Heidegger

John,

While continuing my reading of tea leaves I came across some stuff on
history that reminded me of what that distinction you made between aion and
epoch. Here is a snip of an earlier exchange:

John:The only why that a person can remember
things past is by recollecting images of past occurences, or life. There is
no script to remember, since the script has not “date”, ie., a recollection
of words cannot be ‘date stamped’ and therefore only way to date it
is to refer to the ‘condition’ or ‘circumstance’ of the imager or dreamer at
the time the even took place, no?

which essentially leads to a proof regarding remembrances and
recollections, of a ‘divine’ or extraordinary nature, in the sense of an
_aion_ but not of an _epoch_ which is different in that an _epoch_ is
mediated symbolically and via symbolic intuition.

Tympan: I see more of how you mean symbolic intuition. Doesn’t Jung talk
about aions? You seems to be saying that the aion refers to the “condition”
of the dreamer is this an affect? Why not just say that aion is eternity,
the expansion of the moment backwards and forwards which is what happens
through the exercise of holding onto it until it becomes a habit or ethos?
Maybe there is such a thing as eternalization?

Tympan (new): Thinking again about what you said it seems that by
“condition” you mean ’something’ that is not mediated through symbolic
intuition. I was wondering doesn’t this just mean that the issue is about a
codition that points to simple existence which is a passing of time that
cannot be counted or “date stamped” as you said. It seems like there is two
ways of approaching history. One that can be counted and so is able to be
date stamped and a mode of being that cannot be counted and that is the aion
or that which is outside measure. If we are both talking about a mode of
existence and that which is outside measurable time then this sort of
existence moves on without being able to figure out, predict, control, etc
the next move. It’s a throw of a dice as it were, a leap through the
unknowable. Nothing says that what happens is necessary. Its force is not
that of a causal reason but that of a contingent chance, luck, fortune. Its
part of the realm of gifts, surprises and games this is perhaps why
Hericlitus said that this temporality was that of a child playing. It is the
time where what we do we do for pleasure, we do to celebrate life and we
don’t worry about conserving anything, what we do we do as a Sabbath. In a
very fine little book _The Sabbath_ Abraham Joshua Heschel writes that “To
observe the Sabbath is to celebrate the coronation of a day in the spiritual
wonderland of time, the air of which we inhale when we “call it a delight”.
” He says that it is a delight of both the body and soul and that “unlike
the Day of Atonement, the Sabbath is not dedicated exclusively to spiritual
goals. It is a day of the soul as well as the body; comfort and pleasure are
the integral part of Sabbath observance. Man in his entirety, all his
faculties must share its blessings.” As you know the celebration is that of
a wedding, the marriage of this emptiness where we do what we do when we do
this… and so welcome the bridegroom. It’s the time when Persephone comes
back from the underworld, it is the return of Jesus in his ressurection, it
is a spring festival (I know I am a little ahead of the season, my fingers
are chilled right now so allow me a little healthy hallucination, a
heuristic mirage (c.f. Al-Arabi) lol…) This is a holy time that is apart
from the technological where we conquer space. So Heschel writes that “there
is a time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give,
not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord.” When we
play with toys, with topic threads, commonplaces of this conversation, etc;
we are not concerned with practical-economic things but like children aim to
do all kinds of things with the toys until they are torn to shreds and
destroyed and then there is just this pleasure of being in touch for no
reason with a language that is suspended on the threshold of saying
something with words that may have some meaning but appear to say no more
than this /// or this ***. There is nothing there but the pleasure of
breathing and being together for absolutely no reason. This is making
language be prior to logos, prior to words being the thinking about
something. Being-in-the-world is one “thing”, thinking about what it is, is
something completely different. Existence opens up a space of play that is
all.

“I am now tempted to say that the correct expression in language for the
miracle of the existence of the world, albeit as expressing nothing *within*
language, is the existence of language itself.”

Wittengstein as Quoted by Agamben in _Infancy and History_ pg.10

Tympan (new): If language is on the verge of meaning and it takes on the act
of a plastic quality thereby becoming gesture then it is a way of dancing.
There is less speaking and more inarticulate moanin’ and almost no
understanding certainly no thinking about something. It’s a way of saying in
so many words what La Mothe Le Vayer exclaimed “O precious Epoche! O sure
and agreeable mental retreat! O inestimable antidote against the presumption
of knowledge of the Pedants!” (As quoted in _The History of Skepticism_
Richard H. Popkin). With more thought Montaigne pointed out that this was a
way of living that was according to the laws of the earth and according to
ethos. Ethics as the habit that one develops in being-in-the-world is prior
to making a judgement and saying intelligent things. We are illuminated from
the outside we don’t illuminate or explain anything. This is how genuine
faith is “defined”. There is no question like the vulgar of providing
reasons for one’s actions. It’s as if our actions came out of a fidelity to
a prior obligation that one is obedient to without question because one has
a basic trust of where that obligation is coming from. It’s rule is
consistant as it were, it does not waver or change, neither is it unstable
or does it move but stays here as a firm support for doing this. I don’t
know why, just because. This is why relating Heidegger to the culture of
skepticism as represented by the likes of Erasmus, Cusa, Montaigne, Pascal,
Kierkegaard, and with a bit of bad faith, Hume;– makes perfect sense. It’s
not a completely dubious proposition. Its manner or style is not that of
following a casual chain of reasoning but more in the order of taking a vow
or oath of silence. Faith has a lot more to do with being able to keep
secrets than anything else and with the ability to find the way out of a
conundrum which is why one of its classical models is that of the sense of
timing called kairos in Greek. Kairos like the aion is not part of
quantitative time but involves luck. So in order to work through a difficult
knot, through a crossroad that has left one stumped as to how to go on
kairos calls for being comfortable with the unpredictable and whatever is
completely out of control like our friends, the barbarians and the stupid
idiots. As I say this is a question of being flexible and quick on one’s
feet. It’s that way of using a pen that Nietzsche was sure made him
incomprehensible to Germans. Perhaps this is Stoic time which shows a great
deal of impatience for caculated waiting and deferral, impatience for
wishful hoping. Stoic time is not a time that can be counted but one that
involves the ability to seize the day and feel great enough to do a little
piroutte with the arrival of another well rounded period, a period that is
complete and perfect. A misstep is like the difference between living and
dying. Sometimes there is no room for error and that’s that. It’s like being
in a corner without a choice, you act without further delliberation or die
trying.

I found an interesting essay by a certain Bojana Kunst where this Stoic aion
as kairos is related to Badiou’s reading of Nietzsche’s practice of dancing
with the pen on the edge of the void no doubt. Badiou commenting on this
practice says that “dance is like a circumference in space, but a
circumference which represents its own principle, a circumference not drawn
from the outside, a circumference that is drawing itself.” In Stoic terms
this means that there is no external cause going on but only self-movement.
In recollection this abstraction of external causes is what is happening in
order to develop equanimity, or the virtue of apathetic indifference which
is an expression of pure love. But during a celebration all this effort is
forgotten and one enjoys the prompting or gift of the Holy Spirit because
the long time lived in patient obedience to the rule of a faith “makes” this
reception of a little understood knowledge come from the outside.

Dancing not only is a gesture but also not unlike Heidegger’s formal
indication and so not a thinking about something:

” Friedrich Nietzsche, for example, associated the dancing body with a state
prior to the emergence of intellect. Dance was thus given the privilege of
describing thought, and thought the privilege of being like dance. A thought
that is like dance does not know the spirit of weight, Nietzsche suggested,
and it is crucial to relax the benumbed body by means of dance (Nietzsche
1988: 234). Consequently, dance may be defined as a �self-rotating wheel�,
or, as Alain Badiou comments on Nietzsche�s thoughts, �dance is like a
circumference in space, but a circumference which represents its own
principle, a circumference not drawn from the outside, a circumference that
is drawing itself � (Badiou 1993: 22, my translation). The body of dance is
the original body � cleared of intellect, separated from discourse, a
metaphor for existing in a Dionysian world. Its rotations and movement
mirror its original existence. It is autonomous, yet never fixed,
non-repetitive, never beheld in its entirety. A similar longing for the
autonomous, yet evasive also pervades the poetic writings on dance by Paul
Val�ry and St�phane Mallarm�. The latter stated that the body of dance could
never be a body of someone, but no more than an empty emblem. A dancing body
would not depict some other body or person, and was not conditioned by
anything outside it: �The dancer is not a woman who dances for, the
juxtaposed reasons that she is not a woman but a metaphor� (Mallarm� 1992:
33). Val�ry�s perspective in his Philosophie de la danse is similar. He,
too, was fascinated by the female dancer, comparing the state of dancing to
that of sleep: a state where the dancing body is preoccupied with itself,
where everything moves, but there is no reason or intention to supplement
anything; there is no exterior reference…”
 http://www2.arnes.si/~ljintima2/kunst/t2…

Posted on Monday, February 12th, 2007 at 10:10 pm
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