Monday, March 01, 2004

Ontologicalethics

Re: FW: [Gnothi] What Is Called Thinking? II. 8-9

This is also for the consumption and ruthless use of Jud Evans as is anything I write.

POMONOMO: I agree with what Gary seems to be saying about reason. Strictly speaking, it too (glorious reason) ends in nihilism. As Aristotle says, "of things capable of being otherwise we do not know, when they have passed outside of our observation, whether they exist or not." (Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, 3, 1139b21-22).

GCM: Thanks for reminding me of the Aristotle. I had read it, marked it . . . and forgot it. It is excellent in itself and excellent to this purpose. I might be assuming things about what you think "nihilism" means, and, thinking it through slightly, I find it FAR from clear! It 'originated' with Ivan Turgenev . . . I think . . . in a very bad novel (truly JUST a personal opinion) called FATHERS AND SONS. Turgenev's primary point was that the hero-son held only the knowledge of science and its continuing progress as the ONLY valid value, then falling in love with someone that can noy accept him, in an emotional turmoil his extremely naive and primitive value system (A "value system" in Nihilism? Come on!) cannot handle, he deliberately contracts a deadly infection and appropriately dies to everyones', especially his father and mother, great sadness and much tearing.

BUT it goes on to Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche from, unfortunately, Turgenev. Dostoyevsky, as a novelist, is much more sophisticated than Turgenev (on the other hand, I could never get in his short stories whereas Turgenev's NOTEBOOK OF A HUNTER, a collection of short stories, is one of the greatest ever written and deeply influential on Ernest Hemingway [another 'nihilist'] who expressed his admiration somewhere). Now, the nihilist as exulting in his freedom to do anything whatsoever is developed from Dostoyevsky from CRIME AND PUNISHMENT on with greater and greater depth. CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, now that I think of it, is a sort of unsentimental rewriting of FATHERS AND SONS. But Dostoyevsky is a truly born-again Christian, and PLEASE don't tell me "born-again" Christians MUST be stupid and illiterate. Dostoyevsky could be incredibly stupid and totally insensitive, i. e., his vicious antisemitism, his inability to govern his gambling craze, but this also had to do with his passions which is also why he was a born-again Christian in the first place. PASSION is what Dostoyevsky is all about. Cool minded people are literally worthless, "shit", "Smerdyakov" (JUD EVANS!!!! Do you remember enough of your Russian to confirm this? I think I read somewhere "Smerdyakov" met approximately "shit-eater"???). If you were smart, you also had to have uncontrollable passions!!!! This applies to Raskolnikov, Svigrailov, Rogazin, even the Christian idiot Prince Myshkin, the 'nihilist' Hippolite, Shatov the righteous revolutionary who will not murder, Kirillov the same who commits suicide for the 'cause, Peter Verkovensky who has all the murderous, devilish cold steel passion of Lenin, but most immenently Stavrogin, in THE DEVILS or POSSESSED, the prince of ULTIMATE and lothsome evil (child-rapist/murder) who also has a kind heart for cripples. This is NOT sentimentalism on Dostoyevsky's part but the dicotomy of unbounded passions, for instance, the scene where a pompous, vulgar official says "No one can lead me around by the nose!" and Stravrogin grabs with his iron fingers by the nose and leads him around the room squealing like a pig. I don't think he even says much or anything at all. HE JUST DOES IT!

And then you have the ultimate definition in three different people in THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, the monstrous father Fyodor with terrible and whimsical passions he never even tries to govern, the intellectual Ivan Karamazov who 'thinks' nihilism but never DOES it, and the whimpy nerd Smerdyakov with no passion whatsoever WHO PERFORMS ACCORDING TO WHAT IVAN SAYS!!!! Ivan says, "If there is no God, then everything is permitted." When he finds Smerdyakov has killed his father based on that and other obscure words he really meant nothing by, he is shocked into a mental collapse to such an extent he cannot help his good hearted, bad tempered brother Dimitri, accused of the father's murder, at the trial. Dostoyevsky is saying BOTH that A) nihilism is gutless and passionless and has to be inspired to action by others, and B) it is stupid when someone actually thinks about the real consequences of one's words. Nihilism is belief in nothing and therefore conceptually cancels itself out.

Where the monk Aloysha fits in all this is a matter for concern and thought because A) he essentially condemns no one, though he doesn't like Smerdyakov, B) he listens with passionate instensity to Ivan's statements that there could be no God because of the horrors such a conscienceless God lets happen to innocent children, AND THEN the brilliant defense of the CATHOLIC CHURCH, the correctness--not "rightness"--of which has been bothering me much as of late, in "The Tale of the Grand Inquisitor." Paul Elie has written a good book (THE LIFE YOU SAVE MAY BE YOUR OWN: An American Pilgrimage, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003) on four 20th Century Catholic writers, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, and Dorothy Day, all of whom were deeply influenced by Dostoyevsky with Percy (along with his friend Shelby Foote) and Day crucially and fundamentally so. Back to Aloysha, C) after the novel was published and shortly before he died, Dostoyevsky said he was going to write a sequel in which Aloysha kills the Czar. I don't think that would have made it past the censors.

Now, reading around the Aristotle you referred to, I found a key passage which clarifies many problems. Almost all of the NICOMACHIAN ETHICS is a search for balance between extremes. The judge is not to judge strictly by the letter of the law nor the effect of the case upon his feelings, but is to search for an alternative that most rationally satifies both parties. At the beginning of book VI you refered to, Aristotle says, "Since we have previously said that one ought to choose that which is intermediate, not the excess or the defect, and that the intermediate is determined by the dictates of reason . . ." VI, 1, 1138b18-20.

I would argue "intermediacy" is the fundamental description of human nature itself. It is the balance between the only objective and sure standard the mind can honestly accept, reason, and the world one must live IN but not necessarily OF, as implied in Paul, that is, the "world" of Heidegger as "understanding", which is "tradition," "custom", and "common sense" in David Hume who is forced most reluctantly to accept God and politically correct Anglican Christianity as part of the "world" he lives in, and diametrically is turned by John Henry Cardinal Newman into a ruthless but perfecally logically consistent defense of Cristianity as valid by tradition and custom, and, using the rational falculty as David Hume would to work out an 'acceptable' "world" to one's taste, he demonstrates with the inevitability of a tank rolling over a trench in the sand filled with Iraqi soldiers, that if you are a Christian, and wish to be honest, logical, and consistent, one must be a Catholic. As Heidegger, in a contradictory fashion, and Hume in a consistent fashion, reject all concepts related to "identity" as "object", "thing", "personality", "self", "soul", subjectivity", in favor of pure experience unbounded and undefinable by words in actual pure reality, it would be interesting to know what John Henry Newman thought along these lines because they were dealt with, but with great difficulty, by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham and very possibility by other late Scholastics (Jean Gerson?).

The state of "intermediacy" does not tell you what is 'right' or 'wrong', it just tells you when you are off balance. Now, with seeming but not real contradiction, Dostoyevsky made a whole life out of being unbalanced but in such a consistent way, I think in a terrifying way, it comes out --- 'balanced'. It is certainly the way of pure, unbounded passion.

If anybody really wants me to write more about this, i shall do so later.

POMONOMONO: Everything in our sublunary world moves – thus Nietzsche is right when he says (GS 351) that philosophers don't believe that there are any men of knowledge. Unfortunately, in order for society and civilization to exist there must be knowledge and knowers...

I also like Gary's ruminations on Hume/Heidegger and I especially like his pushing the text of Hume towards considerations of nihilism. I had always thought that what awoke Kant from his `dogmatic slumbers' wasn't Hume's doubts, any idiot can doubt – but understanding the consequences of those doubts. With David Hume our world begins; Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl and Heidegger. The question is how to deal with the fact that we can all say to ourselves, "I'm my own man

("ownness") but I don't know who/what made me this way." Nobody knows where they come from; nobody knows where they are going...

This question – "Why is there something rather than nothing at all" – is the question philosophia generalis attempts to answer. The other question that follows from the above considerations – "What should we do next" – is the question political philosophy addresses. These are in no way the same question... political philosophy starts with and accepts the facticity of the world and human relations and goes from there. Both the `good' and the `bad' are "not something to be avoided or feel guilty for but is the essence of pragmatic action" as Gary said of sin.

On the matter of discord between Heidegger and Husserl I am not certain. But off the top of my head I think that Hume is prepared to accept the given as given. (As Gary also says, "since one cannot, in considering action, step outside of one's tradition or present context.") This `given' is whatever we have to deal with. The problem with the phenomenological method is that it is a method – and therefore its `view' is not of the given but of the result of the imposition of a philosophical method on the given.

As to Heidegger's atheism, he is something of an inverted Carlyle. Yes? Nietzsche said, "he is an English atheist who makes it a point of honor not to be one." (TI, Skirmishes, 12) Heidegger is a German believer who makes it a point of honor not to be one. – Or so it seems to me. I don't read much literature any more, having pretty much stopped reading it in the early eighties. There is only so much time in the day. So I will pass on Flannery and Hannibal.

Kang said, "Thinking, Heidegger clearly sees reason as something derivative, secondary. Secondary to what? To thinking, it would seem, in the lectures on Thinking." Well, maybe from these lectures. Thinking is, I think for Heidegger, secondary to (and derivative of) the facticity of the world. The place of reason in SZ is a very interesting topic. I think we all would love to see the essay of Professor Crowell. (I assume he is one of your Professors?)

Now for nihilism. – I do think Nietzsche was a metaphysical, epistemological nihilist. He thinks that these are ultimately ungroundable in anything. There are no men of knowledge… But he is not an ethical or political nihilist. Values aren't discovered – they are created. Nietzsche understands himself to be the creator of values and thus the anti-nihilist without peer. Nihilism also has, I think, several senses. There is the personal nihilism of the cussed individual. A society is nihilistic when it no longer has any values that the members of that society all accept. And, as Nietzsche indicates in BGE, the unwillingness and inability of a superior person to believe in a `noble lie' is also nihilism. Gary, Kang, can you, are you prepared to, believe an effective fairy tale?

Gary said, "Nihilism is "what-is" as Flannery O'Connor says. It is reality." It is a groundless reality. Once it is grounded by the creation of values this will no longer be thought to be so. Nihilism as lack of motivation isn't a problem because those people ("Nothing is true, nothing is permitted.") don't do anything. The problem of justification is only `solved' by the creation of new values.

I think for Nietzsche perpectivism is, in some sense, fundamental. In BGE Nietzsche mentions perspectivism long before sections 7+8 which draws our attention to the `noble' lies and convictions of the philosophers. The will-to-power itself is only first mentioned, not coincidentally, in section 9. – Long after this distinction was drawn. Kang said, "order of rank is not an artifact of perspective, not perspectival. order of rank is "universal truth."" Order of rank is, however, an artifact (or part) of the Whole. It can be treated as a universal truth by Nietzsche (and Plato) because order of rank is co-extensive with humanity, the existence of humanity. – Order of rank is a local truth that is, for all human concerns, universal and permanent. Gary said, "he [Nietzsche] acknowledges not as any universally applicable TRUTH but is simply his uniquely individual perception of the world." I think this misses the purpose in Nietzsche. I understand him to be making a world for all. But, until it is made, one can always understand him in this (Gary's) manner.

Joe

--- In Gnothi@yahoogroups.com, "Kang Chen" <kchen28@h... wrote:

gary, just a quick response before i start my Zarathustra essay.

i cannot speak to the particulars of comparing BT to THN, since i never read even a quarter of the latter book (damn my shoddy undergraduate education! and hume was one of the precious few pre-

20th century philosophers we were allowed to read in the curriculum! but then, only as a stuttering kant, who himself was definitely surpassed by wittgenstein and progeny). but as is clear even from the intro to Thinking, heidegger clearly sees reason as something derivative, secondary. secondary to what? to thinking, it would seem, in the lectures on Thinking.

as chance would have it, professor crowell has sought to discern the place of reason in SZ. i quote from a draft manuscript.

"The self, which as such has to lay the ground [Grund] for itself, can never get that ground into its power; and yet it has to take over being the ground existingly [existierend]." ... The burden of my argument is to show that "taking over being-a-ground" must be understood as including a reference to ground as reason ... What, then, is to be understood by "reason"? The link between the idea of conscience as "taking over being-a-ground" and the concept of ground as reason is to be found in the character of conscience as a call, that is, in its character as discourse.

i will see about posting his manuscript.

i agree that heid's phenomenology probably divides him from hume, since i do not think heid would deny the "reality of external objects." i refer to the nerve of the argument in "The Origin of the Work of Art" re the thingness of things and quote one sentence from the middle of that argument: "Much closer to us than any sensation are the things themselves" (p. 26 of Poetry, Language, Thought). furthermore, in defense of what you call objective Idealism, i refer to sokolowski's Introduction to Phenomenology, pp. 14-15, 61-65. chapters 5 and 9 are also highly pertinent. one quote in defense of husserl in particular: "Husserl has a much more subtle treatment of absence and difference than Derrida gives him credit for" (p. 225). i grant what you say about physical torture, but i would not draw a skeptical conclusion. it is dangerous to begin with the extreme situation.

i will await your final verdict on hemming. to him i would add Frank Schalow's Heidegger and the Quest for the sacred. i do not recommend it, not having read it, but i mean to read it, and it might interest you. silence, eh? so, theology as mysticism? i wonder how one would then account for the speech(es) of god(s). i suppose the final Q is, silent contemplation or hermeneutics?

comments below on hannibal.

From: Gary Moore

Wed, 25 Feb 2004

Dear Kang Chen and Pomonomo,

What I have been reading of WHAT IS CALLED THINKING is great!

I have some problems that have been bothering me and I would like to at least begin to air them out here.

You'll may or may not approve of my comparison of BEING AND TIME with Hume's A TREATISE OF HUMAN NATURE but as time goes on I keep seeing closer and closer correspondences. One such issue that I find much more clearly deleniated as an aporia, crux, irresolvable problem is the conflict between strict reason, the only standard of judgment that has any claim (and only a claim) to being external, truly objective, and 'enduring' through time as the same naturally and necessarily resolves itself as Pyrronistic or Radical Scepticism because A) it is pure self-consistency and B) the other basis of knowledge, temporal, experiential 'knowledge' that forces itself upon us unwillingly, sense impressions in the most inclusive sense of the term, is, as described wholly irrational. Heidegger has a wonderful term for this, "existential solipsism", which works because it A) seems so self-contradictory yet B) exactly describes Dasein's actual situation: seemingly absolutely self-centered yet totally created from elements from elsewhere. "I'm my own man ("ownness") but I don't know who/what made me this way." Both Hume and Heidegger necessarily reject Radical Scepticism because it completely undercuts all motivation and action which is absolutely dependent on presuppositions that have come from that partially known, mostly unknown "elsewhere." That we must accept our presuppositions as "always already" in place accords with Heidegger's very early concept of ruinaz and SuZ's "falling" which he states has no moral connotation of falling from innocence and coming into "original sin" although these concepts certainly do have a close correspondence. The main difference I can see for the first time right now is that such "original sin" is not something to be avoided or feel guilty for but is the essence of pragmatic action, is useful and necessary, and, as both Hume and Heidegger state needs to be rationally criticized, as a matter of internal consistency, since one cannot, in considering action, step outside of one's tradition or present context.

One matter od discord, however, between Hume and Heidegger may be Heidegger's phenomenology and, hence, Husserl who loved Hume) which may still retain some of Husserl's Idealism in the concept of the experience of "presence" of an indiovidual phenomena in its uniqueness. Unless I am interpreting this naively, and I think I have some good grounds for thinking I am not (for one thing, the results of the last degrees of physical torture when not only words but the identity of physical objects is lost in a mass of undifferentiated sensation), this seems merely the last gasp of an objective Idealism defending the reality of external objects which Hume so thoroughly destroys in his TREATISE. What do ya'll think?

On the matter of god versus gods your professor mentions in his letter, I am slowly reading a book from Notre Dame University Press called HEIDEGGER'S ATHEISM by Laurence Paul Hemming, a Catholic theologian, which is giving an extremely good, detailed breakdown of what Heidegger actually thought about God and theological thinking which, very precipitously I may am, may have the conclusion the only valid theological language is utter silence. Hemming does place Heidegger in a very complex fashion in opposition to monotheistic concepts of God but I have only a very preliminary conception of this so far.

What is of additional interest is that some good Catholic novelists have taken on this problem a number of years ago, saying in one fashion or another that theological language is dead. And if theological language is dead, then only the language of atheism and sin is still alive. This applies to some extent to Percy Walker and maybe Graham Greene, but I really know little of them. However, Flannery O'Connor is absolutely fascinating in this regard. There are critics of her that say of her fiction writings that they cannot tell if she is an atheist pretending to be a Catholic or a Catholic pretending to be an athiest. In her private letters and essays, she states 'plainly' she is a believing Christian Catholic unequivocally. However, she also makes it very plain that what that profession means is A) unequivocably stated in the context of the real world we are forced to live in, and B), just like in Hume, one has to put up with a whole hell of a lot one can NEVER know. In a religion and Church noted for always having an answer for absolutely everything, she essentially shows she, at least, has an "ANSWER" to nothing, nothing at all. No wonder people keep comparing her to Kafka whose resemblance she rejects--mainly because he bores her. And once you get use to her, she is rarely boring. Somewhere she says the opposite of good is not evil, which is a hatred of good and therefore a kind of love, but indifference. And on that point I have to agree witrh her. In some ways, she--even in her personal statements-- seems to have dropped the distinction of good versus evil for honest versus stupid or ridiculous or duplicitous as well as self-duplicitous and the "normal" image of man as utterly ludicrous and freakish. The "average man" to her is an abomination and a monster.

What're ya'lls thoughts on the particular matters?

ALSO: Below is a segment from my commentary on Thomas Harris' Hannibal Lecter Series I would like to have your thoughts on sinbce I keep changing it constantly and caint make up my mind.

GCM: Nietzsche can not be labeled a nihilist at all. A nihilist literally can do nothing because he believes in nothing, has no motivation whatsoever—which logically applies only to the dead. All of his effort is to defy it since he cannot refute it. This is shown must clearly in the parable of the snake and the shepherd in THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA, Third Part, "The Vision and the Riddle," section 2. What nihilism says is true. This is the same as Radical Pyrronistic Scepticism with David Hume. But you can live and act with neither. You bit the head off nihilism and swallow it. You overcome nihilism, you never refute it. Nihilism is "what-is" as Flannery O'Connor says. It is reality. It is what you have to deal with because of pain. You must act, and you must use in order to act what you have at-hand—which is language which is ALWAYS other peoples' language and never your private language as Wittgenstein would say.

KC: well, as you say, man always has a motivation. so that is not the type of nihilism dostoevsky or nietzsche is worried about. nihilism as a philosophical problem consists not in the absence of motivation but in the absence of the possibility of justifying any motivation, or the menainglessness of all "why" Qs.

GCM: However, few people think the meaning of nihilism through to the bitter end. The same thing happens with the meaning of "atheism." The consideration that all exterior binding of commonly recognized truth of any sort, i. e., the truth value of language itself, is destroyed by a thorough application of both these concepts is rarely taken into account. Ivan Karamazov says, "If God does not exist, then everything is permitted." But what, THEN, can possibly be the standard by which to act? To act at all? To do absolutely anything? Hobbes and Hume deal with this, but they explicitly state an individual MUST come into a compromise relationship with other individuals. Nietzsche's nihilism is perspectival. That is, all he writes he acknowledges not as any universally applicable TRUTH but is simply his uniquely individual perception of the world.

KC: order of rank is not an artifact of perspective, not perspectival. order of rank is "universal truth."