A quick thought: Maybe we could move from defining our words, to describing the things.
Nietzsche was far above most. I know some people who might, with some fortune, go far far beyond him. They are my closest friends.
Heidegger was a clever one, mining etymology as a collective memory of a race. That's a cool move. "WE [a people] are a mind, and our language is its memory."
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I think you're right, Ray. etymology is the memory of a race--or, at least, it forms part of the collective memory alongside other things. But it should also be said that, in another sense, etymology is a recent scholarly discipline. this discipline arises--I believe--out of an arcane search for the ancient word of Adam, of which Hebrew is both a faith glimmer and a corruption, which would give us power over the things (for the name of a thing is its power.) I refer to the complex history of Foucault's "The Order of Things" and certain essays by Borges. In turn, the comparative method surely arises out of biblical criticism, and an awareness of the need to reconcile multiple, disparate Greek fragments.
ReplyDeleteEtymology is a memory that is only gained through the comparative method, and it is a recently recalled memory. it could be even said that this memory of the race was a repressed memory, and further still: that this memory became unrepressed in a method similar in some ways to the psychoanalytic. That is, by interpreting many isolated utterances that do not, in themselves, offer any explicit or conscious connection to one another but show something together that is not just the sum of its parts. in this way we come to a common meaning; we come even to a definition.
Yet, there is a danger to all this, and despite my love of etymology and wonder if it is even possible to do. someone ought to write a paper on Wittgenstein and etymology as a language game. Or even how the wider apparatus of the university--even including its reach through colonialism and trade to archaeological sites and new fragments, and its ability to endeavor to collect and compare all the myriad source texts in store houses--makes this memory possible.
The truth is that there was no definition of a word in ancient Greek, for instance; a definition is contained in language, its something we moderns do in particular, and its place in our discourse is precisely an attempt to remove the multiple, contextual meaning that is reflected in the etymologies. Etymology never transports us back in time to speak the English of a 16th century English peasant, or a warlord somewhere in late Roman Gaul. This is because, if asked, such folks would not answer the question "whaddya mean" by a certain word with a definition of that word--let alone a definition in 20th century English. Not only that, but these folks precisely cannot be asked because the only way to ask is to have a text and interpreter it--but neither one would have written.
I once asked Tom about whether Heidegger was particularly knowledge about etymology and its technique. Tom replied that Heidegger probably did exactly what we do: pick up a dictionary and read the etymology for a particular word as recorded. This simple answer further inspired to do my own etymological riffing, but also a bit let down that Heidegger was not the one doing the bare tracings that would form the guideline of his exquisite art.
At the same time, etymology is kind of an abyss for definition. it shows us the moving world of language. What would Wittgenstein's worker be with out the blocks and slabs that he moves? what would his language be without his form of life, except a game that is reducible to a particular mathematics? Even this impoverished example has a kind of world that must be connected up with. How much more the Greeks have a world.
I've gone back and forth, and will go back once again, however; for this connecting up may not be substantively different from Wittgenstein's example: it may just be a product of the imagination. I can imagine a worker with blocks and slabs. I can also imagine a theater with a bunch of dudes in toga's listening to Antigone. but I never held Heidegger's jug, and I have my coffee out of a novelty Branson Missouri mug with a picture of frogs playing country music. (My great aunt got it for me--it even has my name, Matt, printed on it.)
Its certainly not enough just to look at a jug in a museum. I'll go further, however, and say that neither is it enough to use an article form the past and incorporate it into our own life world, even in its original use. One of the few crazy tales I heard from my dad about my grandfather involves a genuine article--a real piece of the past. At that time, ancient art wasn't quite as terribly expensive as it is today and it wasn't all in museums. So, being successful and a lover of pre-Ccolumbian art, he had possession of a burial urn from Aztecs times. He didn't display it behind glass, however--he used it as an ash tray. Sacrilege, you say. But it gets better: when it came time to die (at the age of fifty, after decades of chain smoking cigars,) my grandfather was cremated, his ashes were put into his old ash tray, and he was buried near his cabin in northern Wisconsin.
ReplyDeleteNow, this is pretty awesome in its own way, and no more an affront to the Aztecs than placing the urn in a museum. What would an Aztec think about a museum? Being the savage that he is, he'd probably think it was some kind of showcase of war trophies. A way to gather disparate power from other tribes that is locked in their things, then drain it, concentrate it, and dispense through the act of viewing--through the eyes, which have some kind of black magic on their lids. An all-seeing eye that is never open. Compared to this, having someone buried in the urn would be a reprieve, and something he could understand.
Is there anyway to have a history, except through the imagination? I'm tempted to say "history is as history does"--the history of the nations lives in the way we exist, just as before historiography and recorded history. This isn't true though. the technological, understood barely as the confluence of fossilized solar energy and what Heidegger calls the mathematical, has scrambled everything, and it has become far more my history than the longhouse of my Scandinavian fore-bearers, or the nomad existence they were barely removed from. I also have a Germanic surname, but sure as hell don't know what its like to have to navigate an existence in the dangerous but opportune zones between the steppe and Rome, or all the rest of German history.
Anyway, the point is that there has been an apocalypse of all life-worlds. they've been obliterated and absorbed into the single frame of the desiring/projecting subject. We can never live in them again, and we can never perform the sort of history that Heidegger is after. the apocalypse was total, and it pretty much happened before we were born. I fear the only way to believe in having a history is to racialize it: to make descent bear everything that was lost.
Does this invalidate Heidegger? No. Even his slanderers agree that he wasn't a racialist. And, as I've stressed before, impossible means impossible. For instance, if Kant showed metaphysics was impossible, then metaphyscians must have been doing something other than metaphysics (maybe it, too, is poetry?) Likewise, if the historical return is impossible, then Heidegger must have been doing something different. And he was. he was operating in images, but he operated with images in a way that leads essentially to peasantry.
Just like Lao Tzu, the upshot of Heidegger, at least in his later works, is to stop reading books, pick up a hoe and start digging up the rows for spring planting. both thinkers functioned to constantly agitate, amongst the educated, for the eternal peasant. In ways that were bypassed, usurped, denied for sure--but in ways that remain, and function as exits. The utopian hope, of course, is to use these constructs of images and words to finally stop people from seeking anything more than being a peasant. The hope is eventually there will be just enough books, constructed with the most sublime subtlety, to be read by any aspiring man (any ruler, in Lao Tzu's phrase) and make him forget his ambitions and take up his hoe again. Then there would be justice, happiness and peace.
ReplyDeleteHow are you sure that they are playing country music, they are dressed one way, but playing string jazz.
ReplyDelete