From: "Blank" <gulio-AT-sympatico.ca>
Subject: Re: plans and ends
Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2001 12:32:33 -0400



----- Original Message -----
From: Rene de Bakker <rbakker-AT-bs18.bs.uva.nl>
To: <heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu>
Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2001 11:53 AM
Subject: Re: plans and ends


> At 12:45 23-10-01 -0400, Gulio Blank wrote:
>
> >We are, the list moves on no matter who writes. It's not dependent on
anyone
> >and hasn't been for a long time. People don't seem to be able to say what
> >they want to say or something like that. It takes ages to really be able
to
> >talk on this list. Part of it is just the subject matter and the insane
care
> >given to words that can paralyze your ability to talk.
>
> Gulio,
>
> But isn't this the other side of the speechlessness, the "obscure
> private language, that has no words" in the end of your mail?

Yes, was being a bit loose with words, couldn't quite leave their meaning.
Maybe it's impossible to say much on this, but it does seem that just the
thought of not being able to say anything, makes you talk, just as an
imaginative block can be a spur to imagination or food is much more savory
when you are hungry; or your sense are more acute after staying away from
stimulating them with this or that spectacle.

> When I am right when I say that Heidegger indicates 'something',
> that doesn't want to be known, that turns away from an attempt to
> grasp it  - and that therefore isn't objective, because there is no
> object without a subject, and that isn't subjective, because there
> can't be a subject without an object - then this hiddenness only
> shows itself in the refusal of words, the refusing in words.
> They don't catch reality anymore. Rather reality goes its own way.
> Would the old concepts still work, that is ground reality, by showing
> the Being of beings in beings, then there would not even be the
possibility
> to

The refusal, as I see it, is words working through the limit of meaning, the
direction that words would take, their end as the expression of a refusal,
of an interference, a noise that somehow remains to be thought, the
unthought that must be thought, what is still to be interpreted.  The
hiddenness is expressed.

The 'something'?  (is refusal and hesitation connected?)

On page three of GA26 Heidgger writes that logic, a pure and simple one, a
general logic is not a thought determination of nature nor one of space and
history. In a way it is the thought of nothing "which nontheless means to
think "something". In thinking of nothingness, or in the endeavor to think
"it," I am thoughtfully related to nothingness, and thii is what the
thinking is about" (H2-3). This seems important to me since after all the
conclusion, or one of them, is going to be, in this text, that "the world
"is" nothing". Your quote on history, instantaneity is one I have been
pondering.  The way it reads in English is that historical recollection
(geschichtliche Erinnerung) is only that as moment focused reflection
(Augenblicklichen Besinnung). When Heidegger picks his moments in the
history od ideas it is just to get at an understanding of moment focused
reflection, a moment of vision, the ectasis of temporality. Wether looking
at past ideas, the future, or the present, the obsessive focus is a moment
of reflection in the here and now. You put recollection and a moment of
vision together and you get the "original unity" around pages  H10-11, end
of section two. Heidegger writes that you get, "the unity of the temporality
of the philosophizing factical Dasein itself; [and that] the full
problematic must be unfolded this unity" (H10-11). This is important because
getting to H56-57, it is very much a visio as a praesens intuitus (of the
eternal now, nunc stans), that is in question. In the Scholastics the
veritas primas, the absolute (meaning something like absolved, separated,
freed up) intellect of God is the origin of truth. Without understanding
this doctrine Heidegger writes that it is not possible to have an
intelligent understanding of Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel, or I would add
Heidegger. This list never goes this deep historically which is too bad. I
would love to interpret Thomas, Suarez, Avicenna or al-Farabi with Heidegger
terminology. Being modern or neokantian is easy, seeing the transition from
the Scholastics is harder. It requires pretty much living through a long
conversation. The Italians seem to be the only ones with the depth and sense
of history to be able to do it. Giorgi Agamben always makes the connections
from the Scholastics to modern discussions but he is alone. Before that it
was only Heidegger and one wonders how well he did it; but it's not possible
to see this unless one reads and thinks in Scholastic terms. Anything else
is just following the master's voice and making the same generalizations
about the history of ideas that he did


> experience this extreme, but no longer  'subjective'  urgence to ground,
> that only gets stronger in H2. The un-will to ground has to be overcome
too.
> The entry of the Contributions is the 'Anklang' (transl. as 'Echo'?) of
> oblivion
> and desertedness [of Being]. One can see that much, without reading them.
> Without this, and everything geschichtlich that belongs in it (nihilism),
> the rest, incl. grounding, cannot make sense.
>
> I remember a letter by Schadewaldt to Heidegger, wherein he complains
> about the shortlivedness of words, that they start to stink soon after
> employment, and Heidegger answers: that's correct, das trifft zu.
> Our horizon seems to be vulgarity itself.
>
> > I think back to what I did with the word "plan" for instance and I'm
just
> wondering if it was
> >just too much for this list. I tell you it's got something to do with
> >understanding an end, a grounding purpose and how that relates to our
desire
> >for just that sort of thing. That's what drops out in both Heidegger and
> >Nietzsche and that is what freedom means.
>
> Maybe I do not understand. Do you mean, that both are missing the meaning
> of freedom?
>

I was thinking of The Principle of Reason where Heidegger discusses
Leibniz's principle of sufficient reason. Freedom would there be no longer
feeling the need to answer the demands to give reasons for actions and that
comes with a growing sense of an abyss, a Da in Da-sein. A "there" that will
later become "theOpen" of a poet like Rilke. The project undoes itself
because it's grounding on nothingness and that is a "free projection" and
truly constitutes a moment of vision, or a naked intentionality to put it in
Scholastic terms; a possibility, a seed that is yet to develop. In this way,
Da-sein is the potency of an origin, a vital moment... That is pushing it
don't you think?



> >How and wether that is succesful
> >well I don't know. It is not an all or nothing approach. As I see it
there
> >is a more or less strong desire for a ground to action.
>
> (rene:)
> >> Later he forbids himself the use of notions like horizon and Vor-griff,
> >> fore-cept. What you say is interesting: at first one needs them.
> >>But it sounds a bit like Nietzsche: the distinction subject-object is
> needed by life,
> >>in order to gain the required stableness. Later he says that the
> capturing of the
> >>Vor-griff is too violent and demanding.
>
> >I know he 'forbids' but is there an effort in this forbidding,
restraining
> >move with regards to projective grasping that would be maybe all too
> >subjective? Where is this hesitation coming from?
>
> I have to think of the hesitating, that Heidegger detects in Nietzsche,
> the hinaus-zoegern, on his way to the ER. He takes over from
> Nietzsche the image of the abyss, that only emerges for the one
> that is going up. Aiming at an abyss oneself and directly leads to
nothing.
> (a dwarf abyss)
> One can remark* this in oneself. When I wanted to stress hiddenness
> as something essential and not accidental (as in metaphysical
> privatio), I bumped into the impossibility of showing it. This would then
be
> an experience of an end, a limit of subjectivity. It namely cannot be
> accessed and grasped directly. Either one turns away disillusioned (or
glad),
> that no further ground can be given of this hiddenness. Or one turns away
> from the one that stands in front of this impossibility. A kind of
> transformation,
> without which it doesn't make sense to talk further of Dasein.
> But in constant transformation, there are two, the old subject and the new
> Dasein,
> and we should be both, it seems.
> Now, IN this turning, there can be no willing, Heidegger says.
> But to get to the point of turning, the strongest would be needed.
>
> *a mark, as in German, is an end, which delineates something in its Wesen,
> as in the Greek peras. This is not yet strict definition, but also seeing,
> that there can be no peras/finis without the void surrounding it.
> (this can be, has been thought metaphysically too, as in Spinoza's 'every
> determination is a negation'.)
> Somewhow like this, but differently, the being-toward-an-end would make
the
> 'essence' of Dasein possible, which lies in its ek-sistence.
> Seen thus, there can be no Dasein without death. But a death, that is no
> longer
> a simple ending, but a gate to the in-finite. -- limit of list-talk.
>

I haven't connected this thread to being-towards-death but it's there no
doubt. A projection upon a for-the-sake-of which amounts to an abyss works
just the same as Heidegger's being-towards-death but also Dasein going
towards it's ownmost can-be, potency of its origin. There, and you put this
together with phenomenological seeing as the moment of vision of BT and you
get H1 in a nutshell, a nut, yes I like this, a nut...

That's my limit today,

Gulio








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