Introduction, § III: Philosophy as the Science of Being
October, 2020
Despite all appearances – and let me clear, those are unabashedly terrible – now is not the time for misanthropes. Oh you hate people? Kids screaming on the subway, dumb opinion havers, non-self-awareness practicing chakra wreckers, we all see them. But in the face of such a time that reaches out and grabs everyone by the groin and wrenches this hard, surely no type could seem less helpful than the holier-than-thou ugly saints in the lineage of the malicious shade Houellebecq or its diluted americana cousin a la unhelpful science gnome deGrasse Tyson.
What to do then, when the weight of an existence careening the wrong way up a one-way street with the throttle locked in starts to creak at the rivets in your head? For me these days it’s Bach. What a guy. In an apparent act of foresight some 300 years in advance, he wrote his music intricately enough that the voice of a single instrument requires nothing else nearby to support it. Independence is, albeit tragically, a good trait in a vicious age that threatens all collectivity. Man was into his self care.
Why all this waffle about the baroque?
Take a breath. I’m just here to talk about repetition. Any fan of the cello suites knows they repeat themselves. A lot. A musician worth their salt, say Rostropovich
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBe_4Pe49FA
Don’t get too angry if I tell you there actually isn’t an answer. One answer, that is. The thing is, it’s up to you as a musician to do something with the repetition to make it speak. Play louder than before, emphasize different parts, use different bows. Make the same different. Go back to that breath you were holding and watch it swell again and again. There’s a certain creative sweet spot dozing in the terrain of difference and repetition. Someone should write a book about it.
This is a thought that creeps into my rummage bag of a mind as I’m reading these lectures and it feels like an insight worth tagging along. We’re still in the introduction and it already feels like I’m slowly turning back in on the same words save that they just feel a little bit different each time through. Unfortunately, it’s only text so I don’t have some soviet sex-cellist like Mischa Maisky to really make me tingle. All I have is a muddle of phrases telling me that philosophy is about being (Sein) and not beings (das Seiende). That’s the pedal note. On top of that – layered structure. “Philosophy is not a science of beings but of being or, as the Greek expression goes, ontology.”
Armed with a nice new word, we return to another iteration of the root note: the defining of philosophy as the study of being. “Philosophy is the theoretical conceptual interpretation of being, of being’s structure and its possibilities. Philosophy is ontological”
It feels we’re coming out swinging with a particular vigor considering this has already been covered in the last chapter. Our guy is taking no prisoners – get it? Because they’d have to exist. Look, it’s not easy trying to fit jokes into this teutonic sermon. I’m doing my best. In this corner we have all sciences with an extant “positum” as object, the Weltanschauungen, the “ontic,” the “vulgar,” among others. It seems Heidegger’s still got some destructive juices left over and he’s squaring up with pretty much everybody today. Think of a philosopher that’s hip and still kicking. Isn’t this nightmarish moniker “cultural theorist” almost always stuck on? The entire neoliberal clown car that is the European Graduate School where, for just a decent fraction of a small nation’s GDP, students can lick a chair Agamben once farted in or if they’re lucky, watch Judith Butler or Slavoj Zizek struggle with a coffee machine while the Italian autonomists scoff in the designated smoking space. Not contemporary enough for you? Maybe you want me to look at some neo-Deleuzian flow theorists – we get it, you do ketamine – or if you studied politics as an undergrad, maybe some ethics or communication theory stuff. God, at this point we might as well call Joe Rogan or the Beeperson a “cultural theorist.” It’d serve the rest of us right. The moral is these days it really does seem impossible to find philosophy untarnished with glossy bits about aesthetics, psychology, history, or that horrible plebian pursuit closeted Schmittians insist on calling politics.
If I read one more book where in place of good writing I’m told to consider a scene from Hitchcock… On the other hand, there’s the growing sense that legitimate philosophy not taking into account the reality of ecology and other non-human spheres seems a bit cramped, a bit selfish. Why you always gotta talk about yourself? In the words of McKenzie Wark, “it seems rather old fashioned to speak only of the human and not what Haraway calls the multispecies muddle we actually exist in and as.” After all, if it’s true that “the Anthropocene makes even nature historical and temporary,”
Chaotic as the State of Things today might be, for now the year is still 1927, Richard Nixon is barely getting the hang of shaving, and Doc Martin over here is still allowed to pontificate unawares of the effect of greenhouse gasses and of the mass murder of his political affiliates. Thus, in seated in his lecture hall, we see this growing pile of naïve ontic trash contrasted with the glorious proper philosophy, which is ontological – concerned with Sein. He can even prove it; apparently he’s already given semesters’ worth of lectures on this history from Aquinas to Kant. It seems I’m behind. Prof, will this be on the exam? No? Ok, thanks. Again ensuring that we’re free of anything remotely resembling relevance, Martin insists on denying any inclination towards a historical reading of philosophy. “We shall not now refer to this historical demonstration of the nature of philosophy, a demonstration having its own peculiar character.”
If I can jump in here speaking as an editor, Doc – can I call you Doc? – have you considered cutting some material? I don’t mean to play Gordon Lish to your Raymond Carver
Back to the text. “Philosophy is the science of being.”
There we go. This guy is feeeeeling it, Mr. Krabs. Every time Doc tells us to go back to the sole purpose of philosophy, Sein, think of this face. Better yet, make this face yourself. Really let yourself get into it. This might turn out to be fun after all. Anyway, I’m curious why we backpedaled a tiny bit and now want to call ourselves scientists after all. Maybe it’s something in that German word Wissenschaft. Wissen zu schaffen. To create knowledge. To conceive it. Got a ring to it. To be on par with the god of genesis. Let’s see where this science thing takes us.
For now, this whole show is getting a bit old. How long is this class anyway? To his credit, here comes another moment where Martin sounds almost like he’s got enough wit to realize he’s on the verge of hilarity. This stuff’s ridiculous right? To separate being from that which is? You’re dizzy – did you get knocked on the head too hard? “Can something like being be imagined? If we try to do this, doesn’t our head start to swim? Indeed, at first we are baffled and find ourselves clutching at thin air.”
Goddammit. ‘The bell doesn’t dismiss you; I do’. Remember that teacher? On the other hand, it is just as certain that we are constantly thinking being. We think being just as often as, daily, on innumerable occasions, whether aloud or silently, we say “This is such and such,” “That other is not so,” “That was,” “It will be.”
Far from soothing our suspicions, Doc throws fuel on the fire as he makes clear that philosophy has accepted the simplicity of the “is”-word in no small thanks to that stupid stupid thing we call sound wisdom. By taking the word “is” for granted, common usage has made even the best and brightest forget to question it. The rabble is good for nothing, especially those lazy, dirty ones that have no respect for our customs, amiright? Again, the English “common sense” doesn’t have the same insistence on not being crazy that the German does: “gesunder Menschenverstand.” Healthy human ability to reason. If we had more time here I’d crack open my copy of the DSM V and go through this diagnostic checklist top to bottom. Alas, with no time for medical quackery, I ask you, respectable members of the jury, does this sound healthy?:
“But wherever common sense is taken to be philosophy’s highest court of appeal, philosophy must become suspicious. In “Uber das Wesen der philosophischen Kritik iiberhaupt” [“On the Essence of Philosophical Criticism”], Hegel says: “Philosophy by its very nature is esoteric; for itself it is neither made for the masses nor is it susceptible of being cooked up for them. It is philosophy only because it goes exactly contrary to the understanding and thus even more so to ‘sound common sense,’ the so-called healthy human understanding, which actually means the local and temporary vision of some limited generation of human beings. To that generation the world of philosophy is in and for itself a topsy-turvy, an inverted, world.” The demands and standards of common sense have no right to claim any validity or to represent any authority in regard to what philosophy is and what it is not.”
Read that a few times. Best read it aloud to your friends and unsuspecting neighbors. Let it soak in. Maybe make the face again, Doc. Christ, stop being so weird, can you? Philosophy, as those hapless humanities parents from before well know, has little respect for that thing called Common Sense. No one ever accused this stuff of being too easy. Imagine Plato’s apologia if he just stopped being obtuse and got a job at IBM as a creative tech consultant. I heard Apple’s got a new take on the classic forms. If philosophy were common, what’d be the point of a PhD, you know? Next you’re gonna tell me those Capuchin monks aren’t any closer to god than those kids at the bar. I think I can hear Bourdieu scratching through the clay above his grave somewhere.
Now, good friends, we come to the end for today. Right before you go, Doc’s got something to say. We’re all shuffling our papers and getting ready to head out, listening to him lay out the plan for next week. The usual teasers. “What if being were the most complex and most obscure concept?”
“Today, when philosophizing is so barbarous, so much like a St. Vitus’ dance, as perhaps in no other period of the cultural history of the West, and when nevertheless the resurrection of metaphysics is hawked up and down all the streets[.]”
Today is a time of barbarity. It is the time of the St. Vitus dance. The West is burning. The Occident is at stake. Cheap resurrection hacks abound and the dead are come, it is said, back for thrills and filthy gossip. Is this the language of an academic philosopher? Or is it something heavier, a voice more kin to the Apocalypse of John, the final revelations. Don’t tell me that all which is has ever been can be so easily done away with. Don’t promise there won’t be any victims. I can hear the voice somewhere nearby of Spengler.
And below that, perhaps something more primordial, the screaming engine of huge affliction and dismay, mixed with obdurate pride and steadfast hate
Don’t be too fast to call me paranoid. This voice doesn’t get to tell me to simply lay my life, the human details of connection and living aside when I can hear such a tremor in his voice. For someone who claims to be doing nothing but pure ontology, there is a human malice in these closing words. Is this what philosophy is going to be? A clearing of the barbarous, an encounter with the inhuman horror of the dancing body beyond redemption – remember the mad dancers in front of the statue of St. Vitus who himself was boiled to death? I don’t think I’m quite ready to give Doc here permission to be absolved from all guilt when it comes to worldly horror.
You might think I’m jumping the gun here, but step aside with me for a moment. We’re still in the introduction, so there’ll be philosophical minutia aplenty to come. Right now we’re still talking big picture. An attempt at elevating this mythical Sein doesn’t look like it’s going to leave space for the relations between particulars, all that stuff of the positum; the primacy of the ‘existential’ question is starting to feel like a massive act of arrogant personal self-affirmation. Yet there’s still somehow this note of disdain towards all which is currently around us.
I wouldn’t be the first to note that this works suspiciously well as a metaphysical panacea for the prickly questions about anti-Semitism and affiliations with National Socialism.
Post-Script. 1976. Todtnauberg, on the rim of the Black Forest.
Countless were the days that he would in a dread start and with his inaugural breaths could not but curse already the coming of a dawn over him which signaled anew the rising of yet another day he’d live shambling across the charcoal ruins in his memory of that house that only he could see. How often had he, over nothing but the mundanities of breakfasts and weekday traffics felt the unbidden ripples of a scream, now decades aged in his otherwise healthy breast scrape, trudge across his rib, across his tongue, low like beaten oxen. There exists a species of nightmare, one borne perhaps equally of a tortured memory’s truth as much as vivid, infernal invention, which carries behind it a tail that sweeps a final draft of bitter embers and ashen despair, burning and obscuring indiscriminate, into the waking light of those poor men and women who fate chooses for its riders.
It is one such man now that we now see. He has retained his mind in his extended struggle over what must once have been unquestionably sanity, but his heart, so often lurched across the threshold of a present and a psychic world of involuntary recollection, has been dashed to a bloodied fiber, and here, we see this what was bled emerge in his eyes as they open, as he steps out into the street. Little of the man, the civil agent of his responsibilities as husband, as son, as professor and as citizen, little of this is there in what asks him, demands, screams for each step into further oblivion. The city is in flames again. It was so once before.
What can I say unto you, old man, but that I will pray at higher station for some being of still greater order to one day pity you and simply extinguish all that is light in you finally and quickly. For now you are faced with a burning edifice at every angle your heaving, sweat rimmed look will beg to turn. This city is in flames and the screaming you hear matches the screaming you heard when you watched them burn the first time. This is your doing, it always has been, and the meagre prayer, pittance of repentance you now want to deliver is to absolution as one lone maple leaf to an armada.
You have woken again to the horror, and that, in its uncountable voices singing is what begs you speak. Are you looking into a new world of sleep for as again and before – are you dreaming of their disappearance anew, or is this blaze now final, are you ready to walk?