I have no answer if there is no God.

Jacobi's remarkable letter to Fichte. I haven't read all of it, but it's really good and worth a perusal. (Came to mind while reading Heidegger on Nietzsche. The similarities are very interesting to ponder.) Here is a good part:

I do not see why I should not be allowed to prefer my Philosophy of Not-Knowing to the Philosophical Knowing of Nothing [i.e. to Enlightenment philosophy]. Truly, my dear Fichte, it would not vex me if you, or whoever it might be, want to call what I contrast to your philosophy, which I chide as nihilism, 'chimerism'. I have made a display in all of my writings of my Not-Knowing; I have so boasted of being unknowledgeable with knowledge.

A great and still timely piece.

Falling Into Metaphysics

Heidegger, The Word of Nietzsche:

Every metaphysics of metaphysics, and every logic of philosophy, that in any way whatever attempts to climb beyond metaphysics falls back most surely beneath metaphysics, without knowing where, precisely in doing so, it has fallen.

It would be nice to know if Heidegger is intentionally alluding to the sense of "falling" in Being and Time, and whether he is suggesting that as we fall into the They (the social world), in flight from dread and death and the frightening sense of our own being-in-the-world, we also fall into metaphysics? As Heidegger says "That dread is dread in the face of dread." If so, it would seem that being-toward-death itself becomes a means to recollecting Being. Also, with regard to the famous "God is dead" section from The Gay Science:

Perhaps we will no longer pass by so quickly without hearing what is said at the beginning of the passage that has been elucidated: that the madman "cried incessantly: I seek God! I seek God!"

Funny how often I myself have passed over these lines. What do they mean? Heidegger suggests that God dies because the people have forgotten Being in their metaphysical "idle babble." On this one thing I find myself almost always in agreement with Heidegger, for whom philosophy and thinking itself should become a humbling of oneself before God. And so the question, which retains all of its religious weight I think, is simply: where have we fallen?

Goethe

"Just have the courage to give yourself up to first impressions...don't think all the time that everything must be pointless if it lacks an abstract thought or idea."

Goethe to Eckermann

The Paradox of the Ego

When there is an "I" that looks at itself and says "mine" then questions of where worlds and heads reside go from being jokes to questions of metaphyisical immediacy.

"'I' you say, and you are proud of the word. But greater is that in which you do not wish to have faith-- your body and its great reason: that does not say 'I,' but does 'I'"
Nietzsche

Before one gets to the paradox of idealism, it may be fruitful to consider when and why the head stepped out of my head and said "I" in bold defiance!

The Paradox of Idealism

How can the world be in my head but my head be in the world?

Huh? Part Two

Thought I'd make a sequel to my original Huh? post. This one is from Niklas Luhmann, another legendarily difficult thinker, but though I don't expect this to make sense outside if its (considerable) context, the gist of it is pretty close to what Heidegger says in my original post. At the very least, it will give you an idea of what it is like reading a very interesting and fairly unknown thinker at the moment:

The system is formed out of unstable elements, which endure only for a short time or even, like actions, have no duration of their own but pass away in their very coming to be. Viewed chronologically, every event, of course, takes up a certain amount of clock time. But the system itself determines the length of time during which an element is treated as a unity that cannot be further dissolved; that period has a conferred, not an ontological character. Accordingly, an adequately stable system is composed of unstable elements. It owes its stability to itself, not to its elements; it constructs itself upon a foundation that is entirely not "there," and this is precisely the sense in which it is autopoeitic.

Whew! To be honest, though, that's one of the least difficult passages. Luhmann is a strange writer. He uses exclamation points more than any other philosopher (and I insist on this term for him) I have read. He seems to find his whole theory to be vaguely amusing (a bad sign?). On the other hand, I find reading him to be strangely pleasureable, and I believe someone somewhere said it's like a cold shower.

Emerson, Kant, Cavell

Hopefully this is just part one, but the idea is to do a series of posts on Cavell and Emerson. Here I just begin with Cavell's notion of skepticism.

Stanley Cavell, in Emerson, Coleridge, Kant:

Philosophy's essential business has become the response to skepticism, as if philosophy's business has essentially become the question of its own existence [here we might add to Cavell's statement a rejoinder from Luhmann that the business of all systems is their autopoietic reproduction];...that in philosophy the task is associated with the overcoming, or say critique, of metaphysics, and in literature with the domestication of the fantastic and the transcendentalizing of the domestic, call these movements the internalization, or subjectivizing, or democratizing, of philosophy; and that this communication between philosophy and literature, or the refusal of communication, is something that causes romanticism.

To understand Cavell you have to understand what he calls the "settlement" with skepticism that he finds in Kant. Thankfully, Cavell provides a 5 point summary of the entire Critique of Pure Reason:

(1)Experience is constituted by appearances. (2) Appearances are of something else, which accordingly cannot itself appear. (3) All and only functions of experience can be known; these are our categories of the understanding. (4) It follows that the something else--that of which appearances are appearances, whose existence we must grant--cannot be known. In discovering this limitation of reason, reason proves its power to itself, over itself. (5) Moreover, since it is unavoidable for our reason to be drawn to think about this unknowable ground of appearance, reason reveals itself to itself in this necessity also.

This settlement with skepticism has the effect of dividing us from the world, cutting us off from the ordinary, as Cavell might say, or encasing us in a "prison of glass" as Emerson would say. But by splitting the world in two like this, a third world is created, one of the middle. (I am reminded of Heidegger's remark in Being and Time that Dasein is in its ontic constitution an ontological being.) Cavell writes:

The dissatisfaction with such a settlement as Kant's is relatively easy to state. To settle with skepticism, to assure us that we do know the existence of the world or, rather, that what we understand as knowledge is of the world, the price Kant asks us to pay is to cede any claim to know the thing in itself, to grant that human knowledge is not of things as they are in themselves. You don't--do you?--have to be a romantic to feel sometimes about that settlement: Thanks for nothing.

"Freedom is necessary," Emerson writes in Fate. The antinomies are absolutely irresolvable, and yet they stand. Kant's vision is of two worlds,

"one of which is necessary to the satisfaction of human Understanding, the other to the satisfaction of human Reason. One romantic use for this idea of two worlds lies in its accounting for the human being's dissatisfaction with, as it were, itself. [Which perhaps reaches one of its highpoints in Schopenhauer, and, in a reverse fashion, Nietzsche.] It appreciates the ambivalence in Kant's central idea of limitation, that we simultaneously crave its comfort and crave escape from its comfort..as if the best proof of human existence were its power to yearn, as if for its better, or other, existence.

So the desire is concomitant with that desire's impossible satisfaction: to know the world. To know it sexually? Yes, in a literal and metaphoric sense. To know it as Hamlet and Othello wanted to know it, and as Lear was unwilling to face the illusions of his knowledge. Only Hamlet escapes his desire ("Let be"), but not his death.

The settlement with skepticism makes us homeless. Cavell memorably calls the philosopher the "hobo of thought." I like this line because of its humility. Philosophers are not wandering kings, but beggars. But the question that faces the skeptic, as it faced Shakespeare's protagonists, is how to face the world when it has hollowed itself out, when it becomes a dream, when I become a ghost that cannot but pass through the objects I wish to touch. What Cavell wishes to accomplish through philosophy is to place the question of your redemption (the possibility, the impossibility, of "knowing," in all the senses of that word, the world) before you. What he will ask of you is not an aversion, an active deferral (a deconstruction?), of the world, but its relinquishment. A passivity (Gelassenheit?) towards the world that, at bottom, and we must be frank here, accepts death. Perhaps we cannot seize hold of death (one interpretation of Heidegger) but we can be given it indirectly through a willingness to let our life pass away.

The question I'll try to turn to next time (if there is one) is what the stakes are in Cavell's attempt to retrieve Emerson for philosophy, and just what philosophy becomes under these conditions, a question that ultimately becomes about Wittgenstein's "outside language games" and their impossibility. There is no language of the outside, but can the outside be included as a necessary part of the inside language? The paradox of philosophy: you cannot indicate an "outside" and have it remain outside. But what if you suggest that outsides are a function of any number of particular insides? Could one system observe another and see the outside of that sytem? That's Luhmann's gambit.

Communism or Fascism

Here is an interesting article by Zizek. An old topic, really, and it simply rehearses the old leftist problem of how to oppose totalitarian ideologies without adopting (at least implicitly) their own. Kind of a pointless academic problem really, but I thought this passage pretty interesting:

Till now, to put it straightforwardly, Stalinism hasn’t been rejected in the same way as Nazism. We are fully aware of its monstrous aspects, but still find Ostalgie acceptable: you can make Goodbye Lenin!, but Goodbye Hitler! is unthinkable. Why? To take another example: in Germany, many CDs featuring old East German Revolutionary and Party songs, from ‘Stalin, Freund, Genosse’ to ‘Die Partei hat immer Recht’, are easy to find. You would have to look rather harder for a collection of Nazi songs. Even at this anecdotal level, the difference between the Nazi and Stalinist universes is clear, just as it is when we recall that in the Stalinist show trials, the accused had publicly to confess his crimes and give an account of how he came to commit them, whereas the Nazis would never have required a Jew to confess that he was involved in a Jewish plot against the German nation. The reason is clear. Stalinism conceived itself as part of the Enlightenment tradition, according to which, truth being accessible to any rational man, no matter how depraved, everyone must be regarded as responsible for his crimes. But for the Nazis the guilt of the Jews was a fact of their biological constitution: there was no need to prove they were guilty, since they were guilty by virtue of being Jews.

He goes on. What I think bothers me about these discussions, at bottom, is the need to pick the "the incomparable evil of the 20th century." The idea must be that if we can pick the most evil ideology then somehow we can have a solid moral foundation to stand on: we're against that. Absolute good is just replaced by absolute evil, but it's just a negative version of the same foundational belief. I'm also not sure I can buy the idea that Stalinism was the perversion of an "authentic" revolution while Fascism was from the beginning a perversion of one. Only a doctrinaire Marxist, a strict materialist, would be able to distinquish that sharply between racial and class antagonisms. I'm not prepared to do that, nor can I see any real basis for doing so that doesn't depend a priori on a flawed materialist theoretical position. This article seems like a last gasp to defend a worn-out totalizing ideology.

The Fall

"Nothing is more foreign to our way of thinking than the earth in the middle of the silent universe and having neither the meaning that man gives things, nor the meaninglessness of things as soon as we try to imagine them without a consciousness that reflects them."
G. Bataille

This is the catch of metaphysics. A metaphysics that concerns itself with its questions as objects tends toward either valuation or devaluation of those objects-- hence it is thrown into a dizzying vacillation between meaning and meaninglessness and is never capable of penetrating a constructed surface. What is needed is a metaphysics without parachutes that is capable of going down, a metaphysics of descent-- terrifying and plunging descent.

"Only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified."
F. Nietzsche

Nietzsche is still grasping for justification despite his humble claims of affirmation. It is probable that existence and the world, under the gaze of a conscious eye, will not be justified. Although existence and the world will likely never be justified as an aesthetic phenomenon, it may sing from the lips of a metaphysician of descent through an aesthetic medium.

"Poetry describes nothing that does not slip toward the unknowable...but this poetry is only a way by which a man goes from a world full of meaning to the final dislocation of meanings, of all meaning, which soon proves to be unavoidable."
G. Bataille

But what does it matter? Why should I concern myself with the songs of these new metaphysicians of descent? By posing the question I have already returned to that age-old refrain. I am spun into a desperate sickness. The question is really one of paralysis-- vertical or horizontal paralysis.