Heidegger

rene wrote this recently:

> Anthony, you cannot say that you have not been warned as to the
> growing one-sidedness of your contributions.
>
> Meanwhile i have since then been discussing Aristotle and me and my friends
> have recently finished the first chapter of Physics B. Where Aristotle states
> that trying to prove the existence of physis, is downright ridiculous.
> It is a form of logos, of speaking, without noein, wothout noticing what-is,
> he says. And Heidegger: a logos, which cannot tolerate the sense of being of
> physis: being-of-itself, is at the mercy of exclusive techne. Together they
> form the irresistable combination: techno-logy, where both, techne and logos,
> have reached their extreme effectivenes, and that is: where the possibility
> of questioning them allows of no more opportunity.
> Where is this impossibility?
> In the blind corner of technological thinking. As such it is to be respected.
> Philosophically (aristotelically), one cannot laugh enough about it

Hi rene. I’ve recently gotten to wondering about logos and whether logos
belongs for/to physis in the sense that logos too arises of itself (in the
manner of physis) and as such a ‘mate’, logos is the very pudding of the
‘proof’ of physis; a proper logos (a saying that is a hearing of the logos
in its saying whatever it says) necessarily pertains to physis even in its
possible neglect/rejection of physis (e.g., the mathemata). In that sense,
all of ’serious’ speech is necessarily ‘physics’ but not at all confined to
the modern scientist’s conception of physics.

Today, in a post to a list I belong to, concerning the work of the
(Heideggerian) film director, Terence Malick, I came across this gem:

> “This short essay by Elroy Bode reminded me of Malick’s concept of Eden.
> And also of the nature of cinematic images.
>
> I was seated at my desk when I glanced up from the typewriter to a framed
> picture on the wall. It was a composite of three photographs spliced
> together so that it stretched out like one of these wide-angle pictures
> made of a high school graduating class. The picture showed a dozen or so
> Hereford cows, grazing during a summer afternoon in front of the hunting
cabin.
> I looked at the sleek bellied Herefords, the live oaks and their pools of
> shade, the background greenery of the other pasture live oaks, cedars, and
> sycamores. It was a ranching pastoral that had been a part of my life since
> childhood. As I stared at it - framed, familiar, serene - I tried to plumb its
depths.
> I got up, stood closer. On the summer day when the photograph was taken, I
> was just out of camera range, and now I was inches away from those same
> imperturbable cows that - noses to the grass - were still oblivious of the
> rusted barrel beside the fence, the logs of the back-lot corral, the
> arching live oak limbs, the sunlight and the afternoon shadows.
> What was going on that day? What remained unspoken about it that still needed
to be said?
> I had sat in the cabin doorway on a similar summer day, reading the letters
> of Isak Dinesen to her friends and family. She wrote about the animals, the
> people, the landscapes of her farm in Kenya, as she later wrote about them
> in Out of Africa. I had closed the book, thinking that without too much of
> a shift her descriptions would have been appropriate for the very hills and
> pastures and arroyos that stretched around me.
> I turned from the picture to other things. Days passed. Then, reading a
> letter Henry Miller once wrote to Anais Nin, I came to understand that the
> picture was my own unrecoverable Eden. Miller had written that in the
> beginning, yes, there was the Word, but for the Word to appear there had to
> be a parting, a separation from the original innocence, and that the Word
> is always seeking out the first more perfect condition.
> In my cabin-lot picture the red cows, the constant trees, and the summer
> sky are as silent as Adam: beyond the reach of words. They are in their
> timeless equilibrium, separate and perfect, forever lost to me behind glass.”

And it also brings me back to logos (and its utter silence: to be the very
power of speech, in whatever form, logos must be silent {”as Adam”},
invisible, untouchable, “behind glass”). In the beginning was logos and the
irruption of logos brings forth a cleavage in be-ing (dasein exists on that
cleave). I am too reminded of those appearances of the monolith in Kubrick’s
masterpiece, 2001: signifying cleavages in be-ing (with technology’s
extremity fetching dasein beyond the stifling embrace of the technical and
the technicity of the technical). I muse that all stories of beginnings
(including religious and scientific creation/beginning myths {e.g., the
bizarro big bang theory}) necessarily require the logos in advance, simply
because such stories need to be said to be the stories of the beginning they
are. Thus they must begin with the very possibility of telling any kind of
story. There: I’ve made a beginning…

regards

michaelP

Posted on Monday, July 23rd, 2007 at 5:55 pm
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