about post-modern-pragmatism is that it does not need to be true for people to desire it and adhere to it – it merely needs to “work for them.”  Revisiting the conversation I have had countless times from the beginning of this post – these people are espousing the ideas of Richard Rorty.  The whatever-works-for-you worldview is post-modern-pragmatism and not post-modern thought.

Christians have been unable to deconstruct post-modern-pragmatism because they have mislabeled it and been applying the wrong arguments against it.  The glaring weakness in Rorty’s (and any post-structuralist) thinking is that it is still subversively is appealing to Final Vocabulary in order to deconstruct Final Vocabulary.  In other words, his argument is still essentially:

There is no truth, besides this one.

Post-modern-pragmatism is essentially a bait-and-switch.  Worldviews have always been judged on two criteria:  is it true?  AND  does it work?  Rorty attempted to make those two separate questions, one single question by defining the two terms circularly as being synonymous with the other.  It is a diabolical yet ultimately silly philosophy.  The reason it is so powerful is that people employ this philosophy to justify their mutually exclusive beliefs and sin.  When confronted with the fact that they hold mutually exclusive beliefs they respond, “that’s ok, it works for me.”

I believe the central reason why evangelicals have missed the target by so far on “post-modernism” is because evangelicals are intellectually lazy.  Further, this laziness is always seeking to pigeon hole the many ideas and many cultures of a massive country into a really small box that they can then apply assembly line tools to fix (modernism still rears its ugly head in the evangelical).  Moving forward, evangelicals need to be more precise and more rigorous in understanding cultural and philosophical trends and ideas.  Up next  we will examine how evangelicals have done this, why they have done it, and what we need to do instead.

(if you care to read Rorty for yourself, the best summary of his thought is his book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity)