ETHICAL TENSION, RELEASE, REST
These pages are undergoing construction. Nevertheless, here are a few prefatory remarks.
In the ethical issue of obligation a space gets carved out called, “I am obliged”. And in the tradition (from Aristotle down to Kant, and into what we call modernity) speculation has surrounded this “I am obliged” with...well, with much speculation! But whatever the case this “I” (identity, self-consciousness, the subject) is always there as a supposition, as a presupposition.
“I am obliged”. To what? For what? Who says so and why? And especially as Kant said (and as everybody knows!): “actions spring from self, not from the stern law”?
So what are we to make of this “I am obliged”? Can it be so readily turned into an object or represented as such – especially as there is that little subject, that little “I”, still there in the object, still there in the “I am obliged”. The subject seems to be always wrapped-up in the purported object here.
At this point dualism presses. A particular and a generalised “I” are required. Two “I’s”!! I and I. In fact, addressing an abstract “I”, an abstract subject, in this way is already presumptive of law and politics of some sort or other, already “ethical”.(This to be elaborated)
In the Phenomenology of Mind, Hegel says ethical laws just “are” and nothing more. The “I” has no say at all here for Hegel.
“They are. If I ask for their origin and confine them to a point whence they arose, that puts me beyond them, for it is I who am now the universal, while they are conditional and limited. If they are to get the sanction of my insight, I have already shaken their immoveable nature, their inherent constancy, and regard them as something which is perhaps true, but possibly may also be not true, so far as I am concerned.” (G.W.F.Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind. trans. J.B.Baillie. 2nd.ed. London. Geo.Allen and Unwin Ltd. 1971. p.452)
Ethical laws are transcendent. They are just “there”. And a subject may think what he likes; it makes no difference here. Ethics is transcendental – like the pure forms of time and space supposed by mathematics for instance. That is the sort of basis which Kant and those who came after him sought to demonstrate for the ethical. But do they get rid of that subjective “I” with the move to a transcendental “I”, to “pure” consciousness? Could we not say that pure consciousness might just be the choice of a certain type of subjective consciousness?
A thought comes when “it” wants – not when the sanctimonious “I” wants it to!! If there is a modern turn in philosophy which means anything at all it consists in a deep weariness with the logo self-centric threshold which thinks its “I” over everything. Subjectivity. Here the philosophical problem persists.
TIME
Our individual lives are finite: we’re born, we live, we die. But time carries on of course, so we carry with us some sort of notion of time going on and on and on…infinity.
The problem (philosophically anyway) is how are we to think that, i.e. infinity. An everyday image might be a long line that never stops, always “more”. Another image might be circular. This ordinary blank sense of infinity as endlessness is where thought gives up and turns back upon itself. Now when thought “gives up” – that’s surely a crucial point of interest is it not?
To take the idea of “now”, where the infinite might be made up of an endless succession of “nows”. As our friend Hegel says: “ The ‘now’…has already been dissolved, diffused, pulverised even while I am expressing it.” In other words “now” (which we lay so much emphasis upon in all kinds of ways) is never there! The point about time being made here is that there is no “point” in time where one moment passes into another. All we have of “now”, says Hegel, is coming-into-being and passing-away (at the same time presumably since no priority is given to either). Coming and going. Thus Hegel says of time that it is “intuited becoming”.
If one tries to think of something like “electricity”, rather than “objects”, then Hegel’s “first concrete notion” of “becoming” isn’t so difficult.
In the “pure logic”: being and nothingness reciprocally vanish into each other, and this generates the motion of becoming. This “becoming” is the effort of thought to grasp what is essentially movement pure and simple.
But movement is timeless in the sense that it, itself, does not change; it would not itself suffer any contingency by the fact of all things being “in time”.
So this mutual outpouring or reciprocal vanishing of being and nothingness would be like the motor of becoming. But in its “logical purity” this becoming, like the “point” on a circle which cannot have any length, does not touch upon any “length” of time.
Or, to say the same thing in a different way: becoming is not to be thought of here as being touched in any way by succession or ongoingness. It is identical with the concept “now” or pure immediacy – it is always there in virtue of the fact that it is “never there”.
So the incessant motion that is pure becoming is always, is forever. It is eternal and so goes along with time’s infinite whilst “not touching”.
Becoming is eternal immediacy, which is why Hegel sometimes refers to time itself as “intuited becoming”. But he calls becoming the “first concrete notion” because it presents itself with the (apparent) authenticity of absolution.
So where does all this get us? What is the point of all this? Pure movement, pure becoming, like “now”, is always going to be thought of, always going to have to be thought of, as “never-there”. Fine. O.K. Now what?
Well, staying with Hegel (who is always thinking of the next negation), becoming becomes…something! A “somewhat”, a “quality”. And such a thing arises the moment that pure becoming gets “touched” with time, which is to say, with ongoingness. At this point the pure movement that is becoming is now “in-the-world”. It is now “there” – under the duress of duration.
As becoming becomes “being-in-the-world”, at the “touch” of time so-to-speak, it transforms from just being to being-there. Dasein.
With this point of dasein being reached the category of “quality” has already presented itself. In this order of things, quality is first, followed by quantity and measure (reversing Kant’s “mathematical” order here which puts quantity before quality).
click here for some further discussion on this
