File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_2003/heidegger.0311, message 370


Date: Sat, 22 Nov 2003 11:46:33 -0600
From: allen scult <allen.scult-AT-drake.edu>
Subject: Sex, Love and Philosophy


>Allen wrote concerning sex and thinking:
>
>>  What attracted
>>  Heidegger to what he called thinking is it simply that it didn't respond to
>>  his
>>  seductions.  The work of thinking is precisely to rub up against
>>  the almost overwhelming impossibility of the very encounter
>>  you stand before.
>
>Allen, do you mean that thinking (a la Heidegger) is what re-sists
>engagement/embrace/grasp? Or the content of thinking (being)?

Hi Michael,

Yes, it's thinking itself, the very thought of it, which by 
definition (having no
definition) is an impossibility.  As is love.  Both are similarly 
held in place by a certain
"Begegnis" (encounterativity) which carries with it the impossibility 
of accomplishment.
Even if you reach a moment when you might say, in self satisfied 
epideictic astonishment,
"I'm thinking," "I think I've finally got it," you realize that "what 
most calls for thinking is
you have yet to think."  And as we all know, "There ain't no cure for 
love." So what we're
left with, ultimately, as you already knew,  is nothing.

And so at least in my present frame of mind, which I hasten to add is 
not depressed, just
irrepressibly "there," ("or perhaps real, but not exactly there"
  the following seems too easy:


>  Is thinking (being) thus marked by its overwhelming
>impossibility? Thus the thrill of the chase? The journey not the
>destin-ation? Always already eternally on the way-ness?

Which is not to say that in other moods, such on-the-wayness might not be
totally workable.  Well, perhaps not totally, but perhaps momentarily, at least
in song.


>Again, like looking into the vastness and impenetratability of those
>Arizonan landscapes brought forward in those great western movies and road
>films: love?


And so they drive together over the cliff, or ride together into the 
sunset.  Doesn't
death in that way make an impatient overwrought end to the impossibility?


>
>Is this what it means to be human: that we cannot resist what resists us?
>(Be-)longing...


And doesn't such irresistable  resistance follow upon some romantic sense of a
"favoring"?  That she's really there at the other end rooting foryou 
to overcome the resistance?

So I knelt there at the delta,
at the alpha and the omega,
at the cradle of the river and the seas.
And like a blessing come from heaven
for something like a second
I was healed and my heart
was at ease.
              (Leonard Cohen, again, I'm afraid)

I  know there are more pressing matters preoccupying the list right 
now concerning the Rector,
but I couldn't quite get to it.  Maybe later.

Best regards,

Allen


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