30 July 2015

Sperrzone Bewußtsein

"Die oft genannte 'weltweite Wirkung' meines Denkens bleibt eine rätselhafte Illusion. Was hält den Menschen in der Sperrzone des 'Bewußtseins' gefangen? Warum wird der Rückgang ins Dasein nicht vollzogen und nicht gewährt?

"The oft-mentioned 'worldwide impact' of my thinking remains a perplexing illusion. What holds humankind captive to the closed-off zone of 'consciousness'? Why is the path back into Dasein not taken and not granted?"

Auszüge zur Phänomenologie aus dem Manuskript 'Vermächtnis der Seinsfrage' (1973-75) II 121 Jahresgabe der Martin Heidegger Gesellschaft 2011/12

Heidegger spricht hier kurz vor seinem Tod vom Bewußtsein als einer "Sperrzone". Demnach ist das Bewußtsein ein Innenbereich, der durch einen Gürtel (Gr. zw/nh) von der Außenwelt abgeschnitten ist. Sein Weltruhm als Philosoph ist schon längst etabliert, die Sekundärliteratur wird bereits auf Hochtouren produziert, und zwar in vielen Sprachen weltweit. Dennoch spricht der alte Heidegger von einer "Illusion".

Und er stellt die Frage:

Warum wird der Rückgang ins Dasein nicht vollzogen und nicht gewährt?

"Rückgang" heißt hier, daß nichts Neues proklamiert wird, sondern daß das Dasein der ursprünglichere Ort von dem ist, was in der Neuzeit -- d.h. in ihrem vorherrschendem hermeneutischen Als, wodurch das Weltverständnis entworfen wird -- zum inneren Bewußtsein geworden ist.

Trotz -- oder vielmehr wegen -- aller Heidegger-Forschung bleibt das heutige Denken in dieser Sperrzone eingesperrt. Oder der Ausbruch bleibt auf halbem Weg stecken.
Setzt die Heidegger-Forschung in aller Welt nicht urspünglich genug an?
Dafür gibt es starke Hinweise.
So wird das Sein etwa von Tom Sheehan als dasjenige verstanden, das ermöglicht, daß Seiendes für uns als bedeutungsvoll erscheint. Auf diese Weise wird die Seinsfrage auf die Frage nach dem hermeneutischen Als eines Zeitalters reduziert. Das Da, die Lichtung, wird dann lediglich zum 'neutralen', wenn auch offenen Ort des Sichzeigens des als so-oder-so bedeutungsvollen Seienden, d.h. das Sein auf das Seiende zugedacht, und so lediglich noch einmal metaphysisch -- wenn auch nicht bewußtseinsmetaphysisch -- verstanden. D.h. für Sheehan ist die Lichtung die "clearing-for-meaning" von Seiendem. Zudem verwechselt Sheehan -- sowie Heidegger selbst -- das hermeneutische Als verstanden als um-fassender, orientierender ontologischer Kompaß eines Zeitalters mit der gesellschaftlichen, politischen, ökonomischen Erklärung des Wandels dieses Zeitalters.

Das Da des Daseins aber ist die Zeitlichtung selbst, d.h. das Da und die Zeit sind dasselbe.
(Bezeichnenderweise denkt Heidegger die Zeitlichtung als solche nirgendwo, sondern ersetzt fatalerweise die Zeit durch die Lichtung nun als =a)lh/qeia gedacht.)
Ein älterer Name für das Da ist der Geist, .nou=j
Das Da, der Geist, ist nicht in einem inneren Bewußtseinsbereich eingesperrt, sondern ist selbig mit der offenen, dreidimensionalen, ek-statischen Zeitlichtung selbst. Erst durch die Ausgesetztheit des Menschseins in der ek-statischen Zeitlichtung -- die vorräumlich und daher auch vorweltlich ist -- kann das Menschsein als Ek-sistenz verstanden werden..

Daß der Sinn des Seins die Zeit selbst ist, wird übersehen oder vielmehr beiseite geschoben, und zwar zugunsten eines 'verständlicheren' Zugangs zur Seinsfrage.
Damit kann aber die heutige Vorherrschaft des analytisch-wissenschaftlichen Denkens auf der Grundlage seiner Bewußtseinsmetaphysik weder in Frage gestellt noch verwunden werden.

Die Antwort auf Heideggers Warum-Frage oben, die er selber nicht klar gesehen hat, lautet: der Wille zur Macht über jedwede Art von Bewegung, der unbedingt des modernen hermeneutischen Seinsentwurfs des ein- oder mehrbahnigen Ursache-Wirkungs-Verhältnisses und damit einhergehend der eindimensionalen, mathematisierten, linearen Zeit bedarf, um die Kontrolle zu behalten. Was ist der Geist bzw. Intellekt denn anders als die scharfe, feine Beobachtung -- nicht die beherrschende Kontrolle -- des oft sehr komplizierten, gekreuzten Spiels der An- und Abwesung, Ent- und Verbergung von all dem, was vorkommt -- eben in der Zeitlichtung? Die lineare Zeit der Wissenschaft hingegen ist eine Zwangsjacke der Wirkkausalität, die unbedingt die Vorausberechenbarkeit aller Bewegung ermöglichen sollte -- gleichgültig dagegen, daß sie oft genug scheitert.

Diesem unbedingten, besessenen Willen zur Macht entspricht eine Gelehrtenforschung, die akademisch abgerichtet ist, und es deshalb nicht wagt, begrifflich die Phänomene selbst zu denken über Heidegger hinaus (was u.a. eine Auseinandersetzung mit der mathematisierten Zeit sowie mit der wie die Pest vermiedenen Frage nach dem Wersein erforderte), und sich stattdessen damit bequemt, mit tadellosem Gelehrtenfleiß Bücher und Aufsätze lediglich über Heidegger sowie andere Philosophen zu verfassen. Die Philosophengelehrten meiden die Frage nach der Zeit, genauso wie die Wissenschaflter es tun. Wagten sie es, die Sperrzone des Bewußtseins ernsthaft denkerisch zu verlassen, fänden sie sich aus der Akademie ausgesperrt -- d.h. nicht mehr ernst genommen. Lieber hält man sich weiterhin in der komfortablen Sicherheitszone des Gelehrtentums auf.

Zur vertiefenden Lektüre: A Question of Time.

25 July 2015

A Pilgrim's Progress in Quantum Action

"Eldred brings ideas that are having a profound influence on our culture, but which are poorly understood, into both imaginative and cognitive grasp by means of a road trip in a parallel world with many resemblances to our own. Two friends are followed in their search for understanding, using methods of travel that are aspects of the phenomenon and examples of the ideas that intrigue them. Along the road they meet highly original and entertaining characters who are easily recognised as representing various modern theoretical positions taken on the nature of reality and our responsibility in interpreting, even in obstructing and deforming it. A story also of the hidden roles fear, ambition, and will for power play in ostensively pure intellectual pursuits. All told with a sparkling sense of humour and conceptual clarity." — J. S. Bragdon, Amsterdam, Amazon customer review 13 July 2015 of The Land of Matta.

"Eldred strikes a wonderful, absurdist tone that harkens back to an earlier age of children's fantasy... buoyant cartoonishness... A fantastical puzzle that may be too difficult to solve." — Kirkus Reviews23 July 2015.

21 July 2015

Modern scholasticism

Those philosophers long ago in the seventeenth century laying down the ontological cast for the modern age were fighting especially against one variety or other of medieval scholasticism. This long battle ended with the victory of the modern scientific mind-set with its absolute, mathematizing, scientific method. Today it's a very different fight that is invisible to most, perhaps to all, but especially to the agents of the Geistesgestell, all of whom are players in the modern age's rigged mind-game in one of its bewildering, inexhaustible variants.

The problem is that the scholars do not think in concepts, nor do they work with them in their writings. Instead, they argue logically, citing and alluding to various philosophers and to other scholars. In this way they aim to make progress in whatever discourse is being cultivated. A concept, however, requires much more. Thinking conceptually does not amount merely to defining your terms precisely and arguing consistently in line with your definitions.

A concept here is theoretical, that is, theoretical in the original sense of Greek _theoria_, whose Latin translation is speculatio. Today's theory is not up to the mark of _theoria_, and speculation has become a pejorative term describing thoughts that have not been subject to testing by scientific method and are therefore unscientific. _Theoria_ is the investigation of beings qua beings, an ontological enterprise. Hence Hegel's philosophy, for instance, is speculative in this sense, and Hegel criticizes English and Scottish philosophy for lacking speculation. To the present day, English and Scottish philosophy, which in the meantime can be called analytic-positivist philosophy, lacks the ontological dimension of speculation.

All the greats in philosophy from Plato and Aristotle through to Kant, Hegel and Heidegger are speculative, ontological, conceptual thinkers. Their concepts grapple in a connected way with grasping the phenomena in their being, i.e. their mode of presencing, in which they show themselves hermeneutically AS such-and-such. The interconnections among the concepts have to be respected and mastered to understand what these thinkers are saying, always bearing in mind that it is a matter of speculative concepts, i.e. concepts born out of what Heidegger calls the ontological difference, which Aristotle captures in his formulation _to on haei on_ "beings insofar as they are beings", i.e. beings qua beings.

The ontological difference concerns the hermeneutic cast of an age that defines how beings as a whole present themselves AS the beings they are within the time-clearing. Any historical movement in the hermeneutic cast of an age demands on the part of thinkers a recasting of ontological concepts that has to be performed rigorously, carefully. Thinkers do not 'speculatively' make up a new hermeneutic cast, but are sensitively receptive to an alternative historical cast arriving.

Modern scholasticism is not up to this task. Even and especially when it is dealing with genuine ontological concepts from one great thinker or another, it only ever talks about them and does not work with them. The phenomena philosophy scholars refer to are spoken of only ontically, not ontologically. Therefore there can be no movement and advancement in such a way of scholarly thinking, but only an endless, inconclusive back-and-forth among various argumentative 'positions' each with its own adherents. The positions are invariably labelled as one -ism or another, and the scholars move skilfully among these -isms in formulating their own position. That is their sub-game within the modern age's mind-game.

Thus the Geistesgestell's mind-game proceeds complacently among the thicket of scholarly texts without so much as a speculative glance at the simplest phenomena themselves, which only bamboozles scholars, for they have never bothered to look and contemplate. Nor have their likewise complacent teachers taught them conceptual thinking. Complacency here signifies a lack of courage a.k.a. cowardice, for you will be mercilessly punished if you genuinely risk thinking slowly through the hegemonic hermeneutic cast of the present age, thus exposing it and putting it into question. Modern philosophical scholasticism is flying blind, lacking the ontological orientation that would open an alternative hermeneutic cast of mind.

20 July 2015

Derrida the graffitist

Derrida called his philosophy grammatology, among other things, but this is a misnomer. What he practises is grammatogrammy, a writing over writing that obliterates what the original writing was pointing to -- the phenomena themselves. Hence Derrida is a graffitist working hard to oblieterate the phenenoma themselves, along with their adequate interpretation.

Read on if you dare in

A Question of Time

An alternative cast of mind


Chapter 2.8.

18 July 2015

Academia's Geistesgestell

Das Geistesgestell (the set-up mind)

A recent e-mail exchange prompted a new word to my mind in the early hours: Geistesgestell (mental set-up, mind's set-up). Today's academia, being an established institution, is itself a Geistesgestell that sets up the mind to admit only a certain range of questions across the range of disciplines, and to suppress others. In this, our current age, those questions must be suppressed by hook or by crook that put this established world into question in the deepest way. The Geistesgestell is the modern age's rigged mind-game.

Hence, for instance, physics cannot entertain openly the question of time (but only on its own dictated terms of mathematizability), and philosophical scholarly discourse must avoid the simplest, most elementary questions that open the abyss underneath all kinds of metaphysical thinking. 'Professional philosophy' (a contradictio in adjecto) skilfully circumvents it. Instead, one discourses argumentatively -- never conceptually -- around certain illustrious names such as Kant or Kierkegaard or Heidegger or whatever major or minor name is currently being taken seriously in the academy for a time, around the issues themselves. Philosophy scholars talk endlessly about philosophy without ever doing philosophy, which is rigorous and risky. This corresponds to the apparently innocuous technical distinction between primary and secondary literature, which does not capture what it means to risk being a primary source in this current age.
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Strange concepts naming the simplest phenomena are avoided like the plague, for the academy will not accept them. One accommodates oneself to accepted linguistic usage. For instance, to take the distinction between the phenomenality of 'who' and 'what' seriously and speak of 'whoness' is taboo ('whatness', by contrast, has its venerable pedigree as quidditas, essence, etc. and is allowed -- from a distance). You will be booed if you speak of whoness. If not expressly booed, then tacitly, consensually ignored. You talk about the subject and the self and selfhood without ever touching the term 'whoness', let alone its expressly developed conceptual phenomenality.  If you speak about how renowned philosopher X used the term 'whoness', this is, of course, acceptable, because you're only reporting what someone else has said, not risking any thought of your own.

I could provide more key examples from my now long philosophical life-experience, rich in failure that has been a great teacher. Academia's Geistesgestell  works with eerily Kafkaesque perfection. Only those outsiders, who are vitally interested in certain questions regarding the phenomena themselves, can see the Geistesgestell's oppressiveness without difficulty. I can speak openly and easily with them, for they have no scholarly pretensions, no skin in the academic power plays, nor have their minds been fucked over by the scientific mind-set in one of its variants, be it natural- or social-scientific.

This unique juncture in our age -- scarcely comparable with the long, excruciating (also bloody) transition out of the medieval age -- in which an alternative thinking that is no longer metaphysical has been initiated, needs those very few, very brave ones who press on with trying to see how the world could shape up (surprisingly) differently from an other elementary hermeneutic cast, starting with the simplest, most unheard-of questions (and associated concepts). These questions are invariably dismissed by the agents of the Geistesgestell as ridiculous, trivial, banal, crazy, zealous, dogmatic, fanatic, unscientific or what have you, The vocabulary of denunciation for an attempted historical recasting of mind from scratch is inexhaustible.

Mostly, however, no denunciation is needed; the agents of the Geistesgestell continue cosily with their established business, cultivating the discourse within their respective disciplines with their respective reputational power plays, asking the questions that are deemed worthy of being asked, and receiving professorships, accolades and honours and suchlike if they are successful. No one asks the obvious, elephant-in-the-room question: What are the criteria for this game of mutually estimating the who-status of the players? The question is impolite, indeed, obscene, indecent and inadmissible for serious, professional philosophy. One prefers not to speak so meanly and ungraciously in (ostensibly) merely subjective, psychological terms. It's not the done thing. One would suffer consequences in the ongoing power plays.

How, under these circumstances, against the treacly resistance of the Geistesgestell, can anyone nowadays work at the bleeding, leading edge of thinking? One crucial step would be to learn to see that the Geist -- i.e. the mind, the psyche -- is not enclosed within a subject's consciousness. To attain this insight would require modern psychology's self-abolition and its radical recasting. The Geistesgestell would and could never allow this.

Outsiders are therefore indispensable, outsiders of a special ilk who put their vital energies into learning to see what they and everyone else already see and understand, but to see and understand in an elementarily different way.





09 July 2015

OUT NOW: A Question of Time An alternative cast of mind

 OUT NOW:

A Question of Time

An alternative cast of mind


The question of time is a question of time. How long will it take for the question concerning time to become the question of our time? That neither you nor I know. Today the question is still being evaded, as if it had been settled for all time already by Aristotle. Modern science, even today's most advanced quantum physics, despite eschewing Aristotle as superseded, nevertheless remains true to his conception of linear, numeric time. It doesn't want to touch the question for fear of losing control over time as a mathematizable physical variable. But is time physical? The guiding thesis of the present collection of essays is that it is not, but neither is it a formal construct inside subjective consciousness. Therein lies the subversive adventurousness of the study, which is the philosophical companion to The Land of Matta (2015). Here's the link.

Capital and Technology: Marx and Heidegger

A 140 pp. paperback edition of my

Capital and Technology: Marx and Heidegger

  is now available. Here's the LINK.

To bring Heidegger and Marx together in all the radicalness of their respective thinking means endeavouring to see what light the genius of each of these philosophers throws on the respective blind spots of the other, in particular, with regard to the questions: What is technology? and What is capital? Heidegger goes in search of the essence of technology, articulating it finally in what he calls the Ge-Stell (set-up). The set-up is the historical hermeneutic constellation of being as which beings present themselves in the consummated technological age. From this determination of the essence of technology, Heidegger proceeded misleadingly to subsume Marx’s determination of the essence of capital under the paradigm of production. Marx, however, thinks through the essence of capital as the augmentative circulation of reified value, and value is a phenomenon that has to do first of all with exchange, not production. Value comes about through the interplay of mutual estimation on markets of all kinds. Following this line of thought leads ultimately to determining the essence of capital as that historical hermeneutic constellation of being in which beings present themselves ubiquitously as valuable to all the players in the gainful game, who are all striving for income of different basic kinds. The task then becomes to think through how these two constellations of being, the set-up and the gainful game, intermesh. Only in this way can today’s historical situation come clearly to light, thus providing those living through it with indispensable socio-ontological orientation.

Thinking of Music: An approach along a parallel path

OUT NOW!

Thinking of Music

An approach along a parallel path

  is available in a 130 pp paperback. Here's the LINK.

Today's composers are preoccupied first and foremost with exploring the possibilities of producing new and hitherto unheard-of kinds of different-sounding music. In particular, they employ advanced, mainly electronic, technologies, or invent new musical instruments that break the mould of traditional music-making, thus introducing new sounds to music. On this front there are exciting, creative developments for those willing to open their ears. These contemporary composers also often take a piece of literature, an art work, a landscape or an historical event for extraneous orientation. The traditional understanding of music, especially of Western music, based as it is on harmony and wedded to aesthetic theory, has long since been burst. The beginning of the twentieth century heralded already a break-out into the realm of sounds beyond those well-defined, pure, rational tones produced by specially designed instruments. The advent of electricity and electronics exploded conceptions of music tied to venerated traditions, particularly in European music. Do these new kinds of music come about simply because of advances in technology that composers and musicians licentiously and creatively appropriate for their own music-making purposes? Or does their thinking need to dig deeper philosophically to gain another orientation and attunement?

There is a dearth of philosophical thinking on music nowadays, which invariably remains dedicated either to aesthetic theory or social critique, or to a blend of both. The present study offers an alternative approach to thinking on music along a  path that leads from... via... to music and is parallel to the way from... via... to language.
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