Date: Sun, 9 Mar 2003 01:31:59 +0800
Subject: Re: 'art of gloss



On Saturday, March 8, 2003, at 05:31  AM, rick issan wrote:

> Are not glosses always at the mercy of paying mere
> lip service or limited to a too particular mode of
> speech, either the political or the idiosyncratic?

Not necessarily, a gloss can be a break in a text that attempts to add 
to or interpret what's being said. I guess it's colloquially used in a 
negative sense as in a glib misinterpretation or ingenuous dismissal 
but no, glosses are the stuff of glossaries which I think can be 
particularly helpful... or not as the case may be. But then maybe all 
textual interpretation is a gloss in the sense that it's always an 
insertion in a line of argumentation that is as old as the tradition 
you engage with?

> The difference between gloss and revelation should
> be in the range of essential relevance, the former
> as linear limited, the latter as becoming ergodic.

What's 'ergodic'? Couldn't find it in my oxford... Are you pointing 
here to the difference between writing and discussing about being, 
which is necessarily a textual enterprise, and the 'revelation' of 
being? So on the one hand we would have the act of speaking about 
something and on the other there would be that something itself... in 
this case it's being as such. Both Husserl and Heidegger set this 
distinction up in terms of theoretical intentionality, imagination and 
straight forward or circumspect perception. So we can talk about 
beings, imagine a being or disclose it as it gives itself.

But you seem to also be thinking about this disclosure in terms of the 
'fundamental experience of being', whatever that may be. So I would 
agree that any talk about being, which talk is itself a theoretical 
mode of being, is not yet a fundamental experience of being. So yeah, 
talking or philosophising about it is something other than a meditative 
silent disclosure of being. The latter has revelatory connotations, and 
Heidegger draws on many different traditions such as the Catholic 
mysticism of Meister Eckhart for instance, but it also denotes the 
method of descriptive phenomenology for which authentic access to 
phenomena is something other than the description of what is revealed 
in that access.

The trouble is as soon as we try to communicate what has been revealed 
we are back in theoretical intentionality, and more to the point we are 
describing something that is not an objectively empirical phenomenon, 
it has to be experienced for oneself. That's why I generally don't 
understand notions of 'a' revelation of being, you can describe to me 
what you think about 'being' but my experience is my own and only I can 
attest to that. In terms of 'revelations' this is kind of like the 
difference between exoteric Catholicism and what I see as Heidegger's 
radical protestantism. Only the individual can attest to their own 
fundamental experience of being, there is no external absolute 
authority or communal experience here.

> Perhaps life is an oblivion, that not knowing what
> we do not know, that is, not considering an answer
> because its question was not and cannot be raised.

I think that sort of finitude is where the question of being starts, 
and I also think it's the basic presupposition for any philosophy, 
since as humans we don't ever start from an absolute position of 
knowledge. I don't think this latter ideal is even attainable, finitude 
is an essential existential structure, although I couldn't say for sure 
cos I just don't know... the socratic principle is for me the limit for 
all thinking. But within that finitude, always starting in media res, 
we can still question about 'being' in general. So I also don't think 
Heidegger can offer any absolute authority on a 'revelation of being' 
cos all these difficulties were already a part of his approach towards 
the question of being which simply ended with yet another restatement 
of the question. He never stopped questioning cos everything about 
'being' is questionable.

> What would simple speech be other than going along
> line by line, following each word of another prior
> to turning to novelties; or is there anything new?
>
> Is not this solicitous speech on the way to become
> cryptic, going along the curves that have been set
> out prior to our particular speaking, prior to us?

Who knows? In one sense everything we might think or say is only 
meaningful in terms of the way we already understand the self and 
world, and that meaningfulness is not entirely a rational theoretical 
knowledge. There is much about it that is unknown and passed down by 
tradition so we end up speaking the 'Same'. But I think there's room 
for novelty here as well, otherwise how did we ever get down from the 
trees and end up here thinking about being?

In another sense though, temporally speaking, everything is always new 
and never the same nor identical, even if it's the most mundanely 
familiar speech repeated over and over. Historical finitude and its 
inherent ignorance has its own structure, it has to constantly 
re-constitute itself as the Same, but the constitution is a unity in 
change and as such it is absolute difference.

Cheers,

Malcolm



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