File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_2001/heidegger.0105, message 41


Date: Tue, 29 May 2001 17:10:54 +0200
From: Rene de Bakker <rbakker-AT-bs18.bs.uva.nl>
Subject: Re: body & soul


At 10:48 28-5-01 -0700, Kenneth Johnson wrote:
>
>>Joseph Conrad, in Under western eyes, writes of Razumov,
>>when he is finally all alone and on a little island in Geneva,
>>above him a bronze Rousseau, writer of the Social Contract:
>>
>>""There can be no doubt that now I am safe", he thought. His fine ear
>>could detect the faintly accentuated murmurs of the current
>>breaking against the point of the island, and he forgot himself
>>in listening to them with interest. But even to his acute sense of
>>hearing the sound was too elusive.
>>
>>"Extraordinary occupation I am giving myself up to", he
>>murmured. And it occurred to him that this was about the only
>>sound he could listen to innocently, and for his own pleasure,
>>as it were. Yes, the sound of water, the voice of the wind -
>>completely foreign to human passions. All the other sounds
>>of this earth brought contamination to the solitude of a soul.
>>
>>This was Mr. Razumov's feeling, the soul, of course, being his own,
>>and the word being used not in the theological sense, but standing,
>>as far as I can understand it, for that part of Mr. Razumov which was
>>not his body, and more specially in danger from the fires of this earth.
>>And it must be admitted that in Mr. Razumov's case the bitterness of
>>solitude from which he suffered was not an altogether morbid
>>phenomenon."
>
>
>"--the sound of the water, the voice of the wind - completely foreign to
>human passions."
>
>yes, this dazzling "solitude of a soul" and a recognition of it as
>universally particular echoes to a T Conrad's intuitive grasp at the
>heartpoint of my Nietzsche quote in thread "The Irresponsibility of Art":
>
>"It is impossible for the Dionysian man not to understand any suggestion of
>whatever kind, he ignores no signal from the emotions, he possesses to the
>highest degree the instinct for understanding and divining, just as he
>possesses the art of communication to the highest degree. He enters into
>every skin, into every emotion; he is continually transforming himself."
>
>Conrad is master communicator here, the great diviner of the untheologic
>flow of the emotions and of their transformational headwaters in the heart,
>no?

Kenneth,

Certainly. I read passages like the one above with Heidegger's analysis of
boredom,
that is fundamental mood, in the back of my mind. Mood is always more or less
concrete in a situation, tied to something or present in the whole of it. 
When Razumov finds Haldin on his bed in his room, his world is suddenly
changed 
completely, as if the impact of a a meteorite has made everything
unrecognizable. 
Nothing of what he did up to then, makes sense anymore and he isn't capable 
of going on with it. Even his last illusion - that he didn't have illusions
anymore - 
is taken from him. This feeling surrounds and pervades everything, 
but so that you realize this everything, no: it befalls you. But how?
"In the case of Mr. Razumov":  in the sound of the water, the voice of the
wind.
Something happens, calls - still. And Conrad doesn't fix or explains it,
but leads you to it.
But also Heidegger doesn't, although he thematizes it, deepens it. In its
depht
Dasein is 'simply' the voice of the wind. And in its hidden dephth (not
profoundness) thinking
is poetical. Maybe even Kant's table of categories is poetry.

To Nietzsche this (the happening of something) is tragedy, going down. 
Zarathustra - who climbs upwards, only to see, that everything will glide
back 
into the sea - , in the darkest of nights: Es geschah ein Lachen um mich /
There occurred a laughing around me. Nietzsche is both hero and victim. 
You know, what Karl Reinhardt wrote in a marvellous piece, "Nietzsche's
complaint
of Ariadne"? That in Greek times, Nietzsche would undoubtedly have been
made a god.
And there is surely something strange about him. Eighteen years old he
writes things like
having been born as a human [why don't you have a word for Mensch?] in a
parsonage, 
as a plant near the death-acre, and things like that, which can't be made up. 
But also Leibniz, Kant, Hegel are not simply mortals. That is: to me (and,
I fancy, to H), but one
cannot tell this in an academic room. They have ideas about philosophy,
comparable to ..
well, yours about Chartres.     


>a "place" where "the bitterness of solitude" is an ineffably sweet pleasure
>flowing out from within the suprarational irrational heart - all soulfully
>unmorbid, to the max!
>
>where the "foreign and irreducible" is our native land -

Hoelderlin, another communicator of the headwaters:

Nemlich zu Hauss ist der Geist             Namely at home is the spirit
Nicht im Anfang, nicht an der Quell'.      Not in the beginning, not at the
source.


Rene    
                                                     















 









-----------------------------------
drs. René de Bakker
Universiteitsbibliotheek Amsterdam
Afdeling Catalogisering 
tel. 020-5252368              


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