Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2001 19:41:51 +0200
From: artefact-AT-t-online.de (Michael Eldred)
Subject: Re: The misunderstanding statement 2


Cologne 24-Jun-2001

Henk van Tuijl schrieb   Sat, 23 Jun 2001 23:47:20 +0200:

> From: "Michael Eldred" <artefact-AT-t-online.de>
> To: <heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu>
> Sent: Saturday, June 23, 2001 5:52 PM
> Subject: Re: The misunderstanding statement 2
>
> > Cologne 23-Jun-2001
> >
> > Michael Eldred schrieb   Sat, 23 Jun 2001 13:34:26 +0200:
> >
> > > Cologne 23-Jun-2001
> > >
> > > Henk,
> > > an addendum:
> > > In his "Letter from America" this week on BBC radio, Alistair Cook talks
> about
> > > an ancient Congressman from Texas whose ideas about doing politics
> (_phronesis_)
> > > were summed up in the maxim: "A shot of Bourbon is a better persuader
> than the
> > > twelve Apostles."
> > >
> >
> > A shot of Bourbon can change a person's views, allow them to see the world
> > differently through a different mood so that the views they hold on an
> issue also
> > change. But such a change of views does not take a single step closer to
> the "things
> > themselves" in their self-disclosure.
> >
> > Michael
>
> A shot of Bourbon would not have affected Socrates, if we may believe Plato.
> Socrates was addicted to philosophy. He calls it a mania and intoxication
> (_philosophou mania te kai bakcheia_; cf. Symposion) - referring to
> Dionysian enthusiasm. Where there is enthusiasm, there is a rhetor:
>
> Ich bin ein funke nur vom heil'gen feuer,
> Ich bin ein droehnen nur der heil'gen stimme.
>
> (I am only a spark of the holy fire, I am only a roar of the holy voice;
> Stefan George. "Der siebente Ring. Entrueckung.")
>
> Heidegger often tries to give things their place (_Ort_). You place
> rhetorics in the neighbourhood of _phronaesis_ (with the connotations:
> politics and prudence). I tend to place rhetorics near _enthousiasmos_ (with
> the connotation: extasy or eke-stasis).

Henk,
In such a topology of phenomena, the question would then be: where is ecstasy?
That would help to decide whether rhetoric is ecstatic and enthusiastic, or not.
Your example comes from poetry. Is poetry essentially rhetorical?

It would seem that Socrates himself was a philosophical enthusiast and ecstatic,
but an opponent of rhetoric (if Plato's _Gorgias_ is to be believed). For Plato
puts the words in Socrates' mouth that rhetoric is a mere empirical skill
without true insight into the causes of things: it  “does not have insight into
that which it employs, i.e. what its nature is, and therefore cannot say the
cause of each factor” (_ouch echei logon oudena hoi prospherei ha prospherei
hopoi atta taen phusin estin, hoste taen aitian hekastou mae echein eipein ;
Gorgias 465a) and is “simply a retained memory of what usually happens”
(mnaemaen monon soizomenae tou eiothotos gignesthai ; Gorgias 501b). Rhetoric,
akin to the skill of cooking, offers merely flattering sweetmeats to the soul in
the attempt to persuade, without regard to truth. So, for Socrates, rhetoric is
not a vehicle for philosophical ecstasy.

Nor is the site of _phronaesis_, the affairs of everyday life with their
practical implications, a site of ecstasy, but rather of sobre prudence in which
rhetoric, according to Aristotle, has its proper place. What is the best course
of action in a given situation? is the question posed for _phronaesis_.

But philosophical enthusiasm and ecstasy is ecstatic very close to home.
Heraclitus is among the gods already when warming himself against the oven, and
for Heidegger, Dasein is ecstatic already in being in the world in its
everydayness. Philosophical ecstasy differs fundamentally from holy or religious
ecstasy. The philosophical _mania_ is experienced even with the things of
everyday life. That is what makes philosophers so strange: that they can wonder
about things so apparently trivial, mundane, banal and self-evident. While
others seek ecstasy in the transcendent realm of religion or, say, otherworldly
states of meditative consciousness, philosophy has already transcended,
apparently without going anywhere.

Philosophy is a sobrely rapturous removal to the things themselves.

Michael
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