I introduce to you a welcome moment from my life. Writing on Wittgenstein's existentialism reminds me of one of the first great 'epiphanies' of my life, where everything seemed to resolve itself of its own accord, as if the problems resulting from the imprisonment in my own consciousness suddenly seemed solved. I experienced for the first time the truth of Nietzsche's Dionysian experience. This clip = Genius plot-structure + genius soundtrack + unabashed nationalism (Herodotean/ Periclean nationalism, not the nationalism of the present day, which is a proletarian and self-abasing attempt to grasp votes) + purity of ideal. I am still grateful to the moment in November 2003 when I stumbled accidentally upon this film. It proves the truth of Hegel's philosophy of the master-slave dialectic, that the truth is on the side of the happy man (Ch.4 of the Phenomenology).
NOTE: there is actually dialogue in the theatrical version.
Tuesday 18 December 2007
Fucking epiphany
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2 comments:
Great post! The music in this piece is unbelievable, quite stunning. I have just bought the Sea of Fertility recently and plan on starting it once I finish The Temple of the Golden Pavilion.
Also loved the previous post. As we have discussed before, I am not very familiar with Wittgenstein. However, it is that post which has inspired me to comment with a question, which may indeed be rhetorical, I am not sure.
You quote: “There are indeed things that cannot be put into words.” This polemic you outline against psychoanalysis as delineated by Wittgenstein is very intriguing and something new to me, so forgive me if I have somewhat missed the point. But I cannot help ask, are there any things which can be put into words, or can they only be feigned by language?
I am thinking of the philosopher’s mastery over death, particularly Hegel’s, whereby death becomes an integral part of life expressing disappearance which also becomes a process of gaining something new. In Phänomenologie des Geistes, Hegel speaks of a death spoken in language, whereby ‘Adam’s first, act which made him master of the animals, was to give them names, that is, he annihilated them in their existence (as existing creatures).’ That is, annihilated them in their singularity, leaving only particulars and generalizations remaining, a simulacrum if you will; in language, death speaks, leaving universal simulacrums. Hegel’s mastery however is found in the good fortune made of this negation, that is, the absence held in the concept is ‘redeemed by the presence of the idea’. Thus the absence of the referent is replaced by the palpable idea which stands in for it.
However, based on the Blanchot talk you came to the other day, I wondered what you thought of Blanchot’s conception of death. Blanchot wants to remain with this negativity, with the nothingness which permeates language, to arrest it’s dialectically recuperation. That is, he wises to attend to literary language, because like we were discussing in the seminar, literary language’s referral is nothingness. In arresting language from the information model, in retiring language from the world, Blanchot wishes to illustrate the impossibility of immediacy, to invert Heidegger’s claim, the possibility of impossibility becomes the impossibility of possibility.
This crass and clumsy overview is essentially meant to ask what can if anything, be put into words? Or in doing so does death speak? Do we put death into language and master this negation via Hegelian recuperation or are we to remain with negation? Are we to remain with nothingness, with that very thing, which is not a thing, which permeates all our linguistic undertakings?
I didn't like Temple of the Golden Pavillion much - it's too nihilistic, too full of indulgence for the main character's idiosyncrasies. I did, however, enjoy Runaway Horses, which book formed the basis of the clip I've posted here. It is basically the same concoction of romantic flight into idealism and self-destruction, but it is better written and the plot is frequently interesting. The underlying dialectic of 'life-affirming' traditional Shinto and world-denying, rational, foreign Buddhism would have interested Nietzsche, and also touches on themes which Schiller and Goethe discussed in their characterisation of Europe's transition into modernity. The protagonist Isao’s idealism is similar to that which inspired the ‘Völkisch’ societies which became popular in Germany in the late 1800s and the early 1900s. Mishima was well-read in Western culture, of course.
As to your other points, I think we ought always to talk about intentions when we talk about philosophy. Wittgenstein’s intention, inspired by Heinrich Hertz’s efforts to reduce doctrinal physics to its bare bones, was to complete philosophy by destroying metaphysical quibbles. Consequently, Wittgenstein talks about the unsayable as part of his doctrine of language, which conceives of the world that is essentially ‘externalist’; in other words, there are no hidden trap-doors or spirit-powers, because if there were, we would have discovered them. That we have certainly looked for them and failed in this shows that we are looking for the wrong things. Wittgenstein’s view is that the unsayable is best left unsaid because it is not a something, a ‘not-I’ or ‘A’ that is determined in virtue of being excluded; For Wittgenstein, the unsayable is absolutely logical, so logical that it excludes the possibility of the illogical; as he writes in the Tractatus, ‘It used to be said that God could create anything except what would be contrary to the laws of logic. – The truth is that we could not say what an illogical world would look like’ (TLP 3.031). If we could say the illogical, then it would be logical, because it would be subsumable under our forms of representation.
This conception of logic is undoubtedly a form of what you call ‘mastery’. It is mastery through instrumental reason, through the information model of language, as you appositely put it. Nothing remains outside of it, not even the nebulous concept of ‘the Nothing’. Is there a way to overcome this closing off of possibility?, Blanchot seems to be asking. Heidegger says that this overcoming is possible through a new mythologisation of Being, which will lead to a shift in fundamental disclosures of Being and new forms of ‘enchantment’. Habermas says it is through the employment of ‘communicative reason’/ ‘-action’, that is, in accepting the social-democratic basis of rational debate (. Habermas, incidentally, devotes much space in his Philosophical Discourse of Modernity to the history of thinkers who have attempted to overcome the instrumentalisation of reason (Heidegger, Bataille, Derrida and Foucault, especially). For him, the valorisation of ‘the nothing’ cannot come up with any creative-determinative content with which to replace the practical realities of instrumental reason (chapter 11 of PDM); it will therefore find no truly serious adherents. This was probably Blanchot’s point, but Habermas was trying to be realistic about why the manifold resistance to instrumental reason – to science and technology and capitalism – in other words, why the jesters failed to knock the king off the throne and seize the court for themselves, to put it figuratively. One of these forms of resistance is the desperate desire to uproot subjective consciousness from its imprisonment in mediation (basically, the tools of instrumental reason, like mathematisation, to name but one) and to assert the vitality of life once more in immediacy, in living life through new eyes. In this demand for vitality, the leftist thinkers (Bataille, Breton, Debord) were in concord with the rightist thinkers (Heidegger, Jünger).
As for pure immediacy, the pure experience of the subject, the novels of James Joyce are an example of an experiment that tests the possibility of the expression of immanence. For Wittgenstein, expression is already a form of mediation; thought, too, far from being a privative and essentially unexplainable experience, is a form of representation. What would be truly immanent is nothing, and nothing cannot be said, because something that is represented is already mediated. Representations are ‘external’ forms, which is to say that they are signified, or said. And what is sayable (as a possibility) must be capable of signification. But rather than ask what the unsayable nothing is, Wittgenstein excludes it as the other of representation, and declares that the intent to represent the nothing contradicts the grounds of its own demand – that it should be representable in its nothingness, i.e., something that is unrepresentable. He does not attempt to answer the unanswerable – and at the limits of the problem of representation lies the problem of death – because we have no means of representing the problem to ourselves. ‘Death’, writes Wittgenstein, ‘is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death’ (TLP 6.4311).
That said, it is the prerogative of an individual to continue to contradict himself in refusing to recognise the logic in which he is imprisoned; what is important is, as Nietzsche wrote, not the purity of the ideal – the ideal being in this case the possibility of rejecting the confines of instrumental reason – but how the intention itself may serve us. Although this notion of personal intention seems to read like a triumph of common sense and everyday life over the self-defeating aporias of the specialist’s vision of the world (as Samuel Johnson was supposed to have refuted Berkeley in kicking the stone to prove its reality), we are in agreeing with Nietzsche at a very different place indeed from the bourgeois’s world.
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