Abhinavagupta, Jeffrey Mousaieff Masson, & Heidegger.

This letter is referent to several others I have sent you. If you receive this and have not received them and want to please tell me. They may just be sitting in your computer awaiting your return from a trip.

Fundamentalists are supposedly literal minded. They are nothing of the sort. Only a philosopher might have a grasp of what that might be. "Abstractions do not exist". This is plain, straightforward, and self -evident. Yet, because everything ‘human’ depends on abstractions, most people would ignore or denounce such a concept as obviously self-contradictory. None the less, you cannot weigh an abstraction, can’t see it, smell it, hear it, touch it, draw it or take a picture of it. Nor can it cut you and make you bleed. You cannot do anything physical with it. So what makes you think you can do something mentally with abstraction? But it is always already done; you are always already there in that indeterminate consciousness that gives life to the bare words in the contextual forms of phrases and sentences. Those words are always related to those forms in the sense of, "You use this as . . . " in transcendental apperception as khoura that receives experience, both ‘internal’ and external, and identifies it in the mirror reflection of the Kantian "I think". And even the "I think" is an identification of . . . an imaginary gathering of identity into the light of objectivity, into the sunlight or bulb light physically, out of the "blackness of darkness" of Melville’s raging Jude(8) which I identify with the blacking of the back of the mirror to hold the invisible witnessing silver completely unseen, unwitnessed, into the clarity of the glass. "Let’s get physical." Look into the assuring, objectivized, physical presence of the mirror and lose yourself into an empty sky of thought seen in your trembling hand. Abhinavagupta writes much of the special experience of a jar received into the indeterminate consciousness. Does he ever write about the terrifying magic of the mirror? The intense fear people have of a broken mirror? The especial sharpness of its shards (9)? This is why also Borges should be considered a major philosopher just as Dostoyevsky should be. He takes on one idea and enmeshes the whole universe in it.

It is a matter of imagination that is out of our control. And yet it is also a matter of decision, "resolve" as Heidegger said, and other things such as that utterly uncanny "care" that is what we are and yet is not what we are, and "mood" which your study of the permanent, underpinning emotion of sthayibhava has so illuminated for me, and "comportment": the orientation and pointing of the contextual "world". You don’t have to know you’ve made that decision to have made it. How distinctly conscious is it? But then how can it be distinct when what you are in fact doing is creating your authentic self? Jivanmukti. You are not dead, yet . . . you hold death literally to your back, so close it has become a part of you. Mirror blacking. Death in Heidegger is the fundamental motivation to action. It is there and it impels you. And each choice you make becomes a specific death of time. But neither Heidegger nor Aristotle says how you should start choosing. You are thrown into the project always already and you can merely direct it by thinking, "This is the field of thought I shall wander across to find what I can." And each field and direction of walk is particular. And, to paraphrase Headgear from Being and Time, you must always reverse the right to be wrong. And so I am here, out standing in my field.

This is the atman the Indian philosophers talk about, the continuity of knowledge and perception and movement, the retention of memory, the indeterminate consciousness. Movies are a strange medium. I found the movie Bladerunner frightening the first time I saw it, thinking the message was: How do you know your memories reflect any reality whatsoever? Could they not be manufactured? Inserted? I just saw a program about alien abductions which speculates that this is exactly what happened to these people who are so firmly convinced those experiences really happened. The whole fundamental meaning of the past is undermined by that question. It shows its naked abstractness. However, when I saw the director’s version of the movie, I found his real message to be—human beings might be androids, something of a retarded news flash for him. I was very disappointed to find out it was my idea and not his since that destroyed its objective confirmation and reality. Again, in the movie Silence of the Lambs, I thought the director was being incredibly daring in portraying the dismaying rationality of Hannibal Lecter. His rationality grounded a morality of keeping promises and never lying, the fundamental trait(s) of a moral man according to the immoralist Nietzsche. He also recognizes all the consequences of his actions and accepts them with clarity. This is one of the things Ayn Rand talks about but never thinks through to its end. But when I saw the director’s annotated version, I found out that both he and Anthony Hopkins merely thought Lecter was insane. Now, I have absolutely no desire to see the sequel. And unfortunately this defect, absent in the book Silence of the Lambs is present in its sequel, Hannibal. Thomas Harris has him fantastically trying to mathematically calculate, according to Stephen Hawking’s ideas of time, a return to a moment in the past in order to bring back his dead sister. And the author also ‘excuses’ Lecter’s actions, something that the logical consistency of the character would reject with disgust, by saying that God is the greatest monster of all and Lecter’s acts are mere peccadilloes. In Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter is undoubtedly a real hero in the Homeric, Aristotlean sense (remember the savagery of Achilles across the plain of Troy, Klytemnestra’s planning and execution of her plot which she pursues to its poetic closure), a strange and terrifying hero but an extremely strong one of total consistency. Clarice Starling is the other hero of the books who is reluctantly but consciously a disciple of this ‘guru’ who teaches her so much about herself. In the beginning of Hannibal, he sends her a letter that seems to both belittle her and praise her in the same words, and which in turn gives her the moral strength to endure her deteriorating situation and get out of her despair. Is this in any meaningful way an evil man? Aristotle calls him, in the Politics, "to deinon", the terrible as such, the rational man with no restrictions on his actions from the morality of ordinary people. Hannibal’s letter is relevant to Heidegger’s approach to animality. As I slowly read Heidegger’s description of animal dasein, he does something similar to the letter, that is, both say that the animal is exactly like man and is nothing like him, that the animal is bound and captivated by instinct and yet makes decisions. And yet we have just seen, in relation to the authentic self, just how ambiguous that decision process can be. In other words, if we are entirely unsure what man fundamentally is, why are we so automatically confident we know what an animal is? With Heidegger as with Shankara, that was not so much a process of making a decision as uncovering a ‘decision’ or actuality always already present. Therefore when we try to confront our own animality, we are, to use Abhinavagupta’s image, "Just as one tries to jump over the shadow of one’s head with one’s foot, the head will never be at the place of one’s foot," i. e., "even so it is impossible to know the knower by the various means of knowing, for these own their own existence to the knower." If we do not understand ourselves, then, included in that, we cannot understand the animality either as ‘within’ us or as in any way distinguished from us. And that is before we have even touched on the problem of the totally different ontological realms of ‘you’ and ‘me’. Not only do I not know if ‘you’ exist other than the words attributed to you in your books, but even if ‘you’ were standing right next to me in the flesh, you would just be an object. I can only learn about your existence second hand at the very best, and usually only at third and fourth hand. And if I cannot know the animal nearest me, that is, me myself, how can I make judgements about the soul of ‘my’ dog? In fact, what makes ‘my’ dog mine? I merely maintain her and confine her. She was given to me just as Heidegger says that being "ist gibt". Words give me a number of causes, but the experience comes from nowhere. And as I think you said somewhere, might not the dog be thinking the man is hers?

One of the main, but only implicit, points of Being and Time is that the self, like abstraction, does not exist. The "They" self is handed to you on a plate that you can never reject. Does that make it ‘real’? You would be ‘crazy’ to want to escape it. The "They" self, as in Aristotle, is the bedrock of morality. It is the vague but emotionally empowered netherworld from amidst which you must work out with equity the practical judgements you must live by. It is also how you drive a car from day to day or use a word processor. Morality like riding a bicycle is learned habit from your parents and friends; it is the working context of memory. You’ve got to have it to successfully cross the street. It is INAUTHENTICITY. Authenticity somehow MUST arise out of it, and do so in strife (as a tragedy?) and only temporarily. It is the inauthentic self that always endures the beginningless and endless chain of karma that so terrified Shankara (11). The authentic self is fleeting and flimsy in the hurricane of the soul. That is why the Indian philosophers speak at one time of jivanmukta as eternal and yet at another as rare and momentary because it is both. And the same is true of authenticity, because elsewise nothing of the continuous identity of memory as a historical truth of self would so convince oneself that one is the same person as when ten years old and will be the same person ten years from now. It is grasping who or what this "same person" is, other than as an accumulation of unconnected, arbitrary, localized memories, that calls for a ‘sense’ or ‘need’ for ‘destiny’ that ‘solidifies’ the individual as a specific ‘me’ or ‘mine’ and ‘you’ or ‘yours’. That ‘one’ has a need for an overall purpose, goal, aim, is universal and undeniable in structuring personal identity. What must be necessarily brought into question is whether the events of one’s life exemplifies the actual existence of such a continuous purpose or destiny as a solid personal identity that is not a mere daydream. This is the ever-present need for authenticity that always stands alongside the inauthenticity of the everyday that maintains its necessary hold on everyday life. In everyday life one is always within a group. In everyday life one is always within a tradition. One however always necessarily interprets what the ‘group’ and ‘tradition’ means to you according to the context of your singulare tantum identity. This is done either by simply accepting that group or tradition as it is specifically presented to one (which means your individual perspective necessarily changes it) or you define that group or tradition according to what you desire which must necessarily leave out much you consider extraneous or downright wrong. This is an inescapable human condition. One is largely stuck with one’s group and tradition. One is born with it. One is thrown into it. One cannot reject it altogether because it has determined how you think, feel, and talk. But you can revise it and break it apart. This is something Heidegger seems to have both done and not done at the same time. It is as if his German nationalism is operating, while completely undefined philosophically, purely within the context of his own mind which essentially he has not opened to any coherent degree to anybody as far as I know. His appeal to "spirit", though common in the German philosophical tradition, is still a religious mush word, something like a rotten fruit: press on it and it collapses to mush. It undermines his rational and experiential construction of individual identity that is absolutely alone and must make absolute decisions about fundamentals that leaves no room for the concept of a common ‘spirit’ of a people or any kind of group. A people or a culture is not defined by its highest individual example but by its lowest common denominator. When Heidegger condemns the triviality of the age or society what he must condemn necessarily and first of all is the Germany that is his immediate context. If the age and society are worthless, then where does the greatness of the German spirit come from?

While his aspects of a vicious narrow mindedness are facts, these facts must be placed in his personal vision of German tradition that includes Liebnitz, Kant, Goethe, and Nietzsche, all of whom utterly rejected nationalism as it has defined itself in the twentieth century. So what the hell was going on in his mind? How can one teach a lecture course over a period of years about the arch anti-German Nietzsche in the midst of the Third Reich and make a statement about "the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism" in an almost contemporaneous lecture course? The spirit of Nietzsche is fundamental to the whole destiny of Heidegger’s philosophical project. It is the ‘spirit’ of questioning, of newspaper reporter-like prying into the presented obvious, overturning it to find the dirty, little truths. And Nietzsche finds all sorts of dirty, little truths doesn’t he? Even about him. Was that why Freud, when he read Nietzsche late in his career, glad he waited so long to do so because Nietzsche had already, in his overflowing richness, discovered so many of his ideas so that Freud could honestly say he discovered them on his own? It was easy to ignore Nietzsche’s actual thoughts because there was so many of them, tossed off casually, of no account, so that it was easy to dismiss him because of his ideas taken completely out of an over-rich context like the "ubermench" (a fictional idea from what was really a novel, an idea to play with to get other ideas like the "untermench" and "going under" which are much more fundamental, disastrous, and relevant concepts) or "the blond beast" (which specifically refereed to a dumb beast, not the prenatal idea of the Waffen SS warrior). Heidegger knew all this and demonstrated it. He reduced the idea of the superman to its logical conclusion: the modern CEO. And "going under" is a concept that constantly haunts more and more his later thought. So "tradition" is a very treacherous word to use in public. And to equate the acceptance of whatever any individual makes tradition out to be with necessarily leading to Nazism as Tom Rockmore does is ludicrous (but is this just? True?). There is also a terrible reversal of this. Groups that have no power, such as Jews under Hitler or Blacks in segregationist America, become enclosed and defined (and that definition accepted by them as the only path to unity, and, through unity, to power) by their dearest enemies. A Jew becomes defined by the pseudo-scientific concept ‘race’, even then completely misapplied, which is converted into a historical, cultural identity by the oppressed. The decisions and identity of the individual are then obliterated, cast aside as ‘politically’ unimportant so that human beings like Spinoza, Heine, and Medelsohn are no longer individuals making their own choices, they are ‘Jews’. Yet they’re being born ‘Jewish’ is merely an accidental adjective, which they deliberately changed into something altogether different on their own.

I.D. Code Orient 00005

Footnotes: ENLARGED 1st FOUR LETTERS Date: Sun, 7 Jan 2001 03:14:01 -0600

(1)Masson, J. L. and M. V. Patwardhan. Santarasa and Abhinavagupta’s Philosophy of Aesthetics. Bhandarkar Oriental Series 9. Poona: BORI, 1969

(2) Ibid. pg. iii

(3) Ibid. pg. v

(4) Ibid. pg. vi

(5) Ibid. pp. vii-viii

(6) Ibid. pg. viii

(7) Ibid. pg. ix

(8) Ibid. pg.

(9) Ibid. pg. xi

(10) Ibid. "(Abhinavagupta) is fond of the comparison of life with a drama and the resultant sense of unreality it gives. Dreams come up again and again in his works. In the Tantraloka he speaks of man, the creator, as destroying the produce of his life, a dream. The external building, he says, are razed in the fire of his sudden awareness that he is Siva, the great destroyer. Then follows the purely joy-filled dance of Siva, the Tandava, that has no purpose other than to give expression to a sense of freedom and joy."

(11) Ibid. pg. xiv

(12) One should not really lay such a thing on a dog!

(13) Heidegger, Martin, Nietzsche, vol. 1, The Will To Power as Art, pg. 47, trans. David Ferrell Krell, Harper Collins, 1979.

(14) Heidegger, Martin, THE FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS OF METAPHYSICS: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. McNeill and Walker, Indiana University Press, 1995, pp.

186-273.

(15) Heidegger, Martin, Plato’s Sophist, trans. Rojcewicz and Schuwer, Indiana University Press, 1997.

(16) The first message has been lost.

(17) This is another tremendously important word in Heidegger, though used and explained rarely. As I was standing at the urinal with my teacher Alexander von Schoenborn at the University of Texas Austin, he said everything in Heidegger related to the concept of context, that once you understood that you held the key to all the rest. He also said you could find everything that is in Heidegger also in Plotinus who has always been an unappealing brick wall to me.

(18) But ‘internal’ here means receiving into the imagination as in "This thought as just occurred to me." In other words, you receive thoughts, responses in words, dreams from elsewhere. Just as in spontaneous response while speaking or spontaneous response with a new and even possibly ‘unrelated’ thought to reading and certainly receive as in dreaming, you cannot make, create, plan these responses beforehand in any sense except context! The only ‘plan’ you can lay out is, "This is what I want to think about, and then the thoughts, words, and maybe even dreams occur on their own! Suddenly I now understand what Heidegger meant by man’s being "the shepherd of being"! This is how we think!

(19) (Jude 12-14) "These are spots in your feasts of charity, when they feast with you, feeding themselves without fear: clouds they are without water, carried about of winds; trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots; raging waves of the sea, foaming out of their own shame; wandering stars to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever. And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these . . ." Talk about dhvani and santarasa! The buried denotative core here is trivial, but the words! The words evoke awesome all! No wonder Melville so loved this passage! It says nothing and yet it says everything! Even by evoking Enoch, that most pseudo-apocryphal book, as an authority, and therefore to anything and everything else! (And more: in reading verse 11, a passing reference, kai tei antilogia tou Kore apolonto, literally translated: "and to the contrary saying of the Kore (supposedly the Old Testament "Korah") they destroyed themselves", The Kingdom Interlinear Translation of the Greek Scriptures. Why couldn’t this reference be, considering the outsidedness of Enoch, to Kore, the Maiden, Proserpina? Wouldn’t that be exactly the way a Greek would read it?

(20) Think of that actual pottery jar shard found with the name of Themistokles on it, nominating him for ostracizing! What was the man thinking who wrote it! Was Themistokles, the savior of Athens and all Hellas and the entire West, considered too big for his pants? Was the writer a political rival? This stabs out of history like a broken mirror shard.

(19) Pg. 165 including footnote 15 on pg. 172: Abhinavagupta, Paratrisika Vivarana (A Trident of Wisdom) trans. Jaideva Singh, State University of New York Press, Albany,

1989

(20) Pg. 142-143, Lawrence, David Peter, Rediscovering God with Transcendental Argument, SUNY, 1999. This is a really very intelligent book about Abhinavagupta’s pratyabhijna system of ‘recognition’ whose unfortunate defect of descending into Anselmian verbal argument games for the existence of God is a minor defect and somewhat entertaining. His comment here about Shankara is quite to the point.