Abhinavagupta

Monday, January 24, 2000

I have been reading AESTHETIC RAPTURE. It is very clear and to the point, especially helpful on sthayibhava and vibhava, but so far (p. 28) does not have the passion and charm that SANTRASA did. One point of comparison between Abhinavagupta and Heidegger is their attitudes toward tradition. Abhinavgupta's assumption of his philosophic tradition is like Heidegger's friendly destruction of Aristotle. "Liberation from the tradition is an ever new appropriation of its newly recognized strengths"

(FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS p. 352). In other words, he clarifies the ground from where he starts, specifically defining terms as they were originally meant in the original context, which both perpetuates that tradition in one way and yet utterly destroys what ordinary people regard as tradition, inherited literally from their fathers and father figures without question, religiously, inconsistent with the experience of reality.

Referring in his unpublished 1919 review of Karl Jasper's Psychology of Worldviews to "falling away" of "our concrete and factical life experience" "into the 'objective' kinds of significance in the experienceable world around it", in which "the self quickly becomes experienced as having an objectified kind of significance (personality, ideal type of humanity)". "The more the experienced and known past works its way into our own present situation in the form of an objective tradition, the more the self is understood in this objectified manner . . . Factical life is characteristically loaded down with tradition in this way . . . the most pernicious effects of this loading down are mainly to be found precisely in the resulting experiences of having-oneself in the world of the self . . . the concrete possibility of bringing phenomena of existence into view and explicating them in a genuine kind of conceptuality can be opened up for us only when the concrete tradition experienced as still at work . . . has been deconstructed with an eye to the question of the ways and means of explicating our actual experience of the self, and when as a result of this destruction the basic experiences that have become the effective motives for our thought have been brought into relief and discussed regarding their primordiality." So there is tradition and tradition, the homely kind where the Bible is a comforting support in the trials of everyday life, and the terrible kind that rips away support by finding the author of Ecclesiastes an atheist, the God of Job an ethically unbound omnipotent bully with whom Job can only be in accord by saying, "Though he slay me, yet shall I trust in him; but I shall maintain my own ways before him," the Song of Songs a sex manual, and in Mark, when Jesus despairs, Mark makes a joke about it (Who does Bible commentary nailed to a cross?), Jesus then dies--and that's all folks! This is not 'deconstruction', this is destruction. The two are not interchangeable as most scholars think. It shows incomprehension of the power and importance of the dynamic of destructive questioning that Heidegger starts BEING AND TIME with and continuously invokes throughout his works. He means it when he says he wants to put something in question--or put to the question like the Grand Inquisitor. Whatever he puts in question never looks the same afterwards. He deliberately makes it unfamiliar! unheimlich!

Then, you say, why the banal and naive assumption of the nationalist tradition of the Nazis? I don't know. There is a great blank here, and I don't know if I want to know the answer. Maybe it does fit into some grand scheme. I think of Dostoyevsky and his supposedly naive born-again Christianity. And then I think of Raskolnikov's sullen indifference to Sonia's religiosity, of Ragozhin, Stavrogin, Peter Verkovensky, Kirillov, the brothers Karamazov: idealistic Ivan and black Smirdyakov (in Russian the name is supposed to suggest something obscene) who fulfils Ivan's ideas in reality. These, Dostoyevsky's most vivid creations, completely undermine any naive Christian world view. Let us put it bluntly: it is utterly impossible for Dostoyevsky to create such convincing, converting, villains while making such saccharin Christians as Sonia, Prince Myshkin, and Aloysha the true heros of his books. And maybe he doesn't. Father Zozyma is not sugary, and he bows down to Dimitri not because Dimitri has or will have any great faith, but purely because of Zozyma's foresight of Dimitri's great suffering in and by itself. Dimitri's only spiritual commitment is to being a violently emotional airhead (an animal?), but he is going to share the same fate as Raskolnikov--and Dostoyevsky! And (this may be apocryphal) supposedly in the sequel to The Brothers Karamazov Aloysha blows up the czar. Dostoyevsky's born-again Christianity is a very strange thing. Remember how Holbein the Elder's painting of the dead and rotting Jesus intrudes into The Idiot? Could this strange and supposed incompatibility also exist between Heidegger's naive Nazism and his drastically logical philosophy? Am I letting in the back door what I threw out the front?

Jacques Derrida supposedly wants to throw out or throw over ethics as such or at least a naive conception of ethics. Yet pursuing this consistently puts him in an embarrassing confrontation with Heidegger's Nazism which he rejects only for the most obscure (to me, and my lack of comprehension of what he is trying to say in On Spirit) reasons (And he is compromised again by his being, at least at one time, a Maoist which brings up not only the extermination of millions in China simply for the reason they were slightly more intelligent and independent than the most stupid dolt and its corollary the holocaust in Cambodia by the Maoist Pol Pot. Is this simply "guilt by association"? But then what of the Germans in the Third Reich, i. e., "They must have known"? But this is also the reason why I pointed out that Heidegger committed specific acts against specific people. That is no longer guilt by association.).

But in being human, in being within the inescapable inauthentic everyday constantly, one cannot escape naive morality. One can simply do as Aristotle: build the project of your self upon the past you have irrevocably received from others, i. e., ethics as tradition, NOT philosophy. To reject ethics, then, is to reject what you are, something impossible to do. But what is needed is to turn around as it were, to look back to where you once were and still are, and study existence. Is this an irrational and impossible stance? Like the Cretan philosopher saying, "All Cretans are liars"?

Now to the end of THE FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS OF METAPHYSICS if I can. It is dry and confusing. Heidegger talks of "being free in an originary sense" (p. 343) which is utterly beyond us in the here and now kept away in its "pre-logical manifestness". Is it a freedom that never existed as dasein consciously deciding within a here and now? "We can see more and more clearly (is he being ironic? because he must know he is becoming more and more obscure. Is there a deliberate obfuscation of "wholeness" and the "world-openess" he is trying to describe here?) in particular respects the essential contrast between the being open of the animal and the world-openess of man

(but then on pg. 353, he says "This indicates to begin with that this 'as a whole' is not tailored to any particular area nor even a particular species of beings" which he immediately obfuscates afterwards, saying both that it refers to manifestness of beings and yet "This manifold, however, is poorly comprehended, or is not comprehended at all, if we take it merely as a colorful multiplicity of things at hand."). Man's being open is a being held toward . . . (by what? whom?), whereas the animal's being open is a being taken by . . . (which is an exact description of the 'They' of everydayness, the ordinary, the objectified self) and thereby a being absorbed into its encircling ring (which also applies to Heidegger's description of regioning, a fundamental process of thinking like categorizing)." He remains deliberately ambivalent about the animality of man. Or rather he remains deliberately ambivalent about, "What is man?"