Date: Sun, 01 Mar 1998 17:00:39 +0200
Subject: HAB: Disclosure



Wasn't there some horrible film with this title? Anyway, I'll try to
explain what I meant by "image-guided world-disclosure".

To make sure that at least I understand myself, I have to start from the
beginning. With "disclosure" I refer to the Heideggerian a-letheia, coming
into presence, the entry of beings into the clearing of Being. Things,
people and the world as a referential totality show up as they do based on
a historically changing understanding of Being. In early Heidegger this
showing up results from human practices - a hammer is disclosed to us as it
is because it serves certain purposes, stands in a certain relation to
other tools etc. Language in its assertive use presupposes an antecedent
disclosure. 

After the Kehre, disclosure ceases to be the work of Dasein, but becomes
rather "the sending of Being", somehow divorced from human intentions. At
the same time, language becomes the house of Being; language determines how
beings show up rather than vice versa. In our time, technology becomes the
last step in the history of metaphysics, and determines that nature and
everything else can show up only as standing reserve, ready to serve human
purposes until exhausted. Against this, Heidegger sets up Gelassenheit,
letting-be, a certain passivity aimed at letting things show themselves as
they show themselves from themselves (presumably apart from contexts of
use), to put it in the language that he used in Being and Time to define
phenomenology itself.

Somewhere between the two extremes stands 1935's Der Ursprung des
Kunstwerkes. It deals with the work of art, or rather the work of
a work of art. When it works, the work of art, be it Van Gogh's peasant
shoes or a Greek temple, brings a world (and its limit in the hiddenness of
"the Earth" (die Erde) on which it is grounded) with its things into the
light of Being, into truth. When the temple is deserted, it ceases to work
and will not disclose anything any more.

So, what do I mean by "image-guided"? Well, first of all, as I indicated,
I mean "images" in a general sense which includes metaphors etc. Through the
use of certain metaphors the world is disclosed in a certain way - for
many, the history of metaphysics is a history of metaphors for truth,
being, person, and so on. For this to make sense, there have to be _other_
ways of world-disclosure as well. For candidates, I would suggest our
practices and "the human situation", the kind of a situation we are in by
virtue of belonging to this species. Early Heidegger's work deals with
the kind of practice-guided disclosure, as I already hinted, and our
embodiment as a source of primary ways of opening into the world, from
which metaphors are drawn, is dealt with in the work of Lakoff and Johnson
(among others), if not quite in these terms. Images in this sense cannot be
got rid of; there is no absolute distinction between rhetorical and
non-rhetorical
language, only contextual ones. It seems plausible to me that we have to
use _some_ metaphors to understand a complex and abstract "thing" such
as society. These images become "mere rhetoric" only in a context of
argumentation where they are not mutually accepted. I do not believe there
is anything in Habermas that would require the elimination of figural or
poetic language as such.

For language I would give a role that is probably too little profound
for Heideggerians. On the one hand, it expresses a pre-articulated
world, a world that is already present to us in a certain way because
we dwell in it in a certain way. On the other hand, the ways of talking
about things change the way the appear to us, make certain features of
them pertinent to us; the effect of these is the greater the more abstract
issues we're dealing with.

It follows from the above that there is room for other images than
linguistic ones to influence our perception. Here it is tempting to
link Heidegger's reflections on the work of art and truth to Adorno
and Horkheimer's pessimistic views on mass culture. Instead of paintings,
poems and novels we get "news" and talk shows, which make no effort
to shake the audience from their preconceptions and prejudices, but
on the contrary strengthen them and help create more. This is naturally
an exaggeration - hardly anybody would claim that the whole of Western
media is a vast uniform conspiracy to put us all to sleep, not even Chomsky.
Nonetheless, the majority of images that we get of, say, African countries,
are produced from a point of view that doesn't present itself to be a point
of view, claiming neutrality instead; these images form patterns which
analysis (semiotic or some other) can show to be biased. Of course, there
is no such thing as a neutral point of view (this side of the death of God),
but there can be mutually acceptable ways of viewing the issues, which
is all that a Habermasian discourse requires.

I'm not sure if I'm making sense here. To sum up, I'm trying to
say that different kinds of images (but not only them) guide the
way in which the world appears to us, and that this appearance is
a condition for an argument about something in the world. In the
Habermasian framework, this disclosure is a function of the lifeworld, and
its being
already "political" in the sense of being influenced by different sorts of
interests and relations of power constitutes an implicit criticism of
Habermas's locating power as an independent "medium" outside the lifeworld.
However, I don't think this presents insurmountable trouble for Habermas's
theory, because it can bear a lot more impurity that many of his critics
acknowledge.


Antti




     --- from list habermas-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---