I struggle with the decision to put this fragment of thought-process analogue here for I do not think it constitutes proper rigorous philosophizing and neither is this an analysis of the work of others'. But I consider this as important to deriving at a clear and distinct idea by means of this primitive philosophical meditation. Here I do not consider proper notations, concepts, terms, or the accuracy of such and such in relation to its proper authors. I consider only the aim of deriving at a clear and distinct notion of my idea of truth-hood. Such is then my first draft work.
Preceding conceptual thought
Our faculty of imagination plays the role of bringing the manifold intuition Anschauung - into a unified representation - Vorstellung in a singular moment (Kant, CPR A120). Such a faculty has has a 4 fold role of “recognition, reproduction, association, apprehension” (CPR, A125) to create that Vorstellung, that very order at that and every single moment. When we subsume an intuition under a concept of green, we get a representation and a perception of a green object. But the brilliance of our imagination is not only in its logical automaton subsumption. This very same faculty is what gives us our sense of the infinite. This same faculty of imagination can be not binded by the faculty of understanding and its concepts. It goes into a "free play" with the understanding's concepts... it enters into a non-conceptual schizophrenic state and experiences the feeling of infinitude.
Demonstration
I believe that nowhere in social life can one find infinitude except in our mind's free play. Of all things - natura naturata have a finite lifespan. All things in the animal kingdom are subject to their very own menance. Man is no exception. To man if there is an ontology, not transcendent, to be spoken about, is his finitude. If this were man's ontological substrate, then all modal relations or ties of man have a characteristic of his finitude as well. It is tarred with impermenance, transience, ephemerality that is man. Therefore, for every attempt made to seek permanence in relationships without the aid of laws, public opinion, will to glory, will to attain the honour of the human species, relationships will necessarily reach its final stage of decay and death. This is why we can find in the text and works of Isocrates, Aristotle, Xenophon - Oeconomicus, Plato - Laws that relationships are never in their pure and a priori forms, they are never das sich in itself but is always tied to the greater functioning of the ideal polis. Everything else, the identity of man, the relations of man, is perceived, understood, thought of as a substructure, an auxiliary pole of the polis for otherwise, left in abeyance, whatever is associated with man will necessarily reach its final phase. Hence Zarathustra's teachings. That if one tries to seek permanence in others, he will necessarily be disappointed. If one seeks permanence in any activity of man, he will definitely exhaust its multiplicity. One will necessarily be in time, adulterated and desecrated with disappointments that will not elude man. If one seeks in the necessarily fictive, unreal and unfounded, in man, one will necessarily not attain the felicity he desires and the serenity he wants. It is this 'insidious circularity' that man needs to extricate himself from. From 'him-the others' to 'him' a priori. Where his desired infinitude of life, permanence in love and pleasures is in the 'free play of the mind.' Where he always seek to-become and will always have the possibility to be victorious. Where his relationship with others is the two coming of free minds.
Through this odd collage of the Kantian frame, Descartes-style meditation and logical re-and-de construction, I have now clear and distinct idea of relationships.
Axioms
I: In giving, I give my whole heart and soul to everyone and anyone who crosses my path. In truthfulness then, I am truthful.
II: But truthfulness I do not associate it with common notions of temporality. For relationships with others is as demonstrated, always transient. It can never be outwardly extended in time and can thus never be outwardly prolonged and sustained in time purely. It can only be located only in that Heiddegerian-Foucauldian particularity or moment of time where the past and future is in the present. Thus, where one wants to give all, he must always cease every moment and that very moment. For the moment is all we have.
III: An Other-oriented attitude and mind is then necessarily wrong for it lets every moment pass and thus lets the all-ness of life escape. It is equivalent to suicide if the latter is understood as the surrendering of one's life or the cessation of one's life. If the moment is all we have, all is then the entirety of our life. Hence by letting the moment pass, we let life pass, and we have in such a sense killed ourselves everytime we let a moment pass without ceasing it.
IV: All relationships in whatever form, heterosexual, bisexual, homosexual will necessarily have take on such a form.
V: If IV, is true, then all relationships are equal.
VI: If V is true, then all relationships are equally normal or abnormal.
VII: If VI is true, then all relationships have no "naturally intrinsic" normality or abnormality.
VIII: If VII is true, then there can possibly be many potential types of relationships.
IX: But because there is only one main type of relationship, the dominant heterosexual, there must then be mechanisms or forces at play that constitute such a static form.
X: Such a form of the type of relationship is necessarily aberrant because as demonstrated, the only real form is impermanence, transience and ephemeral.
XI: Such an ideal stable totality is necessarily inauthentic because only singular moments are true.
Friday, October 15, 2010
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Analysis of Foucault’s Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology in the Foucouldian context of ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’
Kant’s Anthropology is like a ‘body’ molded by a great many distinct regimes [pp. 87] and like the body, Kant’s Anthropology alike cannot understand itself. “Nothing in man – not even his body is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men.” Something else must ground the ‘universal nature of man’ that Kant seems to assert in his flowerily written Anthropology. It is this I construe as the ‘dynamic circularity.’
Genealogy unveils the hazardous play of dominations [pp. 83]. The question of ‘how’ is what concerns me here. Enstehung is ‘emergence [pp. 83].’ It is the moment of arising. It can appear as ‘culmination point(s)’ or decisive conclusion(s) as seen in the universal nature of man in Kant’s Anthropology. But in fact, they merely [hide] the current episodes in a series of subjugations [pp. 83]. The Critique as a transcendental a priority is always battling against its unfavourable conditions [pp 84]. To ‘emerge as’ transcendental and a priori, as a species in-itself in an isolated and superior position, it has to first realize itself as a species [pp. 84]. This immediately entails a process [emphasis added] of emergence prior to it appearing as what it is: transcendental, pure, a priori, durable, uniform and simple. The Critique needs to ‘distance itself’ from the Anthropology for it claims the possibility of a priority whereas the Anthropology is a wholesale evidence of its empiricity, its site or its source of originary. It thus has to establish this ‘void’ or ‘nonplace’ between its roots, the Anthropology and itself. Yet this place for the genealogist is spectacular for it is the point or ‘place’ where one can locate this confrontational relationship and hence, discern a relationship that was made ‘invisible.’ In this pure distance, this interstice [pp. 85], we can see the Critique endlessly trying to dominate the Anthropology by subjecting or subjugating it. The Entstehung or moment of emergence thus at once signifies two things: 1) a moment or arising of the “willer” (the Critique’s will to power - the moment it utilizes and exhaust as much as it can, the possibilities given by the Welt-of-knowledge itself and step foot out of it to establish its ‘sovereignty’ and ‘uniqueness’) and 2) the subjection of the to-be dominated. For Kant’s Critique to emerge as transcendental philosophy, it has to “impose limits, inflict torments and mortifications [pp. 84]” on Anthropology. It torments and mortify Anthropology by firstly using what it gives it, by “forcefully appropriating things necessary to [its] survival [pp. 85]” the Anthropology to me in this reading, is a signification of Kant’s empirical roots (his experiences, exposure to classics, various thinkers etc from which he derives his idea of the transcendent subject). Thus, the Critique a) stems from [emphasis added] Anthropology and b) rips it of all its empiricity in it and from it to derive at a ‘pure conclusion.’ Next, 2) the Critique dominates Anthropology by inflicting torment, battle against Anthropology. It arises (transcendent; universal) above Anthropology by making Anthropology look as though [emphasis added] it is a corollary of [emphasis added] the subject’s transcendental act. This is done quite ingeniously by“imposing” the tripartite structural- division upon the Anthropology. Hence, Anthropology appears to have [emphasis added] the mimicry categories and divisions that is quite synonymous to the Critique. But this appearance is the very result of the Critique’s act of domination its Entstehung (emergence). In other words, 1) there exists a relationship between the Critique and Anthropology 2) the Critique needs Anthropology (Critique’s empiricity) to arise to its grand position. The relationship of domination is not found in a historical time or place [pp. 85] but in rituals, in meticulous procedures that impose rights and obligations [pp. 85] on Anthropology. Once the tripartite divisions or rules or transcendental laws are laid, it becomes an automated-engine itself. It stages the stage for its own “meticulously repeated scenes of violence [pp. 85].” Recall, the Critique itself emerges from the real Welt-of-knowledge as Kant wills himself to power. It is his interpretation of the Welt. But once Kant lays down these laws or rules, it is for Foucault as for Nietzsche, “an appearance” that has taken the identity of the truth-itself. This is why Foucault writes:
The transcendental law that Kant sets down becomes the stage of repeated meticulously repeated scenes of violence [pp. 85]. ‘Violence’ as a term used to signify domination against others or other things which cloaks them in Kant’s own veil (veil of his own will to power) and deprives others of willing themselves into their real existence i.e. understanding and deriving their own interpretations of the Welt. Thus, this is for Nietzsche as for Foucault, not a good thing. Moreover, Foucault goes on to say that “rules are empty in themselves, violent and unfinalized; they are impersonal and can be bent to any purpose [pp. 85-86].” Thus, once Kant sets down the transcendental law, we, as a conglomeration of ‘others’ or ‘other people’ can use it and think it to be [emphasis added] the real truth although this is merely, Kant’s truth and Kant’s own will. His act of violence, upon us. Thus, for Foucault, to see truth, one must first be able to seize these rules, pervert them, invert their meaning and redirect them against those who initially imposed them (this is the role of the Genealogist). One must be able to “control this complex mechanism, they will make it function so as to overcome the rulers through their own rules [emphasis added][pp. 86].” Only through one’s very own interpretation of the Welt, is one able to make one’s own rules (not relying on others) and hence subvert Kant’s rule.
What Kant has done is thus, that he has interpreted “a system of rules [of the welt] which in itself has no meaning and impose a direction, to bend it to his [own] will, to force its participation (or point of view) in a different game (the Kantian game) [pp. 86].” Progress or the development of history is thus interpreted by Foucault as a “series of interpretations” that perhaps overcome and undermine one another. Hence, to dispel this false truism of the Kantian transcendence, we cannot ‘retrace history’ through time but must look at and for and analyze this “non-place” this “pure distance” where this violence is perpetrated.
The role of the genealogist is thus to dispel the Kunst the illusion of a Kantian plenitude and meaningful phenomenon. There thus exists a radical discontinuity, pure space between Anthropology and the Critique through which true relations of tensions are played out. 1) Through perpetual and continual repetitions or the repeat of violence upon Anthropology, the Critique gains its transcendence. Its transcendence is rooted and dependent upon Anthropology by always overcoming it and distancing itself from it. This is also important because the Anthropology is a site that displays all of Kant’s empirical links and affiliations to the Welt or context he lives in and is influenced by. To establish the subject as a priori and sovereign, what has just been said must be effaced completely. The pure distance must be maintained. But also, 2) that Anthropology has its the universal and objectively-knowing voice proclaiming this and that to be truth and can make such “universal claims” of what really is good or human is because it depends on the Critique. It depends on this continual violence and dominance inflicted upon it (tripartite divisions established and ‘given’ by the transcendental subject) so as to appear as a sovereign epistemological structure of its own apart from the Welt-of-knowledge. Yet, it has to distance itself from “its own truth,” its source, the Critique, which is Kant’s will to power that its truth, is itself, Kant’s subjective truth for any recognition of this will subvert Anthropology’s “universality.” There thus exist this very dynamic circularity which is extremely hard to point out in isolation between the Critique and Anthropology. Each inflicts violence upon each other and seeks to triumph each other. The Critique of Anthropology to attain transcendence and the Anthropology of the Critique to sustain its status of its scientific universality.
Anthropology is always the site of perversion and inversion of the power of the Critique for it is evidence of a panoply of empirical influences the Critique is dependent on but denies. Thus, the Critique continually impose its divisions upon the Anthropology to sustain its transcendence and (or but) also, continually distance itself from it for it is the Critique’s source of peril.
Important takeaways:
Although this seems contrary to what Foucault wants to say, for me, most importantly, this whole circular display wants to tell us that 1) every mensch’s own interpretations of the Welt is his own. He takes from the Welt that contains infinite possibilities and interprets it for his own. The subject still reigns supreme in the end or does it? 2) We must thus beware of anyone’s claim of “objectivity” and “universality” for its truism is always someone’s will to power and its “naturalness” and “continuity” always entails one’s interpretations. Also, 3) there will always exist something like Anthropology ‘the body’ or site where there can be an unravelling and or dismantling of the truth of, in this case, the “Critique” 4) Any interpretation of the social world must entail a person’s will to truth and power.
Genealogy unveils the hazardous play of dominations [pp. 83]. The question of ‘how’ is what concerns me here. Enstehung is ‘emergence [pp. 83].’ It is the moment of arising. It can appear as ‘culmination point(s)’ or decisive conclusion(s) as seen in the universal nature of man in Kant’s Anthropology. But in fact, they merely [hide] the current episodes in a series of subjugations [pp. 83]. The Critique as a transcendental a priority is always battling against its unfavourable conditions [pp 84]. To ‘emerge as’ transcendental and a priori, as a species in-itself in an isolated and superior position, it has to first realize itself as a species [pp. 84]. This immediately entails a process [emphasis added] of emergence prior to it appearing as what it is: transcendental, pure, a priori, durable, uniform and simple. The Critique needs to ‘distance itself’ from the Anthropology for it claims the possibility of a priority whereas the Anthropology is a wholesale evidence of its empiricity, its site or its source of originary. It thus has to establish this ‘void’ or ‘nonplace’ between its roots, the Anthropology and itself. Yet this place for the genealogist is spectacular for it is the point or ‘place’ where one can locate this confrontational relationship and hence, discern a relationship that was made ‘invisible.’ In this pure distance, this interstice [pp. 85], we can see the Critique endlessly trying to dominate the Anthropology by subjecting or subjugating it. The Entstehung or moment of emergence thus at once signifies two things: 1) a moment or arising of the “willer” (the Critique’s will to power - the moment it utilizes and exhaust as much as it can, the possibilities given by the Welt-of-knowledge itself and step foot out of it to establish its ‘sovereignty’ and ‘uniqueness’) and 2) the subjection of the to-be dominated. For Kant’s Critique to emerge as transcendental philosophy, it has to “impose limits, inflict torments and mortifications [pp. 84]” on Anthropology. It torments and mortify Anthropology by firstly using what it gives it, by “forcefully appropriating things necessary to [its] survival [pp. 85]” the Anthropology to me in this reading, is a signification of Kant’s empirical roots (his experiences, exposure to classics, various thinkers etc from which he derives his idea of the transcendent subject). Thus, the Critique a) stems from [emphasis added] Anthropology and b) rips it of all its empiricity in it and from it to derive at a ‘pure conclusion.’ Next, 2) the Critique dominates Anthropology by inflicting torment, battle against Anthropology. It arises (transcendent; universal) above Anthropology by making Anthropology look as though [emphasis added] it is a corollary of [emphasis added] the subject’s transcendental act. This is done quite ingeniously by“imposing” the tripartite structural- division upon the Anthropology. Hence, Anthropology appears to have [emphasis added] the mimicry categories and divisions that is quite synonymous to the Critique. But this appearance is the very result of the Critique’s act of domination its Entstehung (emergence). In other words, 1) there exists a relationship between the Critique and Anthropology 2) the Critique needs Anthropology (Critique’s empiricity) to arise to its grand position. The relationship of domination is not found in a historical time or place [pp. 85] but in rituals, in meticulous procedures that impose rights and obligations [pp. 85] on Anthropology. Once the tripartite divisions or rules or transcendental laws are laid, it becomes an automated-engine itself. It stages the stage for its own “meticulously repeated scenes of violence [pp. 85].” Recall, the Critique itself emerges from the real Welt-of-knowledge as Kant wills himself to power. It is his interpretation of the Welt. But once Kant lays down these laws or rules, it is for Foucault as for Nietzsche, “an appearance” that has taken the identity of the truth-itself. This is why Foucault writes:
“Humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination.” [pp. 85]
“The nature of these rules allows violence to be inflicted on violence and the resurgence of new forces that are sufficiently strong to dominate those in power.” [pp. 85]
The transcendental law that Kant sets down becomes the stage of repeated meticulously repeated scenes of violence [pp. 85]. ‘Violence’ as a term used to signify domination against others or other things which cloaks them in Kant’s own veil (veil of his own will to power) and deprives others of willing themselves into their real existence i.e. understanding and deriving their own interpretations of the Welt. Thus, this is for Nietzsche as for Foucault, not a good thing. Moreover, Foucault goes on to say that “rules are empty in themselves, violent and unfinalized; they are impersonal and can be bent to any purpose [pp. 85-86].” Thus, once Kant sets down the transcendental law, we, as a conglomeration of ‘others’ or ‘other people’ can use it and think it to be [emphasis added] the real truth although this is merely, Kant’s truth and Kant’s own will. His act of violence, upon us. Thus, for Foucault, to see truth, one must first be able to seize these rules, pervert them, invert their meaning and redirect them against those who initially imposed them (this is the role of the Genealogist). One must be able to “control this complex mechanism, they will make it function so as to overcome the rulers through their own rules [emphasis added][pp. 86].” Only through one’s very own interpretation of the Welt, is one able to make one’s own rules (not relying on others) and hence subvert Kant’s rule.
What Kant has done is thus, that he has interpreted “a system of rules [of the welt] which in itself has no meaning and impose a direction, to bend it to his [own] will, to force its participation (or point of view) in a different game (the Kantian game) [pp. 86].” Progress or the development of history is thus interpreted by Foucault as a “series of interpretations” that perhaps overcome and undermine one another. Hence, to dispel this false truism of the Kantian transcendence, we cannot ‘retrace history’ through time but must look at and for and analyze this “non-place” this “pure distance” where this violence is perpetrated.
The role of the genealogist is thus to dispel the Kunst the illusion of a Kantian plenitude and meaningful phenomenon. There thus exists a radical discontinuity, pure space between Anthropology and the Critique through which true relations of tensions are played out. 1) Through perpetual and continual repetitions or the repeat of violence upon Anthropology, the Critique gains its transcendence. Its transcendence is rooted and dependent upon Anthropology by always overcoming it and distancing itself from it. This is also important because the Anthropology is a site that displays all of Kant’s empirical links and affiliations to the Welt or context he lives in and is influenced by. To establish the subject as a priori and sovereign, what has just been said must be effaced completely. The pure distance must be maintained. But also, 2) that Anthropology has its the universal and objectively-knowing voice proclaiming this and that to be truth and can make such “universal claims” of what really is good or human is because it depends on the Critique. It depends on this continual violence and dominance inflicted upon it (tripartite divisions established and ‘given’ by the transcendental subject) so as to appear as a sovereign epistemological structure of its own apart from the Welt-of-knowledge. Yet, it has to distance itself from “its own truth,” its source, the Critique, which is Kant’s will to power that its truth, is itself, Kant’s subjective truth for any recognition of this will subvert Anthropology’s “universality.” There thus exist this very dynamic circularity which is extremely hard to point out in isolation between the Critique and Anthropology. Each inflicts violence upon each other and seeks to triumph each other. The Critique of Anthropology to attain transcendence and the Anthropology of the Critique to sustain its status of its scientific universality.
Anthropology is always the site of perversion and inversion of the power of the Critique for it is evidence of a panoply of empirical influences the Critique is dependent on but denies. Thus, the Critique continually impose its divisions upon the Anthropology to sustain its transcendence and (or but) also, continually distance itself from it for it is the Critique’s source of peril.
Important takeaways:
Although this seems contrary to what Foucault wants to say, for me, most importantly, this whole circular display wants to tell us that 1) every mensch’s own interpretations of the Welt is his own. He takes from the Welt that contains infinite possibilities and interprets it for his own. The subject still reigns supreme in the end or does it? 2) We must thus beware of anyone’s claim of “objectivity” and “universality” for its truism is always someone’s will to power and its “naturalness” and “continuity” always entails one’s interpretations. Also, 3) there will always exist something like Anthropology ‘the body’ or site where there can be an unravelling and or dismantling of the truth of, in this case, the “Critique” 4) Any interpretation of the social world must entail a person’s will to truth and power.
Monday, September 27, 2010
An exposition of Foucault’s inversion of Kant’s a priori
What is Kant’s transcendental philosophy?
This was asserted by Kant: “I entitle transcendental all knowledge which is occupied not so much with the objects as with the mode of our knowledge [emphasis added] of objects insofar [emphasis added] as this mode of knowledge is to be possible a priori.” [KS, CPR pp. 59] Kant’s concern is if we interpret this correctly, the possibility of pure a priori mode of knowing things. What in fact supplies this possibility? Elsewhere, Kant writes: “Conjunctio of a manifold in general can never [emphasis added] come to us through senses [i.e. sensibility], and cannot therefore be contained in the pure form of sensible intuition [KS, CPR S15 pp. 151].” The combination of the manifold of intuitions, the coherence and order of anything in other words, cannot be pregiven (with coherence) to us (the subject). In fact, Kant cannot put it in a more succinct way when he says: “being an act of the self subjectivity of the subject, it cannot be executed save by the subject itself.” This implies directly that for Kant, it is the subject who attempts this rearrangement and reordering of the manifold intuitions and give it its coherent form. Following this, what must be implied is then that the subject itself makes all modes of knowledge possible. The locus of the “possible a priori” lies not in the exteriority but in the subject. In S17 of the Transcendental Deduction (B) Kant writes:
This “first pure knowledge of understanding” or “original synthetic unity of apperception [in the subject],” is reductively, Kant’s “I” or “I think.” It is the pure simple representation that conjoins synthetically with all representations given to us so that it becomes “our representations” or in other words, so that I can say that all these representations are a) my representations and b) that I am conscious of them. This “I” in short, for our purposes, is then the highest (S17 “Supreme Principle of all Employment of the Understanding”).
For Kant, this “transcendental I”, is an a priori, necessary character for all possible knowledge. It is as Foucault interprets it a “nature in human nature” [pp. 122] but whose fundamental form for Foucault is not the transcendental “I think.” That the source of all possible knowledge lies in the “I think” but not in the empiricity, exteriority, “structural relationship to...” is an illusion. Foucault writes this very interesting paragraph where he defines the illusion as finitude [pp. 122]. This illusion = finitude that Foucault seems to me to be referring to is the originary transcendental “I think” being the source of all possible knowledge a priori and thus that the subject (“I think”) is finite. Foucault then says that this illusion = finitude [is] 1) the retreat of truth 2) that in which truth hides and 3) that in which truth can always be found [pp. 122]. By invoking the term “truth,” Foucault is implying that Kant’s originary “I” is false. If we recognize this illusion, that the subject is finite and thus cannot as an a priori simple analytic representation hold all synthetic predicates, Foucault thinks that it will signify a “retreat” of this false truth and we can find the real “truth.” Foucault’s truth and Foucault through his hybrid of Archaeology-geneaological approach is an attestment to the third point 3) that truth can always be found.
The question then becomes, what is Foucault’s truth? And how is this truth revealed? Where can we find this truth? Here, I explore several paragraphs that can give us a clue as to what is Foucault’s truth.
1) To this, we can begin with pp. 63 where he writes of a movement which in [emphasis added] the Critique, gave rise to the transcendental mirage (or obscurity; illusion) and that this mirage is prolonged (perhaps better understood as manifest) in Kant’s Anthropology in the form of [emphasis added] the empirical (concrete life of the Gemut i.e. mind of the subject).
2) The world. The world is for Foucault is “given in a system of actuality which envelops all existence [pp. 80]” He takes that even in Kant’s Opus Postumum, Kant admits this. That the Inbegriff i.e. concept of the world is this very complex of existence. Existence develops its concrete reality on the basis of the world or in other words, the world is the root of existence, the source containing existence. Foucault’s conception of the world can be derived from his own methodology that I may explore further later. But the last sentence strikes me as important. This “world” manages to a) retain existence and b) set existence free [pp. 80]. The world retains a) the Foucauldian truth of existence in the complex of actual relations and b) can liberate the subject-as-itself-object to the status of the pure subject “I think” the originary source of the world, free from its Foucauldian real existence-in-the-world. Foucault writes this in such a manner: “The possible is thinkable only from within a given system of actuality and the plurality of worlds is only ever seen from the standpoint of the existing world and whatever available experience we have of it [pp. 81].” That we can conceive of the world independent of the subject for Foucault is impossible. It always have to a) retain its existence in the system of actuality. From the latter only can we postulate of us giving teleological possibilities to the world.
The world (as a complex of being; system; structure) appears as or on a 3 way structure 1) source – Quellen 2) domain - Umfang 3) limit - Grenzen.
3) Foucault then says that the question posed in the Anthropology, Was ist der Mensch? (the nature of human beings) repeated as 1) What can I know/The sources of human knowledge 2. The extent of the possible and natural use of every knowledge/The domain of the natural and possible use of knowledge 3) What may I hope for/the limits of Reason. These same anthropological question 1) 2) 3) “are repeated” toward which the repetition itself is directed [pp. 83]. Prior to this, Focault says, “Anthropology says nothing other than what is said in the critique [pp. 83.]” Hence, combining these two sentences, what Foucault wants to say is that whatever is in Kant’s early works of the Anthropology (questions asked and sought for there of human nature) is a repetition. They are repeated in the Critiques. But more importantly, this repetition is already directed to the Critique. Quellen, Umfang, and Grenzen appear in their own right as a set of questions, repeated. By virtue of being repeated from Anthropology-Critique, it takes on an independent common form of the relation of man and the world as though it can be seen apart from the world-structure.
This newly liberated independent form then reattaches itself or correlates itself to “what belongs to it necessarily and originarily” i.e. the “I.” “The man” from which the root of the existence of things emerges. “The man,” in fact, the nature of this man takes on this independent form (the repetition of 1) 2) 3)).
4) The function of the question “What is man” is to give a structure, a fundamental cohesion to the tripartite divisions of the Critique (sensibility, understanding, reason; pure reason, practical reason, faculty of judgment) which Foucault writes as “more radical than any possible faculty” and which I interpret as purer and more basic than any faculty. Purer (a priori) for this is what belies, preceeds or is the very condition [emphasis added] of the liberation of transcendental philosophy i.e. the possibility of all knowledge i.e. “the I.”
5) Foucault seems to me to also want to say another thing. That the Anthropology is marginal to Critique yet is the basis of the Critique. It is the Critique’s empiricity. For Foucault, there exists a “true meaning” of Kant’s Anthropology to be found in its divisions or description of itself as 1) Systematic and 2) Popular.
6) 1) Systematic. Anthropology a) forms a systematic coherent whole of knowledge of man. B) This coherence of such a systematicity of the knowledge of man is borrowed from the whole of the Critical enterprise. C) Anthropology itself is a dispersion of the synthetic activity of the “I.” “[The “I”] is mercilessly dispersed, [insertion: it] serves to obscure, rendering the synthetic acts impenetrable.” (as opposed to the Critique where time is transparent to the synthetic activity constitutive in the subject, the “I”) [pp. 90].
Kunst is defined by Foucault as the fact according to which nothing is ever given without being at the same time exposed to dangers of an undertaking i.e. the undertaking that serves to a) grounds something in construction and b) hurl it into its arbitrary. This is to me vague. But Foucault goes on talking about the Kunst as a 1) construction of an illusion on top of and facing the phenomenon (Erscheinung) – the illusion of plenitude and meaningful phenomenon. It gives the sensible intuitions a mask of illusion. The Anthropology (wholly empirical, nothing transcendental) is for Foucault a dispersion of time (temporal dispersion) in all the manifold intuition or relations Beziehung auf [pp. 92]. This temporal dispersion “reveals” a “relationship to...” or i.e. the “truth” and real “freedom.” This temporal dispersion has no end and no beginning [pp. 92] and it is just the 1) “always already there” and (but) 2) “never entirely given. Time envelops anthropology and the first origins is unknown. But this for Foucault, is the “true meaning.” He says “It is not that the problem of the origin is unknown to it; on the contrary, it gives the problem back its true meaning [pp. 92].” This true meaning does not need to be a first original time [pp. 92] but to “recover” (as a result of Kantian transcendentalizing of it), the temporal framework which has already begun [pp 92.][emphasis added]. The Foucauldian originary or the truly temporal is that point [emphasis added] in time, truth and freedom are bonded [pp. 92]. This is a very Foucauldian theme where Foucault seems to focus on the “points of intersection,” “points of dispersion of power,” etc where truth “reveals itself.”
7) World; subject; truth: Something becomes “truth” only with time [emphasis added] with judgment. The world is an inexhaustible source of knowledge where we cannot go back further. The world is Foucault’s a priori. It is his “fundamental correlation” [pp. 84]. It is the domain of all possible predicates [pp. 85]. The world is given [emphasis added] as a sort of determinism which I interpret as an “open link” that only connects or relates to the subject. The world then is the world, is such a domain in relation to [emphasis added] the subject. The human mind is for Foucault in the system that encompasses the totality of things. But by the very act of our judging i.e. the act of repeating i.e. the repetition of the tripartite divisions, what is fundamental i.e. for Foucault, the world as it is given, becomes “replaced by its transcendental equivalents. The very act of judging = repeating is clarifying, it makes it clear to oneself and others, it declares, it takes the world as given and reinterprets the world not as given but as given by a “transcendental subject.” The act of judging or repetition in time is a will to power of the subject or more specifically put, Kant’s very own will to power. As he repeats this tripartitions, it is a unique act of willing that Kant himself has undertaken to understand the world. Thus Kant transmogrifies the world as given or as it is. Through repetition, Kant is able to make clear that:
8) 2) Popular. The Anthropology gives proofs that look unbiased such that the reader finds himself in a climate of total evidence [pp. 94]. To become [emphasis added] popular, knowledge must be based on the world and human beings – man’s very own tastes and inclinations. The Anthropology is grounded in itself – in its own knowledge and declarations of man and the world. Popularity is made possible by a shared language [pp. 95]. This implies that Kant’s popular Anthropology is speaking from within a shared language structure [emphasis added] and it talks about “man’s taste, inclinations concepts, good etc” from within. Kant thus totalizes language and uses it for his own analysis [pp. 95]. His justifications for how one should conduct oneself, what kind of taste one should develop etc are for Foucault, expressions of their own time. What Kant has does for Foucault is that he has analyzed “the good ways” from within a given language-structure empiricity. The Anthropology is thus, rooted in a German system of expression [pp. 97]. Just based on a thorough analysis of the very bizarre “banquet” in Kant’s Anthropology which indicates what one must do in this and that situation(s) how one should respond and act etc, Foucault wants to claim that language is a form of totality, a total regulation of one’s expressions of which any expressions of freedom and what not must be within this total form. “Everyone is free but in the form of totality [pp. 102].” To realize a concrete universal analysis of man as citizen in the world (Weltburger), he must do it from within his language [pp. 102]. What this entails for us is then that Foucault must want to say that the Kantian a priori is itself grounded in the a priority of the empirical that he can never step foot out.
9) Truth; movement and language. Through a movement of exchange (appropriating language and by virtue of using it, gives (giving) it a universal particular truth), for Foucault, one would find (or produce) the “universal” – the form of some common human universality applicable to all. Language thus becomes transmogrified into a common form. Then, it repeats. “It repeats in the same place and in the same language, the a priori of knowledge and the moral imperative.” Thus, it (being Kant of course) initiates what he postulates (using language). He initiates “transcendental philosophy” by manipulating symbols and elements from within the given language structure producing his own truth (a synthesis of his own thoughts; jugdgment) of the “a priori subject” of which he declares as a priori. By establishing this a priority as the “originary,” it effaces its very own historicity and empiricity. The correlations and embeddedness in language from which Kant’s judgment is produced itself becomes hidden and obscured. Hence, the very point or moment of repetition, the necessary and transitional act of repetition itself grounds Kant’s judgment. Language accords the Kantian a priori itself with all the privilege and structure.
Kantian thought is thus a thinking that repeats itself and hence, instates itself as truth. Foucault on pp.106 now argues that Anthropology is the site where the confusion of this truth will manifest and this confusion will be reproduced incessantly because Anthropology is characteristic of all the empiricity that Kant will only always fail to escape from it.
Foucault says: The Kantian originary a priori that uses and emerges from language-structure can never “liberate itself from it.” In other words, it can never erase its roots completely and the truth of its historicity [pp. 107]. The only route of escape from this Kantian a priori must be a retracement back into the “density of passive syntheses the already there [pp. 107].” This I believe refers very much to Anthropology and its empirical history. By understanding and seeing this movement [emphasis added] Kant makes from its roots to his transcendental, or the movement of exchange whereby Kant uses language to grant his a priori such and such privilege, one can see a total breakdown of the Kantian a priori as constructed from within a given web of interrelations, and structural points. Once we recognize what should have been this a priority’s justification and meaning, we will also as Foucault thinks, seen truth of the the world (welt) and this truth, in-the-world (In-der-welt) itself.
10) Kant’s Anthropology is a collage of empirical examples. What divides it 1) comes from elsewhere and 2) is directed elsewhere. Where is this elsewhere Foucault is talking about? Firstly, Foucault says that the Anthropology is in solidarity with the whole critical project which gives it its divisions and coherence as we read it. But also, there exist a network of influences [emphasis added] that divides the Anthropology. The Anthropology does not betray its universal impeachment. But Foucault argues that the Anthropology written by Kant is influenced by for instance, Platner’s Anthropology (1772), Baumgarten’s Psychologia Empirica (1749) etc. Foucault claims that one can identify the influence of works and texts on Kant’s Anthropology and or Kant’s understanding of the nature of man.
11) Foucault argues on pp. 116 that “natural being [or man] grounds his [emphasis added] knowledge by limiting it.” This I think can be seen as Foucault wanting to imply that there exist a world of knowledge (the world is knowledge). But man is lesser than the world. For man to ground his own knowledge of the world, he necessarily has to firstly, “engage in the play of nature [substitutable as the world].” This world is what offers him the possibility of him knowing anything. But man in wanting to assert his knowledge, or in other words, to ground his knowledge has to devour only a certain matrix of elements of knowledge. Man necessarily withdraw the [total value] of the world of knowledge [pp. 116]. Thus, Kant’s anthropology, is for Foucault, a reduced form of knowledge. It is a “science reduced, science on a man-made scale, devoid of its own truth but for that very reason, restored to the truth of man [pp. 116].” In this whole sentence, when Foucault says that the Anthropology is “devoid of its own truth,” it means to say that in such a “reduced form” which is now, a form apart from the world of knowledge that gives it truth, this “reduced truth” is now emptied of its own historicity and truth. Such a truth however, is a [or the] truth of man. Anthropology becomes itself, through distancing from its real source of truth, its own truth. It “begins to look like a form of normative language, one that pre-emptively [emphasis added], prescribes [emphasis added] its teaching, its possibilities and its limitations [emphasis added] to every other form of scientific inquiry that engages with man [pp. 116].” As such, Anthropology establishes itself as an illusory originary source of knowledge that can pre-emptively tell people of their good or bad. It can even delineate and set boundaries (physical-physis) and serves as the basis of knowledge of what everything (with regards to man) is. Anthropology begins to serve as the basis of knowledge that limits the boundaries of science etc and finalizes and solidifies the boundaries of what is relevant and what is not [pp. 116]. This implies also that anthropology “takes flight” from the empistemological structures of the world of true knowledge. It now has an epistemological structure of its own which has the power to limit man’s knowledge and horizons [pp. 117]. It has the power to objectify man and offer him predicates that claim to “explicate” his natural being. Anthropology is source of knowledge of any possible knowledge of man [pp. 117].
Conclusion
The only epistemological structure of the world it seems is the world itself in its manifold web of interrelations. Kant’s a priori cannot escape this. The a priority itself betrays its own empiricity and historicity in the Anthropology. In the Anthropology, Kant wants to set forth universal knowledge of the nature of man but this attempt displays a forgotten empiricity – the texts and matters of Kant’s time that gives him such and such a view. If one cannot escape the structure of language and its point of emergence, it also teaches us that we cannot make universal claims of this and that without explicating where we come from. If we do so, our claims of truth only audaciously takes on a universal form. The world of knowledge is a pool of dynamic dionysiac energies, and our representations are only our will to power, to assert our thoughts. Our interpretations of this true world of knowledge can only be one mode of knowing and I think the lesson learnt here is that it is important to recognize this. One’s knowledge of something is always from something – the specifity of that point of intersection of many complexly related movements, issues etc within the world. We cannot claim an absolute in anything and all claims must leave an opening for posterity’s further postulation and argumentation.
This was asserted by Kant: “I entitle transcendental all knowledge which is occupied not so much with the objects as with the mode of our knowledge [emphasis added] of objects insofar [emphasis added] as this mode of knowledge is to be possible a priori.” [KS, CPR pp. 59] Kant’s concern is if we interpret this correctly, the possibility of pure a priori mode of knowing things. What in fact supplies this possibility? Elsewhere, Kant writes: “Conjunctio of a manifold in general can never [emphasis added] come to us through senses [i.e. sensibility], and cannot therefore be contained in the pure form of sensible intuition [KS, CPR S15 pp. 151].” The combination of the manifold of intuitions, the coherence and order of anything in other words, cannot be pregiven (with coherence) to us (the subject). In fact, Kant cannot put it in a more succinct way when he says: “being an act of the self subjectivity of the subject, it cannot be executed save by the subject itself.” This implies directly that for Kant, it is the subject who attempts this rearrangement and reordering of the manifold intuitions and give it its coherent form. Following this, what must be implied is then that the subject itself makes all modes of knowledge possible. The locus of the “possible a priori” lies not in the exteriority but in the subject. In S17 of the Transcendental Deduction (B) Kant writes:
“The first pure knowledge of understanding, then, upon which all the rest of its employment is based, and which also at the same time is completely independent of all conditions of sensible intuition is the principle of the original synthetic unity of apperception... the mere form of outer sensible intuition, space is not yet by itself knowledge; it [merely] supplies only the manifold of a priori intuition for a possible knowledge.” [KS, CPR pp. 156]
This “first pure knowledge of understanding” or “original synthetic unity of apperception [in the subject],” is reductively, Kant’s “I” or “I think.” It is the pure simple representation that conjoins synthetically with all representations given to us so that it becomes “our representations” or in other words, so that I can say that all these representations are a) my representations and b) that I am conscious of them. This “I” in short, for our purposes, is then the highest (S17 “Supreme Principle of all Employment of the Understanding”).
For Kant, this “transcendental I”, is an a priori, necessary character for all possible knowledge. It is as Foucault interprets it a “nature in human nature” [pp. 122] but whose fundamental form for Foucault is not the transcendental “I think.” That the source of all possible knowledge lies in the “I think” but not in the empiricity, exteriority, “structural relationship to...” is an illusion. Foucault writes this very interesting paragraph where he defines the illusion as finitude [pp. 122]. This illusion = finitude that Foucault seems to me to be referring to is the originary transcendental “I think” being the source of all possible knowledge a priori and thus that the subject (“I think”) is finite. Foucault then says that this illusion = finitude [is] 1) the retreat of truth 2) that in which truth hides and 3) that in which truth can always be found [pp. 122]. By invoking the term “truth,” Foucault is implying that Kant’s originary “I” is false. If we recognize this illusion, that the subject is finite and thus cannot as an a priori simple analytic representation hold all synthetic predicates, Foucault thinks that it will signify a “retreat” of this false truth and we can find the real “truth.” Foucault’s truth and Foucault through his hybrid of Archaeology-geneaological approach is an attestment to the third point 3) that truth can always be found.
The question then becomes, what is Foucault’s truth? And how is this truth revealed? Where can we find this truth? Here, I explore several paragraphs that can give us a clue as to what is Foucault’s truth.
1) To this, we can begin with pp. 63 where he writes of a movement which in [emphasis added] the Critique, gave rise to the transcendental mirage (or obscurity; illusion) and that this mirage is prolonged (perhaps better understood as manifest) in Kant’s Anthropology in the form of [emphasis added] the empirical (concrete life of the Gemut i.e. mind of the subject).
2) The world. The world is for Foucault is “given in a system of actuality which envelops all existence [pp. 80]” He takes that even in Kant’s Opus Postumum, Kant admits this. That the Inbegriff i.e. concept of the world is this very complex of existence. Existence develops its concrete reality on the basis of the world or in other words, the world is the root of existence, the source containing existence. Foucault’s conception of the world can be derived from his own methodology that I may explore further later. But the last sentence strikes me as important. This “world” manages to a) retain existence and b) set existence free [pp. 80]. The world retains a) the Foucauldian truth of existence in the complex of actual relations and b) can liberate the subject-as-itself-object to the status of the pure subject “I think” the originary source of the world, free from its Foucauldian real existence-in-the-world. Foucault writes this in such a manner: “The possible is thinkable only from within a given system of actuality and the plurality of worlds is only ever seen from the standpoint of the existing world and whatever available experience we have of it [pp. 81].” That we can conceive of the world independent of the subject for Foucault is impossible. It always have to a) retain its existence in the system of actuality. From the latter only can we postulate of us giving teleological possibilities to the world.
The world (as a complex of being; system; structure) appears as or on a 3 way structure 1) source – Quellen 2) domain - Umfang 3) limit - Grenzen.
3) Foucault then says that the question posed in the Anthropology, Was ist der Mensch? (the nature of human beings) repeated as 1) What can I know/The sources of human knowledge 2. The extent of the possible and natural use of every knowledge/The domain of the natural and possible use of knowledge 3) What may I hope for/the limits of Reason. These same anthropological question 1) 2) 3) “are repeated” toward which the repetition itself is directed [pp. 83]. Prior to this, Focault says, “Anthropology says nothing other than what is said in the critique [pp. 83.]” Hence, combining these two sentences, what Foucault wants to say is that whatever is in Kant’s early works of the Anthropology (questions asked and sought for there of human nature) is a repetition. They are repeated in the Critiques. But more importantly, this repetition is already directed to the Critique. Quellen, Umfang, and Grenzen appear in their own right as a set of questions, repeated. By virtue of being repeated from Anthropology-Critique, it takes on an independent common form of the relation of man and the world as though it can be seen apart from the world-structure.
This newly liberated independent form then reattaches itself or correlates itself to “what belongs to it necessarily and originarily” i.e. the “I.” “The man” from which the root of the existence of things emerges. “The man,” in fact, the nature of this man takes on this independent form (the repetition of 1) 2) 3)).
4) The function of the question “What is man” is to give a structure, a fundamental cohesion to the tripartite divisions of the Critique (sensibility, understanding, reason; pure reason, practical reason, faculty of judgment) which Foucault writes as “more radical than any possible faculty” and which I interpret as purer and more basic than any faculty. Purer (a priori) for this is what belies, preceeds or is the very condition [emphasis added] of the liberation of transcendental philosophy i.e. the possibility of all knowledge i.e. “the I.”
5) Foucault seems to me to also want to say another thing. That the Anthropology is marginal to Critique yet is the basis of the Critique. It is the Critique’s empiricity. For Foucault, there exists a “true meaning” of Kant’s Anthropology to be found in its divisions or description of itself as 1) Systematic and 2) Popular.
6) 1) Systematic. Anthropology a) forms a systematic coherent whole of knowledge of man. B) This coherence of such a systematicity of the knowledge of man is borrowed from the whole of the Critical enterprise. C) Anthropology itself is a dispersion of the synthetic activity of the “I.” “[The “I”] is mercilessly dispersed, [insertion: it] serves to obscure, rendering the synthetic acts impenetrable.” (as opposed to the Critique where time is transparent to the synthetic activity constitutive in the subject, the “I”) [pp. 90].
Kunst is defined by Foucault as the fact according to which nothing is ever given without being at the same time exposed to dangers of an undertaking i.e. the undertaking that serves to a) grounds something in construction and b) hurl it into its arbitrary. This is to me vague. But Foucault goes on talking about the Kunst as a 1) construction of an illusion on top of and facing the phenomenon (Erscheinung) – the illusion of plenitude and meaningful phenomenon. It gives the sensible intuitions a mask of illusion. The Anthropology (wholly empirical, nothing transcendental) is for Foucault a dispersion of time (temporal dispersion) in all the manifold intuition or relations Beziehung auf [pp. 92]. This temporal dispersion “reveals” a “relationship to...” or i.e. the “truth” and real “freedom.” This temporal dispersion has no end and no beginning [pp. 92] and it is just the 1) “always already there” and (but) 2) “never entirely given. Time envelops anthropology and the first origins is unknown. But this for Foucault, is the “true meaning.” He says “It is not that the problem of the origin is unknown to it; on the contrary, it gives the problem back its true meaning [pp. 92].” This true meaning does not need to be a first original time [pp. 92] but to “recover” (as a result of Kantian transcendentalizing of it), the temporal framework which has already begun [pp 92.][emphasis added]. The Foucauldian originary or the truly temporal is that point [emphasis added] in time, truth and freedom are bonded [pp. 92]. This is a very Foucauldian theme where Foucault seems to focus on the “points of intersection,” “points of dispersion of power,” etc where truth “reveals itself.”
7) World; subject; truth: Something becomes “truth” only with time [emphasis added] with judgment. The world is an inexhaustible source of knowledge where we cannot go back further. The world is Foucault’s a priori. It is his “fundamental correlation” [pp. 84]. It is the domain of all possible predicates [pp. 85]. The world is given [emphasis added] as a sort of determinism which I interpret as an “open link” that only connects or relates to the subject. The world then is the world, is such a domain in relation to [emphasis added] the subject. The human mind is for Foucault in the system that encompasses the totality of things. But by the very act of our judging i.e. the act of repeating i.e. the repetition of the tripartite divisions, what is fundamental i.e. for Foucault, the world as it is given, becomes “replaced by its transcendental equivalents. The very act of judging = repeating is clarifying, it makes it clear to oneself and others, it declares, it takes the world as given and reinterprets the world not as given but as given by a “transcendental subject.” The act of judging or repetition in time is a will to power of the subject or more specifically put, Kant’s very own will to power. As he repeats this tripartitions, it is a unique act of willing that Kant himself has undertaken to understand the world. Thus Kant transmogrifies the world as given or as it is. Through repetition, Kant is able to make clear that:
“The world is not simply source for a sensible faculty, but the basis of the transcendental correlation of passivity-spontaneity; that the world is not simply a domain for a synthetic understanding, but the basis of the transcendental correlation necessity-liberty; that the world does not simply impose a limit on the use of Ideas, but is the basis of the transcendental correlation reason-mind.” [pp. 86].
8) 2) Popular. The Anthropology gives proofs that look unbiased such that the reader finds himself in a climate of total evidence [pp. 94]. To become [emphasis added] popular, knowledge must be based on the world and human beings – man’s very own tastes and inclinations. The Anthropology is grounded in itself – in its own knowledge and declarations of man and the world. Popularity is made possible by a shared language [pp. 95]. This implies that Kant’s popular Anthropology is speaking from within a shared language structure [emphasis added] and it talks about “man’s taste, inclinations concepts, good etc” from within. Kant thus totalizes language and uses it for his own analysis [pp. 95]. His justifications for how one should conduct oneself, what kind of taste one should develop etc are for Foucault, expressions of their own time. What Kant has does for Foucault is that he has analyzed “the good ways” from within a given language-structure empiricity. The Anthropology is thus, rooted in a German system of expression [pp. 97]. Just based on a thorough analysis of the very bizarre “banquet” in Kant’s Anthropology which indicates what one must do in this and that situation(s) how one should respond and act etc, Foucault wants to claim that language is a form of totality, a total regulation of one’s expressions of which any expressions of freedom and what not must be within this total form. “Everyone is free but in the form of totality [pp. 102].” To realize a concrete universal analysis of man as citizen in the world (Weltburger), he must do it from within his language [pp. 102]. What this entails for us is then that Foucault must want to say that the Kantian a priori is itself grounded in the a priority of the empirical that he can never step foot out.
“The truth that anthropology brings to light is therefore not a truth anterior to language, and that language will [always] be entrusted to convey. It is a truth that is both more interior and more complex: it is the very movement of the exchange, and that exchange realizes the universal truth of man.” [pp. 102]
“The particularities of that language are the legitimate birthplace of the universal significations.” [pp. 103]
9) Truth; movement and language. Through a movement of exchange (appropriating language and by virtue of using it, gives (giving) it a universal particular truth), for Foucault, one would find (or produce) the “universal” – the form of some common human universality applicable to all. Language thus becomes transmogrified into a common form. Then, it repeats. “It repeats in the same place and in the same language, the a priori of knowledge and the moral imperative.” Thus, it (being Kant of course) initiates what he postulates (using language). He initiates “transcendental philosophy” by manipulating symbols and elements from within the given language structure producing his own truth (a synthesis of his own thoughts; jugdgment) of the “a priori subject” of which he declares as a priori. By establishing this a priority as the “originary,” it effaces its very own historicity and empiricity. The correlations and embeddedness in language from which Kant’s judgment is produced itself becomes hidden and obscured. Hence, the very point or moment of repetition, the necessary and transitional act of repetition itself grounds Kant’s judgment. Language accords the Kantian a priori itself with all the privilege and structure.
Kantian thought is thus a thinking that repeats itself and hence, instates itself as truth. Foucault on pp.106 now argues that Anthropology is the site where the confusion of this truth will manifest and this confusion will be reproduced incessantly because Anthropology is characteristic of all the empiricity that Kant will only always fail to escape from it.
Foucault says: The Kantian originary a priori that uses and emerges from language-structure can never “liberate itself from it.” In other words, it can never erase its roots completely and the truth of its historicity [pp. 107]. The only route of escape from this Kantian a priori must be a retracement back into the “density of passive syntheses the already there [pp. 107].” This I believe refers very much to Anthropology and its empirical history. By understanding and seeing this movement [emphasis added] Kant makes from its roots to his transcendental, or the movement of exchange whereby Kant uses language to grant his a priori such and such privilege, one can see a total breakdown of the Kantian a priori as constructed from within a given web of interrelations, and structural points. Once we recognize what should have been this a priority’s justification and meaning, we will also as Foucault thinks, seen truth of the the world (welt) and this truth, in-the-world (In-der-welt) itself.
10) Kant’s Anthropology is a collage of empirical examples. What divides it 1) comes from elsewhere and 2) is directed elsewhere. Where is this elsewhere Foucault is talking about? Firstly, Foucault says that the Anthropology is in solidarity with the whole critical project which gives it its divisions and coherence as we read it. But also, there exist a network of influences [emphasis added] that divides the Anthropology. The Anthropology does not betray its universal impeachment. But Foucault argues that the Anthropology written by Kant is influenced by for instance, Platner’s Anthropology (1772), Baumgarten’s Psychologia Empirica (1749) etc. Foucault claims that one can identify the influence of works and texts on Kant’s Anthropology and or Kant’s understanding of the nature of man.
11) Foucault argues on pp. 116 that “natural being [or man] grounds his [emphasis added] knowledge by limiting it.” This I think can be seen as Foucault wanting to imply that there exist a world of knowledge (the world is knowledge). But man is lesser than the world. For man to ground his own knowledge of the world, he necessarily has to firstly, “engage in the play of nature [substitutable as the world].” This world is what offers him the possibility of him knowing anything. But man in wanting to assert his knowledge, or in other words, to ground his knowledge has to devour only a certain matrix of elements of knowledge. Man necessarily withdraw the [total value] of the world of knowledge [pp. 116]. Thus, Kant’s anthropology, is for Foucault, a reduced form of knowledge. It is a “science reduced, science on a man-made scale, devoid of its own truth but for that very reason, restored to the truth of man [pp. 116].” In this whole sentence, when Foucault says that the Anthropology is “devoid of its own truth,” it means to say that in such a “reduced form” which is now, a form apart from the world of knowledge that gives it truth, this “reduced truth” is now emptied of its own historicity and truth. Such a truth however, is a [or the] truth of man. Anthropology becomes itself, through distancing from its real source of truth, its own truth. It “begins to look like a form of normative language, one that pre-emptively [emphasis added], prescribes [emphasis added] its teaching, its possibilities and its limitations [emphasis added] to every other form of scientific inquiry that engages with man [pp. 116].” As such, Anthropology establishes itself as an illusory originary source of knowledge that can pre-emptively tell people of their good or bad. It can even delineate and set boundaries (physical-physis) and serves as the basis of knowledge of what everything (with regards to man) is. Anthropology begins to serve as the basis of knowledge that limits the boundaries of science etc and finalizes and solidifies the boundaries of what is relevant and what is not [pp. 116]. This implies also that anthropology “takes flight” from the empistemological structures of the world of true knowledge. It now has an epistemological structure of its own which has the power to limit man’s knowledge and horizons [pp. 117]. It has the power to objectify man and offer him predicates that claim to “explicate” his natural being. Anthropology is source of knowledge of any possible knowledge of man [pp. 117].
Conclusion
The only epistemological structure of the world it seems is the world itself in its manifold web of interrelations. Kant’s a priori cannot escape this. The a priority itself betrays its own empiricity and historicity in the Anthropology. In the Anthropology, Kant wants to set forth universal knowledge of the nature of man but this attempt displays a forgotten empiricity – the texts and matters of Kant’s time that gives him such and such a view. If one cannot escape the structure of language and its point of emergence, it also teaches us that we cannot make universal claims of this and that without explicating where we come from. If we do so, our claims of truth only audaciously takes on a universal form. The world of knowledge is a pool of dynamic dionysiac energies, and our representations are only our will to power, to assert our thoughts. Our interpretations of this true world of knowledge can only be one mode of knowing and I think the lesson learnt here is that it is important to recognize this. One’s knowledge of something is always from something – the specifity of that point of intersection of many complexly related movements, issues etc within the world. We cannot claim an absolute in anything and all claims must leave an opening for posterity’s further postulation and argumentation.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Further clarifications with regards to Daesin
Postscript 2:
Understanding Daesin through Greek philosophy
In Blackwell Companions to Philosophy: A Companion to Heidegger: “Dasein: Thomas Sheehan”
This end see how we can understand Heidegger’s Daesin from Greek philosophers. I begin with Aristotle. Aristotle’s Ousiology is the study of the realness of whatever-is-real; the is-ness of whatever is, the being of whatever has being [BCPACH, Sheehan, pp. 194]. For Aristotle, anything that is real, if it is [emphasis added] and is something i.e. if it exists, has a form or essence. A being anything that “is-in-a-form” or “has-existence-with-essence.” Ousia (or being) is what makes something real. Ousia or being means existing in a form. Form is its ideal way of being or how it is supposed to be. There are two very subtle differences here that are crucial for Heidegger.
(1) athleo – “to contend” for a prize
(2) askeo “to continuously” work it out or work towards it (goal)
In Aristotle’s Ousia or Ousiology, the ‘human’ being who is not perfect teleion but imperfect a-teles is always working continuously towards his goal or his ideal form. He is in kinesis or continual movement towards perfection. Only God is perfect teleion or energeia in his finished form. ‘Human’ beings however, are always imperfect and always striving to becoming one’s form i.e. always in kinesis and can never reach stasis – a fully achieved self (like God).
Aristotle also considers God to be the higher ground and human ousia to be the ground or lower form of ousia. Aristotle thus explains ousia (being) and its to on – whatever is by a highest form of pure subsistent existing being (ipsum esse per se subsistens) like Aquinas in explaining the being ens by ens supremum. This is for Heidegger insufficient for it does not give an explanation to being itself.
For Aristotle, ‘being’ is to on (the real and realness of the real independent from the subject). Aristotle’s analysis is object focused. Heidegger’s object of interest is however the to par on or the to athles i.e. the meaningful and his formal focus is the meaningfulness of the meaningful i.e. the correlation between objects and their intentional constitution. The source of meaning for Heidegger is to be found in a lived context. When Heidegger refers to ‘being’ then, he does not refer to being as the Aristotelian being to on, but being (as phenomenologically reduced) to atheles.
(A) Comparing Aristotle and Heidegger:
Aristotle: ‘Being’ = being ‘to on’ – the real object out there
Heidegger: ‘Being’ = what is meaningfully present to paron within a human context.
(B) Heidegger
Anwesen (Being-as-prescence) – does not refer to a thing’s spatio temporal prescence ‘out there’ (Aristotelian). But a Heideggerian intepretation would be: (1) meaningful prescence in correlation with (2) the understanding of that meaning.
When Heidegger talks about ‘nearness’ it is not in terms of spatio temporal nearness but more about the significance. Hence if something is near to us, it means it is or can be present within our concerns.
Heidegger’s being is thus, being-as-meaning (Anwesen) and his task is to know what is the meaningfulness of this meaningful i.e. its nature. The focus is not the meaningful things but their meaningfulness (Anwesen of the Anwesendes). What is the meaningfulness of the meaningful?
For Heidegger, (1) because there is meaningfulness “a priori” (2) that is why there can be meaningfulness (3) that is why we can seek for a source cause or explanation of it – i.e. world analysis. That things are meaningful is hence always presumed in the background. The focus is on how and where things get their meaning, meaningfulness of and by itself (alethia in itself parousia in itself, das Sein selbst).
(A) Structure of meaningfulness
1) The World
a. World is a “place wherein” (das Worin) that focuses on humans beings live out their purposes and interests and “relations whereby” things within that realm get their meaning.
i. Is the total context – total range of human possibilities in terms of which anything within this context can have significance.
ii. Is thus, world=what-constitutes-meaning (to aletheuein)
iii. World=totality of all relational contexts
iv. World wherein (Das Worin) – i.e. the world as a place of our concerns. We live our lives for the sake of our purposes and own survival of being (Spinozistic line). The ultimate goal for the sake of which we live, the ultimate end is thus ourselves in the world.
v. World whereby (Das Woraufhin) – is thus i.e. things found in the world for us. We use them for our survival. Because of this, things in the world get their meaning (from us).
vi. Conclusion: World is the place wherein we are directed to our final goal and the set of relations that directs tools to tasks for the sake of that same final goal.
2) Distinction within meaningfulness
a. Meaningful thing: object – das Seiende
b. Meaning – Seiendheit
i. Meanings are constituted
3) World is being “das Sein” is a meaning-constitutive structure.
a. Das Sein World (Static intransitive): place of meaning
b. Das Sein World (Dynamic transitive): placing of things in meaning, the enworldling and contextualizing of them within a set of possibilities.
Being as (Static intransitive): indicates prescence of the being.
Being as (Dynamic transitive): indicates presenting of things by the being, the act of allowing them to be present.
These distinctions offered by Sheehan was a great help in understanding what Heidegger meant by “the open that opens things up (das da, das Offene).” Das da taken static-intransitively is the world simply writ large and “opened out” like an open field (die Gegend) – the world as an open field where everything is possible and all forms of meaningfulness occur. The second reading dynamically and transitively means the world (the open) that opens things up [emphasis added for an active doing act] for possible use and appropriation. “being open” indicates imperfection – the haven’t achieved telos (en-tel-echeia) – Aristotelian link see above. Hence, the world for Heidegger as a meaning-giving world is always open and never “closed” synonymous to human beings being always finite and incomplete and is always constituted in this world towards his own prescribed ends.
World Structure Analysis
1) The very process of making-sense is thus never complete i.e. it is always a partially synthesizing and never completely synthesizable task of the being. 2) Because, the world is “always open” and “always opening” and never complete. 2) is because 3) it is an arena of difference and tension, of in-between-ness and mediation. The world remember is an open meaning giving world. The world is the medium id quo of intelligibility or meaning relations. Meaningfulness requires mediation, connective relations and the world is that i.e. the medium that mediates (read dynamically) tools and tasks; subjects and predicates together i.e. it is where meaning and sense occurs.
2) The world is ordered to the final cause of human fulfillment but as Aristotle has laid it out, human beings are imperfect and the meaningfulness for human beings thus can never be in perfect unity with itself. It can never be complete. It is like an always ongoing race for humans. As such, the open world as a medium is always drawn out (Austrag), there is always a tension (polemos) between togetherness and apartness, unity and separation, synthesis and difference. The world is a “setting apart” Aus-einandersetzung, Gegen-setzung) that holds separated elements into a tentative unity of sense. The world is never complete and sense making is never complete either
3) The world is the free that frees things; the power that empowers them. Static-intransitively, ‘free’ means an open empty space and power is a reserve of untapped energy. Dynamic-Transitively, the “free” frees things within the world and power empowers their significance. The world remember, is the realm of relations between tools and their possible utility. Thus, the world as “free” (dynamic) or “freeing” must be understood as a sort of “liberating” i.e. world as liberating these tools from their just-thereness. It reveals their aptitude (Bewandtnis) for fulfilling this or that purpose. The world is not “the good” (Plato) but “the empowering” (Heidegger)
4) The world is the opening that clarifies things; the unfolding that lets them appear. Lichtung read static-intransitively is a window that lets light in. But dynamic-transitively, it is the opening that brings clarity to things in the room by letting light shine on them and show them as this or that.
The world is aletheia – unfolding of the world itself but dynamic-transitively it can be seen as unfolding of things (to aletheuein) by bringing them into meaning.
The world is phyesin or physis – arising or self emergence but dynamic-transitively, it is the birthing that brings things forth into the open, where they can appear as this or that.
(B) Source of meaningfulness
i.e. the arche of all forms of aletheia, the aitia of any mode of parousia, the Wesen of das Sein selbst – i.e. the thing in itself (?) What is the meaning-of-being and or the source of the world?
1) Movement as Being opened up and Coming into one’s own
a. Perfection
i. Not the Aristotelian top down kinesis or the attainment of the state of perfection telos i.e. having lack no part of what belongs to it by its essence. (en-tel-echeia being-wholly fulfilled) or (en-erg-eia being-a-finished-work). For Aristotle, the perfect is a finished work and hence at a rest point but the imperfect (human, beings) is always striving to fufill its essence. It participates in the goal to entirely posess it. But in participating or participation, it (means also) it never entirely possesses it. Participation without full possession occurs all the time. Human beings are deficient, a-teles, always still coming into its own. Movement is thus the state of becoming; becoming is the transition into being; becoming for? The sake of being. Hence there is a split-world. Either one is already itself i.e. telic, wholly present or erotic whereby the telos is still drawing the entity for self fufillment or for the good of its own being.
Heidegger’s Daesin as self-moving entity: Ontological condition of the Daesin: Circularity:
ii. The argument seems to be something like this: Human beings are imperfect. So his goal oriented process (his telos) is never complete. Yet it always wants to be fulfilled, to be his own to move to perfection. Man’s very being insofar as it is imperfect, so it always seek self fufillment. If so, His own telos is a mover for it actively moves and draws him towards his own desired fufillment. Daesin is hence self-moved. It’s motivation as its own mover is itself to fill its relative-absence from perfection and its erotic presence to perfection. From this, we can also conclude that the Daesin’s relative-absence is the source of (or for) its presence.
Sheehan thus concludes also that the Daesin’s ontological perfection and completeness is to be imperfect and incomplete, with no prospect of achieving an ideal perfection in the future. It is always frozen in its movedness [of] becoming… itself or fulfilled-self. It can never transcend itself into an ideal God-like state but it can be said to always be transcending itself. It has no further goal but itself. Ontologically, the Daesin is hence going no where. It is already where it is supposed to be i.e. as a finite incomplete being, its essence is always in a perpetual state of coming into its own. The Daesin’s perfection is thus, to be in imperfection or is imperfection.
In terms of knowing: For Aristotle, knowing is a matter of being one with the known (the prefect most knowledgeable, intelligible and meaningful). But human beings are imperfect and can never transcend its own mortal finitude to “meet God.” Thus, for the human being, the knower, knowing, the drive to know or to make sense of all things is one’s degree of presence to the relatively absent goal i.e. the degree that the relatively absent goal is present as [and and] desired. The Daesin is thus again moved by its own desire to make sense of things. How the Daesin comes to know? The Daesin cannot be in immediate relation to God (as explained above). So, it cannot know directly. It can only know, indirectly or mediately by boding what is knowable to itself through a matrix of mediating relationships in the world. They know and find meaning only to the degree they are discovered along with and within the world i.e. by bonding themselves to these mediating relationships in the world. Hence, Daesin makes sense of itself and of others by the way of the world [pp. 205].
Daesin’s circularity based on my above rigorous reconstruction of Sheehan’s arguments (and Heidegger)’s is then truly “the theory of prescence in the ontology of absence.” Its imperfect being engenders a dynamic transitive realm of meditative world relations. This can perhaps be crucial in explaining why there is always conflicting and newly emerging meanings of the world (note to self: this seems to be an even more fruitful and useful explanation then the Kantian teleological argument). Through trying to make sense of itself, to attempt with perpetually guaranteed failure, Daesin is always forced to come into its own and to connect itself with the open world of meditative relations to understand itself and hence, the “world” as we perceive it to be in its multi-coloured strands can be seen as Daesin’s efforts… The human that intends itself (through an inner core imperfection…and hence self-moving desire rooted in Aristotelian “essence”), engenders the world. This is why Sheehan writes that the Daesin Human Being is ontologically bivalent.
(a) it is a lack insofar as it is imperfect. This lack is also a longing, a desire and a belonging even if it is the case that there is no where and nothing to belong to, and no something else to long for and that the human being is always off-center, eccentric, a protention that is going nowhere.
(b) But insofar as it is perfect, Daesin also has presence, although a radically finite presence. The Daesin thus is not a unity but parts outside of parts (I take this for now to be just that it is because Daesin is just a being in relation to the manifold possible meditative relations open up to it by the world). The Daesin is not self coincident (I take this to be self-coincident with the “outside world”) but distended (stretched from inside literally but more holistically, I understand this to be self motivating source from “inside” propelling it). It is also not a pure mind (I take this to be not God for now) but a self-concerned body. Daesin is a self-concerned, distended, self-aware body that ultimately intends itself that always experience a tension of difference (?) and synthesis (It always seeks synthesis from the world-tools given to it.)
The Daesin is (a) opened up into openness (by its own desires) and (b) thereby comes into its own perfect-imperfection and (c) appears as the self-intending distended tension – that is, the world.
This constitutes the Ereignis – the unique ontological movement of the Daesin
(a) as drawn out and opened up by its imperfection, Daesin opens up the mediating realm that frees things from unintelligibility, the clearing that clarifies them, the unifying-of-difference that draws them into tentative aggregates of sense.
(b) This drawn out and opened up by its own imperfection, its always-having-come-into-its-own.
(c) Having always already come into its perfect imperfection, Daesin does not only appear as topos eidon – the place where meaning appears (In Aristotle: soul as the place of forms. De Anima, “thinking faculty thinks the forms in images. Soul is in a way all the things that exist […] objects of thought are in the forms that are perceived… [DA pp. 210]) BUT the eidos eidon (Aristotle: form of forms i.e. the intellect) the very appearing of appearance, the wellspring of meaning, the aitia (cause of) , arche (source of) and logos (reason for) the wonder of all wonders: that there is appearance at all, meaningfulness at all, “being” at all. Daesin is not only the source where meaning appears. Daesin = form of forms. Daesin is the very meaningfulness and appearance.
[…]
It does not matter whether one is (being is) “being thrown open” (Geworfensein) or “being drawn out into its own” (Ereignetsein). It is both.
Our motivation is ourselves. Sheehan describes this as “[because] we are in utter poverty…]. In fact, we cannot say we do it, but it is done unto us (there exist this naturally occurring desire-force at work) (This is what Foucault is against! A self motivating force? Source is found in some mystic human desire (back to Aristotle) That we do not know? It is in Kant’s eyes blasphemy. Looks like we have a split between the mystic [Nietzsche, Schopenahuer, Heidegger] vs the rationalist analytic trend)i.e. that we are moved by our perfect imperfection in such a way that world occurs. World occurs as an after-effect product of our self-striving. “This happens without being fully ourselves (we don’t act as full agencies – that we always assume we are and which always buttresses our source of action as “full agencies” with a stable substratum…) but rather because we have to become ourselves. We are pulled by our own self absence. (I think this is what Kant will call the faith of or in reason).
Thus, we are the opened up opening of meaning, the empowered empowering of sense, Always approaching but never arriving. We are as Stephen Daedalus puts it – “almosting it” we are always in Heraclitus’s word agchibasie – getting near without ever arriving. And the outcome is, meaningfulness.” [pp 207]
i.e. How does Daesin give meaning to the world? Heidegger answers: from itself. Why is there tentative aggregates of sense? Heidegger answers: because sense-making is a never ending process that all beings make. Hence we have many doxas or epistemes (science is just the one of them). Heidegger is as opposed to Kant then who says that knowledge is the transcendental categories + empirical data (from out there).
In Blackwell Companions to Philosophy: A Companion to Heidegger: “Carol J. White: Heidegger and the Greeks”
Carole White seems to suggest also that Heidegger is trying to put forth the notion of a primal world out there in which human’s activity “connects” with the world that gives it its tools or the multiplicity of mediating relations “to be connected to.” Which is why “[the world or even art] is a revealing of being in human activity…” [pp. 122].
Early Greeks
“what-is” must be seen as a whole. Greek work “on” is ambiguous. “on” is both participle and noun. It does 2 things simultaneously. 1) it refers to being as to be something which is and 2) it names something which is-? (concealed). Hence, ‘to be’ and ‘what-is’ is concealed. The riddle of being is kept.
Being is always thought about the being of what-is which “unconcealed itself” to them.
(1) Thales
“It’s all water” “It’s the opposites at war” the what is (it) is never distinguished from the water or the war. But thales is the first thinker to answer the question of being by reference to a being “to be…” water.
(2) Anaximander
“what is” is ordered by necessity to something or the whole.
“to chreon” = “necessity”
“Things come into and pass out of existence according to necessity…” “for they pay one another recompense and penalty for their injustice.”
- “They” Heidegger takes for multiplicity of what is or “ta onta”
- What Anaximander did was 1) He named the being of what-is which “ta onta” they have. 2) He sees the being of “ta onta” as placed in “to chreon” or necessity which is taken as that which unifies or makes a whole of everything. 3) Anaximander’s “to chreon” is thus, a gathering of the multiplicity “ta onta.” A gathering which both “lights” and “shelters” what-is making it what it is.
- Later, Heidegger says that “ta onta” for Anaximander always encompass what is past, what is to come, what is present at some here and now. It is connected with both ways of presencing of what is here and what is not.
- “to chreon” is for Heidegger, connected with “he cheir.” This refers to a) the hand (physical hand) b) chrao – to get involved with something; to reach one’s hand to something; to place in someone’s hands (I take as the act of you putting it, you active as active agent, making something happen); let something belong to someone (Yet you let it belongs to someone: more passive).
- Heidegger thus takes “to chreon” and translates it to Brauch usage or custom and its verb Brauchen in his Heideggerian sense – A) to need, B) to employ, C) to engage.
o “to chreon” or Brauch thus captures the notion of A) a necessity that arises out of practical involvement and the demands of everyday activity. We need to do X we Need to employ it in our daily lives we Need to engage with X. [from subject point of view]
o B) But that that things solicit us, engage us, in this involvement (necessity from 2 point of views). [From object point of view]
- Hence the “world” is a context of involvement which is “to chreon” necessary in order for things to be. World here is a necessity that arises out of human being’s practical involvement and everyday activity but at the same time, the world engages us in this involvement.
-“Brauchen” in its root meaning is – A) to enjoy, B) to be pleased with something, and 3) have it in use – to let it be involved in one’s being at home in the world. [from subject point of view and object point of view]
- “chyre” in its root meaning for Heidegger thus indicates
1) Turning something to use by handling it i.e. when we handle something, we turn that something (object) into use.
2) A turning to the thing hand in hand according to its way of being (according to its already-there-ness way of being).
3) Thus, we (human beings) by handling things, let its way of being become manifest. (what this essentially means is also that meanings of the world are not created by humans. There is some sort of inherence in the world but humans in engaging with the world makes manifest this world. This bolded sentence has serious implications for human agency. In a stronger sense, we can say that there is no Kantian Genius who creates the world gives the world teleological order but only that there already is an infinite number of there-ness to be unveiled through man’s handling) I think my intepretation is right in that “Tending grapes or grain, using leather for shoes or bronze for shields, involves letting these things be what they are…”
My intepretation: A necessity (to chreon) undergirds the finitude of things passing in and out of existence. This must be left ambiguously understood as making a whole of everything from which everything is contained in. The ta onta (they; beings) is by necessity to chreon, engaged and connected in the world-context. The world engages it and the human being acts in it by necessity (link to Aristotle’s imperfect self hence self moving desire…).
Heidegger’s Greeks
Equate “what is” with a) what we are “at home with” in our everyday dealings (I take this to be all the tools etc) and b) what-is-present. Thus Greeks use the term “ta pareonta” for “what-is.”
- Prefix “par” shares meaning with German proposition “bei” indicating “at” or “near” “during” “while” “At home of” = French chez.
- “pareonta” hence indicates something like the unconcealment of our familiar territory or “neighbourhood.”
- Being of “what-is” is thus always associated with our everyday familiar territory (tools, crops, trees, furnishings earth)… they are inseperable.
Early Greeks Heidegger think place great importance in cultural ordering as condition for things to come forth and show themselves as what they are.
(B) Heraclitus
- Concept of logos – has a force of necessity which maintains the order of what-is.
o Logos thus lays out the world as the context of significance in which things are worked out and dealt with.
o Logos lets what is manifest itself as what it is.
o Logos reveals that “all is one” or “hen panta”
o For Heraclitus, there is not just ta onta (the multiplicity of what is) but in a stronger sense a unity and woneness to what-is.
o The what-is (to on) is for Heraclitus a totality.
o Heraclitus for Heidegger is the first to make a claim about the relationship between being and what-is (to on). Logos shows Heraclitus that what-is (to on) has some common bond. Hence Heidegger says “the hen panta lets lie together before us in one presence, things which are usually separated from and opposed to one another, such as day and night, winter and summer, peace and war, waking and sleeping…” (GA 7: 213/Heidegger 1975: 71).
o Logos is thus for Heidegger, the “essence of unification which assembles everything in the totality of simple presenting” (GA 7: 220/Heidegger 1975)
o Logos should not be seen just as “prior to all profound metaphysical intepretations.” It contains things. So things (to on/what-is) may exhibit different unity based on how humans “handle it” and so, no formula to describe their common unity as property can be adequate. That we can discursively abstractly think of them, is just one other mode of thinking of these permutations in the “container.” That we can think of them as ideas (plato) is also in a more basic cruder way of putting it, man’s way of presenting the simple presentings the great and vast assembly of things in the world.
o Logos lets everything be gathered into a unified totality.
Thus, 1) “hen panta” (all is one) is simply 2) in Heideggerian terms, “the being of what-is (to on).” The being of what-is is thus, 3) unity of all that is and all there is – Logos. Necessarily. But this all or hen is only present with or in the being for only the being present of the being allows things to be present and show themselves for what they are.
Thus, when Heidegger says “phusis” is both the activity what lets what is manifest manifest itself and that which is manifest. As the activity of manifesting, it does not reveal itself, it lets itself hide. But phusis is nature, it is the being of what-is, it is hidden.
Understanding Daesin through Greek philosophy
In Blackwell Companions to Philosophy: A Companion to Heidegger: “Dasein: Thomas Sheehan”
This end see how we can understand Heidegger’s Daesin from Greek philosophers. I begin with Aristotle. Aristotle’s Ousiology is the study of the realness of whatever-is-real; the is-ness of whatever is, the being of whatever has being [BCPACH, Sheehan, pp. 194]. For Aristotle, anything that is real, if it is [emphasis added] and is something i.e. if it exists, has a form or essence. A being anything that “is-in-a-form” or “has-existence-with-essence.” Ousia (or being) is what makes something real. Ousia or being means existing in a form. Form is its ideal way of being or how it is supposed to be. There are two very subtle differences here that are crucial for Heidegger.
(1) athleo – “to contend” for a prize
(2) askeo “to continuously” work it out or work towards it (goal)
In Aristotle’s Ousia or Ousiology, the ‘human’ being who is not perfect teleion but imperfect a-teles is always working continuously towards his goal or his ideal form. He is in kinesis or continual movement towards perfection. Only God is perfect teleion or energeia in his finished form. ‘Human’ beings however, are always imperfect and always striving to becoming one’s form i.e. always in kinesis and can never reach stasis – a fully achieved self (like God).
Aristotle also considers God to be the higher ground and human ousia to be the ground or lower form of ousia. Aristotle thus explains ousia (being) and its to on – whatever is by a highest form of pure subsistent existing being (ipsum esse per se subsistens) like Aquinas in explaining the being ens by ens supremum. This is for Heidegger insufficient for it does not give an explanation to being itself.
For Aristotle, ‘being’ is to on (the real and realness of the real independent from the subject). Aristotle’s analysis is object focused. Heidegger’s object of interest is however the to par on or the to athles i.e. the meaningful and his formal focus is the meaningfulness of the meaningful i.e. the correlation between objects and their intentional constitution. The source of meaning for Heidegger is to be found in a lived context. When Heidegger refers to ‘being’ then, he does not refer to being as the Aristotelian being to on, but being (as phenomenologically reduced) to atheles.
(A) Comparing Aristotle and Heidegger:
Aristotle: ‘Being’ = being ‘to on’ – the real object out there
Heidegger: ‘Being’ = what is meaningfully present to paron within a human context.
(B) Heidegger
Anwesen (Being-as-prescence) – does not refer to a thing’s spatio temporal prescence ‘out there’ (Aristotelian). But a Heideggerian intepretation would be: (1) meaningful prescence in correlation with (2) the understanding of that meaning.
When Heidegger talks about ‘nearness’ it is not in terms of spatio temporal nearness but more about the significance. Hence if something is near to us, it means it is or can be present within our concerns.
Heidegger’s being is thus, being-as-meaning (Anwesen) and his task is to know what is the meaningfulness of this meaningful i.e. its nature. The focus is not the meaningful things but their meaningfulness (Anwesen of the Anwesendes). What is the meaningfulness of the meaningful?
For Heidegger, (1) because there is meaningfulness “a priori” (2) that is why there can be meaningfulness (3) that is why we can seek for a source cause or explanation of it – i.e. world analysis. That things are meaningful is hence always presumed in the background. The focus is on how and where things get their meaning, meaningfulness of and by itself (alethia in itself parousia in itself, das Sein selbst).
(A) Structure of meaningfulness
1) The World
a. World is a “place wherein” (das Worin) that focuses on humans beings live out their purposes and interests and “relations whereby” things within that realm get their meaning.
i. Is the total context – total range of human possibilities in terms of which anything within this context can have significance.
ii. Is thus, world=what-constitutes-meaning (to aletheuein)
iii. World=totality of all relational contexts
iv. World wherein (Das Worin) – i.e. the world as a place of our concerns. We live our lives for the sake of our purposes and own survival of being (Spinozistic line). The ultimate goal for the sake of which we live, the ultimate end is thus ourselves in the world.
v. World whereby (Das Woraufhin) – is thus i.e. things found in the world for us. We use them for our survival. Because of this, things in the world get their meaning (from us).
vi. Conclusion: World is the place wherein we are directed to our final goal and the set of relations that directs tools to tasks for the sake of that same final goal.
2) Distinction within meaningfulness
a. Meaningful thing: object – das Seiende
b. Meaning – Seiendheit
i. Meanings are constituted
3) World is being “das Sein” is a meaning-constitutive structure.
a. Das Sein World (Static intransitive): place of meaning
b. Das Sein World (Dynamic transitive): placing of things in meaning, the enworldling and contextualizing of them within a set of possibilities.
Being as (Static intransitive): indicates prescence of the being.
Being as (Dynamic transitive): indicates presenting of things by the being, the act of allowing them to be present.
These distinctions offered by Sheehan was a great help in understanding what Heidegger meant by “the open that opens things up (das da, das Offene).” Das da taken static-intransitively is the world simply writ large and “opened out” like an open field (die Gegend) – the world as an open field where everything is possible and all forms of meaningfulness occur. The second reading dynamically and transitively means the world (the open) that opens things up [emphasis added for an active doing act] for possible use and appropriation. “being open” indicates imperfection – the haven’t achieved telos (en-tel-echeia) – Aristotelian link see above. Hence, the world for Heidegger as a meaning-giving world is always open and never “closed” synonymous to human beings being always finite and incomplete and is always constituted in this world towards his own prescribed ends.
World Structure Analysis
1) The very process of making-sense is thus never complete i.e. it is always a partially synthesizing and never completely synthesizable task of the being. 2) Because, the world is “always open” and “always opening” and never complete. 2) is because 3) it is an arena of difference and tension, of in-between-ness and mediation. The world remember is an open meaning giving world. The world is the medium id quo of intelligibility or meaning relations. Meaningfulness requires mediation, connective relations and the world is that i.e. the medium that mediates (read dynamically) tools and tasks; subjects and predicates together i.e. it is where meaning and sense occurs.
2) The world is ordered to the final cause of human fulfillment but as Aristotle has laid it out, human beings are imperfect and the meaningfulness for human beings thus can never be in perfect unity with itself. It can never be complete. It is like an always ongoing race for humans. As such, the open world as a medium is always drawn out (Austrag), there is always a tension (polemos) between togetherness and apartness, unity and separation, synthesis and difference. The world is a “setting apart” Aus-einandersetzung, Gegen-setzung) that holds separated elements into a tentative unity of sense. The world is never complete and sense making is never complete either
3) The world is the free that frees things; the power that empowers them. Static-intransitively, ‘free’ means an open empty space and power is a reserve of untapped energy. Dynamic-Transitively, the “free” frees things within the world and power empowers their significance. The world remember, is the realm of relations between tools and their possible utility. Thus, the world as “free” (dynamic) or “freeing” must be understood as a sort of “liberating” i.e. world as liberating these tools from their just-thereness. It reveals their aptitude (Bewandtnis) for fulfilling this or that purpose. The world is not “the good” (Plato) but “the empowering” (Heidegger)
4) The world is the opening that clarifies things; the unfolding that lets them appear. Lichtung read static-intransitively is a window that lets light in. But dynamic-transitively, it is the opening that brings clarity to things in the room by letting light shine on them and show them as this or that.
The world is aletheia – unfolding of the world itself but dynamic-transitively it can be seen as unfolding of things (to aletheuein) by bringing them into meaning.
The world is phyesin or physis – arising or self emergence but dynamic-transitively, it is the birthing that brings things forth into the open, where they can appear as this or that.
(B) Source of meaningfulness
i.e. the arche of all forms of aletheia, the aitia of any mode of parousia, the Wesen of das Sein selbst – i.e. the thing in itself (?) What is the meaning-of-being and or the source of the world?
1) Movement as Being opened up and Coming into one’s own
a. Perfection
i. Not the Aristotelian top down kinesis or the attainment of the state of perfection telos i.e. having lack no part of what belongs to it by its essence. (en-tel-echeia being-wholly fulfilled) or (en-erg-eia being-a-finished-work). For Aristotle, the perfect is a finished work and hence at a rest point but the imperfect (human, beings) is always striving to fufill its essence. It participates in the goal to entirely posess it. But in participating or participation, it (means also) it never entirely possesses it. Participation without full possession occurs all the time. Human beings are deficient, a-teles, always still coming into its own. Movement is thus the state of becoming; becoming is the transition into being; becoming for? The sake of being. Hence there is a split-world. Either one is already itself i.e. telic, wholly present or erotic whereby the telos is still drawing the entity for self fufillment or for the good of its own being.
Heidegger’s Daesin as self-moving entity: Ontological condition of the Daesin: Circularity:
ii. The argument seems to be something like this: Human beings are imperfect. So his goal oriented process (his telos) is never complete. Yet it always wants to be fulfilled, to be his own to move to perfection. Man’s very being insofar as it is imperfect, so it always seek self fufillment. If so, His own telos is a mover for it actively moves and draws him towards his own desired fufillment. Daesin is hence self-moved. It’s motivation as its own mover is itself to fill its relative-absence from perfection and its erotic presence to perfection. From this, we can also conclude that the Daesin’s relative-absence is the source of (or for) its presence.
Sheehan thus concludes also that the Daesin’s ontological perfection and completeness is to be imperfect and incomplete, with no prospect of achieving an ideal perfection in the future. It is always frozen in its movedness [of] becoming… itself or fulfilled-self. It can never transcend itself into an ideal God-like state but it can be said to always be transcending itself. It has no further goal but itself. Ontologically, the Daesin is hence going no where. It is already where it is supposed to be i.e. as a finite incomplete being, its essence is always in a perpetual state of coming into its own. The Daesin’s perfection is thus, to be in imperfection or is imperfection.
In terms of knowing: For Aristotle, knowing is a matter of being one with the known (the prefect most knowledgeable, intelligible and meaningful). But human beings are imperfect and can never transcend its own mortal finitude to “meet God.” Thus, for the human being, the knower, knowing, the drive to know or to make sense of all things is one’s degree of presence to the relatively absent goal i.e. the degree that the relatively absent goal is present as [and and] desired. The Daesin is thus again moved by its own desire to make sense of things. How the Daesin comes to know? The Daesin cannot be in immediate relation to God (as explained above). So, it cannot know directly. It can only know, indirectly or mediately by boding what is knowable to itself through a matrix of mediating relationships in the world. They know and find meaning only to the degree they are discovered along with and within the world i.e. by bonding themselves to these mediating relationships in the world. Hence, Daesin makes sense of itself and of others by the way of the world [pp. 205].
Daesin’s circularity based on my above rigorous reconstruction of Sheehan’s arguments (and Heidegger)’s is then truly “the theory of prescence in the ontology of absence.” Its imperfect being engenders a dynamic transitive realm of meditative world relations. This can perhaps be crucial in explaining why there is always conflicting and newly emerging meanings of the world (note to self: this seems to be an even more fruitful and useful explanation then the Kantian teleological argument). Through trying to make sense of itself, to attempt with perpetually guaranteed failure, Daesin is always forced to come into its own and to connect itself with the open world of meditative relations to understand itself and hence, the “world” as we perceive it to be in its multi-coloured strands can be seen as Daesin’s efforts… The human that intends itself (through an inner core imperfection…and hence self-moving desire rooted in Aristotelian “essence”), engenders the world. This is why Sheehan writes that the Daesin Human Being is ontologically bivalent.
(a) it is a lack insofar as it is imperfect. This lack is also a longing, a desire and a belonging even if it is the case that there is no where and nothing to belong to, and no something else to long for and that the human being is always off-center, eccentric, a protention that is going nowhere.
(b) But insofar as it is perfect, Daesin also has presence, although a radically finite presence. The Daesin thus is not a unity but parts outside of parts (I take this for now to be just that it is because Daesin is just a being in relation to the manifold possible meditative relations open up to it by the world). The Daesin is not self coincident (I take this to be self-coincident with the “outside world”) but distended (stretched from inside literally but more holistically, I understand this to be self motivating source from “inside” propelling it). It is also not a pure mind (I take this to be not God for now) but a self-concerned body. Daesin is a self-concerned, distended, self-aware body that ultimately intends itself that always experience a tension of difference (?) and synthesis (It always seeks synthesis from the world-tools given to it.)
The Daesin is (a) opened up into openness (by its own desires) and (b) thereby comes into its own perfect-imperfection and (c) appears as the self-intending distended tension – that is, the world.
This constitutes the Ereignis – the unique ontological movement of the Daesin
(a) as drawn out and opened up by its imperfection, Daesin opens up the mediating realm that frees things from unintelligibility, the clearing that clarifies them, the unifying-of-difference that draws them into tentative aggregates of sense.
(b) This drawn out and opened up by its own imperfection, its always-having-come-into-its-own.
(c) Having always already come into its perfect imperfection, Daesin does not only appear as topos eidon – the place where meaning appears (In Aristotle: soul as the place of forms. De Anima, “thinking faculty thinks the forms in images. Soul is in a way all the things that exist […] objects of thought are in the forms that are perceived… [DA pp. 210]) BUT the eidos eidon (Aristotle: form of forms i.e. the intellect) the very appearing of appearance, the wellspring of meaning, the aitia (cause of) , arche (source of) and logos (reason for) the wonder of all wonders: that there is appearance at all, meaningfulness at all, “being” at all. Daesin is not only the source where meaning appears. Daesin = form of forms. Daesin is the very meaningfulness and appearance.
[…]
It does not matter whether one is (being is) “being thrown open” (Geworfensein) or “being drawn out into its own” (Ereignetsein). It is both.
Our motivation is ourselves. Sheehan describes this as “[because] we are in utter poverty…]. In fact, we cannot say we do it, but it is done unto us (there exist this naturally occurring desire-force at work) (This is what Foucault is against! A self motivating force? Source is found in some mystic human desire (back to Aristotle) That we do not know? It is in Kant’s eyes blasphemy. Looks like we have a split between the mystic [Nietzsche, Schopenahuer, Heidegger] vs the rationalist analytic trend)i.e. that we are moved by our perfect imperfection in such a way that world occurs. World occurs as an after-effect product of our self-striving. “This happens without being fully ourselves (we don’t act as full agencies – that we always assume we are and which always buttresses our source of action as “full agencies” with a stable substratum…) but rather because we have to become ourselves. We are pulled by our own self absence. (I think this is what Kant will call the faith of or in reason).
Thus, we are the opened up opening of meaning, the empowered empowering of sense, Always approaching but never arriving. We are as Stephen Daedalus puts it – “almosting it” we are always in Heraclitus’s word agchibasie – getting near without ever arriving. And the outcome is, meaningfulness.” [pp 207]
i.e. How does Daesin give meaning to the world? Heidegger answers: from itself. Why is there tentative aggregates of sense? Heidegger answers: because sense-making is a never ending process that all beings make. Hence we have many doxas or epistemes (science is just the one of them). Heidegger is as opposed to Kant then who says that knowledge is the transcendental categories + empirical data (from out there).
In Blackwell Companions to Philosophy: A Companion to Heidegger: “Carol J. White: Heidegger and the Greeks”
Carole White seems to suggest also that Heidegger is trying to put forth the notion of a primal world out there in which human’s activity “connects” with the world that gives it its tools or the multiplicity of mediating relations “to be connected to.” Which is why “[the world or even art] is a revealing of being in human activity…” [pp. 122].
Early Greeks
“what-is” must be seen as a whole. Greek work “on” is ambiguous. “on” is both participle and noun. It does 2 things simultaneously. 1) it refers to being as to be something which is and 2) it names something which is-? (concealed). Hence, ‘to be’ and ‘what-is’ is concealed. The riddle of being is kept.
Being is always thought about the being of what-is which “unconcealed itself” to them.
(1) Thales
“It’s all water” “It’s the opposites at war” the what is (it) is never distinguished from the water or the war. But thales is the first thinker to answer the question of being by reference to a being “to be…” water.
(2) Anaximander
“what is” is ordered by necessity to something or the whole.
“to chreon” = “necessity”
“Things come into and pass out of existence according to necessity…” “for they pay one another recompense and penalty for their injustice.”
- “They” Heidegger takes for multiplicity of what is or “ta onta”
- What Anaximander did was 1) He named the being of what-is which “ta onta” they have. 2) He sees the being of “ta onta” as placed in “to chreon” or necessity which is taken as that which unifies or makes a whole of everything. 3) Anaximander’s “to chreon” is thus, a gathering of the multiplicity “ta onta.” A gathering which both “lights” and “shelters” what-is making it what it is.
- Later, Heidegger says that “ta onta” for Anaximander always encompass what is past, what is to come, what is present at some here and now. It is connected with both ways of presencing of what is here and what is not.
- “to chreon” is for Heidegger, connected with “he cheir.” This refers to a) the hand (physical hand) b) chrao – to get involved with something; to reach one’s hand to something; to place in someone’s hands (I take as the act of you putting it, you active as active agent, making something happen); let something belong to someone (Yet you let it belongs to someone: more passive).
- Heidegger thus takes “to chreon” and translates it to Brauch usage or custom and its verb Brauchen in his Heideggerian sense – A) to need, B) to employ, C) to engage.
o “to chreon” or Brauch thus captures the notion of A) a necessity that arises out of practical involvement and the demands of everyday activity. We need to do X we Need to employ it in our daily lives we Need to engage with X. [from subject point of view]
o B) But that that things solicit us, engage us, in this involvement (necessity from 2 point of views). [From object point of view]
- Hence the “world” is a context of involvement which is “to chreon” necessary in order for things to be. World here is a necessity that arises out of human being’s practical involvement and everyday activity but at the same time, the world engages us in this involvement.
-“Brauchen” in its root meaning is – A) to enjoy, B) to be pleased with something, and 3) have it in use – to let it be involved in one’s being at home in the world. [from subject point of view and object point of view]
- “chyre” in its root meaning for Heidegger thus indicates
1) Turning something to use by handling it i.e. when we handle something, we turn that something (object) into use.
2) A turning to the thing hand in hand according to its way of being (according to its already-there-ness way of being).
3) Thus, we (human beings) by handling things, let its way of being become manifest. (what this essentially means is also that meanings of the world are not created by humans. There is some sort of inherence in the world but humans in engaging with the world makes manifest this world. This bolded sentence has serious implications for human agency. In a stronger sense, we can say that there is no Kantian Genius who creates the world gives the world teleological order but only that there already is an infinite number of there-ness to be unveiled through man’s handling) I think my intepretation is right in that “Tending grapes or grain, using leather for shoes or bronze for shields, involves letting these things be what they are…”
My intepretation: A necessity (to chreon) undergirds the finitude of things passing in and out of existence. This must be left ambiguously understood as making a whole of everything from which everything is contained in. The ta onta (they; beings) is by necessity to chreon, engaged and connected in the world-context. The world engages it and the human being acts in it by necessity (link to Aristotle’s imperfect self hence self moving desire…).
Heidegger’s Greeks
Equate “what is” with a) what we are “at home with” in our everyday dealings (I take this to be all the tools etc) and b) what-is-present. Thus Greeks use the term “ta pareonta” for “what-is.”
- Prefix “par” shares meaning with German proposition “bei” indicating “at” or “near” “during” “while” “At home of” = French chez.
- “pareonta” hence indicates something like the unconcealment of our familiar territory or “neighbourhood.”
- Being of “what-is” is thus always associated with our everyday familiar territory (tools, crops, trees, furnishings earth)… they are inseperable.
Early Greeks Heidegger think place great importance in cultural ordering as condition for things to come forth and show themselves as what they are.
(B) Heraclitus
- Concept of logos – has a force of necessity which maintains the order of what-is.
o Logos thus lays out the world as the context of significance in which things are worked out and dealt with.
o Logos lets what is manifest itself as what it is.
o Logos reveals that “all is one” or “hen panta”
o For Heraclitus, there is not just ta onta (the multiplicity of what is) but in a stronger sense a unity and woneness to what-is.
o The what-is (to on) is for Heraclitus a totality.
o Heraclitus for Heidegger is the first to make a claim about the relationship between being and what-is (to on). Logos shows Heraclitus that what-is (to on) has some common bond. Hence Heidegger says “the hen panta lets lie together before us in one presence, things which are usually separated from and opposed to one another, such as day and night, winter and summer, peace and war, waking and sleeping…” (GA 7: 213/Heidegger 1975: 71).
o Logos is thus for Heidegger, the “essence of unification which assembles everything in the totality of simple presenting” (GA 7: 220/Heidegger 1975)
o Logos should not be seen just as “prior to all profound metaphysical intepretations.” It contains things. So things (to on/what-is) may exhibit different unity based on how humans “handle it” and so, no formula to describe their common unity as property can be adequate. That we can discursively abstractly think of them, is just one other mode of thinking of these permutations in the “container.” That we can think of them as ideas (plato) is also in a more basic cruder way of putting it, man’s way of presenting the simple presentings the great and vast assembly of things in the world.
o Logos lets everything be gathered into a unified totality.
Thus, 1) “hen panta” (all is one) is simply 2) in Heideggerian terms, “the being of what-is (to on).” The being of what-is is thus, 3) unity of all that is and all there is – Logos. Necessarily. But this all or hen is only present with or in the being for only the being present of the being allows things to be present and show themselves for what they are.
Thus, when Heidegger says “phusis” is both the activity what lets what is manifest manifest itself and that which is manifest. As the activity of manifesting, it does not reveal itself, it lets itself hide. But phusis is nature, it is the being of what-is, it is hidden.
A deeper understanding of Was ist Aufklärung
When Kant was writing this short essay on Aufklarung, he was adamant in the good and proper use of Reason. There are inherent in his paper, several pertinent concerns and perhaps assertions. (1) The “duty” [emphasis added] of all man to use Reason for his own for Kant perspicaciously observes the lack of will and courage of man to emerge from their illusory safe haven i.e. platonic cave with the flux of chimerical shadows. For Kant, “duty” is a moral imperative or issue (in a weaker sense) that he addresses in great depth in his 3rd Critique of Practical Reason and his Metaphysics of Morals. Afterall, such great strides are made because it seems to me important that Reason has to have a “last grounding point ” for Kant. But this will be merely mentioned and I will not go further. (2) The right of man to use Reason to attain human progress for he fights in his 2nd Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment for man’s pivotal role in giving “order and coherence to the world…” Kant puts it very succinctly in “Was ist Aufklarung?” that any age which puts the posterity to a condition that shuts of further enlightenment from the human race is absolutely null and void. One can see from this that Kant takes man’s right to Reason as very cardinal in many aspects of life. (3) The legitimate use of Reason. This, (3) will be the focus of this short review.
For Foucault said this rightly in his intepretation of Kant’s Was ist Aufklarung, that Kant’s critiques or philosophical ethos can be reduced to a “limit attitude” that of a critique (or series of critiques) consisting in analyzing and reflecting upon the limits of our understanding and Reason. This is important for in the age of englightenment where man may “[more] freely deal with things,” man cannot transgress the truth-claims he is permitted to make. As Foucault writes, the Englightenment is the moment when humanity will put reason to use without subjecting it to any authority and it is precisely at this moment that the critique is necessary, since its role is precisely that of defining the conditions under which the use of reason is legitimate in order to (a) determine what can be known, (b) what must be done and (c) what maybe hoped. For Kant, (a) and (c) takes up a large proportion of his efforts and time and it is to (a) and (c) I will try to discuss more about.
In trying to discuss (a) and (c), I will use a particular example that Kant has only very briefly touched upon. He very vaguely says: “…because religious incompetence is not only the most harmful but also the most degrading of all.” From S83-S91 of the Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment, Kant wants to say that in the mere mechanism of nature, the empirical reality that we can find no final end(s) defined as that end which needs no other as the condition of its possibility [CTPJ, pp. 302] or in layman terms and for our purposes, God. Everything in nature (material nature outside us and even inside us i.e. our thinking nature ) that we can see is always in turn conditioned. If so, Kant wants to say 2 things. Firstly that “if [final ends is] in the order of ends dependent on no further condition other than merely the idea of it [CTPJ pp. 302],” then we cannot find anything in nature that gives us any reason to claim that “God exists.” In fact, we cannot have valid objective cognition (i.e. have an empirical intuition of God in or from nature). “God” Secondly, Kant would eventually want to say is an ideal of Reason. Whose Reason? Our Reason. In the world, there is only a single sort of being whose causality is teleological aimed at ends (humans). But because humans’ causality is so constituted i.e. interpretable as so structured by laws themselves, that we humans too have to follow to determine ends and create order and connections in the world, these transcendental a priori laws becomes represented by humans to themselves as something out there in-itself, unconditioned and independent of natural conditions and themselves. But in fact, these transcendental a priori laws are constituted in humans themselves. Man is the one who sets the highest end, the highest good in the world.
“[Man’s] existence contains the highest end itself, to which, as far as he is capable, he can subject the whole of nature, or against which at least he need not hold himself to be subjected by any influence from nature. – Now if things in the world, as dependent beings as far as their existence is concerned, need a supreme cause acting in accordance with ends, then the human being is the final end of creation; for without him the chain of ends subordinated to one another would not be completely grounded; and only in the human being, although in him only as a subject of morality, is unconditional legislation with regards to ends to be found, which therefore makes him alone capable of being a final end, to which the whole of nature is teleologically subordinated.” [CTPJ pp. 302]
Even happiness Kant puts on the sidenote is a subjective end of humans. Not the final ends of humans. With this, quote, it is clear that Kant wants to establish (stronger sense: establishes) that the final end of humans is his own existence wherefrom everything sprints forth. Thus in light of the Aufklarung, Kant in his 3rd Critique wants to first establish that 1) Man is the ultimate subject of all teleological causality. He is the final end in himself. Hence, he has freedom and thus, autonomy and power to act in this and that way in the Age of Enlightenment. But this is only one part of the story for there is the “negative-limits” of what man can say or do with his freedom which is the (a) that I ambition to only briefly cover.
It is common for man to infer from the ends of nature that he cognizes empirically to the supreme cause of nature and its properties. Kant calls this, physicotheology which is I think one of the commonest amongst layman of the existence of God i.e. that there is X Y Z things in nature with specific X Y Z properties that are unique to it and if it is not created by man, it must be created by God. But this is what Kant replies us with:
“Now I say physicotheology, no matter how far it might be pushed, can reveal to us nothing about a final end of creation; for it does not even reach the question about such an end [CTPJ pp. 304].” When we empirically intuit something, we only see it as the appearance it manifests to our faculty of sensibility and it makes conceptual sense after it goes through our faculty of understanding. But the very concept of a world cause, i.e. God, cannot be justified by it for nothing in that empirical intuition presents God to us. Thus Kant continues by saying that: “It can thus certainly justify the concept of an intelligent world-cause [emphasis added], as a merely subjectively appropriate concept for the constitution of our cognitive faculty [emphasis added] of the possibility of the things that we make intelligible to ourselves in accordance with ends;” Thus, what Kant wants to say here is that the intuition or representation serves only as a justification [emphasis added] of the concept of an intelligent-world cause but this is far from claiming [emphasis added] that there is a “God that exists out there.” Also then, the concept of God at most can only have an appropriate connexion to our cognitive faculty of the possibility of things (refers most aptly to the faculty of our Reason creating the possible ideas). I think another short abstract deals with this much better:
What can be drawn from the above is again that empirical data that we intuit from our faculty of sensibility is simply empirical data as what it is. There is such a vast amount of data in the world that we can simply pick on anyone and find that something we picked on contradicts with the one that we apparently used to justify God’s existence. The empirical intuition or “data” is one very tiny fragment of the whole complete system of nature whereas “God” as an ideal of Reason is if we recall, a final end of nature defined also as the totality that encompasses. Thus, Kant is saying here in this quote that as long as we can never have a total empirical overview of the whole system, we have no rights to make that huge inferential leap to say X justifies God exists, hence God exists. Nothing from empirical experience can sufficiently [emphasis added] be “fitted” to the determinate concept of God (ideal). Yet I must add also this, that it is not always the scrupulous or iniquitous nature of man who makes such an error but it is inherent in us to make such an error especially if we do not understand how our faculties work. Thus for instance, if one does not understand what is meant by the “faculty of judgment” i.e the faculty for thinking of the particular as contained under the universal dem Allgemeinen, then we will not know that once the universal (the rule; law; principle) is gven, then it is in our determining power of judgment [emphasis added] to subsume any particular under it. If we are ignorant to this, then we can easily and fallaciously make that unjustified inferential leap. Hence, the Age of Enlightenment whereby we can speak freely of this and that and use Reason is drastically different and disparate from the Attitude of Enlightenment [emphasis added] which involves knowing the limits of our Reason and on a more positive note, understanding our various faculties.
Hence, I arrive at the last part of what Foucault has re-wrote as (c) what can be hoped for a posteriori the understanding of how our faculties work and the limits of our faculties and hence Reason. Prior to that, I must emphasize that this short essay is not going to give insights to the “how our faculty works” question which is far beyond what I can accomplish at this moment in time. But the problematique is still this: that if we cannot say that God exists, or a highest legislative author exists theoretically [emphasis added], since we cannot have sufficient empirical data or intuitions that adequately support such a total final being, what then can we say? Also, how can or should we act? Here, Kant throws in the Practical Use of Reason. God for Kant is still important for our practical moral needs. If God does not belong to speculative reason and theoretical cognition, for Kant, it belongs to morality alone. God freedom and immortality are thus objects of a moral faith. In a paper by Jane Kellner, she describes this moral faith as a ‘motivation’ or what I think can be called a reason-able motivation [emphasis added]. Kant’s God is thus that of a holy lawgiver, good governor and just judge [RWTLORA pp. lxi]. These cannot be theoretically conceived but can be practically and morally conceived for the purpose of making or more precisely put, motivating man to be a morally rational being. But just on an ending note, what makes man moral is his own looking upon his own [emphasis added] law of reason like duty [emphasis added] as his highest allegiance [emphasis added]. Man is subjected to his own law of reason that acts as his voice of duty i.e. like the categorical imperative calling upon him to do what is right (based on his own law of reason; moral law). As a binding law or duty that man places upon himself via. His self legislative reason (and with faith in postulates of God), man Kant thinks will be obligated [emphasis added] to do the right thing. Most cardinally, to be in such a way morally obligated by one’s own law of reason or moral law, this must be predicated first on the freedom to act in accordance with man’s own laws. Upon this freedom is man’s own moral law or law of reason grounded. Freedom is in this case, man’s ultimate a priori and only by adhering to man’s own self prescribed moral law can man attain Summum Bonum i.e happiness proportioned to moral worth [RWTLORA pp. lvii]. Happiness i.e. Summum Bonum is like God, man’s rational ideals that man must have faith in for something like the Summum Bonum, as an end created by man is not something guaranteed. Even with the most punctilious observance of the moral laws, we may not attain Summum Bonum [RWTLORA pp. lvi].
Thus, man’s freedom in the Age of Enlightenment reigns supreme. He has freedom to act but he is not entirely free to act and Reason as he wishes. The discursive limits of our Reason and truth-claims will only be apparent if one understand how one’s faculties work. Aufklarung ist hence, an attitude that one must take upon himself to study and understand our faculties. This was Kant’s critical transcendental project for a major part of his life. What then may we hope for? We can still in the crudest sense, ‘talk God,’ ‘immortality,’ ‘freedom,’ and ‘soul’ but one must always be conscious of talking about them as theoretical cognitions that have objective validity or are they ideals of reason as like for Kant, for a greater (greatest) purpose, man?
Footnotes:
1. “…as a scholar whose writings speak to his public, the world, the clergyman in the public use of reason enjoys an unlimited freedom to use his own reason and to speak in his own person.
2. Practical Reason for Kant comes into play where theoretical reason and cognition reaches its limit – in the comprehension of God, Freedom and Immortality of the Soul. In general then, Practical Reason becomes associated with a moral duty with regards to (a) man’s use of freedom (b) to act in morally respectable ways and this can be motivated by (or in a stronger sense: conditioned by) a practical faith in God which is argued for by Kant in his later works - Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone.
3. This is not to be taken in the sense of a literal “culimination” point of Reason. For Kant, Reason is the “highest faculty” of cognition. Ideas of reason have formative power to ground the possibility of the [insertion: new] products of nature [CTPJ pp. 248]. Reason described by Kant as a faculty of desire legislates a priori as the supersensible in the subject [insertion: without the constraining binds of the theoretical understanding], for an unconditioned practical cognition i.e. practical ideas and final ends i.e. freedom and causality of itself [CTPJ. 80]. Kant’s transcendental philosophy establishes how theoretical cognition cannot give us valid objective knowledge of the concept of freedom. But Kant still wants to ground “freedom” as an immanent right of man. Hence, he claims that ‘freedom’ is presupposed a priori and “that which presupposes this a priori freedom is [man’s] power of judgment which provides the mediating concept between the concepts of nature and the concept of freedom [insertion: note – supersensible] [CTPJ pp. 81]” so that the transition from 1) the theoretical and the need to abide to the lawfulness of nature; concepts of nature to 2) final end in accordance with the purely practical [insertion: ideas of Reason] is possible. How this transition is made will not be discussed here. But through our faculty of understanding (that contains constitutive principles; transcendental categories), we have only a theoretical cognition of nature in its mechanistic lawfulness. The very possibility of Understanding’s a priori categories and laws for nature gives us cognition of nature only as lawful and abiding appearances and indicates [insertion: merely] of an undetermined supersensible substratum that our theoretical understand can grasp nothing of. But, the power of judgment that through being able to by feelings of pleasure and displeasure give purposiveness to the world provides determinability of this supersensible substratum i.e. through its very ability to give purposiveness and determine this and that in nature, we can somewhat grasp this supersensible substratum’s determinability and that it is able to determine this and that. Yet, determination of this supersensible substratum is given by Reason that legislates a priori (via final ends man sets for himself) for his own freedom [CTPJ, pp. 81-82]. The point that I hope to have brought out is thus that very generally put, it is man’s ultimate right to use Freedom for himself and
4. Refer to Kant’s analogies in CTPJ
5. This must be seen in light of the First Critique of Pure Reason where Kant explores the transcendental nature of how we can perceive things (through sensibility) have valid cognition of things (when what is intuited from empirical reality “fits into” the a priori categories which gives these raw intuitions order and coherence).
6. This argument can be found in the previous sections where Kant gives some interesting analogies on the “Vegetable Kingdom” etc. I will not go further here.
7. Refer to The Critique of Pure Reason – Transcendental Analytic: Ch1 Section III: The Pure Concepts of the Understanding or Categories and for further reference, The Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding.
For Foucault said this rightly in his intepretation of Kant’s Was ist Aufklarung, that Kant’s critiques or philosophical ethos can be reduced to a “limit attitude” that of a critique (or series of critiques) consisting in analyzing and reflecting upon the limits of our understanding and Reason. This is important for in the age of englightenment where man may “[more] freely deal with things,” man cannot transgress the truth-claims he is permitted to make. As Foucault writes, the Englightenment is the moment when humanity will put reason to use without subjecting it to any authority and it is precisely at this moment that the critique is necessary, since its role is precisely that of defining the conditions under which the use of reason is legitimate in order to (a) determine what can be known, (b) what must be done and (c) what maybe hoped. For Kant, (a) and (c) takes up a large proportion of his efforts and time and it is to (a) and (c) I will try to discuss more about.
In trying to discuss (a) and (c), I will use a particular example that Kant has only very briefly touched upon. He very vaguely says: “…because religious incompetence is not only the most harmful but also the most degrading of all.” From S83-S91 of the Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment, Kant wants to say that in the mere mechanism of nature, the empirical reality that we can find no final end(s) defined as that end which needs no other as the condition of its possibility [CTPJ, pp. 302] or in layman terms and for our purposes, God. Everything in nature (material nature outside us and even inside us i.e. our thinking nature ) that we can see is always in turn conditioned. If so, Kant wants to say 2 things. Firstly that “if [final ends is] in the order of ends dependent on no further condition other than merely the idea of it [CTPJ pp. 302],” then we cannot find anything in nature that gives us any reason to claim that “God exists.” In fact, we cannot have valid objective cognition (i.e. have an empirical intuition of God in or from nature). “God” Secondly, Kant would eventually want to say is an ideal of Reason. Whose Reason? Our Reason. In the world, there is only a single sort of being whose causality is teleological aimed at ends (humans). But because humans’ causality is so constituted i.e. interpretable as so structured by laws themselves, that we humans too have to follow to determine ends and create order and connections in the world, these transcendental a priori laws becomes represented by humans to themselves as something out there in-itself, unconditioned and independent of natural conditions and themselves. But in fact, these transcendental a priori laws are constituted in humans themselves. Man is the one who sets the highest end, the highest good in the world.
“[Man’s] existence contains the highest end itself, to which, as far as he is capable, he can subject the whole of nature, or against which at least he need not hold himself to be subjected by any influence from nature. – Now if things in the world, as dependent beings as far as their existence is concerned, need a supreme cause acting in accordance with ends, then the human being is the final end of creation; for without him the chain of ends subordinated to one another would not be completely grounded; and only in the human being, although in him only as a subject of morality, is unconditional legislation with regards to ends to be found, which therefore makes him alone capable of being a final end, to which the whole of nature is teleologically subordinated.” [CTPJ pp. 302]
Even happiness Kant puts on the sidenote is a subjective end of humans. Not the final ends of humans. With this, quote, it is clear that Kant wants to establish (stronger sense: establishes) that the final end of humans is his own existence wherefrom everything sprints forth. Thus in light of the Aufklarung, Kant in his 3rd Critique wants to first establish that 1) Man is the ultimate subject of all teleological causality. He is the final end in himself. Hence, he has freedom and thus, autonomy and power to act in this and that way in the Age of Enlightenment. But this is only one part of the story for there is the “negative-limits” of what man can say or do with his freedom which is the (a) that I ambition to only briefly cover.
It is common for man to infer from the ends of nature that he cognizes empirically to the supreme cause of nature and its properties. Kant calls this, physicotheology which is I think one of the commonest amongst layman of the existence of God i.e. that there is X Y Z things in nature with specific X Y Z properties that are unique to it and if it is not created by man, it must be created by God. But this is what Kant replies us with:
“Now I say physicotheology, no matter how far it might be pushed, can reveal to us nothing about a final end of creation; for it does not even reach the question about such an end [CTPJ pp. 304].” When we empirically intuit something, we only see it as the appearance it manifests to our faculty of sensibility and it makes conceptual sense after it goes through our faculty of understanding. But the very concept of a world cause, i.e. God, cannot be justified by it for nothing in that empirical intuition presents God to us. Thus Kant continues by saying that: “It can thus certainly justify the concept of an intelligent world-cause [emphasis added], as a merely subjectively appropriate concept for the constitution of our cognitive faculty [emphasis added] of the possibility of the things that we make intelligible to ourselves in accordance with ends;” Thus, what Kant wants to say here is that the intuition or representation serves only as a justification [emphasis added] of the concept of an intelligent-world cause but this is far from claiming [emphasis added] that there is a “God that exists out there.” Also then, the concept of God at most can only have an appropriate connexion to our cognitive faculty of the possibility of things (refers most aptly to the faculty of our Reason creating the possible ideas). I think another short abstract deals with this much better:
“But since the data and hence, the principles for determining that concept of an intelligent world cause (as highest artist) are merely empirical, they do not allow us to infer any properties beyond what experience reveals to us in its effects: which since it can never comprehend the whole of nature as a system, must often hit upon grounds of proof that (to all appearance) contradict one another as well as that concept, but it can never, even if we were able of having an empirical overview of the whole system as long as it concerns mere nature, elevate us beyond nature to the end of its existence itself, and thereby to the determinate concept of that higher intelligence.” [CTPJ pp. 305]
What can be drawn from the above is again that empirical data that we intuit from our faculty of sensibility is simply empirical data as what it is. There is such a vast amount of data in the world that we can simply pick on anyone and find that something we picked on contradicts with the one that we apparently used to justify God’s existence. The empirical intuition or “data” is one very tiny fragment of the whole complete system of nature whereas “God” as an ideal of Reason is if we recall, a final end of nature defined also as the totality that encompasses. Thus, Kant is saying here in this quote that as long as we can never have a total empirical overview of the whole system, we have no rights to make that huge inferential leap to say X justifies God exists, hence God exists. Nothing from empirical experience can sufficiently [emphasis added] be “fitted” to the determinate concept of God (ideal). Yet I must add also this, that it is not always the scrupulous or iniquitous nature of man who makes such an error but it is inherent in us to make such an error especially if we do not understand how our faculties work. Thus for instance, if one does not understand what is meant by the “faculty of judgment” i.e the faculty for thinking of the particular as contained under the universal dem Allgemeinen, then we will not know that once the universal (the rule; law; principle) is gven, then it is in our determining power of judgment [emphasis added] to subsume any particular under it. If we are ignorant to this, then we can easily and fallaciously make that unjustified inferential leap. Hence, the Age of Enlightenment whereby we can speak freely of this and that and use Reason is drastically different and disparate from the Attitude of Enlightenment [emphasis added] which involves knowing the limits of our Reason and on a more positive note, understanding our various faculties.
Hence, I arrive at the last part of what Foucault has re-wrote as (c) what can be hoped for a posteriori the understanding of how our faculties work and the limits of our faculties and hence Reason. Prior to that, I must emphasize that this short essay is not going to give insights to the “how our faculty works” question which is far beyond what I can accomplish at this moment in time. But the problematique is still this: that if we cannot say that God exists, or a highest legislative author exists theoretically [emphasis added], since we cannot have sufficient empirical data or intuitions that adequately support such a total final being, what then can we say? Also, how can or should we act? Here, Kant throws in the Practical Use of Reason. God for Kant is still important for our practical moral needs. If God does not belong to speculative reason and theoretical cognition, for Kant, it belongs to morality alone. God freedom and immortality are thus objects of a moral faith. In a paper by Jane Kellner, she describes this moral faith as a ‘motivation’ or what I think can be called a reason-able motivation [emphasis added]. Kant’s God is thus that of a holy lawgiver, good governor and just judge [RWTLORA pp. lxi]. These cannot be theoretically conceived but can be practically and morally conceived for the purpose of making or more precisely put, motivating man to be a morally rational being. But just on an ending note, what makes man moral is his own looking upon his own [emphasis added] law of reason like duty [emphasis added] as his highest allegiance [emphasis added]. Man is subjected to his own law of reason that acts as his voice of duty i.e. like the categorical imperative calling upon him to do what is right (based on his own law of reason; moral law). As a binding law or duty that man places upon himself via. His self legislative reason (and with faith in postulates of God), man Kant thinks will be obligated [emphasis added] to do the right thing. Most cardinally, to be in such a way morally obligated by one’s own law of reason or moral law, this must be predicated first on the freedom to act in accordance with man’s own laws. Upon this freedom is man’s own moral law or law of reason grounded. Freedom is in this case, man’s ultimate a priori and only by adhering to man’s own self prescribed moral law can man attain Summum Bonum i.e happiness proportioned to moral worth [RWTLORA pp. lvii]. Happiness i.e. Summum Bonum is like God, man’s rational ideals that man must have faith in for something like the Summum Bonum, as an end created by man is not something guaranteed. Even with the most punctilious observance of the moral laws, we may not attain Summum Bonum [RWTLORA pp. lvi].
Thus, man’s freedom in the Age of Enlightenment reigns supreme. He has freedom to act but he is not entirely free to act and Reason as he wishes. The discursive limits of our Reason and truth-claims will only be apparent if one understand how one’s faculties work. Aufklarung ist hence, an attitude that one must take upon himself to study and understand our faculties. This was Kant’s critical transcendental project for a major part of his life. What then may we hope for? We can still in the crudest sense, ‘talk God,’ ‘immortality,’ ‘freedom,’ and ‘soul’ but one must always be conscious of talking about them as theoretical cognitions that have objective validity or are they ideals of reason as like for Kant, for a greater (greatest) purpose, man?
“Here are the limits of our reason clearly delineated. Whoever presumes to overstep them will be punished for his zeal by reason itself with disgust and error. But if we remain within these limits, we shall be rewarded by becoming both wise and good [RWTLORA pp. lxii].”
Footnotes:
1. “…as a scholar whose writings speak to his public, the world, the clergyman in the public use of reason enjoys an unlimited freedom to use his own reason and to speak in his own person.
2. Practical Reason for Kant comes into play where theoretical reason and cognition reaches its limit – in the comprehension of God, Freedom and Immortality of the Soul. In general then, Practical Reason becomes associated with a moral duty with regards to (a) man’s use of freedom (b) to act in morally respectable ways and this can be motivated by (or in a stronger sense: conditioned by) a practical faith in God which is argued for by Kant in his later works - Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone.
3. This is not to be taken in the sense of a literal “culimination” point of Reason. For Kant, Reason is the “highest faculty” of cognition. Ideas of reason have formative power to ground the possibility of the [insertion: new] products of nature [CTPJ pp. 248]. Reason described by Kant as a faculty of desire legislates a priori as the supersensible in the subject [insertion: without the constraining binds of the theoretical understanding], for an unconditioned practical cognition i.e. practical ideas and final ends i.e. freedom and causality of itself [CTPJ. 80]. Kant’s transcendental philosophy establishes how theoretical cognition cannot give us valid objective knowledge of the concept of freedom. But Kant still wants to ground “freedom” as an immanent right of man. Hence, he claims that ‘freedom’ is presupposed a priori and “that which presupposes this a priori freedom is [man’s] power of judgment which provides the mediating concept between the concepts of nature and the concept of freedom [insertion: note – supersensible] [CTPJ pp. 81]” so that the transition from 1) the theoretical and the need to abide to the lawfulness of nature; concepts of nature to 2) final end in accordance with the purely practical [insertion: ideas of Reason] is possible. How this transition is made will not be discussed here. But through our faculty of understanding (that contains constitutive principles; transcendental categories), we have only a theoretical cognition of nature in its mechanistic lawfulness. The very possibility of Understanding’s a priori categories and laws for nature gives us cognition of nature only as lawful and abiding appearances and indicates [insertion: merely] of an undetermined supersensible substratum that our theoretical understand can grasp nothing of. But, the power of judgment that through being able to by feelings of pleasure and displeasure give purposiveness to the world provides determinability of this supersensible substratum i.e. through its very ability to give purposiveness and determine this and that in nature, we can somewhat grasp this supersensible substratum’s determinability and that it is able to determine this and that. Yet, determination of this supersensible substratum is given by Reason that legislates a priori (via final ends man sets for himself) for his own freedom [CTPJ, pp. 81-82]. The point that I hope to have brought out is thus that very generally put, it is man’s ultimate right to use Freedom for himself and
4. Refer to Kant’s analogies in CTPJ
5. This must be seen in light of the First Critique of Pure Reason where Kant explores the transcendental nature of how we can perceive things (through sensibility) have valid cognition of things (when what is intuited from empirical reality “fits into” the a priori categories which gives these raw intuitions order and coherence).
6. This argument can be found in the previous sections where Kant gives some interesting analogies on the “Vegetable Kingdom” etc. I will not go further here.
7. Refer to The Critique of Pure Reason – Transcendental Analytic: Ch1 Section III: The Pure Concepts of the Understanding or Categories and for further reference, The Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Postscript: Preliminary Understanding of Martin Heidegger: Being and Time
As like all of my postscripts, the explication given serves only as a very primitive attempt to understand philosophical texts, on my own. Therefore, it is highly likely to be subjected to syllogisms, insufficiently critical deductive reasonings and the like. It is not supposed to be taken as a thesis or a conclusive understanding of Heidegger but only as the title says, a preliminary understanding. I have not yet read the original text of Heidegger’s Being and Time but have been perusing through works of Heideggerian scholars who have already interpreted and digested Heidegger’s works so as to understand the directions of his studies better. Here I have synthesized some of my understandings in perhaps the most untidy fashion, the various important points that Charles B Guigon, Dorothea Frede, Taylor Carman, Robert J Dostal, William Blattner, David Couzens Hoy, Charles Taylor, Piotr Hoffman and Mark A Warthall’s were trying to make of Heidegger’s works. Their works can be found from The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger edited by Charles B Guignon 2nd ed. (2006). I will leave a more precise deduction of Piotr Hoffman’s “Death, time, history: Division II of Being and Time” for another postscript writing for I think it adds to my basic understanding of Heidegger’s concepts of Daesin and temporality better.
Analysis of Daesin
The ontology of Daesin i.e. Being must be understood in temporality Zeitlichkeit. Temporality or time is the transcendental context for Heidegger’s Daesin. Key to this is how the “unitary [my emphasis added] temporal flow of experience is” a necessary condition for conceptual formation and all intuitive experience [pp. 166]. To understand Heidegger, better a contrastdistinction must be drawn with Kant. For Kant, the transcendental apperception is the highest principle of the faculty of understanding but as established in his transcendental Aesthetic, temporality (a priori time) is belongs not [my emphasis added] to the faculty of understanding but intuition. Unity of the two faculties in the original apperception (with the synthetic a priori transcendental categories) thus gives rise to objective knowledge. But Heidegger is trying to establish the ontology of the Daesin based upon Zeitlichkeit itself – the temporal structure thereby conflating the Kantian a priori categories whereby we can derive objective valid knowledge and the form of intuition (time). Zeitlichkeit itself, a conflation of the Kantian form of intuition (time) and understanding is thus where we can derive objective knowledge of the Daesin. Both Heidegger and Kant thus takes formal temporality to be the basis for experience. But the directions both thinkers take is drastically different. For Kant, intelligibility is conferred upon the manifold representations by the transcendental categories and the subject’s sensibility can receive manifold intuitions. This presumes like Descartes, Mr Locke, Hume etc. a separable zone of “subject” [or in Heidegger’s terms, Daesin] and “representational objects [impressions; intuitions etc].” The “Daesin” in modern philosophy’s terms is thus “disengaged” [CCH Taylor, pp. 213] from the nature or world of objects and in its act of understanding, seeks to ‘bridge this gap.’ The subject no longer stands estranged, outside.
What constitutes Heidegger’s ‘hermeunetic turn’ herein lies in how the Daesin is synonymous to an engaged form of agency whose entirety of the world is shaped by its mode of being and itself must be understood in time. The subject is inside [my emphasis added] this time which itself is the horizon of understanding and understanding of the Daesin. Daesin, the subject, is constituted in Heidegger’s Zeitlichkeit which itself is a ‘dynamic totality’ of endless possibilities […] The Daesin is not that free floating spirit that transcends [my emphasis added] its materiality like a projection Entwurf into the world. The factuality of the Daesin must be seen in factically in its concreteness. Everything is within this Heideggerian context of temporality which hence give rise to the dynamic hermeunetic circle, “where all understanding is circular where any interpretation which is to contribute understanding must already have been understood what it is to be interpreted” [H BT 194].
The Daesin is unlike Husserl’s phenomenology whereby the subject is the condition or a priori ground for all objects of experience and thought and one can make a naturalistic description or study of these content of our intentional acts of consciousness. For Heidegger, the ontic – factual is open to the ontological uncovering of the deep structures which is always subjected to the confirmation of the ontic. The Daesin must thus not be treated ‘purely as an abstraction’ and also not detachedly and naturalistically. The Daesin = being is = being-in-the-world as an organic whole. We project ourselves, our whole existence, into the world and understand ourselves as well as everything in the world in terms of the possibilities of our own projection Entwurf [CCH, Frede pp. 63] and underlying our projections, is the ‘Heideggerian temporality’ which at once, impressionistically resembles a circle […] As Frede puts it, we exist in three temporal dimensions at once or in other words, temporality is the simultaneity of: a) being “ahead of ourselves” in the future b) drawing on our past c) while being with the present “being already in” that constitutes our Daesin. Our Daesin thus embodies an “already extended outward temporal dimension.” Our Daesin is thus, an entity whose very understanding constitutes the temporal dimensions of its existence. This has affinity to the Kantian notion of a transcendental a priori horizon or frame that precedes all experience. For Heidegger, this temporality is not at all like the Kantian notion of time in his ‘Analytic of Principles,’ his famous Analogies of Experience whereby as Kant claims: “our apprehension of the manifold of appearance is always successive [CPR pp.213] [and] where there exists a synthetic faculty of our imagination that connects the two states of time A and time B so that either the one or the other precedes in time… [CPR pp. 219]” Hence, for Kant, the extent to which we are conscious of an objective relation of appearances is the extent to which we subject it to the “[law of causality] concept of the relation of cause and effect, the former of which determines the latter in time, as its consequences [CPR pp. 219]” and allow this apprehension in successive relation to be subjected to the synthesis of our imagination – the synthetic faculty that bestows the temporal connection of the manifold. The Heideggerian temporality manifests an outwardly extended and dynamic circle. It does not go in the Kantian unidirectional way. It is a circle or ‘hermeunetic circle’ because we are always tied to our present moment say at present Tb, but at Tb, we carry with us our ancestral history of Ta-antecedents and based on our position at Tb carrying along Ta-antecedents we project intentionality into the future or understand various future possibilities. Every Tb is thus the act of Daesin transcending temporality i.e. an act of transcendence i.e. our Daesin is always transcending temporality or in transcendence [emphasis added]. Thus the conclusion that “intentionality of the consciousness is grounded in ecstatic temporality of the Daesin” [SZ 363n] i.e. the ekstases of temporality i.e. that we are never at every punctual here and now or are never a Kantian synthesis of static points but we are always at once temporally outwardly extended [emphasis added] [CCH pp. 64]. In a way of putting this, the Daesin’s projection is always from the inside and this inside is the ubiquity or totality of temporality. There is always only an inside. There is always only immanence and repeatedly transcendence of this immanence.
Again, this is drastically different from Husserl’s phenomenological bracketing that dictates a consciousness of the subject, very much like Descartes’s conception of the mind as a ‘container’ of all representations from outside. Husserl’s transcendental reduction thus reflects an attempt to turn away from everything worldly or external to consciousness and focusing on the contents in the container [CCH, pp. 106]. For Heidegger however, the existence of the Daesin lies in its very existence [SZ, 42]. Being is or is based on what it takes itself to be. Its intentionality and projections into the future is based upon its present being that carries the baggage of its past. The whole existence of the Daesin lies in its to be in the world [SZ, 42]. For Heidegger then, Husserl’s phenomenology which is purely descriptive only describes relations of one thing to another in the immanent consciousness but fails in comprehension of their mode of being and the realness reellitat of this mode of being (being-in-one-another). What Heidegger wants to do then is to efface the notion of “substance” as an indubitable absolute being in its collateral contact with the external world of things and that we can perceive the thing-in-itself (das sich or ein Selbst) when presented to us gegenwartigt. Heidegger wants to establish that there is never this illusional gap between the subject with de facto consciousness of itself and the ein Selbst. In fact, Daesin and the world are coterminous in understanding [CCH, pp. 178]. Thus, the “i”nterpretation i.e. Auslegung understanding of the world or Daesin itself is to be situated within the world or Daesin itself i.e. its very own context. This applies to the Interpretierung of Daesin as well i.e. that philosophical interpretations for instance must be reflective of the real world or phenomenal world activity. The whole of Understanding thus in grasping the world also grasps Daesin’s way of being in the world and Daesin’s understanding of its world is thus not very much distinct from the understanding of itself [CCH, pp. 184]. In fact, it is an interpretation of itself. Both Entdecktheit (discoveredness of things; particular features of our world) and Erschlossenheit (disclosedness) of the total context opened up through understanding is intimately linked. The former lead to a greater disclosedness of the later and through the latter disclosedness of possibilities, we gain greater understanding of the Entdecktheit. Most cardinally, both processes are key to human activity. If we only focus on the former, we might end up like Hume making quite crazy claims of a totality of disconnected aggregate of representations or things outlawing causality.
Daesin and Circularity of understanding
The Daesin itself exists at Tb as in [emphasis added] real relations, contexts, significance and situations. Daesin is what it is factically and at point Tb, it projects itself onto the concrete current world. But the Daesin also finds itself already in concrete possibilities at point Tb and projects itself based on Tb into the future thereby deriving at possibilities of the future based on Tb. Possibilities of the future is thus, based upon his constitution of the totality in Tb. The Daesin then can become [my emphasis added] what it is, by becoming what it is already possible for it to be [my emphasis added] [CCH, pp. 187]. At Tb, Daesin interprets who he is and how he wants to continue to be and hence, the Daesin can be said to project its interpretation or meaning, based upon this ‘fore-having’ a) Vorhabe i.e. background of understanding (at point Tb). Say the Daesin wants to make explicit a particular feature of the world or derive an Auslegung of a thing. In this case, Daesin needs not only need Vorhabe but also b) Vorsicht i.e. fore-sight a projection, expectation in advance of the appropriate way things can appear based on the Vorhabe. A Vorhabe will thus always precede Vorsicht of something but to attain the most clear and distinct interpretation, a c) Vorgriff fore-conception (concept) is needed. All the three processes of Vorhabe, Vorsicht and Vorgriff are for Heidegger, never complete interpretations and understandings and any interpretation which is to contribute [to] understanding must already have understood what is to be interpreted [CCH pp. 192]. Heidegger assumes no linearity to a) b) and c) but argues that a) b) and c) occurs simultaneously. Circularity does not mean that we will necessarily be stuck within our own assumptions. Yet it does not mean we can extricate outselves out of it. This process of understanding is holistic in the sense that we will always discover obvious -selbstverstandliche but taken-for-granted and undiscussed assumptions - Vormeinung made by the Daesin or subject. In other words, everything is pre-given within the circle of understanding through fore-having fore-sight and fore-conception, i.e. a) b) and c) but we do not take notice of them. They lie at the subsidiary or undetected focus of the Daesin. Hence, it is wrong to say they are “prior” or “a posterior” or “nouveau” discoveries. Everything lies within the Daesin and Understanding is not Understanding something out there in itself as assumed by empiricists or materialists or rationalists philosophers and the like but Understanding for Heidegger is simply, interpretation of what there-is and what there-is, is the Daesin. This is why Heidegger says something like “in interpretation, understanding does not become something different, but instead becomes itself.” The Daesin understands a “new facticity” out of interpretation of its Daesin 1[a) b) c)] and then, based on this “new facticity,” interprets out of its Daesin 2[a) b) c)]… 100[a) b) c)] and so the Daesin or understanding always transcends itself and always becomes itself – not something lying in the exteriority out there and somewhere. Or as David Cozen Hoy puts it, “understanding as projection suggests that explicit interpretations always arise from implicit needs and the appearance of a new interpretation is likely to generate new needs furthering the appearance of a new interpretation…” [pp. 197] But all interpretation = understanding arises from every present the Daesin is in.
Analysis of Daesin
The ontology of Daesin i.e. Being must be understood in temporality Zeitlichkeit. Temporality or time is the transcendental context for Heidegger’s Daesin. Key to this is how the “unitary [my emphasis added] temporal flow of experience is” a necessary condition for conceptual formation and all intuitive experience [pp. 166]. To understand Heidegger, better a contrastdistinction must be drawn with Kant. For Kant, the transcendental apperception is the highest principle of the faculty of understanding but as established in his transcendental Aesthetic, temporality (a priori time) is belongs not [my emphasis added] to the faculty of understanding but intuition. Unity of the two faculties in the original apperception (with the synthetic a priori transcendental categories) thus gives rise to objective knowledge. But Heidegger is trying to establish the ontology of the Daesin based upon Zeitlichkeit itself – the temporal structure thereby conflating the Kantian a priori categories whereby we can derive objective valid knowledge and the form of intuition (time). Zeitlichkeit itself, a conflation of the Kantian form of intuition (time) and understanding is thus where we can derive objective knowledge of the Daesin. Both Heidegger and Kant thus takes formal temporality to be the basis for experience. But the directions both thinkers take is drastically different. For Kant, intelligibility is conferred upon the manifold representations by the transcendental categories and the subject’s sensibility can receive manifold intuitions. This presumes like Descartes, Mr Locke, Hume etc. a separable zone of “subject” [or in Heidegger’s terms, Daesin] and “representational objects [impressions; intuitions etc].” The “Daesin” in modern philosophy’s terms is thus “disengaged” [CCH Taylor, pp. 213] from the nature or world of objects and in its act of understanding, seeks to ‘bridge this gap.’ The subject no longer stands estranged, outside.
What constitutes Heidegger’s ‘hermeunetic turn’ herein lies in how the Daesin is synonymous to an engaged form of agency whose entirety of the world is shaped by its mode of being and itself must be understood in time. The subject is inside [my emphasis added] this time which itself is the horizon of understanding and understanding of the Daesin. Daesin, the subject, is constituted in Heidegger’s Zeitlichkeit which itself is a ‘dynamic totality’ of endless possibilities […] The Daesin is not that free floating spirit that transcends [my emphasis added] its materiality like a projection Entwurf into the world. The factuality of the Daesin must be seen in factically in its concreteness. Everything is within this Heideggerian context of temporality which hence give rise to the dynamic hermeunetic circle, “where all understanding is circular where any interpretation which is to contribute understanding must already have been understood what it is to be interpreted” [H BT 194].
The Daesin is unlike Husserl’s phenomenology whereby the subject is the condition or a priori ground for all objects of experience and thought and one can make a naturalistic description or study of these content of our intentional acts of consciousness. For Heidegger, the ontic – factual is open to the ontological uncovering of the deep structures which is always subjected to the confirmation of the ontic. The Daesin must thus not be treated ‘purely as an abstraction’ and also not detachedly and naturalistically. The Daesin = being is = being-in-the-world as an organic whole. We project ourselves, our whole existence, into the world and understand ourselves as well as everything in the world in terms of the possibilities of our own projection Entwurf [CCH, Frede pp. 63] and underlying our projections, is the ‘Heideggerian temporality’ which at once, impressionistically resembles a circle […] As Frede puts it, we exist in three temporal dimensions at once or in other words, temporality is the simultaneity of: a) being “ahead of ourselves” in the future b) drawing on our past c) while being with the present “being already in” that constitutes our Daesin. Our Daesin thus embodies an “already extended outward temporal dimension.” Our Daesin is thus, an entity whose very understanding constitutes the temporal dimensions of its existence. This has affinity to the Kantian notion of a transcendental a priori horizon or frame that precedes all experience. For Heidegger, this temporality is not at all like the Kantian notion of time in his ‘Analytic of Principles,’ his famous Analogies of Experience whereby as Kant claims: “our apprehension of the manifold of appearance is always successive [CPR pp.213] [and] where there exists a synthetic faculty of our imagination that connects the two states of time A and time B so that either the one or the other precedes in time… [CPR pp. 219]” Hence, for Kant, the extent to which we are conscious of an objective relation of appearances is the extent to which we subject it to the “[law of causality] concept of the relation of cause and effect, the former of which determines the latter in time, as its consequences [CPR pp. 219]” and allow this apprehension in successive relation to be subjected to the synthesis of our imagination – the synthetic faculty that bestows the temporal connection of the manifold. The Heideggerian temporality manifests an outwardly extended and dynamic circle. It does not go in the Kantian unidirectional way. It is a circle or ‘hermeunetic circle’ because we are always tied to our present moment say at present Tb, but at Tb, we carry with us our ancestral history of Ta-antecedents and based on our position at Tb carrying along Ta-antecedents we project intentionality into the future or understand various future possibilities. Every Tb is thus the act of Daesin transcending temporality i.e. an act of transcendence i.e. our Daesin is always transcending temporality or in transcendence [emphasis added]. Thus the conclusion that “intentionality of the consciousness is grounded in ecstatic temporality of the Daesin” [SZ 363n] i.e. the ekstases of temporality i.e. that we are never at every punctual here and now or are never a Kantian synthesis of static points but we are always at once temporally outwardly extended [emphasis added] [CCH pp. 64]. In a way of putting this, the Daesin’s projection is always from the inside and this inside is the ubiquity or totality of temporality. There is always only an inside. There is always only immanence and repeatedly transcendence of this immanence.
Again, this is drastically different from Husserl’s phenomenological bracketing that dictates a consciousness of the subject, very much like Descartes’s conception of the mind as a ‘container’ of all representations from outside. Husserl’s transcendental reduction thus reflects an attempt to turn away from everything worldly or external to consciousness and focusing on the contents in the container [CCH, pp. 106]. For Heidegger however, the existence of the Daesin lies in its very existence [SZ, 42]. Being is or is based on what it takes itself to be. Its intentionality and projections into the future is based upon its present being that carries the baggage of its past. The whole existence of the Daesin lies in its to be in the world [SZ, 42]. For Heidegger then, Husserl’s phenomenology which is purely descriptive only describes relations of one thing to another in the immanent consciousness but fails in comprehension of their mode of being and the realness reellitat of this mode of being (being-in-one-another). What Heidegger wants to do then is to efface the notion of “substance” as an indubitable absolute being in its collateral contact with the external world of things and that we can perceive the thing-in-itself (das sich or ein Selbst) when presented to us gegenwartigt. Heidegger wants to establish that there is never this illusional gap between the subject with de facto consciousness of itself and the ein Selbst. In fact, Daesin and the world are coterminous in understanding [CCH, pp. 178]. Thus, the “i”nterpretation i.e. Auslegung understanding of the world or Daesin itself is to be situated within the world or Daesin itself i.e. its very own context. This applies to the Interpretierung of Daesin as well i.e. that philosophical interpretations for instance must be reflective of the real world or phenomenal world activity. The whole of Understanding thus in grasping the world also grasps Daesin’s way of being in the world and Daesin’s understanding of its world is thus not very much distinct from the understanding of itself [CCH, pp. 184]. In fact, it is an interpretation of itself. Both Entdecktheit (discoveredness of things; particular features of our world) and Erschlossenheit (disclosedness) of the total context opened up through understanding is intimately linked. The former lead to a greater disclosedness of the later and through the latter disclosedness of possibilities, we gain greater understanding of the Entdecktheit. Most cardinally, both processes are key to human activity. If we only focus on the former, we might end up like Hume making quite crazy claims of a totality of disconnected aggregate of representations or things outlawing causality.
Daesin and Circularity of understanding
The Daesin itself exists at Tb as in [emphasis added] real relations, contexts, significance and situations. Daesin is what it is factically and at point Tb, it projects itself onto the concrete current world. But the Daesin also finds itself already in concrete possibilities at point Tb and projects itself based on Tb into the future thereby deriving at possibilities of the future based on Tb. Possibilities of the future is thus, based upon his constitution of the totality in Tb. The Daesin then can become [my emphasis added] what it is, by becoming what it is already possible for it to be [my emphasis added] [CCH, pp. 187]. At Tb, Daesin interprets who he is and how he wants to continue to be and hence, the Daesin can be said to project its interpretation or meaning, based upon this ‘fore-having’ a) Vorhabe i.e. background of understanding (at point Tb). Say the Daesin wants to make explicit a particular feature of the world or derive an Auslegung of a thing. In this case, Daesin needs not only need Vorhabe but also b) Vorsicht i.e. fore-sight a projection, expectation in advance of the appropriate way things can appear based on the Vorhabe. A Vorhabe will thus always precede Vorsicht of something but to attain the most clear and distinct interpretation, a c) Vorgriff fore-conception (concept) is needed. All the three processes of Vorhabe, Vorsicht and Vorgriff are for Heidegger, never complete interpretations and understandings and any interpretation which is to contribute [to] understanding must already have understood what is to be interpreted [CCH pp. 192]. Heidegger assumes no linearity to a) b) and c) but argues that a) b) and c) occurs simultaneously. Circularity does not mean that we will necessarily be stuck within our own assumptions. Yet it does not mean we can extricate outselves out of it. This process of understanding is holistic in the sense that we will always discover obvious -selbstverstandliche but taken-for-granted and undiscussed assumptions - Vormeinung made by the Daesin or subject. In other words, everything is pre-given within the circle of understanding through fore-having fore-sight and fore-conception, i.e. a) b) and c) but we do not take notice of them. They lie at the subsidiary or undetected focus of the Daesin. Hence, it is wrong to say they are “prior” or “a posterior” or “nouveau” discoveries. Everything lies within the Daesin and Understanding is not Understanding something out there in itself as assumed by empiricists or materialists or rationalists philosophers and the like but Understanding for Heidegger is simply, interpretation of what there-is and what there-is, is the Daesin. This is why Heidegger says something like “in interpretation, understanding does not become something different, but instead becomes itself.” The Daesin understands a “new facticity” out of interpretation of its Daesin 1[a) b) c)] and then, based on this “new facticity,” interprets out of its Daesin 2[a) b) c)]… 100[a) b) c)] and so the Daesin or understanding always transcends itself and always becomes itself – not something lying in the exteriority out there and somewhere. Or as David Cozen Hoy puts it, “understanding as projection suggests that explicit interpretations always arise from implicit needs and the appearance of a new interpretation is likely to generate new needs furthering the appearance of a new interpretation…” [pp. 197] But all interpretation = understanding arises from every present the Daesin is in.
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Judith Butler – Gender Trouble: Subversive Bodily Acts – Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions & From Interiority to Gender Performatives
Reading Postscripts
(1) Judith Butler – Gender Trouble: Subversive Bodily Acts – Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions & From Interiority to Gender Performatives
The problem:
Generally, Butler in her Gender Trouble wants to render nugatory any concept of a “pre-discursive” passive body – the assumption of a metaphysical simple substance – that presupposes the acquisition of its “sexed significance” (Butler GT pp. 164) or that awaits some cultural inscription onto it. She wants to blur or in a stronger sense expunge Cartesian-like dualisms of body/mind; subject/object. It is problematic for her that we preclude a stable “body” prior to inscription and that like for Kafka, Foucault or even Nietzsche, the historicity and (or of) cultural values that are inscribed on this bodily medium transvaluate (stronger sense: destroy) the body into a sublimated domain of values (Butler GT pp. 166). Is there a materiality prior to significations and forms?
The argument:
1) Gendered body is a performative: it has no ontological status part from the very acts that constitute its reality.
Implications
a) The idea that the body has an “interior soul” (an interiority; inner core) within the body – a structuring inner space “ready-to-be” signified is itself is a product of discourse, public and social regulation. The ontology of the body as signifying a lack or in other words, having an inner space “ready-to-be” filled is constructed and fabricated.
This is our idealized “coherent body” whose coherence is a fabrication, construction via the very performative enactments (acts, words, gestures, desires). These enactments signify our that very interior absence that needs to be filled. Thus, corporeality of signs, discursive means etc. produces this idealized body: “[the body is] an effect of a corporeal signification… an illusion of an interior organizing gender core.”
2) This Gendered body with a fabricated interiority is an effect or function of a public social discourse. “An illusion discursively maintained for the purposes of regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality.” Hence, gendered body is a discursive product-object produced to be regulated or as an object of regulation.
3) But this phantasmic interior space is so successfully displaced from our view. It is displaced onto a psychological core (localized within our “selves”). In more layman terms, we think our desires, gestures and acts are innately psychological – i.e. that we naturally have this “natural core substantial self” that needs filling to be coherent and realized.
Implications:
As a corollary then, A) subjects will be amnesiac towards the very discursive acts of political regulations and disciplinary practices that produce these phantasmic empty shells that needs to be gendered into realization. B) Inner truth of gender is a fabrication that is C) instituted and inscribed on the surface of bodies. If B) and C) then, D) Neither hetero- genders are true. They are all effects of discourses. They are constructs.
4) On the Drag: the Transvestite that fully subverts and mock (parody) this whole illusive model of appearances.
What the drag does?
The drag is a transvestite say a man wearing dressing women’s clothes. He is essentially a double subversion which blatantly declares that all appearances that we see or think true are illusive. Because a) The transvestite’s (in a woman’s dress) has an ‘outside’ appearance that is feminine but under his dressing, his ‘inside,’ his body is masculine. Also, b) his body is masculine but his inside is feminine. Both are antinomies that are true but contradict one another and hence, have an subversive effect i.e. shows that all forms of “gender significations;” “meanings accorded to gender (Butler GT pp. 175) are itself a prescriptive construction i.e. products i.e. effects of discourses of truth and falsity (Butler GT pp. 174). Thus, Butler thinks that this enlightening insight to the ontology of primary significations can result in a radical reframing of “original meanings” accorded to Gender and that “gender experiences might be reframed” as well (Butler GT pp. 175).
What can we see from the drag? Why is the drag an effective subversion?
The drag creates an “unified picture of a woman” that is falsely naturalized as a unity through the regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence… [The drag] reveals the imitative structure of gender itself as well as its contingency”
The drag is essentially a distinction between the a) anatomy of the performer and b) the gender that is being performed.
But Butler says that what is really going on is not the two dimensions i.e. a) and b) but actually “three contingent dimensions of significant corporeality: a1) anatomical sex, a2) gender identity, and a3) gender performance.” So there is a dissonance between “anatomical sex and gender identity” and “gender identity and performance.” One’s anatomical sex is not instantly coequal with one’s gender identity and one’s gender identity is not instantly coequal with one’s gender performance. The drag has the anatomy of a man with a penis and a muscular body, but he is does not behave like a “man” should. He does not (stronger sense: fails to) identify with his gender identity) and performatively, acts and performs the identity of the woman. Hence, the drag dramatizes this whole “naturalized coherent” story of “XX sex = XX gender identity” story by showing that all “natural originals” is contingent on the performative performance: the very act. The drag is a parody of the very notion of an original core (Butler GT pp. 175).
5) Butler then draws a further conclusion that the “gender parody reveals that the original identity after which gender fashions itself is an imitation without an origin.”
a) Drags are imitations (albeit failed imitations) of the “original woman.” Everyone laughs at them… those transvestites! But their very failure of imitating shows that the original identity of man or woman itself needs to be constantly re-enacted and performed (it is a performative). If so, it shows that the original itself is a performative construction. If it is a construction that always have to be re-enacted and hence is always a “to be” instead of a stable “is,” then Butler argues that the original itself is a myth. It is has no origins (we cannot seek it by retracing its historicity or causality) but it is sustained by imitating itself i.e. it’s very own performative production here and now.
6) Thus, there can be no “original identification” i.e. a determining cause of the original (for there is not even an original or pre-discursive).
If so, then, a Butler sense or understanding of gender-identity must be that of a personal/cultural history of received meanings that imitates itself to create that illusion of a substantially and really existing “gender identity.” All originals are thus copies and hence, can evoke laughter… for there is no original, the original is a copy that always have to copy to be materialized into reality and if so, then the original ideal because it is a nonexistent ideal is something that no one can embody but only delude themselves to embodying. “Laughter emerges in the realization that all along, the original was derived.” (GT pp. 177)
A Butler conception of the “body” is hence not as a being but a variable boundary whose surface or permeability is always politically regulated. The body is a product of regulations within a cultural matrix of gender hierarchy and compulsory heterosexuality. It creates the whole “need-to-be-filled” interiority.
“Gender” is then a repeated strategy constantly having to repeat, constantly under the duress of needing to perform to “survive” within this compulsory system. “Gender,” the fiction is sustained by the “tacit collective agreement to perform, produce and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions (Butler GT pp. 178).” But this whole collective collusion, fiction, performative is obscured by the very appearance of credibility of the productions and punitive mechanisms. These compel our belief in the necessity and naturalness (Butler GT pp. 188) Gender is thus a construction that regularly conceals its genesis.
Critique of Butler
Butler wants to efface original ideals and causal determinism so as to make “gender” a performative – a here and now effect which is contingent on being performed, repeated, imitated (imitating its own productive effects; performative). As Butler says:
“The effect of gender is produced through the stylization of the body and hence must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and styles of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self This formulation moves the conception of gender off the ground of a substantial model of identity to one that requires a conception of gender as a constituted social temporality.” (Butler GT pp. 179)
“…if gender is instituted through acts which are internally discontinuous, then the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including actors themselves come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief…” (Butler GT pp. 179)
“If the ground of gender identity is the stylized repetition of acts through time and not a seemingly seamless identity, then the spatial metaphor of a “ground” will be displaced and revealed as a stylized configuration, indeed a gendered conventionalization of time. The abiding gendered self will then be shown to be structured by repeated acts that seek to approximate the ideal of a substantial ground of identity, but which in their occasional discontinuity, reveal the temporal and contingent groundlessness of this ground.” (Butler GT pp. 179)
I will not mount into a full-scale critique of Butler but will only raise several points and questions for my own future development of contentions from a Kantian perspective.
a) Butler wants to uproot the notion of a “spatial metaphor of ground;” “an abiding gendered self.” Hence, Butler claims that there is no ground (no substance; pre-discursive self; no “abiding self”). There is only a synchronic performative repetition in this or that temporality right here and now. Gender must be seen as a “stylized configuration of time” constructed through its very performative in a cultural-political-social matrix of regulations i.e. gender as a “constituted social temporality.”
Yet, from the Kantian perspective, we are not postulating that there is a simple abiding substance. To that, we don’t know and perhaps cannot know. But we can be sure that there is always an apperceptive “I think” that apprehends and synthesizes all our sensible empirical experiences so as to form coherence and order in the world. In this respect then, if it is in the very nature of our faculties to function this way, i.e. for the subject to give order and coherence to the world, then to what extent can Butler’s project to decenter the subject as a giver of coherence succeed? The project to make Gender be seen as something contingent, groundless (wholly exteriorized to the social-political) i.e. to essentially take the question out of the subject/object dichotomy seems to fail i.e. to not seek recourse to an “I” that preexists signification cannot hold. For if there is no “I think” no unifying mechanism, there will not be any order or coherence in ourselves and hence also, the world as we give order to the world. How then can Butler account for coherence and order without the I? i.e. or the very fact that there is cumulative experiences (Kant: apprehension) happening that gives coherence and continuity in our experience (and as a result of which gives us a sense of coherent identity)? Will she be saying or is she saying that all the exterior floating public discourses, acts etc. gives us our sense of order and coherence? That everything is prescribed/inscribed onto us as the body and self emerges through regulations and practices? Is that a tenable claim to make? That there is some sense of causal order is something I think even Butler cannot refute. Anyone who tries to deny that we at least apparently observe some form of causal order (regardless of whether there actually is or not is another matter) is delusional. It seems to me somehow that Butler like Foucault is letting things spin around in the exteriority… that I can’t really put my finger on at this point in time…
Butler says “The subject is not determined by the rules through which it is generated because signification is not a founding act, but rather a regulated process of repetition that both conceals itself and enforces its rules precisely through the production of substantializing effects. (Butler GT pp. 185)”
She argues that the “signifying I only appears through a signifying practice (in the exteriority) that seeks to conceal its own workings and to naturalize its effects. (Butler GT pp. 184)” She also says that “to understand identity as a practice and as a signifying practice, is to understand culturally intelligible subjects as the resulting effects of a rule-bound discourse… (Butler GT pp. 184)”
But somehow to me, I don’t know if this is going to be a logical or sensible or facile argument… the question will always be: Who then creates this rule bound discourse? Who creates these regulations but the creative man? The “I” that Butler and Foucault seems to all want to reject. They all seem to not realize that most of our knowledge begins with empirical experience of the world but not all of it.
(1) Judith Butler – Gender Trouble: Subversive Bodily Acts – Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions & From Interiority to Gender Performatives
The problem:
Generally, Butler in her Gender Trouble wants to render nugatory any concept of a “pre-discursive” passive body – the assumption of a metaphysical simple substance – that presupposes the acquisition of its “sexed significance” (Butler GT pp. 164) or that awaits some cultural inscription onto it. She wants to blur or in a stronger sense expunge Cartesian-like dualisms of body/mind; subject/object. It is problematic for her that we preclude a stable “body” prior to inscription and that like for Kafka, Foucault or even Nietzsche, the historicity and (or of) cultural values that are inscribed on this bodily medium transvaluate (stronger sense: destroy) the body into a sublimated domain of values (Butler GT pp. 166). Is there a materiality prior to significations and forms?
The argument:
1) Gendered body is a performative: it has no ontological status part from the very acts that constitute its reality.
Implications
a) The idea that the body has an “interior soul” (an interiority; inner core) within the body – a structuring inner space “ready-to-be” signified is itself is a product of discourse, public and social regulation. The ontology of the body as signifying a lack or in other words, having an inner space “ready-to-be” filled is constructed and fabricated.
This is our idealized “coherent body” whose coherence is a fabrication, construction via the very performative enactments (acts, words, gestures, desires). These enactments signify our that very interior absence that needs to be filled. Thus, corporeality of signs, discursive means etc. produces this idealized body: “[the body is] an effect of a corporeal signification… an illusion of an interior organizing gender core.”
2) This Gendered body with a fabricated interiority is an effect or function of a public social discourse. “An illusion discursively maintained for the purposes of regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality.” Hence, gendered body is a discursive product-object produced to be regulated or as an object of regulation.
3) But this phantasmic interior space is so successfully displaced from our view. It is displaced onto a psychological core (localized within our “selves”). In more layman terms, we think our desires, gestures and acts are innately psychological – i.e. that we naturally have this “natural core substantial self” that needs filling to be coherent and realized.
Implications:
As a corollary then, A) subjects will be amnesiac towards the very discursive acts of political regulations and disciplinary practices that produce these phantasmic empty shells that needs to be gendered into realization. B) Inner truth of gender is a fabrication that is C) instituted and inscribed on the surface of bodies. If B) and C) then, D) Neither hetero- genders are true. They are all effects of discourses. They are constructs.
4) On the Drag: the Transvestite that fully subverts and mock (parody) this whole illusive model of appearances.
What the drag does?
The drag is a transvestite say a man wearing dressing women’s clothes. He is essentially a double subversion which blatantly declares that all appearances that we see or think true are illusive. Because a) The transvestite’s (in a woman’s dress) has an ‘outside’ appearance that is feminine but under his dressing, his ‘inside,’ his body is masculine. Also, b) his body is masculine but his inside is feminine. Both are antinomies that are true but contradict one another and hence, have an subversive effect i.e. shows that all forms of “gender significations;” “meanings accorded to gender (Butler GT pp. 175) are itself a prescriptive construction i.e. products i.e. effects of discourses of truth and falsity (Butler GT pp. 174). Thus, Butler thinks that this enlightening insight to the ontology of primary significations can result in a radical reframing of “original meanings” accorded to Gender and that “gender experiences might be reframed” as well (Butler GT pp. 175).
What can we see from the drag? Why is the drag an effective subversion?
The drag creates an “unified picture of a woman” that is falsely naturalized as a unity through the regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence… [The drag] reveals the imitative structure of gender itself as well as its contingency”
The drag is essentially a distinction between the a) anatomy of the performer and b) the gender that is being performed.
But Butler says that what is really going on is not the two dimensions i.e. a) and b) but actually “three contingent dimensions of significant corporeality: a1) anatomical sex, a2) gender identity, and a3) gender performance.” So there is a dissonance between “anatomical sex and gender identity” and “gender identity and performance.” One’s anatomical sex is not instantly coequal with one’s gender identity and one’s gender identity is not instantly coequal with one’s gender performance. The drag has the anatomy of a man with a penis and a muscular body, but he is does not behave like a “man” should. He does not (stronger sense: fails to) identify with his gender identity) and performatively, acts and performs the identity of the woman. Hence, the drag dramatizes this whole “naturalized coherent” story of “XX sex = XX gender identity” story by showing that all “natural originals” is contingent on the performative performance: the very act. The drag is a parody of the very notion of an original core (Butler GT pp. 175).
5) Butler then draws a further conclusion that the “gender parody reveals that the original identity after which gender fashions itself is an imitation without an origin.”
a) Drags are imitations (albeit failed imitations) of the “original woman.” Everyone laughs at them… those transvestites! But their very failure of imitating shows that the original identity of man or woman itself needs to be constantly re-enacted and performed (it is a performative). If so, it shows that the original itself is a performative construction. If it is a construction that always have to be re-enacted and hence is always a “to be” instead of a stable “is,” then Butler argues that the original itself is a myth. It is has no origins (we cannot seek it by retracing its historicity or causality) but it is sustained by imitating itself i.e. it’s very own performative production here and now.
6) Thus, there can be no “original identification” i.e. a determining cause of the original (for there is not even an original or pre-discursive).
If so, then, a Butler sense or understanding of gender-identity must be that of a personal/cultural history of received meanings that imitates itself to create that illusion of a substantially and really existing “gender identity.” All originals are thus copies and hence, can evoke laughter… for there is no original, the original is a copy that always have to copy to be materialized into reality and if so, then the original ideal because it is a nonexistent ideal is something that no one can embody but only delude themselves to embodying. “Laughter emerges in the realization that all along, the original was derived.” (GT pp. 177)
A Butler conception of the “body” is hence not as a being but a variable boundary whose surface or permeability is always politically regulated. The body is a product of regulations within a cultural matrix of gender hierarchy and compulsory heterosexuality. It creates the whole “need-to-be-filled” interiority.
“Gender” is then a repeated strategy constantly having to repeat, constantly under the duress of needing to perform to “survive” within this compulsory system. “Gender,” the fiction is sustained by the “tacit collective agreement to perform, produce and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions (Butler GT pp. 178).” But this whole collective collusion, fiction, performative is obscured by the very appearance of credibility of the productions and punitive mechanisms. These compel our belief in the necessity and naturalness (Butler GT pp. 188) Gender is thus a construction that regularly conceals its genesis.
Critique of Butler
Butler wants to efface original ideals and causal determinism so as to make “gender” a performative – a here and now effect which is contingent on being performed, repeated, imitated (imitating its own productive effects; performative). As Butler says:
“The effect of gender is produced through the stylization of the body and hence must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and styles of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self This formulation moves the conception of gender off the ground of a substantial model of identity to one that requires a conception of gender as a constituted social temporality.” (Butler GT pp. 179)
“…if gender is instituted through acts which are internally discontinuous, then the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including actors themselves come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief…” (Butler GT pp. 179)
“If the ground of gender identity is the stylized repetition of acts through time and not a seemingly seamless identity, then the spatial metaphor of a “ground” will be displaced and revealed as a stylized configuration, indeed a gendered conventionalization of time. The abiding gendered self will then be shown to be structured by repeated acts that seek to approximate the ideal of a substantial ground of identity, but which in their occasional discontinuity, reveal the temporal and contingent groundlessness of this ground.” (Butler GT pp. 179)
I will not mount into a full-scale critique of Butler but will only raise several points and questions for my own future development of contentions from a Kantian perspective.
a) Butler wants to uproot the notion of a “spatial metaphor of ground;” “an abiding gendered self.” Hence, Butler claims that there is no ground (no substance; pre-discursive self; no “abiding self”). There is only a synchronic performative repetition in this or that temporality right here and now. Gender must be seen as a “stylized configuration of time” constructed through its very performative in a cultural-political-social matrix of regulations i.e. gender as a “constituted social temporality.”
Yet, from the Kantian perspective, we are not postulating that there is a simple abiding substance. To that, we don’t know and perhaps cannot know. But we can be sure that there is always an apperceptive “I think” that apprehends and synthesizes all our sensible empirical experiences so as to form coherence and order in the world. In this respect then, if it is in the very nature of our faculties to function this way, i.e. for the subject to give order and coherence to the world, then to what extent can Butler’s project to decenter the subject as a giver of coherence succeed? The project to make Gender be seen as something contingent, groundless (wholly exteriorized to the social-political) i.e. to essentially take the question out of the subject/object dichotomy seems to fail i.e. to not seek recourse to an “I” that preexists signification cannot hold. For if there is no “I think” no unifying mechanism, there will not be any order or coherence in ourselves and hence also, the world as we give order to the world. How then can Butler account for coherence and order without the I? i.e. or the very fact that there is cumulative experiences (Kant: apprehension) happening that gives coherence and continuity in our experience (and as a result of which gives us a sense of coherent identity)? Will she be saying or is she saying that all the exterior floating public discourses, acts etc. gives us our sense of order and coherence? That everything is prescribed/inscribed onto us as the body and self emerges through regulations and practices? Is that a tenable claim to make? That there is some sense of causal order is something I think even Butler cannot refute. Anyone who tries to deny that we at least apparently observe some form of causal order (regardless of whether there actually is or not is another matter) is delusional. It seems to me somehow that Butler like Foucault is letting things spin around in the exteriority… that I can’t really put my finger on at this point in time…
Butler says “The subject is not determined by the rules through which it is generated because signification is not a founding act, but rather a regulated process of repetition that both conceals itself and enforces its rules precisely through the production of substantializing effects. (Butler GT pp. 185)”
She argues that the “signifying I only appears through a signifying practice (in the exteriority) that seeks to conceal its own workings and to naturalize its effects. (Butler GT pp. 184)” She also says that “to understand identity as a practice and as a signifying practice, is to understand culturally intelligible subjects as the resulting effects of a rule-bound discourse… (Butler GT pp. 184)”
But somehow to me, I don’t know if this is going to be a logical or sensible or facile argument… the question will always be: Who then creates this rule bound discourse? Who creates these regulations but the creative man? The “I” that Butler and Foucault seems to all want to reject. They all seem to not realize that most of our knowledge begins with empirical experience of the world but not all of it.
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