Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001 14:00:03 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: COMMENTARY: HEIDEGGER, THE BODY, AND THE FRENCH  PART 3


PART 3:
ADDENTUM to PART 2:

I forgot to mention that my long quote from Heidegger also explicated the
fundamental meaning of “formal indication.”



That pain does not have “referential content” is demonstrated by the way
pain is described. Scarry says few direct descriptions can be used, whereas
the comparative “as if” structure of attempted description, i.e., “It feels
like a hammer blow” is almost universal. In Heidegger, this distinction is
much more crucial because the “as” is the experiential confirmation of the
logical identifier “is.”



The simple propositional statement, however, is a construction we say is
true or false as the case may be. A statement is true when it agrees with
that about which it asserts something; that is, if through the asserted
agreement it informs us about what a matter is and how it is. But informing
us about something means making something open or manifest. The statement is
true because it contains a manifestness of the matter itself. The structure
of the statement that makes manifest bears this ‘as’ within itself . . . The
‘as’ belongs to this manifestness and together with the latter finds its
common home in that construction which we have called the simple statement –
‘a is b’. Thus if we now pursue the structure of this construction called
the ‘statement’, we shall obtain in a single stroke a proper clarification
concerning the ‘as’ and its connection with manifestness as thus  also
concerning this manifestness and therefore the essence of world as
well.(Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude,
Solitude, trans. McNeill & Walker, Indiana University Press, 1995, pg. 288,
Ger. 418)



So that:



In each case the “is” is meant differently. Of this we may easily convince
ourselves, particularly if we take this utterance of the “is” as it really
occurs, i.e., spoken in each case out of a definite situation, purpose, and
mood, and not as a mere sentence or stale example in a grammar . . . Only
because the “is’ remains intrinsically indeterminate and devoid of meaning
can it lie ready for such diverse uses, can it fufill and determine itself
“as the circumstances require” . . . A single determination runs through
them all. It directs our contemplation of “being” to a definite horizon, in
which understanding is affected. The limitation of the meaning of “being”
remains within the sphere of actuality and presence, of permanence and
duration, of abiding and occurrence . . . It is the context that counts.
(Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Mannheim, Anchor
Books, 1961, pp. 75-77,71, Fried & Polt, Yale, 93-97, 89, Ger. 68-70, 65)



Here you have the results of Conrad Gröber’s gift of Franz Brentano’s “On
the Manifold Meaning of Being According to Aristotle.” It is the
‘manifoldness’, the indeterminacy of ‘being’, its openness that makes the
copula is function, that makes identification pick out amongst many things
one thing, that then makes logic function, and that makes language function.
But the primary work of the “as” is not to identify, but to make manifest
experience. So then essentially all words are metaphors, serving like
fingers pointing at . . . and do not directly relay experience as if brought
by conveyance or vehicle. The words are simply there to point to what is
present. So you can point to many things directly and speak the identifying
word, but you cannot point to pain directly but only with something that
says “as if” – the foundation words of imagination. And yet pain is
“unnegotiably present”, “the most vibrant example of what it is to ‘have
certainty’” , and yet is “private and incommunicable.”  No wonder then that
Scarry finds in the expression of pain the beginning of artistic creation.



Scarry uses the metaphoricity of  this “language of agency,” that she also
calls “analogical verification” and “analogical substantiation,” to try to
develop a ‘positive’ theory of human creativity but, strangely enough, after
clearly showing that the dialectical procedure between torturer and tortured
completely deconstructs language, conceptual thinking, and even coherent
sensual perception, thereby leaving any meaningful self identity far behind,
she tries to delineate an aesthetics/ethics/politics/economics of
self-effacement whose ‘positive’ goal is disturbingly similar to the results
of torture. Even so, it is an interesting line of thought when you take into
consideration her own caveat:



. . . Torture and war are acts of destruction (and hence somehow the
opposite of creation), that they entail the destruction of civilization (and
are somehow the opposite of civilization), are things we have always known
and things one immediately apprehends even when viewing these things from a
distance; the only thing that could not have been anticipated from a
distance but that is forced upon us  as self-evident once we enter the
interior of these two events is that they are, in the most literal and
concrete way possible, an appropriation, an aping, and reversing of the
action of creating itself . . . The vocabulary of “creating,” “inventing,”
“making,” “imagining,” is not in the twentieth century a morally resonant
one . . . But an unspoken question begins to arise in Part One which might
be formulated in the following way: given that the deconstruction of
creation is present in the structure of one event which is widely recognized
as close to being an absolute of immorality (torture) . . . is it not
peculiar that the very thing being deconstructed – creation – does not in
its intact form have a moral claim on us that is as high as the others’ is
low, that the action of creating is not, for example, held to be bound up
with justice in the way those other events are bound up with injustice, that
it (the mental, verbal, or material process of making the world) is not held
to be centrally entailed in the elimination of pain as the unmaking of the
world is held to be entailed in pain’s infliction? The morality of creating
cannot, of course, be inferred from the immorality of uncreating, and will
instead be shown on its own terms. That we ordinarily perceive it as empty
of ethical content is, it will be argued, itself signal to us of how faulty
and fragmentary our understanding of creation is . . . It is not the
valorization of making but its accurate description that is crucial, for if
it is in fact laden with ethical consequence, then it may be that a firm
understanding of what it is will in turn enable us to recognize more quickly
what is happening not only in large-scale emergencies like torture or war
but in other long-standing delimmas, such as the inequity of material
distribution. (pp. 21-22)



The very clarity, honesty, and precision of Scarry’s argument argues against
her. To make art moral, she has to reify it, make it into an object, i.e.,
“be shown on its own terms,’ “perceive it as empty of ethical content” as if
art were an empty jam jar. If torture is an act defined not in itself but
its effect, why then is its supposed opposite “creation” turned into
something to be put on a shelf? There is no “morality of creating” because
the language of “as” must necessarily be primordial just as in “In the
beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” We create first, then we
can have morality. Creation is primary, morality is derivative.



She does not observe with the neutral bracketing of phenomenology, but
brings in assumptions about morality that she assumes are assured and
accepted by all including the torturers! A torturer could not function if
he, or at the very least the person who ordered the torture, did not think
the act in some way morally justified! I remember an incident from Nahzeda
Mandelstamn’s memoirs when she and her husband Osip were in exile in Kazan.
An agent of the NKVD (KGB) has come home thoroughly drunk after torturing
his best friend to death, and his wife has locked him out of the apartment.
He is yelling, screaming, and crying his grief at having to so kill his
friend, and all his neighbors are leaning out their windows desperately
telling him to shut up, that he’s going to get them all into trouble saying
such things out loud, and to the wife, for God’s sake, open the door and get
him inside. The point is that he felt strongly bound to do what he did
whether it was for duty or for the preservation of his own life, both moral
codes of their own. So the torturer does what he does for the sake of
morality also. Therefore appealing to a mere consensus of opinion (“which is
widely recognized as close to being an absolute of immorality”) hardly
clarifies or defines anything whatsoever. The NKVD agent is protecting his
social order, his political beliefs, and the security of the Soviet state.
He knows exactly what is right and wrong, and he is firmly on the side of
right. So where then exactly is Scarry? She wants to cure the “long standing
delimma” of “the inequality of material distribution.” Well, guess what. The
NKVD agent would whole heartedly agree with her on that point.



To say Scurry is at fault here because of her presuppositions would be
entirely fatuous on my part because not only, for the most part, do I feel
the same way she does about torture, I know I will find only one out of a
million people will feel differently. But if we are talking about knowledge
instead of consensus of feeling then presuppositions based on her good
feelings fall completely apart. But because she is thoroughly honest – and
that is THE primary phenomenological virtue – her observations brilliantly
bring out numerous fundamental truths, truths other people altogether refuse
to face. It is only though discovering what is destroyed in the process of
torture, as she plainly says, that you discover exactly what it is that, in
the process of being lost, is truly valuable. But it is not morality that is
put in question by torture. Rather, torture enforces morality. Just refer to
Torquemada, the good archbishop of Seville and Grand Inquisitor. It is the
very structure of Da-sein that is torn apart here, and it is Da-sein which
is that which is truly and fundamentally and undeniably valuable.



The use of the term Da-sein, here, is deliberately jarring because it is
meant to make one think what exactly life is, what existence is, what mind
is. To the tortured one, even the abstract, purely detached, neutral mind of
objectivity, in this situation, is passionately desired to be retained in
act by them by them as they watch relationship and understanding dribble
away into a desert. You only value it when you lose it. Otherwise, the
average person in everyday life disparages it. That too is moral consensus.
So an appeal to moral self-effacement as the basis for aesthetics, ethics,
politics, and economics (the question whether material goods can in any
rational sense be “distributed,” as if they were just lying about to be
picked up and not created by individuals from their own motivations, without
being self-destructive in the short or long run should be asked in the first
place) would, in actuality, be accomplishing the torturer’s job for him.
What the artist hardly wants is to be “laden with ethical significance.” The
artist discovers new realms, regardless of how threatening to themselves or
others, not simply repeat what they have been taught. The artist wants to
create which means to be most alive, not ‘most moral.’ What the tortured man
wants, that is, before he reaches endgame (it is said that, after a length
of time, even the torturer ceases to care about life, and will let himself
be tied to the chair and tortured to death without resisting. Did
Mandelstamn’s drunk reach that point?), is to live, and certainly not to
think about living for others at that moment!



Let us then define Scarry’s brilliant and very disturbing delineation of the
eight stages of torture. What we must keep in mind is that torture is the
refinement and clarification of exactly what pain is, their truly
fundamentally ultimate result, then think upon what values are involved.



Torture . . . is . . . a demonstration and magnification of the felt
experience of pain. In the very processes it uses to produce pain within the
body of the prisoner, it bestows visibility on the structure and enormity of
what is private and incommunicable, contained within the boundaries of the
sufferer’s body . . . The physical pain is so incontestably real that it
seems to confer its quality of “incontestable reality” on that power that
has brought it into being . . . Intense pain is world destroying.



Now let me make it clear I am deliberately leaving a number of important
things out of Scarry so as to concentrate on one thing. “That power” refers
to one such issue, and you need to read Scarry yourself to get the full
context. But here, I want to make it perfectly clear she is dealing in FULL
with a total ontic-ontological context, that she is making a serious and all
encompassing philosophical statement. Pain never becomes a reified object
with her as does creation. In fact it is defined substantially through the
flesh as the act of negation of coherence. When she says “Intense pain is
world destroying” she is NOT making a vague use of the word “world” but is
exactly referring to the same context as in Heidegger. But when she says,
“It bestows visibility on the structure and enormity of what is private and
incommunicable,” it is crucial for a deeper understanding of Heidegger,
because she is going into a realm far beyond language where her very ability
to talk about it still is extremely disturbing because she is ‘bestowing
visibility’ to the tortured person of ‘things’, inherent relations in
perception itself, that are, technically, beyond philosophical concepts. In
other words, for the prisoner, the fruit is being ripped open to the core,
to expose things it does not want to know, and things it thought it could
not know before by experience or abstract thought. Not only does the
torturer observe the prisoner as object, the prisoner now sees itself as
something of distance and detachment that it observes. And also keep in mind
the concept “prisoner” is not something specific and unusual, but has been a
basic concept of human existence since the Orphics and the Upanishads.
Whether you consider that ‘human being is a spirit imprisoned in the body’
valid or not as a scientific or logical statement, it still reflects a
primordial aspect of human existence – of being trapped by time and
mortality.



The first, the most essential, aspect of pain is its sheer aversiveness . .
. The very content of pain is itself negation . . . Pain is a pure physical
experience of negation, an immediate sensory rendering of “against,” of
something being against one, and of something one must be against. Even
though it occurs within oneself, it is at once identified as “not oneself,”
“not me,” as something so alien that it must right now be gotten rid of.



A second and third aspect of pain . . . are the double experience of agency
. . . It has often been observed that when a knife or a nail or pin enters
the body, one feels not the knife, nail or pin but one’s own body, one’s own
body hurting one . . . Conversely . . . there often arises a vivid sense of
external agency, a sense apparent in our elementary, everyday vocabulary for
pain: knifelike pains, stabbing, boring, searing pains . . . But inside and
outside and the two forms of agency ultimately give way to and merge with
one another: confession and exercises are a form of external as well as
internal agency since one’s own body and voice now no longer belong to
oneself . . .



The dissolution of the boundary between inside and outside gives rise to a
fourth aspect of the felt experience of physical pain, an almost obscene
conflation of private and public. It brings with it all the solitude of
absolute privacy (GCM: remember what Rene de Bakker said about Heidegger’s
comment at his t. v. interview in THE NECESSITY FOR DEBATE) with none of its
safety, all the self-exposure of the utterly public, with none of its
possibility for camaraderie or shared experience.



A fifth dimension of physical pain is its ability to destroy language, the
power of verbal objectification, a major source of our self-extension, a
vehicle though which the pain could be lifted into the world and eliminated.
Before destroying language, it first monopolizes language . . . Eventually
the pain so deepens that the coherence of complaint is displaced by the
sounds anterior to learned language. The tendency of pain not only to resist
expression but to destroy the capacity for speech is in torture reenacted in
overt, exaggerated form.



A sixth element of physical pain . . . is its obliteration of the contents
of consciousness. Pain annihilates not only the objects of complex thought
and emotion but also the objects of the most elemental acts of perception.
It may begin by destroying some intricate and demanding allegiance, but it
may end (as is implied in the expression “blinding pain”) by destroying
one’s ability to simply see. In torture, the world dissolution . . . is
mimed in the . . . resulting cancellation of all parts of the room as well
as all parts of the larger world . . .



A seventh aspect of pain . . . is its totality. Pain begins by being “not
oneself” and ends by having eliminated all that is “not itself.” At first
occurring only as an appalling but limited internal fact, 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. From no matter what perspective pain is approached, its totality
is again and again faced . . . So the torturers, like pain itself,
continually multiply their resources and means of access until the room and
everything in it becomes a giant externalized map of the prisoner’s
feelings.



The eighth and, for now, final element carries us back to where we were
immediately before starting this enumeration of objectified elements of
pain, namely, that one of its most frightening aspects is its resistance to
objectification.  Though indisputably real to the sufferer, it is, unless
accompanied by visible body damage or a disease label, unreal to others. The
profound ontological split is a doubling of pain’s annihilating power: the
lack of acknowledgement and recognition (which if present could act as a
form of self-extension) becomes a second form of negation and rejection, the
social equivalent of physical aversiveness. This terrifying dichotomy and
doubling is itself redoubled, multiplied, and magnified in torture because
instead of the person’s pain being subjectively real but unobjectified and
invisible to all others, it is now hugely objectified, everywhere visible,
as incontestably present in the external as in the internal world, and yet
it is simultaneously categorically denied. (pp. 52-56)



Maybe the implication of “for now” is spelled out explicitly somewhere in
Scarry’s book, but as it stands it is certainly intimidating. The prisoner
no longer senses the same world with others in a shared world although his
perception of pain in their world is “incontestably real.” It reminds me of
the statement of the ‘schizophrenic’ to the psychiatrist’s question of how
real does God’s voice seem to you, and the patient replied, “God’s voice is
more real than you are.” Would not Thomas Aquinas agree? Aristotle’s “common
sense” in De Anima, III, 2, 426b17-427a5, that is the nearest thing to
establishing self-identity, a “self” of subjectivity at all in Greek thought
and which is still not in any sense an object but the undivided act of
perception as a unity, literally becomes dissolved here. Here you have the
physical reality of negation, a conflation of  those ‘rejected’ terms of
“inside” and “outside” into a state that curiously fits Heidegger’s
description of the “throwness” of “being-with” in the “being-in-the-world”
of Da-sein which is totally “being-there” as being-out-there completely
“always already” thrown into the everyday world of the average ‘They’ self,
with the irruption in reversal of Heidegger’s “Rede” or “discourse” which is
“the existential-ontological foundation of language” and “existentially
primordial with attunement and understanding” (S 150/M&R 203/SuZ 161) into a
‘communication’ as “the sounds anterior to learned language.” Here is the
experience of the deconstruction of consciousness which is not at all an
intellectual virtue,  and an experience of wholeness that is not at all
blessed and utterly peaceful, although I have read somewhere in another text
on pain that the tortured begins to think of the torturer as God. So, in
essence, you have, through bodily demonstration, the greater part of the
thesis of Being and Time.



Robert Payne, in his book The Great Terror, states only two people survived
the entire course of physical and psychological torture by Stalin’s police.
A Soviet admiral got through the physical process. A party philosopher got
through the psychological process. No one got through a combination of the
courses. This tells you something fundamental about the absolute contingency
of human nature. There is no security, there is no safe place – anywhere.



But there are survivors. And were they concerned about abstract morality and
self-effacement? Henry Kissenger wrote a letter from occupied Germany in
1945 to the aunt of Helmut Reisner. Reisner, a survivor of Buchenwald, was
planning to immigrate to Long Island where she lived. Kissinger wrote her in
order to prepare her for the person she was going to meet.



I feel it necessary to write to you, because I think a completely erroneous
picture exists in the States of the former inmates of the concentration
camps . . .

Concentration camps were not only mills of death. They were also testing
grounds. Here men persisted, and in a sense fought for survival, with the
stake always being nothing less than one’s life, with the slightest slip a
fatal error. Such was the filth, the compulsion, the debasement, that a
person had to be possessed of extraordinary powers, both psychic and of
will, to even want to survive. The intellectuals, the idealists, the men of
high morals had no chance . . . Having once made up one’s mind to survive,
it was a necessity to follow through with a singleness of purpose,
inconceivable to you sheltered people in the States. Such singleness of
purpose broached no stopping in front of accepted sets of values, it had to
disregard ordinary standards of morality. One could only survive through
lies, tricks, and by somehow acquiring food for one’s belly. The weak, the
old had no chance.

And so liberation came. The survivors were not within the ordinary pale of
human events anymore. They had learned that looking back meant sorrow, that
sorrow was weakness, and weakness synonymous with death. They knew that
having survived the camp, surviving the liberation was no problem. So they
applied themselves to the peace with the same singleness of purpose and
sometimes the same disregard of accepted standards as they had learned in
the camp. Above all they wanted no pity. Pity made them uncomfortable, jumpy
. . .

You would make a terrible mistake, were you to expect a broken boy. Helmut
is a man. He has seen much more than most people in a lifetime . . . Helmut
will want to be much alone, he will not want to be pampered. He will want to
live an ordinary life, but a life of his own making. (Kissenger, a biography
by Walter Isaacson, Simon & Schuster, 1992, pg. 52)



A qualifier to “surviving the liberation was no problem”: Terence des Pres
in his book The Survivor said the highest rate of suicide was in the two
hours after liberation. Maybe that was the consequence of “looking back
meant sorrow, that sorrow was weakness, and weakness synonymous with death.”
There was no place in that life for regret. Morality, to put it plainly, is
not a survivor trait. Kissenger wrote in another letter, “They have seen man
from the most evil side, who can blame them for being suspicious?” (Ibid.,
pg. 53)



Now Scarry also says – and this clearly demonstrates her brilliance and
honesty –



In the long run, we will see that the story of physical pain becomes as well
a story of the expansive nature of human sentience, the felt-fact of
aliveness that is often sheerly happy, just as the story of expressing
physical pain eventually opens into the wider frame of invention. The
elemental “as if” of the person in pain (“It feels as if . . .”, “It is as
though . . .”) will lead out into the array of counterfactual revisions
entailed in making. (pg. 22)



There is no better way of expressing this and I could not agree more: “the
story of expressing physical pain” is the compulsory “story of the expansive
nature of human sentience.” One does not create if one is satisfied.



That the certainty of pain is a private event gives rise to grave
epistemological and ontological ‘problems’. Medical discourse is the most
obvious place for the expression of pain. Yet Scarry says:



. . . “Perhaps the most obvious” – acknowledges the fact that many people’s
experience of the medical community would bear out the opposite conclusion,
that they in effect perceive the voice of the patient as an “unreliable
narrator” of bodily events, a voice which must be by passed as quickly as
possible so that they can get around and behind it to the physical events
themselves . . . Medical contexts, like all other contexts of human
experience, provide instances of the alarming phenomenon noted earlier: to
have great pain is to have certainty; to hear another person has pain is to
have doubt. (pg. 6-7)



It must not be left unsaid that there are good reasons to doubt that are not
only obvious but self-amplifying in their own dialectic. The crucial point
is, when the person in pain is requiring something of another, suddenly the
consensus belief that other people have the same structure of self-awareness
as I comes into doubt either in that the ‘Other’s self’ is being deceptive
or, worse, that pain is deliberately or unconsciously amplified, where
sympathy or drugs only increases their claims upon you. In other words, the
person in real pain asking for legitimate help is completely lost amidst all
these other readings of an ‘Other’s self’ that is based on various kinds of
misdirection whether intentional or not. There is no correspondence, no
“intersubjectivity” as Merleau-Ponty would put it. The people say the same
words as everybody else, but now that you have a strong reason to
disbelieve, now you no longer have any idea what, if anything, you no longer
can relate to as reasonable in another human being as to what is going on
inside them. So does this mean fundamentally the belief in the existence or
similarity of the selves of other people to your own is merely a polite and
convenient convention, discarded when it asks too much of one? If you do not
believe in their pain when your own pain is the greatest concrete certainty
of all things to you, does that not truly undermine the equivalence and
equality, the reality of “Others”? That no one truly believes the reality of
the selves of other people is as real as their own selves? And then what do
you do, if you follow Heidegger and Sartre closely, when they demonstrate
that one’s own self has no reality, no substantiality to it whatsoever, that
it is a necessary fiction to explain the existence and overwhelming power of
time? But then what possible permanent hold can time, that only exists to
the observing ‘self’, have on a mere imaginary object? That is why Paul, no
matter what, is always a personally formidable voice to contend with. In a
world that is unable to offer meaningful reasons to live oneself – or as
Camus would add, even to let others live – the reality of Paul’s emotional
affirmation of something that steps outside this worthless world, even
though imaginary, is strong. One wants to live, and Paul offers
uncontaminated life. What ‘ism’ can compete with that on a purely selfish,
individually mortal level? That it is imaginary is no problem: 1) Paul’s
imagination conforms to the form of a real and powerful human passion, and
2) as Heidegger amply demonstrates, Kant’s fundamental faculty of
imagination is the absolute ground of intuition and understanding.
“Imagination” cannot simply mean faked knowledge.


........................................................ 
iWon.com       http://www.iwon.com     why wouldn't you? 
........................................................



     --- from list heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---