Heidegger

In a message dated 12/28/2006 9:24:15 PM Eastern Standard Time,
daxsein at hotmail.com writes:

Allen,

I remember having a brief discussion with you on Spinoza a long time
ago.
Can’t remember what I said but I do remember it held the aproval of my
understanding.

Isn’t it interesting that we can remember undergoing a particular sort
of
experience of language, in this case an experience of Sichverstehen, (I
remember it the same,” a Sichverstehen of a Sichverstehen”!) without
remembering the content. I don’t mean to make too much of this, but I
have
this experience quite often.

It brings to mind a few things. First Heidegger’s formale Anzeige,
where
the form performs a function irrespective of the content. It’s what
Kenneth
Burke called the symbolic function of language, i.e. rhetoric. It’s
something like music where form satisfies certain “appetites.” Spinoza
would probably think of such linguistic pleasures as part of the disease
of
the imagination. If we could only just think!

Tympan: That’s an interesting drift… I have a few of his books, can’t
say
he is always on my mind but following the slip of ideas, a symbolic form
brings many together into a more, say, inclusive term like a universal
or
the operation of a synecdoche or maybe even metonymic drifting along a
placid surface that has a homogenous character to it as if it were a
genus.
It appears like the imagination is under the sway of curiosity but a
deserted sea makes it all pointed like a number or time. It’s like the
mind
becomes concentrated or essential and able to make this pointed remark.
One
of our problems according to Spinoza is that our minds are scattered
over
too many objects when it is not in focus as it is when we are not
thinking
in an adequate manner. I suppose the sea or desert as a symbolic form is
a
visual aid that helps a person focus and gather intentionality into a
potential imagination. It’s a poor imagination then which is why it is
so
abstract and therefore concentrated like a seed or a proverb. This is
prior
to the ability to expand on anything. First you need a sort of body
without
organs which also means discourse gets really dry and the texture of
language gets cracked… no wonder water is so welcomed. Perhaps an
Epicurian garden has always began with a clearing away of everything in
a
new land, with an uprooting denaturalization of national identity. This
new
found land which some of us come to see as our little hideaway or true
home
where we can be ourselves is a neutral universal which is why it lends
to
ever inclusive associational linkages or is open to dialogue no matter
which
perspective a person is coming from. Probably it attracts the most
alienated
and marginalized since after all it is an expression of someone who
doesn’t
fit in anywhere and is a creature of borders like any malleable identity
that changes according to the circumstances. I am drowing in a sea of
language now and it feels like me, myself and I.

Continuing to try to bring this closer to Spinoza, the
rhetorical
experience of language is constituted by our “capacity to be affected.”
which Spinoza, as per the text below, would characterize as passive:

“I say that we are passive
Bk.XIV:2:1891.
as regards something when that something takes place with-

in us, or follows from our nature externally, we being
only
the { inadequate, } partial cause { that is not clearly
and
distinctly
understood. }”

The rhetorical dimension of language is “of language,” we being only
partially at cause and not clearly able to understand. What I’m trying
to
say here is that in some, or large part we are subject to language and
can
act only through it. I don’t think even Spinoza’s artful attempt to
contain
language within a geometric frame outsmarts the determination of
language to
force its will upon us.

I think the best we can do under the circumstances is to think language
as
such, language as it wants to be thought, observing our capacity to be
affected even as it is being affected.

Tympan: Well yes this is what the study of rhetoric is all about,– fine
feelings that we get from polishing this surface so that it becomes more
smooth and graceful and all that jazz. No matter what, you are selling
yourself whether it is to your children, friends or wife and lover. The
tropes are similar but the actual words are different and with the
latter I
think the body is affacted in a more erotic fashion. Drowning can be a
scary
thing or not… listen to how women discuss and spin the sort of ideas
men
like Deleuze and us express in our own way:

“Catherine Clément describes oceanic feeling as “a flood; a torrent of
waves; a delicious immersion; a feeling of drowning; arriving in a
liquid
that rolls, shakes, exhausts and draw one up” (201). It is, she writes,
a
“mystical syncope.” Syncope offers a range of meanings. It is open and
ambiguous: “a fainting or a swooning and other kinds of loss or absence
of
consciousness; an irregularity in the heartbeat; a grammatical or other
elision” (xix). The samba in the water—the loss of
consciousness—operates as
a syncope.”

“In oceanic feeling, in syncope, the self dissolves into rapture. The
sea,
Irigaray writes, calls “to still-unheard-of truths. A siren song drawing
them away from any shore.” (Marine Lover 46) . She asks “is there any
greater rapture than the sea? . . . Endless rapture awaits whoever
trusts
the sea” (13). In Marine Lover, a water-saturated analysis of and
response
to Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, Irigaray assumes the position of
Nietzsche’s feminine other, and evokes the rapture of the sea:

And the sea can shed shimmering scales indefinitely. Her depths peel
off
into innumerable thin, shining layers. And each one is the equal of the
other as it catches a reflection and lets it go. As it preserves and
blurs.
As it captures the glinting play of light. As it sustains mirages.
Multiple
and far too numerous for the pleasure of the eye, which is lost in the
host
of sparkling surfaces. And with no end in sight. . . . And whoever looks
upon her from the overhanging bank finds there a call somewhere further
than
the farthest far. Toward an other ever more other. Beyond any anchorage
yet
imaginable (46-7). “

 http://transformations.cqu.edu.au/journa…

At the time of the reformation, in Cusa’s time, as I understand it, this
was
the element that gave birth to new ideas, to innovation which is also a
way
of keeping yourself and readers awake and interested. It’s an energetic
cause of activity. For a Catholic this was the virgin mother herself and
the
origin of baby Jesus. There, I’m a little late but the thought counts I
think. I don’t have one but I find it difficult to imagine that anyone
can
have a baby without being able to make women swoon and without doing a
little samba like Jud’s Elf.

Merry Christmas and a happy new year Allen and the rest of you, all of
you,
not just the part but the whole of you.

Cheers,
Tympanic

Dear Tympanic;
Merry Christmas to you and others on the list. The above was a marvelously
written discourse. The question of form, however, needs further
clarification, more so in view of Aristotle’s formulation of entelechy and
which I suspect Spinoza had in mind.
Sincerely;
Bernard

Sure, I was only suggesting more associations to the one’s that Allen added
rather than completing a thread. He was going back to an old thread on
Heidegger’s formal indication which adds other aspects you might not be
aware of. But… I was thinking further that, getting back to the link I
made between water and mercy or pardon that I mentioned to Anthony that in a
way the washing away of an offense follows the capacity to move not just
someone else to compassion and mercy but ourselves. We give pardon to
ourselves as much as we solicit it from others. That part of us and others
which is cold and a narcissistic individualist is what is address through
this graceful rhetoric. It’s not others who have selfish narcissistic
impulses as their problem but you as much as I just like anger, envy,
jelousy, resentment is not a problem of other people but of everyone. In the
same vein of thought, sadness (anger, envy, resentment) is part of
everyone’s experience of life. The expression of fine feelings which is a
way of turning phrases involves the removal of sadness or depressing
passivity which is why writing and reading can be seen as an energizing
activity that gives us joy. I care about this empty screen you know enough
to honor it and to want to make it sparkle like a shiny mirror where people
can see themselves.

Your mechanical “Dear” and “Sincerely” which you stole from Gary sounds
sincere today Bernard, Merry Christmas. I hope you are happily enjoying your
family during the holidays. Only this business about holy water instigated
by the trolls I suspect gave me the wherewithal to bring meaning to the
holidays and experience genuine joy. I salute the trolls!

Cheers,
Tympan

Posted on Sunday, December 31st, 2006 at 4:45 pm
comment | rss 2.0 | trackback