No More Learning

What is the shadow outline o f this making? Do we understand what we are looking for when we ask how are we made or how do we make the world?
We can circle into the world into ourselves or into ourselves into the world: this is ourKantianheritage. Emersonpicturedthisas"Natureislovedbywhatisbestinus";but
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this love is a redrawing ofconcentric circles endlessly. Emerson draws circles in spirals of replacement, totality failing and following totality towards doing "something without knowinghoworwhy"(175). Ifweforgetourselveswelosethehowandwhy,or"Iam not careful to justify myself' (173). Justification settles us. Emerson's experimenting, as he calls it, "unsettle[s] all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane" (173). The loss ofjustification proceeds from asking forjustification: "The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated
without end. . . Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another canbedrawn. . . "(166). Thereisnottranscendentworldortranscendentknower,but the 'eternal generator abides . . . somewhat superior to creation": the stability of an
aufhebung in relation to which the world appears as the world changing, the world worlding. In this shift from 'I', the unsettler to the eternal generator, itself circles the eye with a horizon, as if Emerson conflates the transcendental aesthetic describing the 'science o f a priori sensibility' o f the first Critique with the aesthetic judgment, a 'critique o f taste,' ofthethird. TheunsettlednatureofNatureservesasthecriterionforourknowingand being and our failure: "People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them" (174). "Hope" proceeds in the unsettling o f circles as the future or let's say subjunctive circle o f the generator, a spiral or line pointing through and beyond anyparticularcircularlimit. Sohesays,"Greatnessappealstothefuture"(Self-Reliance, 137). In this state the world is never just ours. Making another world ("to draw another circle" [175]) or finding oneself beyond oneself and the coherence o f a 'past' world ("'when he knows not whither he is going'"[175]) recasts our subjectivity knowing as
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"the soul [that] generates matter" ("Poetry and Imagination", 450). "Imagination animates" (451): soul-making can not only be about the soul but in its power to make the world.
How do we enter into this making and animating?
What is the horizon ofjustification? The fundamental implication that defines the relations ofjugging, the semantic, temporal chain determining thejug asjug. Justification must act in two directions. It must control and determine the categorical relations around which the demand for justification arises. Scenes like: 'this is x. '; 'Why is it x? '. Heidegger must forestall the asking of this 'why. ' As we have seen every term in describing the temporal-functional series o f 'jug' provides an implicative link to another. This links are often categorical: from holding to gathering for example. Heidegger, however, has posited function as the ground o f being, and thus within the semantics o f identity only 'weilen1articulates a fundamental categorical relation: between time, space, aspects o f the world, human beings, and divinities. Its functional flexibility, its ability to constitute the other terms from taking to 'gering,' allow it to displace demands for
justification into explications o f its meaning. It describes, however, a condition o f all beings,ofboththingsandthequadrature,andinthisenactsBeingitself. Thisenacting animates. Thus,justificationdissolvesintoanimation.
Heidegger splits value from justification. Heidegger is not asking the constructivist questions 'how do we make a world? ' or 'how is it that we, human beings, can find the world at all, or as our world, or as a world? ' (the kind of questions, with some philosophical modification, that could make sense to McCulloch). Nor is he asking 'why
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these things (or any thing or any particular set of things) make a world? ', Thoreau's ontological-semantic justification question. He describes how we fit (how we experience fitting) the world from within language as a fitting together of a semantic puzzle that will pickouttheworld/formoflifeinwhich'weilericanworkandmean. Theintentionality of his language addresses not us but this 'weilen' determined world-Being. In this puzzle notallpiecesareofequivalentvalue. Asetofpiecesthatseemclosesttotheshape- functioning o f the jug are more 'valuable' because they are nearest to the reality o f
jugging. There is no single nearest part o f the world to the jug--the analogy fails because the world is not an accumulation of solid-edged things. This resistance is because, like the latter Wittgenstein, Heidegger resists viewing the world from sub species aetemitatis, which for Heidegger means as a function of quantity.
He cannot, however, abandon quantity. The following quotation answers the question 'How can you get qualitative distinctions to describe quantity? ':
But things are also compliant (ring) and modest (gering) in number, compared with the countless objects everywhere o f equal value, compared with the measureless mass of men as living beings.
Men alone, as mortals, by dwelling attain to the world as world. Only what conjoins itself out of world becomes a thing. (DD182)
Hodstadter's translation o f 1gering' as 'modest' in the first sentence and then as 'conjoins' in the second marks the emergence of meaning here as following the same conjoining it describes. HeideggerwhenhefirstintroducestheOldGermansenseofringandgering has given the possible meanings, possible translations from which we can make sense of
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his usage. The coherence ofthe quadrature takes place through 'nestling': "So nestling, theyjoin together, worlding, the world" (DD180). The unifying force ofgering works in compliant and complementary relation to the emergent force o f ring, to become a specific unity, to surround and contain, to resist (modem German, ringen): this emergence, however,isofthefour"nestleintotheirunifyingpresence"(DD180). Whatarethe semantics of 'weilen' in this aspect-sliding ring, gering worlding? From the 'ringing mirror-playthethingingofthethingtakesplace"(DD180). Theunifyingrelationsamong
the quadrature, determining the world as the world, determines the thing as a thing. Heidegger etymologizes ring, 'combine,' and gering, 'small,' 'close,' 'little,' back into the old German 'nestling, malleable, pliant, compliant, nimble' in order to determine essence (W esen) and existence and identity outside o f the fragmentation attending identity.
Heidegger will not ask why these pieces? Why these things constitute a world? These questions would be answered by an explanation or description of how the world was made (the question 'why are human beings like they are? ' would be answered with a Darwinian history of our evolution) or of who has given us the world (God or parents) or how do we find ourselves in the world. Heidegger continually maintains a disjunction between representation and making. The animation of the world proceeds through the transformation of all forms of being into actors, personified mirrors. The four 'mirror' each other 'mirroring'; mirroring does not pick out the particular forms of the quadrature. The image o f the mirror or the act o f mirroring are figures for identity, for being. A mirror mirroring, however, is different from saying 'this picture mirrors the world. ' There is even a greater difference. These mirrors mirroring mirror each other mirroring. This means
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they each enact a collapse o f the particular and context as what they are (mirror) and do (mirroring)foreachother. Thereunityarisesbecauseamirrormirroringanothermirror can functionally enact the mirroring o f another mirror. It is always the world mirroring, not a subject, and thus the mirroring never becomes a particular image (which would require the world to be constructed from within a knowing subject). This use of 'mirror' and 'mirroring' should not be understood to make a claim about what is real. Its claim should be understood to describe the meaning of a world. Such a world can not be fully meaningful, nor can the viability, that is, the justification for this semantics (for the use of 'mirror', for example) be determined, without asking Thoreau's "why do these things make a world? " Consequently, Heidegger's semantics tell us more about 'meaning' than 'being'.
How do we count the matter ofthe world?
But things are also compliant (ring) and modest (gering) in number, compared with the countless objects everywhere of equal value, compared with the measureless mass o f men as living beings. (DD180)
Heidegger suggests that under the aspect of number things gering and ring, and in this they are particular. Number here has already pressured number into a qualitative distinction, built around a 'logic' or 'aesthetics' of identity. Number defined as numerical identity (x=x; x=y) ceases to be countable. Number here is not a semantic function, describing or allegorizing or mapping something into its logic, but functions ontologically as both the groundless ground ofbeing. This means that ifeverything can be reduced to number or quantity, then number and quantity become senseless. Heidegger's description
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ofscienceandtechnologyasmakingthingsdistancelessisthustwofold. Objectscanbe reduced to each other, and thus are neither close nor far. This reduction is not descriptive but constitutive of what is real and therefore number can no longer function as a description o f particulars. I do not think number functions this way in science or
technology or, for the most part, in mathematics. Mathematicians are often accused of being closet mathematical realists, arguing in public that mathematics is a language-game, but in private hypostasizing number into entities. Heidegger assumes that science and technology function as if they instantiated an unwarranted mathematical realism.
When are objects countless and the mass o f men measureless? Heidegger's answer is 'when objects are o f equal value, that is, reduced to an equivalence everywhere'; and when human beings are beings + life. Quantifying the world into objects makes them uncountable. Theequivalenceofobjectsreducesallobjectstoasinglevalue,wheresince each x = y, all objects collapse into a single term, x or y. Such a reduction makes them uncountable because the are inseparable. The "[mjeasureless mass of men" do not live in any appropriate world: neither in a world that fits within the logic of the thing nor in a
world that is theirs, and thus not replaceable. As being + life they form a reduced identity, X. Heidegger imagines authentic counting as the counting of categories not particulars.
Heidegger wants to resist this equalization, and convert 'scientific reduction' into semantic a description (development from Being and Time and its existential analytic description): absorbtheworldwithinhislanguageofthinkingasthecountertothe absorption o f the world into mathematics. In the "Letter on Humanism" he marks the turn toward language away from an existential analytic, in which our phenomenal experience
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constitutes our being (Dasein) as stances and involvement's framed within a hermeneutics, not o f language, but o f time as the limit o f both Dasein and the question o f Being (what exists), to a semantic ontology:
For thinking in its saying merely brings the unspoken word ofBeing to language. The usage "brings to language" employed here is now to be taken quite
literally. Being comes, lighting itself to language. It is perpetually under way to language. (239)
"Thinking brings. . . Being comes, lighting itself. . . under way to language"; what does this describe? The circularity of"Being. . lighting itself', the agency ofthinking "put[ting] its saying of Being into language as the home of ekistence" ("Letter", 239), and the intimacy o f language "raised into the lighting o f Being" animates and personifies Being, thinking, and language, as actors and acting, in their becoming visible as what they are. They function as both minds (animate agents) and worlds (grounds and context) making visible each other as the other in this functioning, as if before the differences between these hypostasize into subjects and objects, or selfand world, or particulars and universals. These relations and 'entities', however, are not part of a transcendental deduction. Such a deduction would require justification: why these and not other categories or beings or aspects? why lighting? how does one light the other? Heidegger removes human agency, the temptations toward skepticism and subjectivity by excluding
the demand for justification from his questioning. Rhetorically he does this by presenting his thinking as a description that acts ontologically ("Thinking is a deed . . . its saying
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merely brings the unspoken word o f Being to language")- Thinking describes thinking, and in this thinking implicates the world, undermines subjective reductions o f being, etc. The equivocation of being "equally near and equally far" (DD177) is opposed by
nearness--through which the world and things appropriate each other (fit and mutually belong together) in the mirror-play and the staying/ dwelling of the ring and gering. Nearness is therefore an ontological value, giving and staying and dwelling through which we understand the earth as nourishing, the sky as sky, the divinities as "beckoning messengers", and mortals as capable of death. Things are not of equal value. How do we recognize or live within this unequal value? How can things have any value that we can recognize? Not by being made, but by dwelling within the reflective implications that determine the world as world within a mutually reflective totality of relations.
Anima mundi seu orbis
How do these fragments oftime (or function) make a world? The world is a unity as a function of the functioning of a thing (not an effect, because the function of any particular thing includes the quadrature and presents the world as world, it does not form it). Thisseemsabsurdifweincludemorethanonething. Isthequadrature'stayed'in different ways in and for each thing? In other words, things as the condensation of different function-time series produce each a different 'staying' or 'dwelling' of the world. The difficulty o f the world functioning as a world determined by these fragmented times returns Heidegger to the problem of many times (and possible worlds) 15th century philosophers found themselves facing.
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I f time arises as a function o f movement then different movement rates produce different times. 15th century philosophers posited an Absolute measure in relation to which all of these different rates were regularized as time. Appealing to Aristotle, this absolutemeasureisbestdescribedinthecelestialmovements. Thisleavestwoproblems. How does this celestial movement determine time for us in our everyday life and within the sublunar world? That is, how do we experience time? and what is the temporal relation between the celestial clock and the different movements describing change in the world? The second question takes a peculiar medieval form derived from the incident in
Joshua (10. 12) where God stopped the movement ofthe heavens but time continued on earth: "thesunstoppedbuttimewenton"(Confessions,XI. xxiii[30]). Augustine constructed time as a function o f the soul, and thus he could untie the world from time. Aristotelian versions o f time, however, require movement and a uniform physical periodicity for change to emerge.
Ockham attempts to resolve, or rather integrate, Augustinian and Aristotelian times:
Thus one sees how a man does not see heaven can perceive the movement of heaven, once he perceives himself as existing in an existence subject to change (se esse in esse tranmutabili), meaning once he perceives his own coexistence with a mobile moving uniformly and continuously, or once he grasps the proposition, I coexist with a certain body moving continuously and uniformly.
Second, as has just been stated, when we perceive that we exist in an existence subject to change, we perceive time essentially, for we perceive then that
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something moves continually and uniformly--and this is to perceive time essentially It suffices for him to grasp the proposition, I coexist with a certain body moving continuously and uniformly; in fact, that is the concept proper to the movement o f heaven. (Duhem, 318-19)
Ockham develops the role ofheaven intwo other arguments, but he concludes only, as he does here, that celestial movement is accidental to time, but supervenes on it. What Ockham recognizes is that time requires a conceptual uniform and continuous temporal order that includes both us and the world. Our knowledge o f this movement, although it may arise from observation and induction, requires only our existential acknowledgment andcontainmentwithinafundamentaltemporalorder. Thisacknowledgmentfollows through a double perception: of ourselves as subject to change in relation to an external temporal order with which we coexist.
Walter Burley develops Ockham's solution and formulates the nature of the absolute measure as necessarily the first movement:
I assert that in perceiving any movement whatever, we perceive the first movement in a confused way; in fact, we perceive that there is a simple and uniform movement which is the measure ofthe movement we are perceiving. But whether this simple and uniform movement is the movement of heaven or some other movement, we do not perceive. Thus when we perceive any movement whatever, we perceive the first time in some way; in perceiving any movement whatever, we perceive the first movement in a confused way moreover, in perceiving any
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movement whatever, we perceive the particular time that results from that
movement. (Duhem, 326)
The first movement and its extension as the temporal order o f the world constructs a coherent and singular time-world. Without this originary ground time could fragment into different time scales and rates, if not within the same physical world, at least at different future time (or at past times):
" . . the word time does not signify something single, distinct in its totality from allpermanent things,whosenatureorbeingcanbeexpressedbymeansofa definition. But we must imagine that this world signifies that first continual and uniform movement, and that it also signifies at the same time, the soul that conceives the before and after and what is between the two in this movement. " (Ockham, Tractatus de succesivis, in Duhem, 306)
Although Ockham argued that a fixed body was required for local movement to appear as movement and that this fixed body need not be an actual body in nature, but can be an abstract concept. He develops this same idea in his description oftime, but hesitates to described the standard in relation to which time emerges as an abstract concept. Nicholas Bonet, a contemporary of Ockham, however, draws this conclusion. He distinguishes between two kinds oftime: natural time which is constituted by as many different times as movements, and mathematical time, which is constituted through abstraction in relation to asinglestandard. ThisiswhatDuhemcallstheAbsoluteClockandwhatGraziadei developed into the series that wound back reaches a point of unity between natural and mathematical worlds:
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Even though time is the measure o f all movement, and there is, at the same time, a multitude o f movements, there is, however, only one numerically single time, and not multiple times; that is so because the first movement is unique, and time concerns this movement first and properly. (Duhem, 360)
When Heideggerjettisons the making ofthe thing as part of its identity, he loses this series.
As we have seen the consequence ofHeidegger's functional description ofthings fragments the world into multiple times. How are these times stabilized into a single world or time? They cannot be stabilized into a single time without invoicing either (1) physics, to construct something like an absolute clock describing a mathematical order or a physical order o f ontogenesis or (2) a perceptual apperceptive order (as do Augustine and Kant). The first, while it does not reduce the world in the way that Heidegger fears
(physical laws are not the world nor can any science, except in special cases [physics and chemistry] reduce one level of complexity to another), it does problematize the animation o f the world, reintroduces the problem o f substance, and reintroduces a metaphysics o f science. What is the relation between physical descriptions of time and our perception of time? . The second, filters the world through our perception or knowing or mind, and, therefore, places us on the edge of a skeptical teeter-totter.
W e recognize change in us and change in the world. I f these are different, how are they related? Heidegger answers we are things, and these things enact time as the functioning through which they emerge at any point as what they are. But what kind of functional description, or semantic embodied series captures our functioning? Things are units o f time, but these units are not stabilized relative to each other nor are they uniform
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except as semantic concepts. There are many times: only what counts as a thing stabilizes the concept o f time as what is. 21
Kant in On the Form andPrinciples o fthe Sensible and the Intelligible World, a precursor to the first Critique, proposes that time is not a concept, as Leibniz argues against Locke in the New Essays, but a fundamental, pure intuition: "you conceive all actual things in time, and not as contained under the general concept oftime, as under a common characteristic mark" (? 14)22 In the Critique o fPure Reason, this has become
Time is not discursive, or what is called a general concept, but a pure form of sensible intuition. Different times are but parts o f one and the same time; and the representation which can be given only through a single object is intuition. Moreover, the proposition that different times cannot be simultaneous is not to be derived from a general concept. The proposition is synthetic, and cannot have its origin in the concepts alone. It is immediately contained in the intuition and representation o f time. (A 32/ B 47)
The unity o f time is not established by God, being, or an Absolute clock, but rather by objects which constitute a world within the singularity o f an intuition.
Heidegger in "Das Ding" redescribes this being in time within the singularity o f an intuition by refiguring or turning inside out the world and things and mortals and divinities as 'weHen'. 'Weilen', to stay, linger, dwell, functions as an absolute clock-- that is, the pressure that translates the ontological into a semantic condensation is stabilized, as are all things, all temporal series, in the semantics of 'weilen' taken into the implicate totality of whatHeideggercallsthequadrature. Inthechainofimplicationconstitutingathing--
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each functor depends on. the categorical difference between its descriptive force and 'weilen'. Alloftheseotherfunctorsaswordsdescribethefunctioningofthejugwithin
thesemanticsofourordinarylanguage. Thereisametaphoricclaritytothisimplicate chain that is missing in Heidegger's use o f'weilen'. The sense of 'weilen' does not attach to the jug through its function, as do the other terms, but through the personification of the jug that allows it to 'take', 'gather', 'outpour', 'gather'-- and 'dwell': to claim these wordsasexpressiveofitself. 'Dwell'heremarkstheentrancesi'weilen'intothe dimension of function. The more obscure meaning of 'weilen' as 'staying' flattens the temporal order described by function into semantics, where the meaning o f this world requires the construction o f a world-organism, a form o f life, in which this semantics can have meaning. The object o f "Das Ding", therefore, is an attempt to construct this form of life through the elucidation of the semantics o f'weilen'.
The syntax o f function that describes the jug, however, cannot describe either the world or us. The relation between things, therefore, requires this further abstraction into stasis--or rather into the subjunctive. But it is exactly this subjunctive that needs to be described in order for 'weilen' to function as the categorical functor between the descriptive and functional temporal series and the world-constituting relations ofthe quadrature (Geveirt). Not only must Heidegger describe humans as things, but he must also describe the world, the quadrature, and in this redescribe how all three can describe a function, an identity, and an unfolding of time, a time series, as an implication that includes the others. Such an attempt would precipitate the skeptical dilemmas he is trying to avoid. The emergence ofthe opposition between making and given, where the given is emergent
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in our relation to things and in their functioning, must also include our species history. Heidegger's question about how the world emerges as a world must also include Thoreau's question 'why do these things make a world? '. Our self-reflective awe includes not just the philosophical question 'why is there anything instead o f nothing? ', but the questions'whythesethingsinsteadofothers? whymeinsteadofanother? ' Buildinga mind stabilizes this questioning by integrating how is this world mine with why is this world mine, not instead of another's but instead of simply 'not mine. ' I can make myself in order to make the world. Heidegger wants to forget this question in the givenness of things.
1Translating Geveirt as 'fourfold' as does Hofstadter, confuses the categorical distinction between the kind of coherence among earth and sky, divinities and mortals and that which is achieved in the abstraction o f the einfaltigen\ these domains are distinct and cannot be reduced one to the other, but complete each other while retaining the other category as a set o f relations or possibilities that enact the world in a particular way.
2 Der Krug steht als Gefass doch nur, insofem er zu einem Stehen gebracht wurde. 3Heidegger'spictureofscience: Scienceobscureswhat'thejug-characterofthejugconsist[s]',when science, as he believes it does, claims to "inform us about the reality of the actual jug" ("die Wissenschaft konneunsuberdieWirklichkeitdeswirklichenKrugeseinenAufschluflgeben"). Thisisaclaimfew scientistswouldmake,andattheveryleastisstrictlyspeakinglogicallyimpossible. Inductioncannot lead to certainty. The question science asks is 'How does this work? ' It collapses why-questions and what-questions into how-questions. Heidegger's claim, therefore, that science pays 'no heed to that in the vessel which does the containing. . . to how the containing itself goes on" is false. Science specifically provides an answer to "how the containing itself goes on". Its answer is embedded within a system of mathematical (broadly speaking) descriptions, simplified and idealized in order to answer this how. Heidegger's question 'how does the containing itself go on? ' asks not for a causal description but for a kind of transcendental deduction determined within phenomenological limits (and therefore exploring the semantics of 'containing') and describing a set of ontological possibilities. 4TheJournalsandMiscellaneousNotebooksofRalph WaldoEmerson.
5 If we can use Bohm's description o f quantum relations as a metaphor.
61say a noumenal boundary although Heidegger makes a distinction between the Ding an sich and Ding als Ding, because he asserts that from the thing qua thing we may reach thing in itself (DD168), but more importantlyrepresentationandmakingformthethingitselfasthenoumenal. Andthustheysetuptheir own failure.
7traut: cosy, secure, within, intimate, close.
trauen: trust, believe in, venture, dare, marry.
zutrauen: believe sombody is capable of doing something.
8 If the world always stays in this outpouring, beyond or forgonen by our representations, we can only discover it in following this outpouring in whatever world we find ourselves in. Losing the world might seem to suggest instead the possibility that 'this world', accompanied by a wave of an arm (my arm? ), is a
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true or false world. This can mean either that this might not count as a world, requiring some tests, an examination o f world-criteria, or that this might be a true-world or a false-world.
9 Aristotle's hylomorphism determines substance as matter determined by form, in a similar conceptual unity,inorderprimarilytoresistthePlatonicreductionofmattertoform. Realisminmodemphilosophy argues for the irreducibility o f category in order to resist what is often understood to be, but should not be, the scientific reduction to 'matter'.
10 See On the Way to Language; "Letter on Humanism"; "Dwelling Building Thinking".
11 ". . . Dasein's going-out-of-the-world in the sense of dying must be distinguished from the going-out-of- the-worldofthatwhichmerelyhaslife[desNur-leben-den\. Inourterminologytheendingofanything that is alive, is denoted as "perishing" [Verenden]. We can see the difference only if the kind of ending which Dasein can have is distinguished from the end of a life. Of course "(tying" may also be taken physiologicallyandbiologically. Butthemedicalconceptofthe'exitus'doesnotcoincidewiththatof "perishing". (BT 284-85; 240-41).
12 See Sein undZeit, 88.
u Averrois Cordubensis, lib. IV, comm. 88; cited in Duhem, 301.
14 Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 29/30.
15The Genesis ofHeidegger's Being and Time.
16Basic Concepts, tr. Gary E. Aylesworthy, 21-22.
17 The following is a schematic translation o f this passage: Thinking: (Being, essence) embrace; Embrace (thing, person) = love =favor, Favor = bestow essence as gift: Favor = essence of enabling = unfold as letting it be; enabling= possible (essence of favor): Being enables thinking; enables = make possible; reintegrated into Being as enabling/ favoring2 possibility o f Being.
181 am not finished with perishing and dying, as i f anyone could be! , but I don't want to recapitulate
existential descriptions- but to work out the relation between grammar and ontology--you could read that here as possibility and necessity as stances toward oneselfand the world- and thus not as logical (modal) possibilities.
19"Moira (Parmenides VIE, 34-41)" in Early Greek Thinking, tr. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi.
20 Although Heidegger never articulated it as such, this construction o f things as functions responds to Putnam's twin-earth argument and its consequences for functionalism narrowly conceived as a model for the mind.
z,How does form emerge as the kind of thing I should be or am, if I do not already understand form, at least of others, as who they are?
22 In Theoretical Philosophy 1755-1770, tr. and ed. David Walford and Ralf Meerbote (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992) 373-416.
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9. 1 Thunder-talk
9
'Weilen' in The Waste Land
Howdowedwellinandstaytheworldaslanguage? Science,Heidegger imagines, stays the world into quantity, while he stays it into semantics, into the quality of being a thing and a world. Eliot asks in The Waste Land, I imagine, 'How do we dwell in and stay language as our world? ' Heidegger's transformation of ontology into semantics mutates, in the poem, into a translation ofthe semantic into the subjunctive under the aspect o f a more restrictive aesthetics o f identity. Eliot's questioning does not undo Heidegger's work, but it shows how the giveness ofthe thing is also made against the fantasy o f the subjunctive. Thus, The Waste Land highlights our language into a subjunctive mode through which we constitute ourselves in language (at the very least investigating the way in which pronouns and names and voices have a claim on us, or 'we' on them). How do we approach the inanimate through the subjunctive?
How do we dwell in and stay language as our world? I find this question in another kind of semantic play on 'weilen' in a fragment Eliot quotes from the opening scene ofWagner's opera Tristan undIsolde:
Frisch weht der Wind Der Heimat zu
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
Notes for this chapter are on page 398
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A sailor sings these verses. Isolde, mistakenly or not, interprets them to be about her: "Who dares to mock me? " She is th e 'you'. Asking "where you dwell? " to a woman figured as nothing but a pronoun can be understood as another way of asking 'How do we dwell in and stay language as our world? ' A provisional answer, that will prove not to be an answer at all, but a restatement o f the question is the invocation o f memory and desire withwhichthepoembegins. Theenvironmentandtime(figuredasApril)arestayedinto poetry through the Coincidentia Oppositorum, "mixing/ Memory and desire" (2-3). I find thismixinginTheWasteLandoperatic. Howisthisenactmentofstaying(notreallya stasis) or lingering or dwelling through the fragments different from the astonishment of soul Kierkegaard describes as an effect of Opera? Certainly the power of The Waste Land is not the "exuberant gaiety" that is the power o f Don Giovanni. This gaiety is the expression of"his voice, the voice ofthe sensuous" (96). How would we describe the
voices in The Waste Land?
Heidegger leaves us in a world of things, with neither people nor the scientific
logic with which to build these things into people. This is something like the world in which Tristan finds himself in The Waste Land. Heidegger wants to get to the organic coherence of the world as a form of life that can speak 'weilen' with the ontological force that he needs to reconstitute a particular thing into staying, dwelling, being the world, avoiding the traditional attempts to link particulars and universals (examples, exemplars, forms, versions, reflections, and so on). Heidegger's romanticism remains akin to Schlegel's in his attempt to reconstruct a semantics with ontological force. His attempt, however, blocks offany questioning ofthe giveness ofthe world (like Wittgenstein, he
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wants to disconnect 'how the world is' form "what is higher. God does not reveal himself intheworld'(TLP6. 432);Heideggerbothbeforeandafterhisturn("dieKehre") rejects this kind o f transcendence: Wittgenstein and Heidegger always had alien views concerning logic. What is common between them, however, is not just their appeal to the ordinary and to the grammar of language (albeit in different ways) but their failure to understand the depth of questions about how the world is). For Eliot some possible world speaks 'verwielen' and from this speaking he must construct its semantics, in this case the semantics o f thunder.
What is created in an by The Waste Lcmdl
The attempt to justify the poetry results in an appeal to and requires the constructionofakindoftheoryofmind. Whythisisremainsamystery. Ifmindsfunction within an ontological universe described by science, by strict laws describing a totality of possibilities, then these constructions have force only in so far as they articulate themselves in relation to such an ontology. When Eliot deciphers "What The Thunder Said" as "The spoke the thunder/ DA," the etymological force o f DA, and its inclusion in
Datta (give), Dayadhvam (sympathize) and Damyata (control) does not get taken up into mythological or theological promises or stories separate from the physics of thunderstorms and the indifference of these natural processes to our concerns, understanding, and meanings. Howdoesitgettakenup? Orhowarewetakenupbyit?
Is this thunder the voice of our beginning as human beings, or our end? Vico and, through him, Joyce settled thunder at the beginning of humanity, driving our ancestors
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into caves and into society. From our havens listening toward heaven, our "forebears" (FW572. 06) mimicked onomatpoetically thunder into language:
The first men, who spoke by signs, naturally believed that lightening bolts and thunderclaps were signs make to them by Jove; whence from m o , to make a sign, can numen, the divine will, by an idea more than sublime and worthy to express the divine majesty. They believed that Jove commanded by signs, that such signs were real words, and that nature was the language of ove. The science o f language the gentiles universally believed to be divination, which by the Greeks was called theology, meaning the science o f the language o f the gods. (NS379)
The world requires divination, and thus "Sibyls and oracles are the most ancient institutions of the gentile world [721, 925]" (NS381). Divination, as the form of what Vico calls "poetic metaphysics," "seeks its proofs not in the external world but within the modificationsofthemindofhimwhomediatesit"(NS364). Themythicconsciousnessis
gripped by a kind o f idealism that resists the conscious articulation o f the question "Are the signs I see in the world actually in the world or a function o f my interpretations? "
"Because o f the indefinite nature o f the human mind, wherever it is lost in ignorance man makes himselfthe measure of all things" (NS120). What is the nature of this ignorance? In this case it is the ignorance attending finding ourselves fragments (represented or acted out in our ignorance of the meaning of The Waste Land). Eliot's ignorance is not directed at the world and its workings but toward God and the
justificationoftheworld. ThisisagainakintoVico'sdescriptionofpoeticmetaphysics:
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So that, as rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them (homo intelligendof i t omnia), this imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them (homo non intelligendofit omnia). . . . . . . . . for when man understands he extends his mind and takes in the things, but when he does not understand he makes the things out of himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them. (NS405)
How do we extend our mind into our mind? The Waste Land requires us to remark our ignorance of the significance or nature of our own believing and of our visions as self- reflexive ignorance: our ignorance of our ignorance.
Vico explicitly grounds the poetic and the mythic in the same logic, or poetic wisdom. Eliot's project in The Waste Land is ostensibly the same (or similar). What is the poetic logic Eliot uses to expose the mutual relation between poetry and myth? (This is another way o f asking what does the poem create? ). I do not want to explore this question byexaminingEliot'suseofmythorhisuseanddistortionsofquotations. Vicooffersa way into a more interesting question about how we enter into the correlation (an origin) between language and consciousness. If Vico's history is too obscure, then, at least, his argument that human consciousness derived from mythical consciousness and that this mythical stance toward the world articulates a poetic metaphysics places the logic of origins within the logic of coherence determining language as a language, a consciousness as a consciousness, or a mind as a mind. These logics of origin and coherence are akin to
Heidegger's configuration of the thing as the staying of the quadrature. The logic of origin and coherence in The Waste Land function as the aesthetics (or justification) of
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fragmentation within the poem. Eliot's aesthetics o f fragmentation is the poetic enactment of the Sibyl's condition described in the poem's epigraph. Such an aesthetics attempts to organize language, consciousness, and the world within and around the inhabitation o f the concept o f identity represented (or enacted) by the Sibyl.
Unlike Vico and Joyce, Eliot does not ground the speaking o f the thunder in the "first men, stupid, insensate, and horrible beasts" (NS374). Eliot does not give us a complete thunder language, nor the integrated language or form o f life evolved, evolving and expressing the infrarational mind of someone, but rather the grammatical (the linguistic forms, examples, usages, bits) limits between thunder language(s) and the minds and times and societies in which they made sense, between the theology of God's language
and the insensate forms o f nature's indifference to make our kind o f sense. offers different kinds o f education: an incarnation versus T&ks(h*,xxj:
Then spoke the thunder DA
Datta: what have we given?
DA
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
DA
Damyata: The boat responded
The thunder
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