Heidegger

Allen: It’s no big thing. As a matter of fact it’s a small thing, a very
small thing. But I think it’s only basic list decorum that if you’re not
going to respond to someone who responded to you under a certain subject
heading (especially someone who put himself out to appreciate something you
said), before you set off on another path in your own direction, change the
subject heading.

Tympan: Sorry, I read you but had nothing immediate to say so I picked up my
thoughts again and threw them out into the universe. I asked you questions
but you don’t have time to answer them or you just ignored them. I thought
that your concern there about (is it the “allegorical” interpretation?) not
respecting the purity of the object of thoughts if this is the right way of
putting it was interesting for working out questions about the imagination
and symbolical interpretation or at least the distinction between the
spiritual meaning and the literal meaning but you dropped it.

I am not changing the subject heading as it fits whatever I write which
tends to explore the conversion of thoughts that I am getting at. I think
the heading and most of what I write tries to get at the transformation of
thinking where the old habitual tracks change course to other habits like
that of dwelling on the verge of I don’t know what.

That having been said, I’ve been reading Boethius “Consolation of
Philosophy.” He seems to have a similar sense of the value of ascesis (I
like the word. To my own unschooled ears, it sounds like phronesis, a way
of acting in the world which somehow aims at truth).

Tympan: Which is a link worth exploring. In the writers I am reading ascesis
means a “return to oneself” so it’s pretty close to immediate everyday
experience. More to the point it targets the transformation of the appetites
so that they don’t influence the operation of the mind (nous) so much and
them our thoughts can be turned towards ‘heaven’ to use an illustration or
to that which remains to be thought or is simply impossible to think and so
unheard of, unseen, untasted, unfelt or nothing to do with the senses. Isn’t
this how Waerner Jaeger thought of paideia? (”Since self-government was
important to the Greeks, Paideia combined with ethos (habits) made a man
good and made him capable as a citizen or a king. (1a) This education was
not about learning a trade or an art, which the Greeks called banausos
(mechanical) unworthy of a citizen, but was about training for liberty
(freedom) and nobility (The Beautiful). Paideia is the cultural heritage
that is continued through the generations.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paideia). Do you think perhaps phronesis is
something like an education of free citizens?

No matter what at issue is a crucial aspect of philosophy and how to make
progress in it towards the intellligibles to put it in a neoplatonic manner.
The “guarding of the heart mind” keeps the _nous_ from being governed by an
external authority such as that which the senses are involved in when they
are operating with the appetites. This practice of attention as I understand
it is the Hellenic Paideia. This is how the _nous_ is thought in the book on
Orthodox pscychotherapy that I came across yesterday: “So the nous itself,
which is not simply the thoughts, but the subtler attention, should return
to the heart, to the essence of the soul, which is located, as in an organ,
within the bodily organ of the heart, since this bodily organ is the seat of
intelligence and “the first intelligent organ of the body”. Thus we should
concentrate our nous, which is scattered abroad by the senses, and bring it
back again “to the selfsame heart, the seat of thoughts” (84).” The quoting
here is of Theoleptos of Philadelphia. Thus the words “heart mind” refer not
“simply to thoughts” but to a “subtler attention”.  http://www.pelagia.org/htm/b02.en.orthod…. Just
like Ibn Arabi, Sphtadic Je

Meter 7

Every pleasure knows this one thing:
Goading on those who enjoy it,
Like the honeybees that hover.
Once it pours its pleasing nectar
It’s gone, and pangs the bruised heart
With a sting that can’t be drawn out.

Interesting first note by the translator:

“Boethius does not name his addressee; it is therefore technically open
whether the title speaks of the consolation that Boethius’ philosophy
provides to the one unnamed, the consolation that Philosophy provides to
Boethius, or the consolation which Boethius provides to Philosophy.”

All three I think. And that’s only the beginning.

We tend to pass over the therapeutic aspects at issue in books like this one
but it’s their medical culture that is also a kind of education in the good
life applicable to bad times. It’s serious medicine that still today *really
works*. This is the quote I am stumbling on as I open “The Consolation…” :
“If you desire to look on truth and follow the path/With unswerving course,/
Rid yourself/ Of joy and fear,/ Put hope to flight,/ and banish grief./ The
mind is clouded/ And bound in chains/ Where these hold sway.” The ancient
monasteries were like hospitals where you went to cure yourself with the
help of good counsel if you were luckier than we are today when all counsel
on the philosophical life is gone and not to be found. Once better off you
could become a priest or a doctor and help others arriving at what
essentially was a hospital for poor souls.

I think I brought Halevi up before in the context of reading E.R. Wolfson’s
“Through A Speculum That Shines” which now one can read in the richer
context opened up by the Greek Fathers: “He has an image that the eye does
not see, yet the soul in the heart discerns Him and gazes upon Him” (Halevi
quoted in pg. 175). This is like the Orthodox Fathers say. There is a image
in th heart which with the fall gets darkened and the whole salvation story
is about how to clear up this image through *praxis* or ascesis but they are
not so anti-philosophy like Halevi or Al-Gazzali for that matter. It’s
anti-philosophy which leads then to extreme nationalist sentiments which
can be a good thing if it is spiritual and not an earthly geographical
location or if Jerusalem or Zion is more nomadic and a question of where one
happens to be wandering… Anyway, a little more of an esoteric reference to
the heart by Wolfson in note 213 pg. 178 involves it in as it does for
al-Ghazzali the “Well-guarded tablet (al-lawh al-mahfuz) mentioned in Qoran
(75:22). Wolfson comment on this is that this is “identified in the mystical
literature with the Active Intellect or the Universal Soul”. Also the heart
is the Ark and the tablets or commandments but also _ousia_ or divine
essence. I mean _ousia_ before the Latin distinction between essentia and
existentia. So essence is close to Aristotle’s *foundation* or substance
understood as that which is subjected like a servant is subject to a Lord.
The foundation in this regard is a potential on the verge of being
actualized. This is how I read physis in the light of the grace of God if
you will;– or given a transformation of the will. But none of this makes
sense without the practice whereby thoughts are turned such that they can
come under the influence of the Active Intellect hence the need for ascesis
which Wolfson kind of avoids turning piety too much into an academic museum
object or fetish that doesn’t have to challenge us too much.

regards,
tympan

Allen

Posted on Wednesday, June 7th, 2006 at 3:25 pm
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