Friday, February 23, 2007

On the Life of the Mind

On a certain lecture of Agnes Heller I attended recently in the companionship of the painter and Eve's son, I heard some interesting remarks about Arendt that can only come and complete a picture I've myself drawn from the beginning of my acquaintance with her when I read the book "Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin" a good number of years back. What is most striking about Arendt is actually her originality albeit philosophically speaking this gives just too little information about anything in particular; the issue presented here is that what (this sounds a little too metaphysical) or the point "where" Arendt is at stake the best is never in the development, the content or even the accuracy with which she presents her thoughts, the results are unimportant (probably living up to her own remarks of the "fallacy of truth" made to Mary McCarhty), she's the strikingly original thinker only in the questions she asks and at that one might better comprehend her life-long love story with St. Augustine. Arendt thought uncannily in the poetic sense just like the Christian saint thought in the rhaetorical mode. This is how I can find myself at home in her thinking space - because the questions are all phenomenological from within the innermost cradle of the ego's imprisonment with itself, namely saying that the Arendtian questions are asked so thoroughly independent from traditions and philosophers that at times they strike a certain banality and lack of concreteness. But only because they are produced in the extraordinary milieu of purest consciousness and the flux of the ego with itself they're so profoundly important.

This is especially clear in the fluctuation of the contradictions that feed the life of the mind in the non-historical space of hermeneutics and of earthly existence. "Quaestio Mihi Factus Sum" said Augustine, and this mistrust of the traditions which lift up the banisters of the worldly artifacts reveal a very serious problem that concludes in Arendt's uncompromising mistrust of metaphysics. Ring explained this by arguing that Arendt applied "specific" Jewish ways of thinking (yet with a totally different content) by relating the life of the mind to the life of the community. My experience is a very similar one, in that I find it very difficult to think when not in the company of others or with the pre-conditioned thought of answering an specifically human question asked by a real person or by a narrative set in motion. My distrust for metaphysics lies on the hierarchical purity of the ego that in finding a comprehensive world-view that aims at a system it works on the assumption of syllogisms and logical processes that eventually lead the path to the gate where truth lies behind at the end of a long road. I believe this hardly to be so and adhere to Arendt's "fallacy of truth" that might be as old as Plato.

The ego can't leave his very own companionship and therefore is imprisoned in a rather claustrophobic dense space where the system is fully constructed on the basis of movement toward itself along which it develops all kinds of human faculties believed to be absolute. I shall argue that there're unaccountable number of "facts" that remain unthinkable in the totality and this is the only foundation criticism that can be ever set upon the grandiose enterprise of dialectic and negative thinking. The Hegelian reconciliation can't be completed unless the world of the everyday in which humans live could be an abstraction of heterogeneity and homogeneity in constant flux back and forth. Negative thinking remains the only possibility available to the ego, it's a "destruction" of all the knowable for the sake of the known, yet this is hardly the case in the world of "realia" within which everyday life reproduces itself. Here I can argue that the only serious critic of the Hegelian thinking of the absolute by negative destruction is Henri Bergson in expounding how the "negative" isn't available as a phenomena or as an experience anywhere in nature. The totality limits strictly the possibilities of thinking but never the possibilities of philosophy, but what we're concerned with here is the "activity", whereby in the world of contingency (namely the one "proposed" by Hegel in the Philosophy of Right) whose base in "all men are free" the authority of the tradition as an all-binding structure is suspected, yet this is where it can become truely enlightening, that the "thinking" is condemned to live on the doubt of the authority and therefore its possibility for communicability in the Jasperian sense relies once again the power of negative thinking eo ipse.

Lastly I want to comment on another Hegelian problem; Hegel has a problem (a major one actually) in the "way" to the absolute spirit to tackle the difference between Logic and Metaphysics which is rooted in Kant's destruction of the metaphysical possibilities for the sake of a rational logic that can derive all the principles of knowledge (and its limit) from the sources of reason, including the problems of religion, art, ethics and the individual. Hegel does Phenomenology and that's why his reconciliation is never possible in metaphysical terms, in the absolute. This is an idea I'm indebted for to Gillian Rose and her pupil Nigel Tubbs, the broken middle is what actually matters in Hegel and not the Absolute which if it cannot be thought there's no possible social import to any philosophy at all. The broken middle if at all, is the only secure foundation of modern philosophy and its good friend, Modernity... because it lives on the rupture of time, the broken middle is this broken time itself. Phenomenology proves a much reliable method than metaphysics in arriving but it can never arrive, reason for which Phenomenology could only understand itself in furnishing social import at all at the stage of Existential Philosophy where the discovery of the pure ego pilgrimaged from the sources of reason to revelation. The creation stories from thereinafter can never start at the "totality" but rather travel to the whole of the broken middle until they dissolve themselves in the unthinkable which is the greatest objectivation of the world, the Heideggerian averageness and the Kierkegaard-Weber-Heller "everyday" that can never be experienced in a phenomenal sense because the heterogeneous quality of its movement. These are just mere pegs, I shall refine this along the way in my work.

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