Date: Fri, 04 Jan 2002 12:14:51 -0600
From: allen scult <allen.scult-AT-drake.edu>
Subject: the pleasures of speaking



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Let's say I am posting primarily because I miss the pleasures of 
putting my words in a form which gives me pleasure, at least some 
some part, because I imagine it will give you pleasure.  This giving 
and taking of pleasure through speaking is a prime constituent of 
Dasein's worldly being as :  zwou logou econ (Looks like Eudora 
permits Greek to be written!).

Pleasure-seeking through speaking we might say is "rhetorically 
driven."  That is, its form is shaped by the imagined effect the 
words will have on others.  But of course that imagined effect cannot 
be construed in a vacuum. There is an already existing community of 
discourse which lends value to our words as we imagine them.  And so 
the giving and taking of pleasure through speaking comes to involve a 
publicly adduced judgment of value--a judgment which is grounded in 
the history of our "deliberation" together.  This communal history is 
itself constituted by the pleasures of particular words as we 
remember them--words spoken by individual persons.  I know some of 
those persons very personally by the way I remember their words( but 
of course I won't mention their names). Perhaps another dimension of 
the give and take of pleasure then is the imagined remembering of 
one's words by the community, even as one speaks them!

The pleasures of discourse for Heidegger, of course, were exchanged 
in correspondence ("Entsprechung" he calls it) with the still living 
(for him) words of the great philosophers. But does he ever "think" 
the ways in which the pleasure seeking of speaking might skew his 
discourse?

And then there is the erotic dimension of these pleasure exchanges-- 
the capacity of certain words, uttered in certain contexts of 
being-with, to eroticize the saying of an idea. Plato contends with 
this aspect of himself in a way which evokes Heidegger's admiration:

"Specifically, Plato shows indirectly what the philosopher is by 
displaying what the sophist is. . . Precisely on the path of 
reflection on the Being of beings, Plato attains the correct ground 
for interpreting the sophist in his Being." (Plato's Sophist, 9)

I read "sophist" here as a metonym for all those who compose their 
words  " for effect."  The wonder of Plato is that he is unafraid to 
confront this tendency in his own speech.  Remember, he is all the 
characters in the Sophist, the Gorgias etc.  Plato is willing to 
think the pleasurable exchanges of "flattery" and how they might lend 
themselves to philosophy, where Heidegger simply brackets them ( The 
most blatant example perhaps is "The Thinker as Poet")

But one of the pleasures of this list, not pretending to be serious 
philosophy, is that we can indulge our pleasures and even speak of 
them explicitly. So we talk of music, and poetry, and novels and even 
moments in our lives.  I see these exchanges at the very least as 
aesthetic rehearsal for philosophy.. .  I wonder if the old ski bum 
would have approved-- even participated!?

Allen



-- 
  Allen Scult					Dept. of Philosophy
HOMEPAGE: " Heidegger on Rhetoric and Hermeneutics":	Drake University
http://www.multimedia2.drake.edu/s/scult/scult.html	Des Moines, Iowa 50311
PHONE: 515 271 2869
FAX: 515 271 3826

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