Date: Sun, 1 Apr 2001 16:27:39 -0500 (EDT)
Subject: COMENTARY PART 2


PART 2

If  “it is very difficult to see the problem of the phenomenology of the
body”, and the body’s death does not exactly correspond to Da-sein’s death
as exactly the same ontic-ontological event, then we definitely do have a
problem. Now, the objection will be raised, that in Da-sein’s knowledge
ontological understanding of its own death is indefinite because Da-sein
cannot actually experience its own death, and that this very indefiniteness
leads us to the fact that the concern about our own death which my Da-sein
never can actually know yet is firmly convinced will happen is both a
product of reflective imagination and necessary choice so that in
authenticity Da-sein chooses to freely run ahead toward death. This is
relevant to the last quotation from Heidegger in PART 1 which leaves us
hanging as if he said we were God. But the whole issue here, as in Kant and
the Problem of Metaphysics, is finitude, incompleteness: It is the very
finitude and incompleteness of Da-sein that is Da-sein’s fundamental ground
and is the very contingency that I exist. The main problem with the concept
of God, that was evident with the notice of Ockham and the free but “always
already” completed will of God in PART 1, is that any definition of God
makes it an inoperable concept, an aporia of definition and words but not of
existence which is per se, by definition and logical necessity, incomplete.
If truth is discovery, then you cannot know unless you do not know.

ALL of Sartre’s ‘psychology’ rest upon the uncompleatable passion (“Man is a
useless passion”, B&N, Phil. Lib pg. 615,Wash.Sq. pg. 784, very last
sentence of Part 4, Chap. 2, III) of Da-sein’s or the “For-itself’s” desire
to be a self-cause:

Man makes himself man in order to be God, and selfness considered from this
point of view can appear to be an egoism; but precisely because there is no
common measure between human reality and the self-cause which it wants to
be, one could just as well say that man loses himself in order that the self
cause may exist. We will consider then that all human existence is a
passion, the famous self-interest being only one way freely chosen among
others to realize this passion. (B&N, Phil. Lib. pg. 626, Wash. Sq. 796)

To be man means to reach toward being God. Or if you prefer, man
fundamentally is the desire to be God.  It may be asked, if man on coming
into the world is borne toward God as toward his limit, if he can choose
only to be God, what becomes of freedom? For freedom is nothing other than a
choice which creates for itself its own possibilities, but it appears here
that the initial project of being God, which “defines” man, comes close to
being the same as a human “nature” or an “essence.” The answer is that while
the meaning of desire is ultimately the project of being God, the desire is
never constituted by this meaning; on the contrary, it always represents a
particular discovery of its ends. (B&N, Phil. Lib pg. 566-567, Wash. Sq. pg.
724)

In other words, man is finite, therefore free. Heidegger concludes Kant and
the Problem of Metaphysics with a series of questions leading in the same
direction as Sartre, but does not state a conclusion.

What is the transcendental essence of truth in general? How, particularly on
the grounds of the finitude of Da-sein, are this [essence of truth] and the
nonessence of untruth, which were originally unified with man’s basic
neediness as a being who has been thrown into beings, to be compelled to
understand something like Being?  Does it make sense, and is there a
justification for grasping man on the grounds of his innermost finitude –
that he requires “Ontology,” i.e., understanding of Being – as “creative”
and consequently as “infinite,” where indeed there is nothing which even
idea of an infinite creature recoils from as radically as it does an
ontology? (GCM: Why would an “infinite creature” recoil from ontology unless
ontology smelled of mortality?)  At the same time, however, is it
permissible to develop the finitude in Dasein only as a problem, without a
“presupposed” infinite? (GCM: This refers to Kant’s primary project in the
Critique of Pure Reason to clearly separate the previously presupposed
divine point of view of philosophers like Liebnitz, Wolf, and Baumgarten
from the radically finite human project of David Hume.) What in general is
the nature of this “presupposing” in Dasein? What does the infinite which is
so “composed” mean? (trans. Richard Taft, Indiana University Press, 4th
edition pg. 168, 5th edition pg. 172, 1990, 1997)

This is perfectly consistent with his own method as stated in the second
volume of his Nietzsche lectures, The Eternal Recurrence of the Same that
gives a fundamental clue as to their – ‘disagreement’:

The question “What is being?” . . .The more this question becomes the
guiding question, and the longer it remains such, the less the question
itself becomes an object of inquiry. Every treatment of the guiding question
is and remains preoccupied with the answer, preoccupied with finding the
answer . . . Yet no matter how varied the configurations have been, they
remain unified by the framework of the sole guiding question; once it is
posed, the question seems to pose itself automatically – and hence to recede
as a question. The question is not unfolded along the lines of its own
articulation . . . Because the guiding question is what is properly
metaphysical in metaphysics, we call the stance that derives from the
undeveloped guiding question the fundamental metaphysical position (Krell: 
literally “the metaphysical ground question”).  The concept fundamental
metaphysical position may be grasped in prepositional form as follows: The
fundamental metaphysical position expresses the way in which the one who
poses the guiding question remains enmeshed in the structures of that
question, which is not explicitly unfolded; thus enmeshed, the questioner
comes to stand within being as a whole, adopting a stance toward it, and in
that way helping to determine the location of humanity as such in the whole
of beings.  All the same, the concept of a fundamental metaphysical position
is not yet clear . . The historically developed fundamental positions
themselves are necessarily . . . opaque and impenetrable . . . We invariably
represent the fundamental metaphysical positions . . . Leibnitz, Kant, and
Hegel . . .  extrinsically, according to the various doctrines and
propositions . . .  We adopt sundry “aspects” which apparently just happen
to be there . . . ignorant of the fact that there can be such aspects only
because a fundamental metaphysical position has been adopted here . . . Such
unfolding of the guiding question is not solely and not even primarily
motivated by the desire to achieve a better conception of the fundamental
metaphysical position as such . . . To treat this question as stated and
posed is simply to look for an answer. To develop the question as it is
formulated, however, is to pose the question more essentially: in asking the
question one enters explicitly into those relationships that become visible
when one assimilates virtually everything that comes to pass in the very
asking of the question. When we treat the guiding question we are transposed
forthwith to a search for an answer and everything that has to be done on
behalf of that search. Developing the guiding question is something
essentially different – it is a more original form of inquiry, one which
does not crave an answer . . . An answer is no more than the final step of
the very asking, and an answer that bids adieu to the inquiry annihilates
itself as an answer. It can ground nothing like knowledge . . . Here the
development assumes such proportions that it transforms the very question,
bringing to light the guiding question as such in its utter lack of
originality. For that reason we call the question “What is being?” the
guiding question, in contrast to the more original question which sustains
and directs the guiding question. The more original question we call the
grounding question . . . To question questioning strikes common sense as
rather unwholesome, extravagant, perhaps even nonsensical. If it is a matter
of wanting to get to the beings themselves – and in the guiding question
this is surely the case – then the inquiry into inquiry seems an aberration.
In the end, such an attitude, asking about asking, seems nothing short of
noxious or self-lacerating; we might call it “egocentric” and “nihilistic”
and all the other nasty names we so easily come by . . . What is being? What
is meant is being as such, neither some particular being nor a group of
beings nor even all of them taken together, but something essentially more:
what is meant is the whole, being taken as a whole from the outset, being
taken as such unity. Outside of this one, this being, there is no other,
unless it be the nothing. Yet the nothing is not some kind of being which is
merely other . . . Let us then resolve not to forget in anything that
follows what it was that rose to meet us in the first tentative step in the
question concerning being, namely, the incontrovertible happenstance that we
stumbled across the nothing . . . In the field of the question, in the very
staking out of the field, the goal of the question is itself already
established – what we are asking for in the matter interrogated, to wit, the
Being of beings. Just as we collided against the nothing when we undertook
to set the field of the question in relief, so here the staking out of the
field and the establishment of the goal that is at stake condition one
another reciprocally. And if we may say that the nothing looms at the border
of this question, then, in accordance with the reciprocity of the field and
the goal of the question, we may experience the proximity of the nothing
also in the goal, that is, in the Being of beings; provided, of course, that
we are actually inquiring, that our aim is true, that we are on target . . .
Thus the most durable and unfailing touchstone of genuineness and
forcefulness of thought in a philosopher is the question as to whether or
not he or she experience in a direct and fundamental manner the nearness of
the nothing in the Being of beings. Whoever fails to experience it remains
forever outside the realm of philosophy, without hope of entry. (trans.
David Farrell Krell, Harper Collins, 1984, pp. 190-195)

THIS IS IMPORTANT!!! I do not think you will find anywhere else in Heidegger
such a summation in a nutshell of his WHOLE philosophy, from beginning to
end, and even then, without my ‘creative’ editing you may or have missed it
as indeed I did when I first read it. Go and read the pages yourself, which
you should do anyway since I have an irresistible urge on this April Fools
Day to play a trick on everyone, and see if my version gives you the message
much more clearly and directly. Do you remember how the first chapter of the
introduction of Being and Time is entitled? “The Necessity, Structure, and
Priority of the Question of Being.” This little quotation contains the whole
of Being and Time in it. Also, it clarifies and sharpens the lectures/essays
“What is Metaphysics,” “Introduction to ‘What is Metaphysics’”, and “On the
Question of Being”, all key texts from Wegmarken/Pathmarks. Here is
explained how the question is to be asked and why it is so important. For
one thing, the grounding question can only be asked by a finite being. 
“Being” that Heidegger is forever talking about is in the question, not in
any answer! It relates directly to the question and nature of human
finitude, and why finitude is more valuable and important than ‘infinitude’!
The simple, overwhelmingly obvious incompleteness of human being is all that
it is all about. Also, you can find in that the ground of the fundamental
disagreement between Husserl and Heidegger. Also, note the importance of
experience in what Heidegger says: Not thought, experience. What Heidegger
says about the artificial complication and obscuration of the great
metaphysicians (This is NOT a category that Heidegger derides! In Kant and
the Problem of Metaphysics, he states, “The Metaphysics of Da-sein is not
just metaphysics about Da-sein, but is the metaphysics which occurs
necessarily as Dasein. But for that reason it can never become metaphysics
‘about’ Dasein, as for example zoology is about animals” Taft, 4th ed. pp.
157-158) is reflected in The History of Sexuality, volume 1, An Introduction
by Michel Foucault, trans. Robert Hurley, Pantheon, 1978, pp. 55-57:

This much is undeniable: the learned discourse on sex that was pronounced in
the nineteenth century was imbued with age-old delusions, but also with
systematic blindnesses: a refusal to see and to understand; but further –
and this is the crucial point – a refusal concerning the very thing that was
brought to light and whose formulation was urgently solicited. For there can
be no misunderstanding that is not based on a fundamental relation to truth.
Evading the truth, barring access to it, masking it: these were so many
local tactics which, as if by superimposition and through a last minute
detour, gave a paradoxical form to a fundamental petition to know . . . The
important thing, in this affair, is not that these men shut their eyes or
stopped their ears, or that they were mistaken; it is rather that they
constructed around and apropos of sex an immense apparatus for producing
truth, even if this truth was to be masked at the last moment . . . What
needs to be situated, therefore, is not the threshold of a new rationality .
. . but the progressive formation (and also the transformations) of that
interplay of “truth and sex” which was bequeathed to us by the nineteenth
century, and which we may have modified, but, lacking evidence to the
contrary, have not rid ourselves of. Misunderstandings, avoidances, and
evasions were only possible, and only had their effects, against the
background of this strange endeavor: to tell the truth of sex.

Now, substitute the word “Being” for “sex”, and the obvious reaction would
be, “That is the most innocuous, utterly inane, and totally stupid,
ridiculously illiterate and ignorant thing I have ever heard of!!!!!. This
is good and true, and quite on the point. It is the most obvious thing in
the world, the most obvious of all things, that human being is limited in
every way simply because it has a body. Man is finite. “What’s the big
goddamn deal?” Man is mortal: Socrates is a man: Socrates is mortal.
Socrates died. Here is the fundamental root of all insanity, the
contradiction in human behaviour that the mad – and goddamn well mad for
good reason – pick up on as just as obvious to the normal, sane man sees but
does not, let us say, follow out the immediate and blatant implications.
Saint Paul at least knew exactly what the problem was, and knew exactly the
only way to ‘solve’ it:

Else what shall they do which are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise
not at all? Why are they then baptized for the dead? And why stand we in
jeopardy every hour? I protest by your rejoicing which I have in Christ
Jesus our Lord, I die daily. If after the manner of men I have fought with
beasts at Ephesus, what advantageth it me, if the dead rise not? Let us eat
and drink; for tomorrow we die.    I Corinthians, 15: 29-32

Paul could say, like Luther did say, believe in the risen Christ or you
believe in nothing, that there is no alternative. So I eat and drink and
make merry.

Not only did [the society that emerged in the nineteenth century] speak of
sex and compel everyone to do so; it also set out to formulate the uniform
truth of sex. As if it suspected sex of harboring a fundamental secret. As
if it needed this production of truth. As if it was essential that sex be
inscribed not only in an economy of pleasure but in an ordered system of
knowledge. Thus sex gradually became an object of great suspicion; the
general and disquieting meaning that pervades our conduct and our existence,
in spite of ourselves; the point of weakness where evil portents reach
through to us; the fragment of darkness that we each carry within us; a
general signification, a universal secret, an omnipresent cause, a fear that
never ends. And so, in this “question” of sex (in both senses: as
interrogation and problematization, and as the need for confession and
integration into a field of rationality), two processes emerge, the one
always conditioning the other: we demand that sex speak the truth (but,
since it is the secret and is oblivious to its own nature, we reserve for
ourselves the function of telling the truth of its truth, revealed and
deciphered at last), and we demand that it tell us our truth, or rather, the
deeply buried truth of that truth about ourselves which we think we possess
in our immediate consciousness. We tell it its truth by deciphering what it
tells us about that truth; it tells us our own by delivering up that part of
it that escaped us. From this interplay there has evolved, over several
centuries, a knowledge of the subject; a knowledge not so much of his form,
but of that which divides him, determines him perhaps, but above all causes
him to be ignorant of himself. (Ibid., pp69-70)

The first and main point that should come to our attention, when
‘interchanging’ “Being” for “sex” if in fact we are not simply exchanging
one synonym for another attached to the same meaning: the body - is the
ridiculous simplicity of the actual subject interrogated. Nothing is simpler
than sex itself. Just look to the animals. Do you see any psychic damage
done if your dog commits incest? And as to life, they just live it. They
don’t need philosophy just as Heidegger says a normal person doesn’t need
ontology: “The question of existence is an ontic “affair” of Da-sein. For
this the theoretical transparency of the ontological structure of existence
is not necessary” (S 10-11/M&R 13/SuZ 12). All they do and need is to live.

Ivan Karamazov puts the matter with blunt simplicity: “If God does not
exist, then everything is permitted,” and then everything one constructs
metaphysical systems for goes down the toilet. In the face of death, there
is no point to Marxism or Fascism because the need for human co-operation is
fundamentally undermined, and the worst those systems can do to you is kill
you – and you are going to die anyway. The only way to truly threaten a
person fundamentally is with eternal punishment. Otherwise, if they are up
to accepting the consequences of their actions, anything goes, no matter how
many fantastic systems of morality are invented by philosophers that have
nothing to back up their strictures if death is not a threat. However, pain
is, and stays. A philosopher can construct a morality based on that. Do you
think it would be pretty? Would you like to do it? Would it make you feel
proud?

But death is not a poem, nor a merely cognitive problem, though it certainly
is that. The convincingness of Da-sein’s authentic death comes precisely
from the experience of the contingency of one’s own body. You cannot know
the death of your body just as Da-sein cannot experience its own death. But
you do experience the contingency and fragility of the body, that the
viability of parts of it is experienced as put into question through injury,
or merely the threat of injury, and pain and sickness which one can actually
experience their threat to the existence of the whole body through the
diminishing ability to act as one normally does. Old age itself becomes a
kind of ‘sickness’ defining the growing death in the body everyday. To
bastardize Paul, “I die daily.” Death gains its whole importance from the
fact that it is bodily death. The sick and injured body dominates,
overwhelms, the fundamental ontology of Da-sein. This is clearly
demonstrated by Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking
of the World (Oxford, 1985). Torture is the most thoroughly studied
dialectical development of the full process and reality of pain. All other
kinds of pain that are essentially objects of a medical gaze are in that
very context events to be arrested and reversed, and only through a failure
to arrest does pain begin to show its full potential. But this reality is
deliberately ignored because it is counter to the medical treatment and
indicates more and more the doctor’s failure to arrest and reverse the
problem, so that they are not observing phenomenologically the reality that
is developing in front of them. However, even in the medical context, there
are clues as to pain’s real nature. Scarry quotes the Civil War surgeon S.
W. Mitchell:

. . . After lancet wounds, the most terrible pains and local spasms
resulted. When these had lasted for days or weeks, the whole surface became
hyperaesthetic, and the senses grew to be only avenues for fresh and
increasing tortures, until every vibration, every change of light, and even
. . . the effort to read brought on new agony. (pg. 55)

Scarry notes “the failure of many surgical attempts to remove pain pathways”
because “the body quickly, effortlessly and endlessly” recreates them
(Ibid.). Scientists want to discover a specific pain center in the brain
that would vastly simplify the whole question and nature of pain, but the
very nature of the brain as an organ and not a mechanical component does as
much for pain as it many times does for lost bodily functions due to brain
damage. Scarry quotes Ronald Melzack, “a leading theoretician on the
physiology of pain”, from his book The Puzzle of Pain (New York: Basic
Books, 1973):

It is traditionally assumed that pain sensation and response are subserved
by a “pain center” in the brain. The concept of a pain center, however, is
totally inadequate to account for the complexity of pain. Indeed, the
concept is pure fiction, unless virtually the whole brain is considered to
be the pain center, because the thalamus, hyperthalamus, brainstem,
reticular formation, limbic system, parietal cortex, and frontal cortex are
all implicated in pain perception. Other brain areas are obviously involved
in the emotional and motor features of pain. (Ibid; Melzack 93)

Pain then is a creation of the whole brain AND the whole body. But in
torture where pain is taken through its whole course of development, Scarry
says:

It eventually occupies the entire body and spills out into the realm beyond
the body, takes over all that is inside and outside, makes the two obscenely
indistinguishable, and systematically destroys anything like language or
world extension that is alien to itself and threatening to its claims.
Terrifying for its narrowness, it nevertheless exhausts and displaces all
else until it seems to become the single broad and omnipresent fact of
existence. (Ibid.)

These ‘extravagant’ claims for pain come toward the end of a deliberately
designed course of action, designed to specifically accomplish what Scarry
states when torture is inflicted not simply to elicit information, which,
when accomplished, should end the torture, but is used to disintegrate the
personality of the victim altogether. Actually, the completed process of
torture does much more than that.

The fundamental premise that is brought to this conclusion Scarry states is;

When one speaks about “one’s own physical pain” and about “another person’s
physical pain,” one might almost appear to be speaking about two wholly
distinct orders of events . . . For the person in pain, so incontestably and
unnegotiably present is it that “having pain” may come to be thought of as
the most vibrant example of what it is to “have certainty,” while for the
other person it is so elusive that “hearing about pain” may exist as the
primary model of what it is “to have doubt.” Thus pain comes unsharably into
our midst as at once that which cannot be denied and that which cannot be
confirmed.  Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its
unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to
language . . . Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively
destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to
language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is
learned . . . The utter rigidity of pain itself  - its resistance to
language is not simply one of its incidental or accidental attributes but is
essential to what it is . . . If one were to move through all the emotional,
perceptual, and somatic states that take an object – hatred for, seeing of,
being hungry for -  the list would become a very long one and, though it
would alternate between states we are thankful for and those we dislike, it
would be throughout its entirety a consistent affirmation of the human
being’s capacity to move out beyond the boundaries of his or her own body
into the external, sharable world. This list and its implicit affirmation
would, however, be suddenly interrupted when, moving through the human
interior, one at last reached physical pain, for physical pain – unlike any
other state of consciousness – has no referential content. It is not of or
for anything. It is precisely because it takes no object that it, more than
any other phenomenon, resists objectification in language. (pp. 4-5)

Pain destroys the sharable world necessary to morality, and turns morality
merely into co-operation so one will not be hurt. A truly noble and elevated
ethical system.


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