From: "Christopher Daly" <dalyjazz-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: Mnemosyne: thinking poetization
Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2001 11:43:07 -0400
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<P>Dear Gulio, </P>
<P>Thank you so much for your thoughtful and clear meditation on Heidegger/Nietsche/Kant. The remarks about the shallowing out of our experience by consciousness is particularly profound and evokes a terrible sadness in me, a melancholy perhaps since it also indicates the unattainablility of a "raised consciousness" on the part of the proletariat as some kind of path toward a more just and egalitarian society. Indeed, Nietsche throws in our faces the de facto hierarchy of experience and perhaps even of the cosmos and of the ontological constitution of our beings. I have heard it said by philosophically well-informed people that it is impossible to be a Nietschean because, I guess, one must embrace too many contraries at once but I think perhaps it is also impossible not to be Nietschean insofar as one cannot escape the contrariness of experience through an idealist schema or any other.</P>
<P>Heidegger's program violates the true spirit of Nietsche's texts although his reading of Nietsche remains interesting but perhaps only in relation to his own project which in a certain sense moves toward a Nietschean stylistics, aesthetics and moral understanding as indicated by the subject heading of your post: Re: Mnemosyne: thinking poetization<BR><BR>[The sport of understanding is a game without rules, forever demanding that we make them up as we go... </P></DIV>
<P>Chris Daly] </P>
<P> </P>
<P> </P>
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<DIV></DIV>>From: Blank <GULIO-AT-SYMPATICO.CA>
<DIV></DIV>>Reply-To: heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
<DIV></DIV>>To: heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
<DIV></DIV>>Subject: Re: Mnemosyne: thinking poetization
<DIV></DIV>>Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2001 14:18:00 -0400
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>Dear list,
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>I don't know, still reading a bit of Heidegger on Niezsche but wow he likes
<DIV></DIV>>to give a neat order to what Nietzsche is saying. I suppose that tells us
<DIV></DIV>>more about Heidegger than Nietzsche. In section 354 of The Gay Science
<DIV></DIV>>Nietzsche writes something that gives us insight into his train of thought,
<DIV></DIV>>he says that consciousness is part of man's social or herd nature. It
<DIV></DIV>>represents an averaging out, a shallowing out and grossness of individual
<DIV></DIV>>experience into generalities that are useful for the human herd. The strange
<DIV></DIV>>uniqueness that is encountered in experience is always reduced by
<DIV></DIV>>consciousness to something familiar and that gives us comfort: "Look, isn't
<DIV></DIV>>our need for the familiar, the will to uncover under everything strange,
<DIV></DIV>>unusual, and questionable something that no longer disturbs us? Is it not
<DIV></DIV>>the _instinct of fear_ that bids us know? And is the jubilation of those who
<DIV></DIV>>attain knowledge not the jubilation over the restoration of a sense of
<DIV></DIV>>security?" (section 255). When Nietzsche encourages us to embark upon the
<DIV></DIV>>high seas that means we leave the comfort and familiarity of the home; for
<DIV></DIV>>more strange, exotic horizons; for the anticipatory projection of a terrible
<DIV></DIV>>and rare beauty. It's a philosophy of adventure that lives dangerously as
<DIV></DIV>>Nietzsche says and that means with less and less consciousness and closer to
<DIV></DIV>>our natural instincts, closer to the barbaric than to the civilized and
<DIV></DIV>>social with his affected artfulness and theatrics of an actor, closer to
<DIV></DIV>>the lack of consciousness of a child. The projective adventure of the
<DIV></DIV>>imagination while pointing towards a horizon in the future (i.e. the
<DIV></DIV>>manifestation of beings as a whole) also is a nostalgia for our childhood
<DIV></DIV>>and for German idealist of course it's a nostalgic cult for the most ancient
<DIV></DIV>>Greek primitives. But all this means our unconciousness is the vehicle of
<DIV></DIV>>visionary insight when the generalizing, typifying screen of consciousness
<DIV></DIV>>has loosened up a bit and been dissolved. The process of how this happens
<DIV></DIV>>is the real issue. Even Kant takes up the critique of consciousness when in
<DIV></DIV>>his practical philosophy unconciousness or a "clear" consciousness is what
<DIV></DIV>>he calls a freedom of the will. There can only be a free will when the will
<DIV></DIV>>is no longer determined by pathalogical or empirical interests and so is an
<DIV></DIV>>'expresion' of _determinability_ and hence an overflowing intoxication that
<DIV></DIV>>Kant calls "moral feeling". In this case beings as a whole is a law of
<DIV></DIV>>harmony that always remains in the future as a guiding horizon which is
<DIV></DIV>>projected ahead of us where "the concept of freedom is made the regulative
<DIV></DIV>>principle of reason." In the _Critique of Practical Reason_ in the
<DIV></DIV>>"Analytic of Pure Practical Reason" chapter 3 on "The Incentives of Pure
<DIV></DIV>>Practical Reason" Kant writes that through the determination of the will by
<DIV></DIV>>a moral law; which I'm saying leads to the determinability of the will;
<DIV></DIV>>there is a checking of our inclinations or sensual impulses based on
<DIV></DIV>>feelings, a check on our pathalogical or empirical will. This causes though
<DIV></DIV>>a "feeling of pain" as Kant writes since the satisfaction of our inclination
<DIV></DIV>>which would lead to happiness are interrupted. What is sepearated and
<DIV></DIV>>cut-off is our self-regard, self-love, self-steem, self-satisfaction. The
<DIV></DIV>>moral law in general strikes down self-conceit. There is a humilation which
<DIV></DIV>>causes the further feeling of "respect for the moral law": "...the moral law
<DIV></DIV>>inevitably humbles every man when he compares the sensous propensity of his
<DIV></DIV>>nature with the law. Now if the idea of something as the determining ground
<DIV></DIV>>of the will humiliates us in our self-consciousness, it awakens respect for
<DIV></DIV>>itself so far as it is positive and the ground of determination" (pg. 74).
<DIV></DIV>>Or later on page 80: "The consciousness of free submission of the will to
<DIV></DIV>>the law, combined with an inevitable constraint imposed only by our own
<DIV></DIV>>reason on all inclinations, is respect for the law." He describes this
<DIV></DIV>>epoche of our natural propensity as a removal of resistance and obstacles to
<DIV></DIV>>the operation of the causality of reason now becoming pure practical
<DIV></DIV>>reason, a free will or a flame that feeds of itself and constitutes
<DIV></DIV>>self-respect and character. You can see then that in Kant there is nothing
<DIV></DIV>>of that search for a soothing comfortable familiar cause that Nietzsche sees
<DIV></DIV>>in the common operation of consciousness. In Kant there is no exclusion of
<DIV></DIV>>the new, unexperienced or the strangeness of the sublime, or any exclusion
<DIV></DIV>>of dangerous beauty. In the _Twilight of The Idols_ Niezsche writes that
<DIV></DIV>>freedom is measured "by the resistance which has to be overcome, by the
<DIV></DIV>>effort it costs to stay _aloft_. One would have to seek the highest type of
<DIV></DIV>>free man where the greatest resistance is constantly being overcome." In
<DIV></DIV>>Heidegger Dasein is another word for freedom and how much does it cost
<DIV></DIV>>again?
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>Gulio
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>
<DIV></DIV>>
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