Some things to think about regarding Kant
Kant had tried to find in our “ordinary” language, in our object language, the principles authorising the various judgements, norms and prescriptives found within it. He pressed hard against the alogicality of the normative, its uncertainty, its defiance of reference, and in that space he bravely invented “categories”.
In the nature of the exercise the categories had to be transcendental, because in this rather special rising up Kant was trying to get away from a dilemma :
He couldn’t see much in the prevailing language authorising, that is to say, rationally authorising, the various acts of judgement, cognition, will, emotion and so forth supplied within that language. Much to everyone’s great relief he found what he secretly hoped he already had: a “faculty” which would furnish the criteria for judgement, will, emotion etc.
Disturbed by the uncertainty of reason in the sphere of the ethical, Kant set about putting this “impossible” situation aright. As everybody knows he invented an “apriori”, an advance-experience, which would reassure us of this at least:
Righteous judgements are possible.
A snippet from the practical reason
“A lust...unnatural...imagination, depicting to him in fancy the object...this unnatural use (and so abuse) of one’s sexual organs is a violation, in the highest degree, of the duty owed by any to himself...a thought so revolting, that even the naming of this vice by its own name is regarded as a kind of immorality...”
“And yet, to prove on grounds of reason...even the disallowedness of a mere irregular use of one’s sexual part...is a task of no slight or common difficulty.”
“The ground of proving is to be sought, no doubt, in this, that man meanly abdicates his personality, when he attempts to employ himself as a bare means to satisfy a brute lust,” which is, “effeminate surrender to sensitive excitement.”
“Enjoying his own self-abuse...he makes himself an object of abomination, and stands bereft of all reverence of any kind.” (I.Kant, Metaphysic of Ethics. p.241-242)
“The spectacle of Tartuffery in old Kant,” wrote Nietzsche, “equally stiff and decent”. Stiff?
Philosophy: Being, Words.
There is something which may be called the absolutely current value of those great “cultural events” in the vast wealth of European philosophy, in a culture (our own) which wants to deny and flatten-out those events. But for this very reason of denial it is all the more difficult to get at those absolutely current values. That is why very good philosophers give up on philosophy…they push on in faith and try to find something exciting, relevant, useful – and finally give up. Even Wittgenstein bears this sort of pessimism, maybe stands for this sort of pessimism. But I would like to try and explain something.
Maybe one of the great tragedies of modern philosophy is that Heidegger endorsed the Nazis – who would want to read his ethics after that? One can tell, after the war, how reluctant publishers felt about Heidegger. Yet we must be thankful to Levinas especially for pointing out what Heidegger actually did in Being and Time, without absolving the author of that work (who could?) of his complicity with fascism.
And before we proceed with any points relating to Heidegger, we have a duty to remind ourselves yet again: for twelve years in Europe, under Hitler, an entire culture believed, and acted upon the belief, that a substantial proportion of their like were not in fact human at all – sub-human in fact. If anyone should imagine that anti-Semitism was just a policy of Hitler and party they should be mindful that every pore, every nook and cranny of social life (education, health, military, law, family, media etc.) became steeped or overlaid with this motif of the sub-human Jew (see: Nazi Culture – Intellectual, Cultural and Social Life in the Third Reich, by George L.Mosse. trans.Salvator Attanasio et al. W.H.Allen. London 1966). The Jew was in turn: capitalist and(!) communist , materialist, parasite, vermin, untrue, evil, bad, enemy, problem, everything-that-is-wrong, a disease and worse, and so on. Learned scientists in text books explained how parasites might be controlled though not entirely eliminated. Others explained how the Jew, Einstein, could only be an imposter upon the true Teutonic science of Kepler and Newton. During that specific period, German culture literally vomited and defecaeted in a frenzy of violence and war.
After that…nothing could be the same. Kant, Goethe, Mozart…shame! This enigma, this puzzle. This is why Lyotard is haunted by Auschwitz, why he keeps referring to it – because this is where, this is how, we have to begin to understand our own befuddled and fragmented modernity.
Dread, Nothing and Otherness
So what did Heidegger say? What is it that Levinas admires in Heidegger’s philosophy?
Well – Heidegger helped enormously with the philosophical question of being, of existence “as such”. He allowed it to appear outside and beyond (traditional)metaphysics, in an idea or state of “being there”. And at that point…all kind of possibilities suddenly got opened up. To have the Greeks for example, as they were then, but now…would be, let us say, one of the “hermeneutic” promises here.
“Dread reveals Nothing” – this is a most interesting phrase which Heidegger uses to express his key concepts. (What is Metaphysics?, in Existence and Being by M.Heidegger, trans. R.F.C.Hull and A.Crick. Vision Press. London 1949).
Leaving aside the stunning words “dread” and “nothing”: What, exactly, is being revealed here? Something is “revealing” something else, which is getting called…nothing!
Well, the essence of nothing, according to Heidegger, is nihilation. This is carefully distinguished from anihilation because it does not mean negativising or crossing out something which is already there or was once there. No, nihilation “cannot be reckoned in terms of anihilation or negation.” (p.369.ibid.). It is not in any way a something-which-was which is now-no-longer. It is an active concept which purportedly brings us face-to-face with being.
This Nothing of Heideggers thereby becomes a very important “something”. It brings with it something which Heidegger calls “dasein”, or “being there”, which in turn he articulates as a recurrent dread in fact, a sense of terror in the face of complete otherness. Nothing for Heidegger is, as he says, a “veil of being”.
Now Levinas` philosophy is based upon this notion of otherness, but is very different from Heidegger. Whilst Heidegger left “dasein” in neutral as it were…waiting, listening, listening ever so attentively but ever so passively, in a “clearing” – Levinas makes of it an obligatory being. Not just a “being there” but a “being there for others”. Taking responsibility, being responsible. That is what Levinas is about. Still, he does not ditch the Heideggerian baggage at all but rather puts it to use in the development of concepts.
Further Explanation
With dasein there is no reference. Psychologically speaking, there is in fact “disturbance”…precisely because there is no reference. Where there is no “thing”, there is no body, no reference. No application of “this” upon “that”. No subject/object frame. One encounters an aporia, a doubtfulness…
So this may well bring…”disturbance”, “dread”. But maybe not necessarily.
There is…emptiness. There is a mood, a silence. With no “thing”, somehow there is already, and contradictorily, at least “one”. And then of course there has to be “another”. So now we have “one” and “another”…and yet with nothing there is neither!
Certainly there are maddening riddles here, though one may be tempted to say it all amounts to nothing. Maybe sweet nothing, which is also maybe the message of Heidegger’s (albeit unsurpassably brilliant) philosophising.
“But when does language speak itself as language? Curiously enough, when we cannot find the right word for something that concerns us, carries us away, oppresses or encourages us. Then we leave unspoken what we have in mind and, without rightly giving it thought, undergo moments in which language itself has distantly and fleetingly touched us with its essential being.” (p.59. On the Way to Language. M.Heidegger.Trans.Peter D.Hertz. Harper and Row 1971. Originally published in 1959, Verlag Gunther Neske, Pfullingen, under the title, Unterwegs zur Sprache)
In an analysis of a poem, “The Word” by Stefan George, Heidegger (ibid.) makes a great deal of the phrase: “Where word breaks off no thing can be.” Nothing is where “word breaks off”, where we can’t find words, where we struggle to find words…
Clearly this is where creativity has to make entrance.
Compare what Heidegger says about language here, how the enigma of nothing presses against its creativity, and what Levinas says, for example, about an enigma as such:
“What is essential here is the way a meaning that is beyond meaning is inserted in the meaning that remains in an order, the way it advances while retreating.” (Collected Philosophical Papers, p.66)
Obligation in Essence
Being, in Levinas, is "being responsible", which is to say, "being responsible for others". This is not merely a moral maxim, a matter of choice (which of course is what Kant didn't want either), but essentially and inescapably.
To be, to exist, to be "I am..", uniquely - this is, right there and then, "being responsible", "being obliged", obligatio in essentia.
Thus priviledged, before any typical selfishness inexorably sets in, this ego, this "I am", has to be..."for others".
Certainly the ego is responsible to no-one but itself, but the measure of that, precisely, is how far that responsibility is, or has been, and in what way...for others.
This would be the position Levinas proves philosophically.
Levinas, Nietzsche and the "After-Hegel"
“Hegel is obviously considerable.” confesses Levinas (The Old and The New, in Time and the Other, trans.R.A.Cohen,Duquesne U.P.,Pittsburgh 1987,p.127). He continues as follows: “But one can put into question the novelty of the modern as it is lived, even if it is difficult to contest the accuracy of the image Hegel gives to human consciousness in its ascent to the zenith. One can ask if the concept of novelty that the Hegelian analysis promotes answers definitively to the human desire for the new and for renewal. This desire, which goes right to the excessiveness of the dream of eternal youth, is nonetheless not mad, but belongs to those several exigencies wherein man infinitely surpasses man. One can ask if the human coincides with knowledge. One can call late nineteenth century philosophies to witness; one thinks of Nietzsche, and of Bergson, who is so unjustly forgotten today. One stresses certain moments of Heideggerian thought. One must refer to all the actual experience of our twentieth century, which is proof of an unbalanced world, to the world wars, to the tolitarianisms of left and right, to the holocaust, prototype of all genocides – to all this barbarism of the human or inhuman face. There is a crisis of human freedom,power and knowledge, a reversal of technological power into enslavement. There are all the unremitting and already well known critiques of the modern novelties, which are all the more serious as they are not followed up with any exhaltation of past values. No return to the old could reasonably be preached. Has not the world completed by knowledge, where in the final account novelty only stands out as a menace, grown old in this heavy fin-de-siecle consciousness?”(ibid.)
Alors!
And in Nietzsche I find the following rather interesting remarks on Hegel:
“The German, who possesses the secret of knowing how to be tedious in spite of wit, knowledge and feeling, and who has habituated himself to consider tediousness as moral, is in dread in the presence of French esprit lest it should tear away the eyes of morality – but a dread mingled with ‘fascination’, like that experienced by a little bird in the presence of the rattlesnake.” He continues directly with the following characterisation of Hegel: “Among all the celebrated Germans none possessed more esprit than Hegel, but he also had that great German dread of it which brought about his peculiar and defective style. For the nature of this style resembles a kernel, which is wrapped up so many times in an outer covering that it can scarcely peep through, now and then glancing forth bashfully and inquisitively…This kernel, however, is a witty though often impertinent joke on intellectual subjects, a subtle and daring combination of words; such as is necessary in a society of thinkers as gilding for a scientific pill – but enveloped as it is in an almost impenetrable cover, it exhibits itself as the most abtruse science and likewise as the worst possible moral tediousness. Here the Germans had a permissible form of esprit and they revelled in it with such boundless delight that even Schopenhauer could not understand it and during the whole of his life thundered against this spectacle that the Germans had offered him, but could never explain it.” (F.Nietzsche:The Dawn of Day, tr. J.M.Kennedy, published by T.N.Foulis, Edinburgh and London 1911,p.192.)
It is interesting, in passing, that a certain K.Marx used precisely this very metaphor; that celebrated “rational kernel within its mystical shell” to describle Hegel’s thinking upon “intellectual subjects”. But for Nietzsche this rational kernel becomes an impertinent joke! Now this is hardly the case. And which philosopher is the one par excellence who would make impertinent jokes upon the highest and loftiest, indeed especially the highest and loftiest, “intellectual subjects”, in every line, paragraph, page, essay and book that he ever wrote? Step forward Kaiser Nietzsche.
c:tsm "out of the blue"