Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2001 03:02:45 -0800 (PST)
From: "Gary C. Moore" <gospode-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: #33: NECESSITY OF DEBATE, Part 33


█PART 33
“The meanness of the nothing consists precisely in the
circumstance that it is capable of seducing us into
thinking that our empty chatter – our calling the
nothing an utter nullity - can really shunt the matter
aside.* The nothing of being follows the Being of
being as night follows day. When would we ever see and
experience the day as day if there were no night! Thus
the most durable and unfailing touchstone of
genuineness and forcefulness of thought in a
philosopher is the question as to whether or not he or
she experiences in a direct or fundamental manner the
nearness of the nothing in the Being of beings.
Whoever fails to experience it remains forever outside
the realm of philosophy, without hope of entry”
(NIETZSCHE, vol. II, trans. Krell, Harper-Collins,
1991, “25. The Essence of a Fundamental Metaphysical
Position”, pg. 195).

The basic key to real philosophical thinking is,
negatively, to escape generalizations, abstractions,
opinionation, and off-hand metaphoricity. This is not
a statement in a void. I have established that the
very loose and vague word “experience” relates to
sensibility as a whole, which does NOT mean “sum”,
“amount”, “combination”, or “gathering together”.The
concept of “gathering” or “thinging” in Heidegger’s
essay “The Thing” relates to A being as a concept. The
primary image and focus of sensibility has been in
Aristotle and Kant, is with Heidegger, and always has
been and will be with me PERCEPTION which is
absolutely in no way “scientific” or “optical”, but is
where science and optics as impoverished side issues
begin. Here I inject from an essay by Jean-Luc Nancy,
“The Calculation of the Poet”, trans. Simon Sparks, in
THE SOLID LETTER: Reading of Friedrich Holderlin, ed.
Fioretos, Standford, 1999, pp.44-73. I shall make
several quotes from this essay: Q “What characterizes
the poet for Holderlin is: ‘the constant precision of
consciousness with which the poet looks at a WHOLE’
[die durchgängiger Bestimmtheit des Bewußtseyns, womit
der Dichter auf ein Ganzes blickt’; SA 4;I:156]. [If
there is garble, it has to do with the failure of
transmission of the German ‘double S’ and the umlaut.]
Bestimmtheit can be rendered as ‘determination’ or as
‘precision’: the poet has an absolute and constantly
determined consciousness, one complete and unified,
without remainder, which holds nothing back and gives
itself entirely over to his look. Clearly this is not
exactly what the philosopher understands by
‘consciousness.’ It comprises less the moment of
self-relation, of re-presentation as such, than the
single moment of the look – not even the intention,
but the opening, the look turned or thrown on (Blick
auf), before, out of the self.  This look falls on a
WHOLE: the totality of the whole is thus touched
beyond – or outside – all composition or synthesis, at
the center, at the heart, at the joint which does not
totalize, but which is the whole. It is the
being-whole of the whole which is directly and
perfectly sighted and seen. And since it is the WHOLE
– Holderlin does not emphasize the word for nothing –
the center is no more interior than exterior. It is
identically and immediately the outline and the
periphery. It is not the concept but the figure and
existence of the whole: the whole revealing itself as
whole. The whole showing itself for a look, by a look
fixed exactly on it for and by a look which, in the
final analysis, is only the showing-itself of the
whole itself.  The poet: the clearly present whole.
The incontestable and incontestably punctual presence
of the whole. The act which calculates exactly the
moment – the instant, the thrust, the passing – of the
presence of the whole. The act which thus leaves
nothing out: neither the background of an ‘intention’
nor that of a ‘thing in itself.’ But the thing itself
in the presence of the look itself, in clarity itself
– and the distancing of this ‘itselfness’, its exact
calculation.  And nothing else - although here it
would be more accurate to say ‘no one else’. The poet
is not the ‘subject’ of the representation of the
whole, but the place of the envisaging of the whole IN
PERSONA. Holderlin also calls this ‘the pure’ (SA 4;
I: 235; Essays, 47), or ‘pure (poetic) individuality’
(SA 4; I: 254; Essays, 73). . . Calculation consists
in exactly fixing on this being and nothing else,
without approximation, without comparison or metaphor
. . . What matters for the poet is that it be stated
straight out, straight to the point, and that is to
say straight to the source” Q (pp.45-47). 

Precisely because Jean Luc-Nancy deliberately avoids a
‘Heideggerian’ reading, the thought of Holderlin
expressed in his philosophical writings comes out with
great clarity compared to his actual syntax which is
extremely difficult, much more so than Heidegger or
his Friends Hegel or Schelling. Much of this
difficulty is due to the haste with which these,
essentially, notes were dashed off. However, the very
theme Holderlin is dealing with, Kant’s fundamental
faculty of the imagination taken quite literally as
the grounding force of reason. David Hume quite
thoroughly established that the imagination was
totally arbitrary, but he seems to regard this as a
source of riches from which reason can discover new
ideas. Holderlin, however, is not on the outside of
the imagination looking in at it as an ontic faculty –
this is exactly the problem Heidegger says Kant saw,
and that it frightened him into a retreat from his
statements about the imagination as ultimate ground in
the first edition of the CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON – but
regards imagination as A PRIORI fundamental ontology,
as the “grounding question” instead of “guiding
question”. One might say what Kant inadvertently
disclosed in the first edition was the fundamental
faculty of the imagination as Heidegger’s “grounding
question”, the question that generates all answers as
derivative but cannot have an ‘answer’ equivalent, or
rather inherent, within itself. This is fundamental to
the Liebnitzean rationalism that Kant basically wants
to synthesize with Hume’s empiricism. If the ‘answer’
is not preformed in the logical structure of the
question as in Heidegger’s “grounding question”, then
any attempt at such an equivalent answer becomes
contingent and ACCIDENTAL. The question of, in, and by
itself then becomes fundamental ontology as the
fundamental ‘faculty’ (the concept of ‘faculty’ is a
rationalist compartmentalization and therefore, as
fundamental, becomes nonsense when applied to
imagination) of imagination - which means, just as
Kant clearly stated in the first edition, that as
fundamental ‘faculty’ it is APRIORI to BOTH
understanding (reason) BUT ALSO INTUITION ITSELF! It
is essentially the concept of ontic ‘faculty’ that
Heidegger undermines in KANT AND THE PROBLEM OF
METAPHYSICS because ‘faculty’ implies a kind of TOOL
which in turn implies a substantial subject
constructed out of the thoroughly insubstantial X of
the Kantian “I think” to manipulate as with an
ontological ‘hand’ the tool-faculties of reason and
intuition to discover the equally substantial
properties of objects within the world. The ontic
therefore is safely the ground of the ontic as long as
the concept of ‘faculty’ seems functionally adequate,
which is what Kant tries to do with the editing of the
second edition. But making imagination the fundamental
‘faculty’ essentially destroys the concept of faculty
and simply leaves the arbitrariness of the “grounding
question” in its place with its random circumspection
within the wholeness of the “look”. And this is
precisely what Holderlin seizes on, the calculation of
literal experience as the whole of sensibility where
it is not a ‘faculty’ of intuition as some molecular
ontic structure of the brain but ontological feeling
that keeps the opening of “Da-sein” open. In other
words, there is no pre-established harmony of reason
that safely secures the history of human being as
making ‘sense’. The destiny of “Being” is arbitrary. A
very simplistic example as far as evolution is
concerned is what one day is factors of survival,
size, power, and the ability to expend great amounts
of energy in swift reactions, becomes literally the
next day factors of extinction when diminutiveness of
size and expenditure of energy become the only ways to
survive. Evolution is totally accidental from the
ground up, though there are individual sub-factors of
selection and seeming ‘development’. But those
sub-factors only endure in time, i.e. are ‘tolerated’,
only by accident, and by accident suddenly cease as
paths going nowhere, “wegmarken”. There is absolutely
no ‘progression’ to any Ideal of “the survival of the
fittest.” What is the ‘fittest’ today may very well be
dead tomorrow. And considering the utter
‘indifference’ (it is rather silly to account
‘indifference’ to time and chance) of originary time
and arbitrary chance, “tomorrow” may be millions of
years away or literally this next second.

Nancy admits what he does is an artificial rendering
of Holderlin that abridges him: “More, generally,
however, I am not claiming to propose a true
‘interpretation of Holderlin’ and cheerfully leave too
many aspects of his thought to one side. Here,
Holderlin is halfway between theme and pretext” (pg.
421, footnote 1). But I think Nancy’s approach is by
far the best that at least establishes road marks
which one can merely tentatively accept in order to
see if this line of thought gets one into recognizable
territory. Reading Holderlin, even in Pfau’s excellent
English version (which is referred to as Essays here:
FRIEDRICH HOLDERLIN: Essays and Letters on Theory,
trans & ed. Thomas Pfau, State University of New York
Press, 1988), is somewhat like reading James Joyce’s
FINNEGAN’S WAKE – which considering the immense amount
of Giambattista Vico (as well as Thomas Aquinas),
along with a great deal of the rest of the history of
philosophy, and Marshall McLuan’s great admiration for
the work, also deserves serious philosophical
consideration. Much of Holderlin’s prose, not meant
for the public eye, is simply unpolished first draft
text, and one can simply ‘edit’ it in one’s mind and
get ordinary common sense language. But at various
points, the overwhelming wholeness of literal
experience that relates everything together BY
POSITION, IN PLACE, TOPOS, “homeliness”, Aristotle’s
“familiarity”, NOT the abstract conceptualization of
Cartesian/Galilean mathematical/filing clerk space
tends to dissolve the predominance of a single subject
within his sentences which then makes the rational
interpretation of the sentence, as with Jean-Luc Nacy,
a matter of choices amid several possible choices. As
with Nancy and Holderlin, it is easier to read Vico
than it is to read Joyce. Both Holderlin and Joyce
have literally infinite domains within their thought
where each sentence can point in hundreds of different
directions. So when someone like Nancy that can
simplify without utterly distorting the thought, it is
not just welcome but absolutely necessary if one is
not to become discouraged in approaching such complex
texts. Trying to read Holderlin’s philosophical works
is like reaching into the reality of a person’s mind,
into the whole context of a thinking in process.
Compared to that, and especially after directly
dealing with those texts, his poetry comes to you in
astounding clarity. And to Holderlin, the philosophy
is merely a prelude and precursor to the real thing.
Similarly, when you read FINNEGAN’S WAKE seriously,
you experience a double vision of language. On the one
hand, the simple-minded dreamy blur of the drunk
Finnegan. On the other hand, you see the connection of
each word with the whole history of the English
language and literature. So when this semi-literate
drunk dreams his long speech, the whole history of the
world becomes evident in the words which no longer can
be meaningfully said to be his. 

And something very similar is going on in Holderlin.
Nancy says, “It is less a matter of an economy of
means than of an extreme precision of end – of this
extremity in which precision itself disappears in
favor of rigorous exactitude: the whole, each time
THIS whole (of the world, of man, of community, of an
epoch, of a form, of a country, of a river, of a god .
. . ). Whence the economy of means: namely the brevity
of what one would elsewhere call an ‘image’, and which
becomes a ‘look’ when Holderlin writes, for example:
‘Since we have been a dialogue” (Seit ein Gespräch wir
sind’; SA 3:536).  This is not an image, but a strict
predicative proposition that says we are, in fact, a
dialogue (a conversation, a speaking-together or
with-one-another, a Gespräch, a together which
speaks). It says, not that we are in dialogue, but
that we are our dialogue. ‘We’: all of us, those who
speak, defined in their being by this
speaking-between-themselves. Thus, the whole of the
indeterminate ‘we’ is absolutely determined; we are
this between-us that is language, and, likewise,
language is the between-us” (pg. 47). Nancy’s
simplification of Holderlin lays bare the source of a
great deal of Heidegger’s thought (Catweasle is now
saying, “WHY does he have to bring HIM in here?”). And
if you have tried to read Holderlin’s philosophic
prose, you can see this is really not plagiarism. Even
Nancy here is really just Nancy and cannot be
Holderlin because what Holderlin did was not
philosophy, maybe was never ever intended to become
philosophy in an established public text, but was
direct experience in words of words just as in
FINNEGAN’S WAKE. Joyce, too, was a master poet just
like another master poet, in BOTH Russian and English,
who was also a word-and-thought player in prose (I
once ran across a strange and startling likeness in
one of his novels to a text in Hegel) named Vladimir
Nabokov. But though they are both masters of poetry,
both thoroughly in technique and in expression to an
absolute perfection of language, they have a
tremendous disadvantage compared to Holderlin who
lived in an age that still had real heroes whose
‘good’ and ‘evil’ aspects were known and accepted to a
large degree and not publicity images everyone
automatically knows is a lie - real villains sometimes
indistinguishable from the heroes and not just
sociological misfits - and people of spiritual
greatness that could be truly nihilistic yet still
seem fully ‘positive’ as Goethe was simply because of
his “lust for life” (his last words were, “More light!
More light!”), because they are all too conscious of
the trivialization of literature in general and poetry
especially in the modern world. Both of them became
much like Hannah Arendt’s description of Heidegger as
the fox trapped in his dark hole, who, since he cannot
get out, invites other people into their trap with
them, into a world where literature and poetry is NOT
a game for professors and literary critics and
psychologists. This applies still JUST AS MUCH to
Heidegger who was always consciously straining to turn
his thinking into poetry. “Poetic thinking” was NOT a
metaphor to him, but the pinnacle achievement of
philosophy. (Catweasle, please be quiet. Do your
gagging elsewhere. Surely YOU hear him, can’t you?)

In Nancy’s statement, “we are this in-between-us that
is language”, is the clearest, best, and most VALID
statement of what “mitdasein”, being-with is.
Heidegger has always indicated that language was not a
‘thing’ like a personal possession one could do
anything with whatsoever one wished. Rather, unless
strictly controlled (and I will go into that below:
this is NOT an abrogation of the responsibility of the
self for its creations, but rather a clarification of
the ABSOLUTELY NEGATIVE POWER of this act of
imaginative creation as a deliberate act of
MISDIRECTION that becomes the indirect evasion of the
meaningless present-at-hand, one of such ‘presences’
is the automatic ‘sincere’ presence of language),
language more speaks us that we speak it. This is what
Freud’s whole project of psychoanalysis is based on.
It is a constantly demonstrable reality we all have
thoroughly experienced, sometimes in extreme
embarrassment. But few people really want to admit the
full reality of the Situation. A practical and
sophisticated solipsism as fundamental ontology still
remains in place, but a space is forcibly and
intrusively made for the “Other” – but JUST as
“Other”, NOT as another “Da-sein”. “Da-sein” is
experience as a WHOLE as Nancy/Holderlin wrote about
which is unique and ownmost, which is you. And you are
an existential of fundamental ontology all by your
self: absolutely alone: SINGULARE TANTUM.

Heidegger says in NIETZSCHE/ vol. I, THE WILL TO POWER
AS ART, ”. . . The state of feeling is original,
although in such a way that thinking and willing
belong together with it. Now the only important matter
that remains for us to see is that feeling has the
character of opening up and keeping open, and
therefore also, depending on the kind of feeling it
is, the character of closing off . . . In the essence
of will, in resolute openness, will discloses itself
to itself . . . It is will itself that has the
character of opening up and keeping open . No
self-observation or self-analysis which we might
undertake, no matter how penetrating, brings to light
our self, and how it is with our self (INTRUDE: this
is meant LITERALLY). In contrast, in willing and,
correspondingly, in not willing, we bring ourselves to
light; it is a light kindled by willing (INTRUDE: this
also is literal, but not in a simple-minded way;
rather, it is the WHOLE of sensibility as perception,
i.e., “the light” as opening). Willing always brings
the self to itself; it therefore finds itself out
beyond itself (INTRUDE: I have quoted Heidegger’s
description of this as the ‘authenticity’ of running
ahead toward death as pure possibility being thrown
literally outside its factical, real, everyday self as
an imaginative project, without any practical reality
to it whatsoever). It maintains itself within the
thrust away from one thing toward something else. Will
therefore has the character of feeling, of keeping
open our very state of being, a state that in the case
of will – being out beyond itself – is a pulsion. Will
can thus be grasped as a ‘compelling feeling’. It is
not only a feeling of something that prods us, but is
itself a prodding, indeed of a sort that is ‘quite
pleasant’. What opens up in the will – willing itself
as resolute openness – is agreeable to the one for
whom it is so opened, the one who wills. In willing we
come toward ourselves, as the ones we properly are.
Only in will do we capture ourselves in our most
proper essential being . . . If feeling and will are
grasped here as ‘consciousness’ and ‘knowledge’, it is
to exhibit most clearly that moment of the opening up
of something in will itself. But such opening is not
an observing; it is feeling. This suggests that
willing is itself a kind of state, that it is open in
and to itself. Willing is feeling (state of
attunement). Now, since the will possesses that
manifold character of willing out beyond itself, as we
have suggested, and since all this becomes manifest as
a whole, we can conclude that a multiplicity of
feelings haunts our willing” (“8. Will as Affect,
Passion, and Feeling”, pp. 51-52). It is precisely
this “multiplicity of feelings” as states of
attunement that one experiences when reading
FINNEGAN’S WAKE or the run-on sentences of Holderlin
where one cannot clearly identify what is the main
subject and verb where several contend for attention,
thus making the sentence understandable in several
completely different ways. And yet to clarify those
specific ways, like Jean-Luc Nancy does, is to be to a
certain extent false to what Holderlin wrote. 

Corresponding to this is the necessity to obliviate
prudishness, obliviate respect AS GIVING INTO FEAR as
opposed to openly fearing something one openly
confronts, and be able to deal directly with the truly
“nasty” where we hide most things that really need to
be thought. For instance, there is in both our popular
culture and, only slightly more sophisticated, in our
‘philosophic’ culture, an overwhelming “push” to
metaphorize death, to ‘cleanse’ it into unreality by
either turning it into something fantastically
dreadful and unthinkable, and therefore of course
‘unreal’, or to trivialize it into merely a natural
function of life. Yet neither being born nor dying is
anything like taking a shit. And also unlike taking a
shit, you can know nothing truly about your own birth
or death, yet have a great curiosity about both. Only
a few people, though, think much about shit, although
that is also a subject about which there is a great
deal of curiosity that is immediately suppressed
because someone might think you’re weird. Thomas
Pynchon in his wonderful and dreadful novel GRAVITY’S
RAINBOW has some interesting thoughts about shit.
Norman O. Brown in his book LIFE AGAINST DEATH goes
deeply into the study of scatology, referring to the
works of a most unjustly ignored and great poet, Dean
Jonathan Swift of St. Paterick’s Cathedral in Dublin
who also wrote one of a series of letters on Irish
affairs about the solution to the then current
(mid-1700s) Irish famine, proposing the Irish should
eat their new–born young since, after all, they are
going to die anyway. Brown makes a clear and definite
connection between scatology and eschatology that
relates directly to Martin Luther’s exclamation, “Die
Teufel ist schist!” (if my German is wrong, and it
probably is, someone please correct me). Some people
have criticized Sartre for having too much interest in
bowel habits and dirty underwear. Obviously these
people have not dealt with old people very often or
intimately. The correspondence with them of shit and
death soon becomes overwhelming. In making death a
metaphor by calling it “natural” we have used a
metaphor merely to define another metaphor. 

On the other hand, “The ‘natural’ to which Nietzsche’s
aesthetics refers is not that of classicism: it is not
something accessible to and calculable for a human
reason which is apparently unruffled and quite sure of
itself. On the contrary, Nietzsche means what is bound
to nature, which the Greeks of the Golden Age call
DEINON and DEINOTATON, the frightful” [also “das
Unheimlich”, the uncanny, and “das Gewaltige”, the
powerful from EINFÜHRUNG IN DIE METAPHYSIK, pg.
112ff., INTRODUCTION TO METAPHYSICS, pg. 123ff.]
(NIETZSCHE, vol. I, 17, pg. 128). What, after all, is
more frightening and horrifying than someone shouting
“SHIT!” spontaneously in a room full of very young
children, especially if this vocation comes from a
child itself, and yet – what is more “natural”? But
this is nature as existentially experienced, not
‘studied’ down into being ‘common sense.’ This is
nature when ‘nature’ brings itself to your attention
by rudely intruding and SEIZING your attention. Thus
metaphor doubly makes “death” a vacuous piece of
abstract nonsense, as if someone running from a
barking dog feels the dog snap at their rear, which
makes them go twice as fast. Kant’s identification of
the self of the “I think” as “X” is also such a piece
of nonsense. Now, I have absolutely no reason to
belittle nonsense. It is a basic tool of my thinking
for sure. And Kant’s nonsense very sensibly points,
with necessary and extreme ambiguity, toward something
that CANNOT BE POINTED AT IN ANY SENSE WHATSOEVER. And
so too is “death” which is why we can get away with
making it a metaphor in the first place. Death is
absolutely a pure nothing, nothing at all. It ‘does’
nothing whatsoever. It has no physical reality, unless
one really wants to stretch a point and create one out
of mere PARTS of physiology  which of course becomes
ridiculous. After all, the fearsomeness of death comes
from its wholeness, not from being particularized down
to a physiological process which becomes indifferently
lost amongst a plethora of physiological processes.
And yet death is a grounding determination in
everything we do, because, in one sense or another, we
do everything and anything ‘for’ life. And life is
“day” to Heidegger’s “night” which is also necessarily
death. “The nothing of being follows the Being of
being as night follows day. When would we ever see and
experience the day if there was no night!”  

But the motivations here are entirely opposite: Kant
wants to clarify the real Situation, whereas the prude
wishes to hide from it.  To identify the self as an
imaginary, merely pragmatic, mathematical point is
daring and drastic, something most commentators –
other than Heidegger – have ignored. But Heidegger,
actually starting from Kant, says self is a feeling,
and feeling is existential experience, the primary
primitive principle of Aristotle FROM WHICH the
universal is THEN derived directly from experience.
And this reflects exactly what Heidegger means when he
says “being”. When he says “being”, it is not a genus,
whereas “beings-as-such” IS properly a genus: “being”
is the feeling from which the universal is derived. So
feeling is the absolute opposite of metaphor. And
feeling is exactly where philosophy begins and IS
fundamental ontology.
 

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