How can one be an entity and not an
identity?
Brett Bourbon - 1996 - Constructing a Replacement for the Soul
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? criedoutfromthesameentrapmentintheincommensurableasKurtz. TheSibylasksfor her death, as a response to the horror o f life, out o f a metaphysical disjunction between meaning and reality, that for her is marked by identity (being who she is) and time (shrinking into an eternity o f isolation), and for Eliot and for us might describe the ontological descriptive power ofphysics, the indifference ofwhat Davidson calls sciences attempt to "extrude the concept of causality in favor of strict laws" (297) and the domain ofmeaningconstitutingsubjectivity,culture,etc. InthisquotationfromPetronius'
Satyricon, the Sibyl is already entrapped within a foreign language, speaking Greek when she was in fact Roman, and already a story within the mendacity o f low-character (Trilmachio), decayed already from a prophetess into a ship in a bottle (her ampulla: ajar for liquids, a container of feminine essence, but also bombast, inflated talk: proicit
ampullas; if the Sibyl is not Cassandra, then at least her truths now sound absurd not just because she speaks from inside ajar and in a foreign language, but because we put her there).
The Sibyl describes an ontological myth, embodying in her body, identity, and being an indeterminate allegory, a description with an unclear referent that conceptualizes asrealaseeminglyphysicallyimpossiblestate. Thedistortionofherfatefromthe everyday condition o f humanity marks her difference as an aspect o f our being human. The hypostatization o f the identity o f being as what counts as existing within the continuation of time describes a picture of how we think of ourselves: the picture that we existintime,butaredefinedbyauniqueessence,ouridentity. TheSibyl'spredicament demonstrates the absurdity ofthis picture (this does not mean we can dismiss it, however;
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? by claiming that either the principle o f identity as being or time are fantasies). More importantly, it demonstrates the effect ofthis metaphysical model on how we are within the world, a model linking subjectivity, here understood to be the continuity that expresses itself as a sense o f loss, to the metaphysics o f a world determined by change, time and loss. If we exist as able to speak, we mark our utterance by either time and identity, an 'I' or a 'now', as our subjectivity. Subjectivity embedded in time constituted by change functions as identity in relation to this change. Any domain of personal experience (subjectivity) or o f possession (grammatical 'I') which functions and exists under the same ontological description as change (time) generates the condition o f the Sibyl as a picture
of being human. The Waste Land enacts this picture within an attempt to make it meaningful, to give it a language within which the ontology o f things and objects, call this a picture o f science and technology from a distance brought on by the despair o f thinking oneself an object extruded from an animate tradition o f cultural existence and integration. Such a mirror hopes to show the way out o f the mirror.
The adequacy o f Eliot's new epigraph lies in its descriptive power in collapsing the realm o f conceptual self-reflection (who she is: her continuing identity) into a name referring,throughoutthediminishmentofthematterofherbody,tothisself-reflection. In such a state questions o f the form "what is it? " "what is true? " can be confused with questions o f the from "who is it? " "is she real? "
If The Waste Land asks "who is the Sibyl? ", where does it leave us after it becomes the answer? Do we recognize it as an answer? That would be to recognize it as theexemplarofourownlives. Itisnotjusttheworldthatwewouldhavetoreach
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? through this possibility, the world would make us into this possibility. This is the way in which the claims of our humanity might suffer under the pressure of natural selection (Darwin) or amorality (Machievelli). Instead of resistance or despair or irreverence the demands o f this pressure require that we twist the problem around such that we describe how our human inheritance, our language and appeals to meaning, our theology and morality can arise and operate within the ontological descriptions that seem to dissolve their force and efficacy.
Eliot constructs an aesthetic, a language game, a poem in which the Sibyl's predicament, her soul embodied as a kind of eternity, can seem true or real: The Waste Land in all of its voices constructs the Sibyl's form of life, her condition, a community in which she can be understood and which she would recognize as her own; The Waste Land is the Mind of the Sibyl. Even for us to hear Eliot's personal grip against the world we would have to recognize her form of life to be ours, and this language to be ours; the process of reading or of training to survive the poetics of The Waste Land offers us a language in which we can express or articulate our soul as the Sibyl's. This logic of paralytic identity turns paralysis into subsistence and identity into symbolism. We should read "What the Thunder Said" as oracular in the sense o f Heraclitus: "The Lord whose
oracle is in Delphi neither indicates clearly nor conceals but gives a sign" (Plutarch, De Pythiae oraculis 404d, fragment 93). As a sign these words function not as pointers into some secret truth, the unconscious, a [the] god's mind, or even the future; they mean withinthelogicofsignswhichistheirownspeaking. Onecouldcallthisanewlanguage game or a poetics enacting our mind, subjectivity, or soul (we can not distinguish these
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? here) as a subjunctive stance toward ourselves similar to the Sibyl's predicament and her desire to die, to re-enter the limits of mortality. The Waste Land describes being human as being the Sibyl in her glassjar (is she a fly in her fly bottle? ). For The Waste Land, it is the logic, or language game, or poetics, or form of life that is missing and must be constructed out o f the oracle's words: if a riddle or an allegory, it can only be understood if we already understand it. This means the ambiguity ofthe oracle and ofthe poetry stand as a sign of a form o f life embodied not simply as these signs, but it only exists as an oracle, and as poetry, once we understand these signs as meaningful and thus make ourselves anew
within or as a mind that could speak them. In this way they point to a mind or act as expressionsofamindthatisbothoursandnot. Thattheydonotonlypointtous,inour understanding, allows them to be spoken to us as if by god.
As in the machine symbolism of Yeats (chapter 3) the symbols of identity constituting "What The Thunder Said", the words we understand as something we can say in a world in which we might find ourselves, if not now, someday or yesterday, offer themselves as containers for our minds, and in this offer of our translation into the structure of a thing we project our essential self, as if that is what our life means to us. The logic of identity, of equivalence, not the copula, nor the 'is' of existence, articulates not only what the poetry means but what we mean by ourselves. The fragments of The Waste
Land are dying (or are dead) in the way that we are dead or dying. This is the crucial analogy. Thetemptationtowardatheoryofidentityasatheoryofmeaningbuildsminds, as we saw in Jakobson, because it is the limit of death that constructs our lives as
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? containers (with holes, as sieves ofvarious kinds, shapes, and sizes). To enter language through identity is as if to enter as a container.
The Waste Land wants to be the answer, whatever that might mean or entail, to the riddle: What is made o f words but is akin to the Sibyl? It attempts to translate the ordinary disjunction between these two time series into a form o f being. Such a translation is a process of symbolization, the engine for generating symbols. Not all symbolization proceeds through such a translation, which is itself already either metaphoricoritselfasymbolandinthisapictureofthepossibilityofusinglanguage. The notion o f time itselfj because it is not an entity within our experience, but can only be seen as an effect. But does this imply a cause? How would we know that time is an effect? The very structure oftime looks like what Cora Diamond calls a great riddle: "'the riddle of life in space and time,' 'the riddle "par excellence'" as Wittgenstein called it, and which he said was not a question" (268). 19 As we saw in Chapter n, the Finnegans Wake version
o f the great riddle is, in its final version: "The first and last rittlerattle o f the anniverse; when is a nam nought a nam whenas it is a. Watch! " (FW607. 10-12). When is a man/name not [nothing] a man/ name whenas it (nested in the world o f objects) is a--but not a thing at all but either watch Finnegans Wake or when he is a watch, timing the
world, which is to clock human language against both the world and our fantasies. The Sibylshrinks, "aWomanoftheWorldwhocanTellNakedTruthsaboutaDearManand
all his Conspirators" (FW107. 03-04). But in Eliot's waste land the saint's quest diminishes any woman; but this diminishment translates identity into the ordering pattern oftime. Canthiskindoftimesupportasoul? AnAristoteliansoulhylomorphically
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? identical to the body can produce only the Sibylline immortality. Joyce glosses "Here is a homelet not a hothel" (FW586. 18) when someone gets aetherealized into desire: "Sylphing me when is a maid nought a maid he would go to anyposs length for her! " (FW495. 6-7). Paracelsus populates the air with the elemental sylph; this sylph constitutes what in The Waste Land one can call the void and the Sibyl as the holding of the ampulla. How does she dwell in the world? In a "homlet" and not a "hothel"?
1Table TalkandOmnianaofSamuelTaylorColeridge. 2"The Love Song of J. Alfred Pnifrock. "
3 These quotations are both from "Gerontion. "
4"Little Gidding"
5"The Love Song ofJ. Alfred Pnifrock".
6JosiahRoyce'sSeminar1913-1914,ed. GroverSmith. AlsomentionedinLyndallGordon,Eliot's Early Years, 58.
7Psycho-analysis and its spawn oftherapies and descriptions interprets fantasy as modes or expressions of sicknessorhealth. Psychologicalallegoriesconstruedreamsasmeaningfulmanifestationsofembedded allegoricalscenesorpatternsofrelationconstitutingparticularsetsofpsychological'entities'. These manifestationpretendtobecaused,althoughthemechanismsofcausationareunexplained; psychological meaning, etiology and structure, do not map onto the physiology o f the brain. Cognitive science must reduce all forms of qualia, consciousness, feelings, etc. , to the quanitities describing brains, or logic, or mechanism. Thisreductionisresistedbyanumberofphilosophicalblackboxeswitheitherspecial functions or as irreducible states.
8 We do not write a theory o f knowing in order to determine what we know, but as a means for the world to claim or reject us.
9Paremenides ofElea: Fragments, A Text and Translation with an Introduction. Trans. David Gallop, (Fragment3). Thetranslationismine.
10Sparshott,F. E. LookingforPhilosophy. SeealsoGallop(above)andJ. BarnesThePresocratic Philosphers, 155-230.
11WarrenS. McCulloch. EmbodimentsofMind. Thisquestiondescribesacertainontological- physiological-logical nexus that would allow it to be rephrased as "What is a Number, that a Woman May KnowIt,andaWomanthatSheMayKnowaNumber? " Thepressurethisformulationputson "knowing" compresses thinking into our species-being.
12Cited and translated in Duhem, 360.
13EC: "East Cocker"; BN: "Burnt Norton"; DS: "Dry Salvages": LG: "Little Gidding.
14The Tractatus begins "The world is everything that is the case" in order no"t only to end with an appeal to silence, but in order tojustify Wittgenstein's intuition that "The solution to the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem":the problem is a riddle that neither the after life will answer ("Is this eternallifenotasenigmaticasourpresentone? Thesolutionoftheriddleofourlifeinspaceandtime lies outside space and time"[6. 4312])
15This is the use/ mention distinction described by Quine.
16What is being claimed to be identical with what? An object is conceptualized within a specific kind of
discourse, a language game, or under a particular aspect and equivalence is asserted according to the terms,criteria,aspectdefinedbythisdiscourse. Inthesecasestheassertionx=ysuggeststhatundera particular aspect or discourse they can be construed as the same, synonomous, and thus replacable as
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? reflections o f each other: x=y is true because each term can be reduced to or substituted for the other and thus they become identical as x=x or y=y; x=x defines x=y describes the relation between x and y.
17 An interesting case o f an attempt to formalize the interrelation between identity, existence, and predicationcanbefoundinthelogicalontologyofthePolishlogicianLesniewski. Hisformalization makesexistenceascountable. Ileavethishereasanoteonlytobringouttheprincipleofcountability[as anassumption]asakindofKantianform: thetheoreticalmachineinmylastchapterispartlydesignedto discoveritselfinthiscounting. Thisdiscoveiyisthelinchpinbetweenalgorithmicfunctioningand metaphoric self-description [of course my machine is nothing but the latter- described as if it were the former]. Lesniewski'slogicallanguagedescribesthecomplexityoftheverb'tobe'throughlogical relations. The means by which this is done shows the possiblitities, assumptions, and limitations o f any suchlogicaldescription. SeeC. Lejewski"OnLesniewski'sOntology"Ratio1(195S),150-76.
18 Compare with Alice in her adventures in Wonderland, 37.
19 The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind.
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? 8
(How) Can things mean?
Eliot sketches the smudges on the Sibyl's glass bottle and mimics the echoing noise o f the world inside the bottle. Hiedgger, in "Das Ding" recasts the glass bottle into athrownpot,ajug,athing. Whatisthesoulofathing? Iquotemypreviousdescription: "In his latter work, Heidegger reconstitutes the ontological claims the world makes on us as semantic functions, as following a conceptual pattern o f meaningful relations. In other words, he attempts to reconstitute what something is as what it means. These ontological claims and semantic possibilities determine Being, not simply as existence, but as the functional condensation of all meanings ofthe verb 'to be' into those aspects of our experience we recognize as things, ourselves, and the world. "Das Ding" enacts the question 'What is the qualitative aspect o f things? from within a language that can enact the answer as our re-education; the ontology of things in their participation or inhabitation of Being can look like a psychology of things. Heidegger begins his essay with the question "What is a thing? " He takes this question to be asking something like 'How do things exist? ' or 'What exists for us? '. His answer to these question, however, proceeds through asking 'what does "existence" mean? ', questioning the verb o f 'to be' into its ontological and functional force. We inhabit this force through a redemptive semantics which transforms the concepts o f identity and predication determining existence, 'being' and 'is', from a world both containing and against us, into the categorical semantic
Notes for this chapter begin on page 326
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? ambiguity of the word 'weilen' (dwelling, staying, abiding, lingering) under the pressure of this re-education. "
I want to use this re-education as a way of sketching how time can be translated into a grammar. Strictly speaking, this is not meant as a critique ofHeidegger, as much as an attempt to write an exegesis of "Das Ding" towards the limits of our language exposed under the pressure o f the concepts o f things and o f time that he reads in his description o f a jug. It is at these limits that the relation between animation and semantics offers descriptions o f how we make and inhabit the world in which we find ourselves.
I want to begin with some confusion about one o f the ways the mind emerges in Being and Time as a way of opening up a set of questions that will lead me through "Das Ding". To recognize something as countable is to know how to count. Knowing how constructsthedomainofthecountable. Thisisthewayinwhichpracticesgain ontological significance. Heidegger in Being and Time, therefore, is correct, I think, to the degree that he says our being-in-the-world necessarily requires and functions within pre-established domains of interaction, something like what Wittgenstein means by forms of life. Heidegger asks, in chapter IV, what allows for the mutual interaction among Dasein, things, and other humans? : "The Others who are thus 'encountered' in a ready- to-hand, environmental context o f equipment, are not somehow added on in thought to some Thing which is proximally just present-at-hand; such 'Things' are encountered from out ofthe world in which they are ready-to-hand for Others~a world which is always mind too in advance' (BT154;118). Heidegger thinks, however, that counting disguises this requirement:
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? Even to come across a number o f 'subject' becomes possible only if the Others who are concerned proximally in their Dasein-with are treated merely as 'numerals'. Such a number o f 'subjects' gets discovered only by a definite Being- with-andtowards-one-another. This'inconsiderate'Being-with'reckonswiththe Others without seriously 'counting on them', or without even wanting to 'have anything to do' with them. (BT163)
I f we clarify Heidegger's mood in saying this, we might translate this as "we count so we don't have to count what we count". Is the fact that "count' can also mean 'to matter', 'to have significance or value' an indication of the hidden structure of what Heidegger calls care[Sorge]inknowing? ofanecessaiy(orsupervening)relationbetweenvaluingand knowing?
Answering this question, I think, would involve answering why Heidegger attempts to dissolve empathy into what he calls Being-with, my finding myself already within a world with others:
Dasein is with equal originality being-with others and being-amidst intraworldly beings. The world, within which these latter beings are encountered, is . . . always already world which one shares with the others. (Basic Problems, 297)
We can at least ask: Is Heidegger justified in making empathy dependent on Being-with as a way of grounding Dasein outside of doubt? Does taking a stance toward others as if they had souls undo my doubt that their souls are like mine?
In Being and Time, Heidegger wants to undo the structuring of our being in the world as a form of knowing, determined as a relation between subject and predicate,
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? quantified in such a way as to insure that to exist is to be constituted as a metaphyscial form o f identity. The relation between subject and object quantified in this way constructs our subjectivity, our being, within the realm of objects. If such an objecthood is to be resisted as the ground ofour being, then one must reinhabit the meaning ofBeing, recognize as authentic (although the complexity o f this recognition prevents any brief description) Dasein's being in the world prior to its becoming my world. The structure of this involvement is exposed authentically as care (sorge), which is our responsiveness, our being in relation to time, where "being is itselfan issue. " Dasein is "[ejssentially ahead of itself' (BT458;406), "ahead-of-itself-being-aIready-in-(the-world) as being-amidst (entities encountered within-the-world)"(BT237; 192). Temporality is understood as a dynamic involvement within the world against which the identity o f things is constructed, as a resistance. We must re-enter this temporality through care in order to re-enter the ground or the meaning of our being as non-things.
Heidegger's conceptualizing ofDasein as Being in the world, Dasein's proximate and for the most part relation to the world, unwinds the object status o f the world into a relational disposition that places the world and our relation to it before our construction of theworldintothings. Doubtasaspeciesoffailuretransformswhatisready-to-hand(our ordinary usage o f things) into present-at-hand (the presence o f objects as against us) and therefore into things (or what in "Das Ding" he will call objects). As things the objects of our dispositions and intentions, o f our world, lose the guarantee o f their relation to us (in third man arguments, for example); and thus doubt can work its way into skepticism.
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? Heidegger constructs "the They" in chapter IV as a replacement for matter as the given form o f our substantiality, and thus as the guarantee o f the world and our relation to it.
How can one be an entity and not an identity? How can one be relational and still work within our embodied form? The riddle is 'what is both subject and yet not an identity reducible to a thing? ': We--they, us, "das Man. " Underlying the question o f who is Dasein, in chapter IV, is the question cDo we function as things, as individuals organized as identities? ' For Heidegger, it is the relation between identity and thing that must be avoided, displaced into our Being-with, our existing as a function of our relations withothersandwiththeworld. The"wayofBeing"configuresDasein(anditsBeing)as a disposition and a becoming (a function of time): how do we temporally exist within the everyday? How is this Being within everyday time a disposition toward others? Why do
we count others as versions of ourselves?
Associating 'mattering' and 'numbering' (a form of knowing) in 'to count' might
be justified by 'numbering recognizes, and recognition values'. Is this order correct: knowingthenvaluing? Whatdowegainifwereversetheorderandsayvaluing recognizes? Counting is a way of constructing a set. We can mark value within a set or betweensetsbynumberingwithordinals. Isthisanexplanationforthemeaningof'to count'? When it means 'mattering', counting is a way of making value explicit. How can caring become abstracted into counting? What exactly does counting make explicit about caring? Heidegger assumes we can care (solicitude) without counting. But can we care outside o f our need and ability to count (which Heidegger would agree is a function o f our doubting, i. e. needing to know)? (Wittgenstein's resistance to scientific knowing as
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? immoral and destructive suggests that a scientific attitude is not a legitimate form o f life, although it can operate with legitimate language games in some domains. ) This might be a way of asking how skepticism makes empathy possible (something Heidegger implies,
BT163). What is the difference between the symbolizing procedures (the structure of identities and relations) which define empathy and solicitude? If solicitude can for Dasein "take away 'care' from the other and put himselfin his position in concern" (BT158), it requiresakindofself-symbolization(toallowforthisreplacement). Tosaythatempathy depends on a greater estrangement between Daseins than solicitude does not at all challenge the similar conceptual relations that construct an Others as something that can be replaced by oneself. The ability to "leap in" for someone else, while it structurally agrees with the condition of the "They", where "everyone is the other, and no one is himself' (BT165), is a Being-with-another by "not 'mattering' to one another" (BT158). Solicitude,therefore,cantaketheformofdenyinganother,orfailingtounderstand. If such a denying is possible, lying is possible. In fact one could understand solicitude-as- domination as a form o f lying based on the symbolization o f the other as someone to be replaced (to be used). Wouldn't this kind of leaping in create conflict? Does this kind of
solicitude meet with opposition? And can it fail?
Similarly, whatever allows us to feel empathy also allows us to lie. How could we
lie without simultaneously ascribing mental states to others, which we then manipulate, assuming our mental state(s) can be hidden? Lying requires both caring ("the other is primarilydisclosedinconcemfiilsolicitude",BT161)anddoubting. Chimpanzeescan bothlieandcount. HowcanwedissolvelyinginBeing-with? Thepossibilityoflyingand
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? our need to lie arises out o f our solicitude. Lying can function as the failure to recognize another in the face of one's own desire, such that one can replace one's desire for another. Since this replacement takes place in the context o f Being-with, it represents a turning away that for the Other could be understood as a hiding, This would not be lying only if we could cease Being-with, could erase our mutual identity within the 'They'. Otherwise we are stuck in a split structure, within a doubling, where we remain with the other but in thewayofhisnotmattering. Ontologysplitsfromvaluing. Butwithoutthisvaluingthe ontological relation expressed in Being-with has not content, and could not describe our everyday existence. Heidegger is stuck with the 'They' as the domain in which Being-with functions. Being-with becomes an orientation o f the 'They', within the 'They', as who a particular entity is (what is ontic if not a "non-committal formal indicator"? BT152). The content ofDasein is simultaneously its context (and thus Heidegger seems to avoid the separation between universal and particular). "Our" Being-with, therefore, is not so easily separated from empathy (as concomitant with lying). The ontological unity o f Being-with,
at the level o f complexity o f Dasein, already involves a kind symbolization that allows for counting and doubting. Being-with because it embodies an orientation, and is not simply unconsciousness in the way a lower animal might be unconscious, must conceive of others within a realm in which our orientation might fail, creating the possibility for doubt.
Heidegger resists and ignores this possibility in Being and Time. In "Das Ding" "Being-with" describes our nearness (or relation and involvement both ontologically and semantically) to and with things. Heidegger's philosophical therapy is directed at exposing our "Being-with" within the totality ofthe world as an animate whole. This
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? means that "Das Ding" is a manual for animating the world as a means o f re-animating being human outside ofthe temptations ofself-reflection that have reduced being human to consciousness (Descartes) and then to a mode o f knowing (Hegel).
Heidegger's philosophical therapy resists (or Heidegger fails to understand) the meaning and depth of the scientific stance within and towards the world (partly because he collapsesscienceandtechnology). Thisscientificstancewasarticulatedclearlyby Lucretius inDe Rerum Natura: "The dread and darkness ofthe mind cannot be dispelled by the sunbeams, the shining shafts o f day, but only by an understanding o f the outward form and inner workings o f nature" (31). Lucretius attempts to separate psychology, or rather divinity, from physics, while Heidegger wants to collapse both into a more fundamentalstancetowardearth,sky,mortalsanddivinities. Thehistoryofscientific therapy has yet to be written, as has a study investigating the depth of the question 'how is it? ' and its relation to the question 'why is it? ' (This is not to suggest that science reaches
"the real in its reality" [DD170]). Heidegger, in "Das Ding", is partly attempting to usurp these questions, suggesting that in the case of the jug whose nature he is exploring science gives "no thought to how the containing itselfgoes on" (171). While I do not think this is true, it opens up the intersection between science (or knowing) and the question of the meaning ofthings (or, in this case, ofjugs and containing). This intersection is what allows Lucretius to offer "the inner workings of nature" as an antidote to "dread and darkness. " Thus,Heideggerbringsusclosetosomeofthequestionsofscience(although he misrepresents their nature as scientific questions at least). And he is right to suggest that the meaning of our ontological commitments cannot be given by science (although I
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? do not think they can be 'given' by his semantic ontology either). Heidegger, at least, attempts to undo who we are as what and how we know, and in this avoid skepticism by animatingtheworld. Herevealsourrelationtotheworldasnotdeterminedorlimitedto representation (knowing) and asserts that science pictures and structures a world around the equation person = object + life = automaton; this picture o f science is more akin to vitalism than modem biology.
In "Das Ding", Heidegger's philosophical therapy contests the semantics and the ontological claim o f ways o f making and being made. One aspect o f this contestation enfilades along a line between 'making' and 'educating'. The relation between making
and education, however, is not symmetrical, bound as they both are to different pictures of whatisgiven. HeideggerenjoinsPlato'ssubsumptionof'becoming'ineducationand 'recalling' in knowing. Becoming human, recalling our humanness, through the reconceptualization o f our being in the world in relation to things, proceeds through
recalling our nearness to things as things, before they emerge as objects o f our knowing, as some predicate attached to a subject. But what can this 'before' mean here? Heidegger collapses (as a function of his holism, although there is some confusion here, I think, as well) four possible interpretations of this 'before':
1. historical before
2. psychological before 3. false consciousness 4. loss/ recovery
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? Historical loss describes the diminution and rejection of the Pre-Socratic expression of the relation between humans and the world (the conception ofBeing), a rejection that, he claims, precipitated the philosophical confusion ofWestern civilization. This loss, however, has a psychological analogue in the way subjectivity is formed within the context ofourparticularculturesandsocieties. Ineitherthehistoricalorpsychologicaldimension, however, Heidegger is faced with the possibility that our relation to Being remains an unrecognized existential-ontological reality (described in Being and Time) or that this relation has been lost and must be recovered (a possibility which was partly responsible for his turn towards historical interpretation).
8. 1 Matter
Heidegger wants to make the relation between mathematical description and semantic expression into the riddle: What's the difference between an atomic bomb and a
jug? Theybothlooklikeajug. Theirdifferenceistheirsimilarity. Isn'tabomb something like a jug? They both bring, or 'gather', atoms together. Atomic bombs do not always go off. I can use a jug to hit you over the head: it might not destroy a city (or even a world), but it might kill you. Not anyone could build an atomic bomb. Uranium, or any fissionable material, is hard to come by. But even if I did not understand the physics, that is, if I could not make it the first time, I could follow someone's instructions. I wouldn't know how it worked or why I built it in the way I did, but I could make it without any conscious commitment to the laws of science underlying it, except for my faith that such a combination of stuff could produce an explosion. It might seem like
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? magic to me. Could I make a jug, even if I just followed instructions, and not know how it works as a jug, or even how my making worked? I am nearer to the inside o f a jug than I am to the inside of an atomic bomb.
Let's ask the question again: what's the difference between an atomic bomb and a jug? I can mistake myselffor ajug, but not for an atomic bomb--even ifI know that I am
madeofatoms. Imightcallyouajug-head,andmeanyourmindisavoidorthatyour ears look like jug-handles or that you look like a cartoon character. If I say you're an atomic bomb, I might mean you hurt a lot o f people. That you might metaphorically explode and transgress the limits o f human behavior in some kind o f orgy o f violence.
God made us like we make a jug, formed out of clay. Is that more reasonable than that we were made and determined by the same laws of physics made articulate and used to construct the atomic bomb?
Feynman asks at the beginning of his Lectures on Physics:
I f , in some cataclysm, all o f scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made o f atoms-- little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. (1-2)
How much rests on the atomic constitution ofmatter? What is the role ofjustification and value in this sentence? Language is reduced to its informational content. This information
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? is communicated within a kind o f scientific fragment: a basic descriptions o f the relations which determine the physical world as the physical world. The world consists of an exceedingly large number of particles or parts. These parts have specific and law-like
relations describing their interactions as a function o f their distance from each other, at a little distance they attract each other, but at a smaller distance they repel each other.
'Atoms' answers the question 'what are we made of? ' Modem materialism does not necessarily dissolve the mind into material interactions, rather these interactions describeaparticularlimittowhatcancountasanexplanation. Itrulesoutspiritormagic for example. What counts as an atom, how atomic relations constitute matter and how mathematical descriptions capture fundamental relations and constituent aspects are all
questions beyond saying the world is made of atoms. Scientific knowledge describes the world in such a way that we can act through that knowledge to predict events, to alter events and forms, to discover how the givenness of our world works and determines itself as a world limited by the same limitations binding us.
Heidegger asks what is the nature of determining what the world is as a world, through knowing. This question does not ask about the nature of reality nor about what constitutes the real or the world. In fact it forecloses that question in order to demonstrate that at the most fundamental stage of the recognition of a thing (or non-
conceptual seeing) our stance toward the world is determined as meaningful. And thus Heidegger attempts to describe epistemology as a form of semantics, or rather to dissolve epistemology into an ontological semantics, where what counts as 'ontological and
'semantic'iswhatistobediscovered(ordescribedorunconcealed). Whatthisineffect
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? entails is the transformation o f what Heidegger understands as Science's question (a lot is already hidden in personifying science here, in not asking about different sciences at different times as defined in the practices of different scientists) from 'what is the real thing (object)? ' into 'what does a thing mean? ' That Heidegger phrases his question as 'What is a thing? ' indicates that this transformation must take place in our understanding of'is', and in this the question ofour figuration and picture ofthe real is bound with what
it means to be (the question ofthe meaning ofBeing). One ofthe goals of"Das Ding" is to replace sein, ist with Gegenstand, stehen, vorstellung, Weilen (west; verWeilen), versammelt, ring and gering within a coherent idiom.
Heidegger describes a vessel as "something self-sustained, something that stands onitsown"(DD166). ThisiswhatHeidegger'slanguagepantomimes,whathecallsour saying, and by this he means the ordinary logic through which a thing is a thing, as "the thinglycharacterofthething"(DasDinghafledesDinges). Athingbecomesanobject (Gegenstand) when or if "we place it before us" (against us; ob-, gegeri). An independent, self-supporting thing may become an object if we place (stelleri) it before us, whether in immediate perception or by bringing it to mind in a recollective re-presentation. We make a thing into an object by this placement or standing (stelleri). Placement is a presentation of the thing as against us, as a form distinct from other forms. Heidegger obscures what
thisplacingconsistsof,howwedoit,whywedoit,andsoon. Anaccountofthegenesis of our fall into an object world would force Heidegger into metaphysics.
Our stance toward the world can be defined by this placement in which objects appear in our "immediate perception" (and in this it is not a placement o f the object but
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? our placement o f ourselves before the fact). Recollection replicates this stance by presenting the world, representing things as presentable, and thus as presenting the thing asknowable: representingmeansknowing. Whatisrecollectedisthestancedetermining the thing as object. This stance because it defines an object as an object, in the way that social relations are inscribed in and as the commodity in Marx, embodies in the object, and
thus the object mirrors our being human knowers. If we discover a world of objects, it is because we have become objects ourselves. We might call this one way ofbecoming objective. This is at least true for science which "always encounters only what its kind o f representation has admitted beforehand as an object possible for science" (DD170).
This link between our stance and the world justifies Heidegger's assumption that the reformation o f being human can proceed through saving things from objecthood. Heideggerdoesnotofferajustificationforhiswaytowardreformation. Partofthis reformation consists of embedding value in the world (the quadrature or fourfold) outside ofthe demand and criteria forjustification (ofknowledge, belief, ofsense or nonsense). 1 The form o f the jug is lost to the jug acting and our use resides not in our acting but in the time-series constituting jugging (the jug).
Heidegger, for example, counters skepticism with the assertion that "[t]he jug remains a vessel whether we represent it in our minds or not" (DD167). But this is not an argument or an invocation of what tempts us toward doubt or even a counter to the Cartesian dualism that sets up the problem of mind and world that is one ofHeidegger's specific targets. The temptation he is diagnosing here is our tendency to see the self- standing independence ofthejug (ofthings) as a function ofits being made or ofthe
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? description of how it is made. The onlyjustification for ignoring the force of skepticism, if we ignore his final goal to undo the unity between knowing and being, he offers here, although it is less an offer than a strategy, appeals to a scientific principle, that something is first what it is when it is made.
Clearly the jug stands as a vessel only because it has been brought to a stand. This happened during, and happens by means o f a process o f setting, o f setting forth, namely, by producing a jug. (DD167)
Self-sustaining and supporting (Selbstandigen) determines the jug as a thing, but not as an object. Does this "standing on its own" (<das in sich steht) ("Das Ding" 158) happen during the process of producing the jug? "Clearly the jug stands as a vessel only because it has been brought to a stand" (DD167). 2 Standing on ones own is not the same as being brought to a stand (Stehen). In confusion we understand self-support "in terms of the making process. Self-support is what making aims at" (DD167). Our confusion, it seems, is to understand the meaning of "self-support" as determined by the "making process. " For Heidegger this is a kind of category mistake. The 'meaning' of thejug can only be its use. One would expect that Hiedegger, even at this early stage o f the essay, would suggest the way in which the meaning of 'self-support' is bound by its inclusion in our intentions, practices, language, and so on. Instead, he personifies making, itself, giving it
an intention that is satisfied (if successful) in "self-support": "Self-support is what making aimsat. " Heideggerdistinguishesherebetween'meaning',orthedeterminingofidentity (and therefore this is already a site o f confusion between meaning and ontology), and 'causation', the "making process. " Heidegger, however, is careful how he invokes cause,
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? and in fact reinstitutes the confusion between meaning and cause, attaching it not to the jug,buttothe"makingprocess"throughhisascriptionofintention. Heidegger(orrather
my interpretation) makes explicit that all descriptions o f cause (even in science) inscribe an intentionality (described by laws) that provides an agency for any particular cause. The way this agency (or intentionality) attaches to other 'things' (how and towards what 'effect' something is animated) can be confused (and can describe the difference between science and phenomenology, for example). Heidegger's goal, therefore, is to reconfigure the lines o f animation (intention) in such a way that they make an animate world (the concept or the sense o f an 'animate world' is exactly what is at stake in such a picture).
The jug is brought into the same world as the earth, being made o f earth, and thus itcanstandontheearthbyvirtueofthisidentityinmaterial.
