From: "Blank" <gulio-AT-sympatico.ca>
Subject: Re: plans and ends
Date: Thu, 1 Nov 2001 12:30:09 -0500



----- Original Message -----
From: Rene de Bakker <rbakker-AT-bs18.bs.uva.nl>
To: <heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu>
Sent: Thursday, November 01, 2001 10:01 AM
Subject: Re: plans and ends


> At 13:54 31-10-01 -0500, you wrote:
> >
> >
> >> Gulio,
> >>
> >> Thanks, a real Borges story - I remember having read it a long time
ago.
> >> Borges visited Juenger shortly before his death, his only visit in
> >> Germany. He thanked him for the overwhelming experience
> >> of the Spanish translation of "Storms of steel". He was writing
> >> "Martin Fierro" at the time.
> >>
> >
> >I was browsing and reading a little on this hero of yours. Sounds like he
is
> >part of a generation
>
> Nothing personal, 'Gulio', but within two sentences he is caught as
> "part of a generation". Heidegger says, that we are determined
> historically through and through, it is already there before we say
> something. Not realizing this, means: leaving the subject where it
> feels at home. But this historicality, and its complete blindness for
> itself, seems to be "part of our generation", you see: it eats everything,
> that is said against it.
>

I'm missing something, you are going over my head but I'm listening. What,
you are upset of how I gathered him together somewhat under a gloomy
generation? No, I don't see but go on... perhaps if you say something on how
you use the word historicality here?


> Which leads to the principal problem: if it is true, that we are in
> something (BT says: Dasein = in-sein) how can we ever know
> that? If we would be rational animals, we would, just as the
> not-rational animals, be numb, benommen. And not be capable
> of any transcendence.
>

Okay, but in-sein is not like wine is inside a cup. More like being-in that
strange 'something' that is the-world, a kind of space with neither an
interior or exterior.

> This is strange .... In BT there is the friend, that every  Dasein
> has.
>


> "Hearing constitutes the primary and authentic way in which Dasein
>  is open for its ownmost potentiality-for-Being--as in hearing the voice
>  of the friend whom every Dasein carries with it."
>

Yes, I hadn't thought of this but this is an imaginative projection, a
representative determiantion. What are the page numbers I want to look at
the passage more closely?

> In an unexpected way, then, we would need the voice or the glance
> of the other (Levinas), but not in order to open up for another person,
> but for the other in oneself.
>
<smile> you are going to do a Levinasian reading of Heidegger now?? This is
unexpected but you are surprising sometimes. I think you have to be in
yourself, necessary for yourself before you can 'open' to others. Dasein
being at it's ownmost possibility is the condition for any sort of
hospitality. Isn't hospitality a sort of withdrawal, a separation that makes
room, gives way, testimony as courtesy? Go ahead, please, tell me more.

> In the address  "Meridian", Celan  - another hero - says:
> We're talking about art here, that's easy.
> But then, there is always also someone present, who doesn't listen.
> Or who hears, but doesn't know what the talking is about.
> Who watches the speaker.
>
Hey, have you seen a recent movie called The Others? It reminds me of what
Celan says here.


> We touched this before. (Caspar David Friedrich)
>
> > know well with their love of everything natural and
> >primitive and their search for hidden forces that would be the gluing
bond
> >of community in spite of an attachement to individuality.  A generation
that
> >would have come of age, intellectually, during the twenties and would
have,
> >to some extent, their cultural roots in the romantics and symbolists. A
> >complicated lot with strange alliances from the perspective of today.
Only
> >the marxists still remain, somewhat, if barely respectable today. Then
there
> >is the ecological feminists who think like the generation Junger.
> >
> >
> >> That one might be in a dream, and that the search for rational
certainty
> >> is accompanied by the fear of irrationality or insanity, is already
clear
> >> in the metaphysical meditations of Descartes. The absence of ground
> >> only gets dangerous to the one, that still feels the need for ground,
> >> hardly to nowadays man.
> >> The malignant genius, that makes us take images for real things, might
> >> very well bring one in the deranged position of one, who believes
> >> his body is of glass. And: who says that the people I look down upon
> >> walking in the streets, are not machines? (Meditations)
> >> Also Nietzsche's shadow in the 'Wandererer und sein Schatten' comes
> >> to mind, a period in Nietzsche's life, "Also sprach Zarathustra" refers
> >to,
> >> in that night, where "a laughing occurred around me."
> >>
> >> That reality is a dream is his thought since the dionysian and
apollinian
> >> "dream forces" (Traumgewalten). Nietzsche refers in later years to
> >> Zarathustra as "a mere atheist", at the time that he was interested in
the
> >> god-man,
> >> in his parallel foresight of humanisation/deification.
> >> You've read the Nietzsche volumes, so you'll know that Heidegger
connects
> >> Nietzsche's concept of WtP back to the will-character of the monad
> >(appetitus)
> >> According to Leibniz and Nietzsche (and Schelling etc.) will is the
> >> fundamental
> >> character of reality, of ALL reality. (this is not human willing)
> >> Leibniz' position is central: one can go back from him to Thomas, and
> >ahead
> >> to Nietzsche. The overman takes the place of the highest monad: visio
dei
> >>
> >
> >No, I haven't really put his lecttures on Nietzsche together like this. I
> >still have to do a thorough reading them. What you say sounds right as
far
> >as I can tell but how do you go back to Thomas? Maybe by working through
the
> >Scholastic understanding of intentionality to the modern notion of drive
> >(Drang).
>
> Or Scotus' univoque concept of being, which 'makes' possible infinite
being,
> because, as such, 'being' doesn't entail finiteness. Or Cusanus' infinity
> of the universe and his conception of the mind, 'mens', which he derives
> from mensurare, to measure.
>
> But Heidegger makes clear, that historical influences can never be
decisive.
> Kant wouldn't probably, with what he writes about Plato, pass a test
> of a first year student, still he has been the only one to have developped
> Plato's idea further. (this in GA45)
> So the question in the background is: how happens tradition?
>

I don't know, it seems obvious that it happens through reading and
interpretation, or maybe the "hive mind" in "The Glass Bees" by Junger?

> Just passing it on: Heidegger somewhere speaks of the real thinkers
> as the flowers on a branch.
>

How does tradition flourish? Maybe because the seeds are planted in a well
tended field. I was reading that Junger said that "the mission of an author
is to provide a spiritual residence, a homeland." Now that I'm starting to
think about the handing down of tradition, well, it's obvious that it
depends on having a "clean glass" for the wine when your friend(s) comes to
visit. Hard for me since I'm messy, hardly a spotless, impeccable person,
just look at the messy variety that I throw out with dark stains everywhere.
I don't know how to make good choices Rene.

> >I'm exhausted now LOL,
>
> Aesthetically I'm over the hill too. The only thing left that is
interesting
> about art, as I see it, is its Gestell-character. A museum is a weird
thing.
>

I don't know, I still look around in a bit of a frenzy sometimes for
stimulation. I enjoy the subtle development of tension in a good thriller or
film noir. Don't you think that art can have Gestell as it's very content?
Self-reflective works of art are like that. They involve a mise en abyme. A
mirror is placed inside
then so that it can tell a sort of behind the scenes story of how the
imagination works and so give us an understanding of illusion. A recent
movie called Wonder Boys was like this. It was about a washed out, doping
english prof who couldn't write a second novel. Not a really deep
exploration of the subject of a blocked imagination like Fellini's 81/2 but
okay. 'Metaart' like this is the only thing I find really worthwhile and
serious. Hamlet is like this too, a play is placed inside the play and so
Shakespeare disrupts commentary from inside the play.


> I think, Heidegger is meaning, that exhaustion might save us in the end.
> The end being, that one is sitting on perfect technical equipment,
> in utmost boredom. Only then a change might come.
> That's why we must cling to technology. There cannot be a halfway
> solution.
>

I hold my box pretty tight. I enjoyed buying the parts and putting it all
together. I have never found the conversattions that I find on this list
anywhere not even in the university with the few professors I have talked
to. Living the life of a screen geek is no different than the old pasttime
of spending your life inside a book fascinated by stories and poems and
coming to philosophy after you get bored (and don't we mean apathetic?) for
a barely noticeable affect. I really think that art is a good thing because
it trains you for philosophy, it makes you more aware of subtle movements,
barely noticeable affects. And that means knowing how to have a refined
taste, how to be perceptive of the secret of phenomena.

Gulio

> sleeping is good halfway solution, and laughing.
>
> Rene
>
>
>
>
> -----------------------------------
> drs. Ren de Bakker
> Universiteitsbibliotheek Amsterdam
> Afdeling Catalogisering
> tel. 020-5252368
>
>
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