Date: Mon, 10 Nov 1997 11:33:51 -0500 (EST)
From: TMB <tblan-AT-telerama.lm.com>
Subject: Re: Nihilism & Science


On Sun, 9 Nov 1997, Daniel James Arthur Tarte wrote:

> 
> 	Hey,
> 
> 	What I have found interesting in the discussion over the past
> couple of days is the occasional convergence of the two themes of science
> and nihilism. Heidegger(H) concludes his --36 lecture course on Nietzsche
> (N) with an appeal to the following passage: "To see science under the
> optics of the artist, but art under the optics of life....". The passage
> becomes the locus for and crystalization of the immense variety of themes
> H has drawn out of N's writings up to that point; for on the basis of his
> reading of N (that is, in terms of the history of being 'thesis',
> which is solidifying as early -if not earlier- as the mid-thirties), H
> 'subsumes' N within the historical possibility of being ('Sein') 

No reason not to use paragraphs, I think.

> articulating for us a 'postmetaphysical' thinking. For 

Is your "for" a little pretentious?

according to what H
> is saying about N (as I see it), N's thinking is correct in spirit, if not
> in execution. But the execution of thinking is what make all of the
> difference for H: who shall enact the coming destiny (assuming that there
> is such a destiny at all), the thinker or being? 

I have to draw attention to the stylistic of the "who shall"...rather
grand, wouldn't you say?

For N, the thinker,
> inasmuch as 'the thinker' for N is the 'New Man'.

The conception of the "new man" is a very old idea, one which in a way
recapitulates, rather than really overcomes. The very logics of
'overcoming' may constitute nothing but the "last" man's attempts. Yet, at
the same time, I think it's not to be overcome, either, which is a very
moderated response to Nietzsche's call here.


 For H, being, inasmuch
> as he is speculating upon the possibility that existence is dependent for
> its existence upon its relationship with something that it is as yet
> unable to grasp. But according to H, the whole idea of 'grasping', with
> all of its cognitive variants, is the very idea that is preventing us from
> cultivating the thinking disposition that shall be up to the standards
> required by being, that shall be adequate NOT TO AN OBJECT, 

Right, but then, to "grasp" man, "the man", as *the man*, as man, as
something to be overcome, in one fell swoop, etc., this totalization is
utterly of the grasp, I think.

but to the
> possibility of a new kind of thinking.

Ditto, presupposes a totality of an "old kind", a simple
"premodern/modern" split, etc.

 Setting aside the excellent
> question of what all this may mean in itself, I return to the N passage
> given above: As H describes it, N's optics are a form of perspectivism. To
> use Bergsonian language, every entity is a 'center of action',
> continually striving to configure itself in the most advantageous
> (ie.self-affirming) way vis-a-vis the continually shifting complex of
> 'other' centers of action that it is bound up within, as a part of
> [Perspectiverse]. 

Too action-heavy, but still refreshing since it is not so deeply lodged in
the logics of "power", "will to power" ala Nietzsche,


Transcendence, or 'going beyond', is the essential
> dynamic of such a material system, 

That is, in fact, only one essential. More generally essentialy would be
simply: cendence, just as the "trans" of "transvaluation", which is not
necessarily *beyond* at all. N's conception as you read it here is marked
by the logics of an "over", an "overcoming", a "getting over", etc. 

for every entity must strive to
> establish a basis,

Is Dasein realy an "entity"?

 a configuration, for itself, that will then allow it to
> go beyond itself for the purpose of appropriating the world within the
> terms of its own nature and structure. It goes out, grasps, and returns,
> increasing its power thereby, which then allows it to go out again, grasp
> for more, etc etc.

This is one action/movement, but taken totalistically, it's reductive and
mistaken.


(as Whitehead points out, these dynamic structures can
> be repeated on a 'scale' of relative complexities to infinity).

And their narrativic and shematic enframing can be imposed on the
phenomena to "infinity", albeit only within a limited one, or else, they
can be imposed at length, but not without significant violence that gives
me pause.

 It
> seems to me that N is compelled by the idea of elaborating human existence
> in terms of these dynamics, hence his interest in physics, psychiatry,
> physiology, etc. N's artist, according to H, is the one who can fully
> 'maximize'

And yet, the Bersonian view also would suggest a certain "satisficing",
which stops short of the continual hubris of "maximization", which is
also a more parsimonious hypothesis in many ways.


 himself and his conditions toward the task of striving for more
> and more 'life'; to live optically-perspectivaly -beyond you know what- 
> is to live as an 'artist', and this 'artistry' is the new science of life,
> of potentialities exerting themselves in a qualitative and quantitative
> expansionism without end ('the twin pincers of Russia and America...'). 
> In what way can it be said that H believes all of this to be true? In that
> N is significant for the fact that he straddles the line [X] between being
> as it gives itself as metaphysics, and being as it gives itself as...what?
> But I think that it is now necessary to go back to 'Being and Time' (ah,
> good ol' BT; the book of death), for there we observe the first fully
> articulate elaboration by H of the relationship between possibility and
> the 'negative'. So much so that I cannot but read the book as a meditation
> upon the nature of the relationship between the two phenomena (an
> interpretation which has the virtue of preserving the integrity of the
> text as a description of 'Dasein'(D) and as an investigation into the
> meaning of the question of being); a meditation that eventually ends up
> making it clear that the possible and the negative are one and the same.

I don't see this.

> That is, D is a negative in that it is a possible and a possible in that
> it is a negative. That is, D is continually contending with the ongoing
> ecstasies and anxieties of its pastness, presentness and futureness. That
> I am continually struggling

Why always "struggling"?

 with my present, my past and my future
> says something about my 'essence' as a possibility ("the essence of
> Dasein is its existence"), but what does it have to do with the negative?
> It has nothing to do with the negative, so long as we think of the
> negative as the negation of being(s). But H's talk of the negative is
> distinguished from such ontic-ontological presuppositions; rather, he
> characterizes the negative in terms of fundamental ontology, in terms of
> the fundamental status of human be-ing as temporal (and upon which all
> ontic experience and ontological conceptualization is based). But coupled
> with the exigencies of temporality is the exigency of our awareness of our
> own mortality; 

And many other things. Don't forget that orgasm was called, at one time,
"le petit mort"...

not as an empirically-verifiable fact, but as an
> existential experience, so that I KNOW that I am going to die.

Ditto.

 But is this
> ultimate negative a vacuum, a void, a non-being, a chaos? No, it is an
> agonizing 

oh, bummr, for a second I thought you wrote "organizing"...

>realization of one's limit; 

One's limit? one's Limit, I think you mean?

but the limit here is not defined by
> an empty ontological notion of infinity. Instead, the limit is
> self-defining and autonomous, and takes itself upon itself in order to
> live out the possibilities 'invested' into the existential space it has
> been granted/thrown into. Here, negative and possible converge; the
> possible is that which is NOT, yet which MAY be. 

Yet, the future is not simply only the possible. That is a gross reduction
of things, very serious business. The ecstases, which, likewise, are in
fact not simpl ecstases at alll, are also beyond the possible in certain
ways: the future of the *established*, the relationship, etc., is never
simply *possible*. Such a sense of the possible depends on a certain
*mode* of presence from which Heidegger writes.


But I am a not, not as
> a not-being, but as an entity that has accepted its 'real' possibilities,

except that they aren't simply possibilities...


> as a function of an awareness of its limit, its finitude, its mortality,
> its DEATH.

Oh, now here come the capitals. Dasein, thought in terms of both death and
its little deaths is much more permeated with death than that.

 Back to N and the history of being: N's transcendence remains
> metaphysical because it is fixated with beings, and elaborates their
> essence, their capacity for transcendence, for 'going-beyond', in terms of
> themselves: this is the mature H's formulation, that metaphysics is
> defined by the endeavour to obtain to being ('Sein'/'Seyn') via beings. So
> what is nihilism, according to H? It has a twofold guise; 1) it is the
> state of existence whereby all that is real, including that which is most
> profound and worthiest of our attention, gets defined in terms of beings,
> in terms of presences, in terms of that which may be perceived, verified,
> manipulated, transformed, produced. 

Yet what if, after a certain fashion, this is also what occurs in
Heidegger, in the way that he determins the possible? What if I'm right in
suggesting that the past and the future are not simply and only
possibility and memorial?

All thinking becomes thinking in terms
> of what can be accomplished by humans for themselves, with the resources
> available to them on the surface of the earth.

This is where Heidegger's thinking leads, but it is based on his
pre-establishment of a certain arena which in fact tends to produce this
very malaise in the process of identifying it.

 2) it is an 'aspect' of
> being itself, which has given us the event of metaphysics, as a finite
> historical possibility that has achieved its limit: Dasein as Destiny. In
> this sense, nihilism is necessary, and no 'great thinker' is wrong or
> right; they are simply expressing the possibilities of thinking, within
> the sphere of assumptions regarding the nature of 'what is', that they
> have inherited. But N is unique, in that his metaphysics is the thought of
> metaphysics without anything more to say. N faces the past and the future;

Yet, can these simply be *faced*? Or is rather the face itself not
*already* drawn through past and future, both in their possibility and
memorial, but also as flesh of time, rooted?

> he expresses thinking on the cusp of a new possibility, while at the same
> standing for a thinking with nowhere left to go. H's interpretation of N,
> then, is completely misunderstood by those who say H radically distorts
> it; H's scholarship is impeccable,

Nothing is impeccable.


> and yet at the same time he is
trying
> to draw from N a directive for the future. According to H, N exemplifies
> the entire history of being as it has played itself out to this point. But
> what if it were to be 'translated' into non-metaphysical terms? What if if
> were to be investigated NOT ONLY FOR ITS OWN SAKE, but for the sake of our
> possibility? This is where H's reading becomes 'wrong', as he attempts to
> suggest that the 'Ubermensch' is not the ultimate historical affirmation
> of the powers of 'Life', but rather the creative thinker who will be able
> "act in accordance with the standard of Being" (Heidegger Nietzsche I,
> p.220: Krell tran), who will not carry out the transcendence himself, but
> will instead be consumed by the transcendent act of being. Heidegger
> NEVER claimed to be such a one.
>

Interesting conclusion. Can you make it more clear?

TMB


     
>                                         Shut up already!
> 
>                                         Daniel Tarte  
>        



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