The Western Mind [6] RUC, SPRING 2017 - PowerPoint Presentation

Slide1

The Western Mind [6]

RUC, SPRING 2017Slide2

PART ONE Slide3

ESSAY QUESTIONS

EITHER

Compare and contrast Kant’s understanding of ‘enlightenment’ in his ‘What is Enlightenment?’ (1784) with Foucault’s understanding of the term in his work with the same title (1984).

OR

Analyze

some of the ways in

which Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology and/or Martin Heidegger’s metaphysics

influenced the

philosophy of Emmanuel

Levinas

and/or Jacques Derrida.

Slide4

PART TWO Slide5

Moore, A. W.. The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics (432-435) 1

2

. The Phenomenological

Reduction

: We

make sense of things. How? What are the relations between us and the things of which we make sense that allow for and/or contribute to our making sense of them? How are things given to us? Such are the questions that concern Husserl. Here are two pertinent quotations:  

‘We

have, on the one hand, the fact that all thought and knowledge have as their aim objects or states of affairs, which they putatively ‘hit’ in the sense that the ‘being-in-itself’ of these objects and states is supposedly shown forth … in a multitude of actual or possible meanings, or acts of thought. We have, further, the fact that all thought is

ensouled

by a thought-form which is subject to ideal laws, laws circumscribing the objectivity or ideality of knowledge in general. These facts … provoke questions like: How are we to understand the fact that the intrinsic being of objectivity becomes ‘presented’, ‘apprehended’ in knowledge, and so ends up by becoming subjective? What does it mean to say that the object has ‘being-in-itself’, and is ‘given’ in knowledge? How can the ideality of the universal qua concept or law enter the flux of real mental states and become an epistemic possession of the thinking person? What does the

adæquatio

rei et

intellectus

mean in various cases of knowledge

…?’

(Investigations 1, Vol. II,

Intro,

§

2)

Slide6

Moore, A. W.. The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics (432-435) 2

‘How

can experience as consciousness give or contact an object? How can experiences be mutually legitimated or corrected by means of each other, and not merely replace each other or confirm each other subjectively? … Why are the playing rules, so to speak, of consciousness not irrelevant for things? How is natural science to be comprehensible …, to the extent that it pretends at every step to posit and to know a nature that is in itself – in itself in opposition to the subjective flow of consciousness? (Philosophy, pp. 87–88

)’

Slide7

Moore, A. W.. The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics (432-435) 3

Husserl’s

fundamental idea is that, in the case of our scientific sense-making, indeed in the case of all our normal sense-making concerning things in space and time – all our ‘natural’ sense-making, as I shall call it – there is no prospect of our answering such questions, no prospect of our understanding what it is that we manage to do when we make such sense, by doing more of the same. Partly, he has in mind the threat of vicious circularity (Philosophy, pp. 88–89). But he also believes that our focus would be wrong if we tried to make sense of our natural sense-making by carrying on in the same vein. It is thus that Husserl urges on us what he calls ‘the phenomenological reduction’. This is a methodological tactic whereby we cease temporarily to engage in any natural sense-making. This leaves us free to reflect self-consciously on the sense-making itself. For us to cease to engage in any natural sense-making is not for us to call into question any of the beliefs that we have arrived at as a result of having engaged in it in the past, any of our ‘natural’ beliefs. Still less is it for us to replace any of these beliefs with others, something that in any case we could not

wilfully

do. It is for us to stop being concerned with ‘natural’ matters at all.

Slide8

Moore, A. W.. The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics (432-435) 4

We

are to refuse to allow such a concern, and the miscellaneous beliefs with which it has so far furnished us, to inform this upper-level sense-making project. For example, many of us believe that the sun is an enormous ball of gas whose light takes approximately eight minutes to reach our eyeballs. And we have untold further beliefs that stand in various relations of entailment, justification, and the like to this belief. But to make sense of our conception of the sun we are to ‘bracket’ all of these beliefs. We are to reflect instead on the beliefs themselves, and on what their significance for us is; on what they come to for us. How do our various beliefs about sunshine, say, never mind for the time being sunshine itself, relate to that familiar glare that each of us experiences when standing outdoors (as we suppose) on a bright summer’s day? And what is the exact intrinsic nature of the experience itself, never mind for the time being the facts about light and sight that occasion it?Slide9

Moore, A. W.. The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics (432-435) 5

Here is how Husserl himself characterizes such bracketing:

‘[

It is] an

epoché

of all participation in the cognitions of the objective sciences, an

epoché

of any critical position-taking which is interested in their truth or falsity, even any position on their guiding idea of an objective knowledge of the world…. Within this

epoché

, however, neither the sciences nor the scientists have disappeared for us who practice the

epoché

…. [It is just that] we do not function as sharing [their] interests, as coworkers, etc. (Crisis, §35) When we pursue natural science, we carry out

reflexions

ordered in accord with the logic of experience…. At the phenomenological standpoint, … we ‘place in brackets’ what has been carried out, ‘we do not associate these theses’ with our new inquiries; instead of … carrying them out, we carry out acts of

reflexion

directed towards them…. We now live entirely in such acts of the second level

.’

(Ideas I, §50, emphasis in original)Slide10

Moore, A. W.. The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics (432-435) 6

And here is how he justifies its implementation:

‘How can the

pregivenness

of the life-world become a universal subject of investigation in its own right? Clearly, only through a total change of the natural attitude, such that we no longer live, as heretofore, as human beings within natural existence, constantly effecting the validity of the

pregiven

world; rather, we must constantly deny ourselves this. Only in this way can we arrive at the transformed and novel subject of investigation, '

pregivenness

of the world as such’: the world purely and exclusively as – and in respect to how – it has meaning and ontic validity, and continually attains these in new forms, in our conscious life…. What is required, then, is … a completely unique, universal

epoché

.’ (Crisis, §39, emphasis in original)

The temporary transformation of the ‘natural attitude’ to which Husserl refers here is the temporary suspension of all natural sense-making in

favour

of reflection on that very sense-making. It brings into focus how things are given to us: the appearance of things, the significance of things.Slide11

PART THREE Slide12

MARTIN HEIDEGGER: INTRODUCTION TO METAPHYSICS 1

Chapter

One — The

Fundamental Question of Metaphysics

Why

are there beings at all instead of nothing? That is

the question

. Presumably it is no arbitrary question. "Why are

there beings

at all instead of nothing?"—this is obviously the first of

all questions

. Of course, it is not the first question in the

chronological sense

. Individuals as well as peoples ask many questions in

the course

of their historical passage through time. They explore, investigate

, and

test many sorts of things before they run into the

question "

Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?" Many

never run

into this question at all, if running into the question means

not only

hearing and reading the interrogative sentence as uttered,

but asking

the question, that is, taking a stand on it, posing it,

compelling oneself

into the state of this questioning

. And

yet, we are each touched once, maybe even now and then

, by

the concealed power of this question, without properly

grasping what

is happening to us. In great despair, for example, when

all weight

tends to dwindle away from things and the sense of

things grows

dark, the question looms. Slide13

MARTIN HEIDEGGER: INTRODUCTION TO METAPHYSICS 2

Perhaps it strikes only once, like the muffled tolling of a bell that resounds into

Dasein

and

gradually fades

away. The question is there in heartfelt joy, for then

all things

are transformed and surround us as if for the first time, as if

it were

easier to grasp that they were not, rather than that they are

, and

are as they are.

The question is there in a spell of boredom

, when

we are equally distant from despair and joy, but when

the stubborn

ordinariness of beings lays open a wasteland in which

it makes

no difference to us whether beings are or are not—and then

, in

a distinctive form, the question resonates once again: Why

are there

beings at all instead of nothing

?

But whether this question is asked explicitly, or whether

it merely

passes through our

Dasein

like a fleeting gust of wind,

unrecognized as

a question, whether it becomes more oppressive or

is thrust

away by us again and suppressed under some pretext,

it certainly

is never the first question that we ask

. But

it is the first question in another sense—namely, in rank

. This

can be clarified in three ways. The question "Why are

there beings

at all instead of nothing?" is first in rank for us as the broadest

, as

the deepest, and finally as the most

originary

question.Slide14

MARTIN HEIDEGGER: INTRODUCTION TO METAPHYSICS 3

The question is the broadest in scope. It comes to a halt at

no being

of any kind

whatsoever

. The question embraces all that is

, and

that means not only what is now present at hand in the

broadest sense

, but also what has previously been and what will be in

the future

. The domain of this question is limited only by what

simply is

not and never is: by Nothing. All that is not Nothing comes

into the

question, and in the end even Nothing itself—not, as it were

, because

it is something, a being, for after all we are talking about it

, but

because it "is" Nothing. The scope of our question is so

broad that

we can never exceed it. We are not interrogating this being

or that

being, nor all beings, each in turn; instead, we are asking

from the

start about the whole of what is, or as we say for reasons to

be discussed

later: beings as a whole and as such

.

Just as it is the broadest question, the question is also the deepest

: Why

are there

beings

at all . . . ? Why—that is, what is

the ground

? From what ground do beings come? On what ground

do beings

stand? To what ground do beings go

?

The question

does not

ask this or that about beings—what they are in each case,

here and

there, how they are put together, how they can be changed

, what

they can be used for, and so on. The questioning seeks

the ground

for what is, insofar as it is in being.

Slide15

MARTIN HEIDEGGER: INTRODUCTION TO METAPHYSICS 4

To seek the ground

: this

means to get to the bottom

ergrü

nden

.

What is put into

question comes

into relation with a ground. But because we are questioning

, it

remains an open question whether the ground is a

truly grounding

, foundation-effecting,

originary

ground; whether

the ground

refuses to provide a foundation, and so is an abyss;

or whether

the ground is neither one nor the other, but merely

offers the

perhaps necessary illusion of a foundation and is thus an unground

. However

this may be, the question seeks a decision

with respect

to the ground that grounds the fact that what is, is in

being as

the being that it is. This why-question does not seek causes

for beings

, causes of the same kind and on the same level as

beings themselves

. This why-question does not just skim the surface,

but presses

into the domains that lie "at the ground," even pressing

into [

3] the ultimate, to the limit; the question is turned away from

all surface

and shallowness, striving for depth; as the broadest, it is

at the

same time the deepest of the deep questions.Slide16

MARTIN HEIDEGGER: INTRODUCTION TO METAPHYSICS 5

Finally, as the broadest and deepest question, it is also the

most

originary

. What do we mean by that? If we consider our question

in the

whole breadth of what it puts into question, beings as such

and as

a whole, then it strikes us right away that in the question,

we keep

ourselves completely removed from every particular,

individual being

as precisely this or that being. We do mean beings as

a whole

, but without any particular preference. Still, it is

remarkable that

one being always keeps coming to the fore in this questioning

: the

human beings who pose this question. And yet the

question should

not be about some particular, individual being. Given

the unrestricted

range of the question, every being counts as much

as any

other. Some elephant in some jungle in India is in being just

as much

as some chemical oxidation process on the planet Mars,

and whatever

else you please.Slide17

MARTIN HEIDEGGER: INTRODUCTION TO METAPHYSICS 6

Thus if we properly pursue the question "Why are there

beings at

all instead of nothing?" in its sense as a question, we must

avoid emphasizing

any particular, individual being, not even focusing

on the

human being. For what is this being, after all! Let us

consider the

Earth within the dark immensity of space in the universe.

We can

compare it to a tiny grain of sand; more than a kilometer

of emptiness

extends between it and the next grain of its size; on

the surface

of this tiny grain of sand lives a stupefied swarm of

supposedly clever

animals, crawling all over each other, who for a

brief moment

have invented

knowledge

[

cf

Nietzsche, "On Truth

and Lie

in the

Extramoral

Sense," 1873, published posthumously

].

And

what is a human lifespan amid millions of years? Barely a

move of

the second hand, a breath. Within beings as a whole there is

no justification

to be found for emphasizing precisely this being that

is called

the human being and among which we ourselves happen

to belong

.Slide18

EMMANUEL LEVINAS: TOTALITY AND INFINITY 1

METAPHYSICS AND TRANSCENDENCE

Desire for the Invisible

"The true life is absent." But we are in the world. Metaphysics arises and is maintained in this

alibi (i.e. ‘elsewhere’).

It is turned toward the "else­where" and the "otherwise" and the "other." For in the most general form it has assumed in the history of thought it appears as a movement going forth from a world that is familiar to us, whatever be the yet unknown lands that bound it or that it hides from view, from an "at home" ["chez

soi

”, i.e. ‘being at home’]

which we inhabit, toward an alien

‘outside-of

­

oneself’

[hors-de-

soi

],

toward a

beyond.Slide19

EMMANUEL LEVINAS: TOTALITY AND INFINITY 2

The term of this movement, the elsewhere or the other, is called

other

in an eminent sense. No journey, no change of climate or of scenery could satisfy the desire bent toward it.

The other metaphysically desired is not like the bread I eat, the land in which I dwell, the landscape I contemplate, like, sometimes, myself for myself, this I, that "other." I can "feed" on these realities and to a very great extent satisfy myself, as though I had simply been lacking them. Their

alterity

is thereby reabsorbed into my own identity as a thinker or a possessor. The metaphysical desire tends toward

something else entirely,

toward

the absolutely other

. The characteristic analysis of desire can

not expla

in away its singular pretension.

As commonly interpreted, need would be at the basis of desire; desire would characterize a being poor and incomplete and fallen from its past grandeur. It would coincide with the consciousness of what has been lost; it would be essentially a nostalgia, a longing for return. But thus it would not even suspect what the

truly other

is.Slide20

EMMANUEL LEVINAS: TOTALITY AND INFINITY

3

The metaphysical desire does not long to return, for it is desire for a land not of our birth, for a land foreign to every nature which has never been our fatherland and to which we shall never take ourselves.

The

metaphysical desire does not rest upon any prior kinship. It is a desire that cannot be satisfied. For we speak lightly of desire satisfied, of sexual needs or moral and religious needs. Love itself is thus taken to be the satisfaction of a sublime hunger. If this language is possible, then it is because most of our desires and love too are not pure. The metaphysical desire has another intention; it desires beyond everything that can simply complete

it. It is

like goodness – the desired does not fulfill it, but deepens it.

Slide21

EMMANUEL LEVINAS: TOTALITY AND INFINITY 4

It is a generosity nourished by the desired and thus a relationship that is not the disappearance of distance, not a bringing together, or- to circumscribe more closely the essence of generosity and of goodness- a relationship whose positivity comes from remoteness, from separateness for it nourishes itself, one might say, with its hunger. This desire is radical only if not the possibility of anticipating the desirable, if, that is, ' toward an absolute,

unanticipatable

alterity, if it does not think it beforehand, but moves towards it aimlessly, as approaching death. Desire is absolute if the desiring being is mortal and the Desired invisible.Slide22

EMMANUEL LEVINAS: TOTALITY AND INFINITY

5

Invisibility does not denote an absence of relation; it implies relations with what is not given, of which there is no idea. Vision is an

adequation

of the idea with the thing, a comprehension that encompasses. Non-

adequation

does not denote a simple negation or an obscurity of the idea, but-beyond the light and the night and beyond the knowledge measuring beings - the inordinateness of Desire is desire for the absolutely other. Besides the hunger one satisfies, the thirst one quenches and the senses one allays, the

metaphysical desire

for the other is beyond satisfactions, where no gesture by the body to diminish the aspiration is possible, where it is not possible to sketch out any known caress nor invent any new caress. A desire without satisfaction which, precisely, understands the remoteness, the alterity, and the exteriority of the other: For Desire this alterity, non-adequate to the idea, has a meaning. It is understood as the alterity of the Other and of the Most-High. The very dimension of height is opened up by metaphysical desire. That this height is no longer the heavens but the Invisible is the very elevation of height and its nobility. To die for the Invisible, this is metaphysics. This does not mean that desire can dispense with acts. But these acts are neither consumption, nor caress, nor liturgy.Slide23

EMMANUEL LEVINAS: TOTALITY AND INFINITY

6

Demented

pretension

to the invisible, when the experience of the human in the twentieth century teaches that the thoughts of men are borne by needs which explain society and history, that hunger and fear can prevail over every human freedom and resistance. There is no question of doubting this human

mysery

, this dominion that things and the wicked exercise over man, this

animality

. But to be a man is to know that this is so. Freedom consists in knowing that freedom is in peril. But to know or to be conscious is to have time to avoid and forestall the instant of inhumanity. It is this perpetual postponing of the hour of the infinitesimal difference between man and non-man - that implies the disinterestedness of goodness, the desire of the absolutely other or nobility, the dimension of metaphysics.Slide24

JACQUES DERRIDA: OF GRAMMATOLOGY 1

The

Program

:

By

a slow movement whose necessity is hardly perceptible, everything that for at least some

twenty centuries

tended toward and finally succeeded in being gathered under the

name of language

is beginning to let itself be transferred to, or at least summarized under, the

name of writing

. By a hardly perceptible necessity, it seems as though the concept of writing

no

longer

indicates a particular form of

language in general (whether understood as communication, relation, expression, signification, constitution of meaning or thought, etc

.),

the

signifier of the signifier

—is beginning to go beyond the extension of language. In all senses of the word, writing thus comprehends language. Not that the word “writing” has ceased to designate the signifier of the

signifier. “

Signifier of the signifier” describes on the contrary the movement of language: in its origin, to be sure, but one can already suspect that an origin whose structure can be expressed as “signifier of the signifier” conceals and erases itself in its own production. Slide25

JACQUES DERRIDA: OF GRAMMATOLOGY 2

There the signified always already functions as a signifier.

There

is not a single signified that escapes, even if recaptured, the play of signifying references that constitute language. The advent of writing is the advent of this play; today such a play is coming into its

own. This

, strictly speaking, amounts to destroying the concept of “sign” and its entire logic. Undoubtedly it is not by chance that this overwhelming supervenes at the moment when the extension of the concept of language effaces all its limits. We shall see that this overwhelming and this effacement have the same meaning, are one and the same phenomenon. Slide26

JACQUES DERRIDA: OF GRAMMATOLOGY 3

It is as if the Western concept of language (in terms of

what attaches

it in general to

phonematic

or

glossematic

production, to language, to voice, to hearing, to sound and breadth, to speech) were revealed today as the guise or disguise of a primary writing:

more fundamental than that which, before this conversion, passed for the simple “supplement to the spoken word” (Rousseau). Either writing was never a simple “supplement,” or it is urgently necessary to construct a new logic of the “supplement

.”

These disguises are not historical contingencies that one might admire or regret. Their movement was absolutely necessary, with a necessity which cannot be judged by any other tribunal. The privilege of the

phonè

does not depend upon a choice that could have been avoided. It responds to a moment of economy (let us say of the “life” of “history” or of “being as self-relationship”).Slide27

JACQUES DERRIDA: OF GRAMMATOLOGY 4

The system of “hearing (understanding) -oneself-speak” through the phonic substance—which presents itself as the

nonexterior

,

nonmundane

, therefore

nonempirical

or

noncontingent

signifier—has necessarily dominated the history of the world during an entire epoch, and has even produced the idea of the world, the idea of world-origin, that arises from the difference between the worldly and the

nonworldly

, the outside and the inside,

ideality

and

nonideality

, universal and

nonuniversal

, transcendental and empirical,

etc. With

an irregular and essentially precarious success, this movement would apparently have tended, as toward its telos, to confine writing to a secondary and instrumental function: translator of a full speech that was fully present (present to itself, to its signified, to the other, the very condition of the theme of presence in general), technics in the service of language, spokes-man, interpreter of an

originary

speech itself shielded from interpretation. Slide28

JACQUES DERRIDA: OF GRAMMATOLOGY 5

The

Signifier and Truth

The “rationality”—but perhaps that word should be abandoned for reasons that will appear at the end of this sentence—which

governs

a

writing

thus enlarged and radicalized, no longer issues from a logos. Further, it inaugurates the destruction, not the demolition but the

desedimentation

, the de-construction, of all the significations that have their source in that of the

logos

. Particularly the signification of

truth

. All the metaphysical determinations of truth, and even the one beyond metaphysical onto-theology that Heidegger reminds us of, are more or less immediately inseparable from the instance of the

logos

, or of a

reason

thought within the lineage of the logos, in whatever sense it is understood: in the pre-Socratic or the philosophical sense, in the sense of God’s infinite

understanding

or in the anthropological sense, in the pre-Hegelian or the post-Hegelian sense. Within this

logos

, the original and essential link to the

phonè

has never been broken.