Humanities 1Honors Introduction

Poetic Dwelling on Earth

A Reading of James C. Edwards’

The Plain Sense of Things

What has been the situation of religion in the West?

James C. Edwards says when one looks at the common features of Western religiousness one sees at their centers three structural features:

a binary account of what there is

the sacred grounding of the profane

the need for proper harmony (p. 10)

Edwards claims that now all of us are nihilists:

“To say that we are normal nihilists is just to say that our lives are constituted by self-devaluating values. What makes these values values is that we normally recognize, as our ancestors normally did not, their reality as pragmatically posited filters through which experience must be passed to become manageable; what makes them self-devaluating is that we also recognize—and only with their help, of course—their contingency, their subjection to history understood as the Mendelian evolution of life forms.” (p. 46)

How did we get here?

• Age of the Gods

• Age of the Forms

• Age of the Cartesian Subject

• The Age of Transvalued Values

Age of the Gods• Sacred ground of all being is conceived as divine presence. The world

of the Gods is complete, the rest of the world is dependent on it. The Gods are the center of a transcendental and terrible will.

• The Gods are not moral beings at all, since morality derives from the epoch of Idealism. Yahweh, for example, spends a fair amount of time making things terrible for the inhabitants of Israel. The Gods want what they want just because they want it.

• The gods are directly and immediately encountered.

• One sacrifices one’s will to a higher power.

Age of Forms• The Euthyphro plots this shift. We go from Euthyphro’s ideas of

pollution to a world in which justice is a rational concept.

• Plato’s myth of the cave sets out the basic idea of this age (Republic 7). The Forms represent the look of things as seen from above, and this is contrasted with what we find in everyday experience. We understand what the things we encounter are because we can see the kind of thing they are, the Ideal Form. Vision is the central metaphor in this account, and may depend on a prior awareness of these forms implanted in the soul.

• According to (this kind of) Idealism, the sacred rationally grounds the profane.

• One sacrifices one’s illusions to a higher truth. One submits to perfection.

Age of Cartesian Subject• Idealism’s way of thinking remains dominant in Europe as Christianity (Plato

for the masses) sets the agenda. Everything is understood as part of a Great Chain of Being in which everything is organized hierarchically.

• But by the 17th century philosophers had begun to have doubts about what they could know. Our knowledge seems to proceed not from some kind of fully present Truth, but from a number of propositions that have not been proven (e.g., “accept the evidence of the senses as reliable.”)

• Descartes tried to address this problem, but he made some problematic assumptions. (1) He assumes that all of our knowledge is a hierarchical structure built up out of many individual beliefs, discrete acts of intentionality, some of which serve to support others. (2) He assumes that a belief is the mind’s intentional representation of a determinate state of affairs external to it.

Cartesian Age (cont.)• In Meditation 1 he lays out the problem. We don’t seem to have any

strong belief that can serve as the foundation for all other beliefs. Perhaps an “Evil Genius” is deceiving us in everything. But in Meditation 2 he comes up with the strong idea, strong because of its immediacy: the belief in his own existence as a center of consciousness, as a ‘thinking thing” (the ego).

• The ego thus becomes the “fixed and identity-granting ground of all other reality. It is the original source of the world’s substance.” Metaphysical objects become objects of the ego’s belief, and this is a fundamental loss in status for those entities. They are representations displayed on the ego ground. It becomes necessary to believe in God(s) or the Ideal Forms.

Cartesian Age (final)

• This obviously creates a problem for God, but Descartes makes it clear that God is not a deceiver. While he might be a second order object of knowledge, he is a first order Being.

• Our lives then become a matter of “do you believe in X because it is a representation of the way the world really is?”

• Thus, in this age, the fundamental religious practices are intellectual.

Age of Transvalued Values

• Most of our culture still proceeds within Descartes’ framework.

• For Cartesian thinkers, the mind is mirror, and our job is to continually polish it to make it clearer. But Nietzsche says this obscures the function of will at the center of ego-subjectivity. From the Cartesian point of view the ego-subject must choose the most accurate representations; its salvation depends on it. But this fails to take into account that there is not a simple and clear objective point of view from which to analyze all of this. It’s like, as Wittgenstein said, buying multiple copies of the same newspaper to verify the truth of the headline.

• Kant recognized something problematic in this. He knew that what the ego encounters is representations, but held to the idea of “the thing itself.” (Of course, one eliminates this thing without any loss.)

Transvalued Valules (cont.)

• So Nietzsche notes that this practical reason is a kind of error, an error that may in fact be necessary, but there is no reason to conclude that there is a “thing itself” at all. Everything is appearance, and therefore there is no appearance as such.

• Thus, what appear to be highest truths, are just values, values that are expressions of will.

In this context life is like living in a Mall. We can choose from a variety of ways of being, but we are aware that all of these choices are contingent.

They don’t take us anywhere.

We all know we are just trying out costumes, though we may be willing, in certain modes of this kind of expression, to die, or even kill, for our costuming scheme.

Both Hegel and Nietzsche create a kind of nihilism by making it necessary for one to see oneself as a historical phenomenon, as a product of conceptual, political, or economic forces—whether those forces are claimed to be directed by a self-conscious teleological reason (Hegel) or by the blind and hungry will to power (Nietzsche)—both Hegel and Nietzsche produce a climate of devaluation (according to Edwards).

French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard characterizes postmodernism as an "incredulity toward metanarratives," those all-embracing foundations that we have relied on to make sense of the world.

American antifoundationalist Richard Rorty makes a similar point: "Nothing grounds our practices, nothing legitimizes them, nothing shows them to be in touch with the way things are" ("From Logic to Language to Play," 1986). This epistemological cul-de-sac, Rorty concludes, leads inevitably to nihilism. "Faced with the nonhuman, the nonlinguistic, we no longer have the ability to overcome contingency and pain by appropriation and transformation, but only the ability to recognize contingency and pain" (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 1989). In contrast to Nietzsche's fears and the angst of the existentialists, nihilism becomes, for the antifoundationalists, just another aspect of our contemporary milieu, one best endured with sang-froid.

In The Banalization of Nihilism (1992) Karen Carr discusses the antifoundationalist response to nihilism. Although it still inflames a paralyzing relativism and subverts critical tools, "cheerful nihilism" carries the day, she notes, distinguished by an easy-going acceptance of meaninglessness. Such a development, Carr concludes, is alarming. If we accept that all perspectives are equally non-binding, then intellectual or moral arrogance will determine which perspective has precedence. Worse still, the banalization of nihilism creates an environment where ideas can be imposed forcibly with little resistance, raw power alone determining intellectual and moral hierarchies. Edwards says this is a conclusion that dovetails nicely with Nietzsche's, who pointed out that all interpretations of the world are simply manifestations of will-to-power. (I think this simplifies Nietzsche’s view.)

Kierkegaard offered one possible response to this problem:

In Fear and Trembling (1843) Kierkegaard suggested that all the big ideas were on sale, but they were still not finding any buyers. Hegel had tried to show that everything could fit together into one conceptual framework, collapsing categories of oppositions into a unity of Absolute Idea and its expressions. Everything will be understood as the working of this Geist. In his reading, there will be nothing irrational. Everything is absorbed/retained, aufgehoben in the end. In his thinking, horrifying stories, like Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, will not remain horrifying and irrational, but will make sense. Thus they do not require any faith.

Abraham as Counterweight to Nihilism: Abraham is the hero that Johannes de Silentio will praise. He is not the knight of infinite resignation, but the knight of faith.

While most Christians resort to a clichéd reading of the Moriah story, Johannes wants us to embrace the horror for Abraham and Isaac.

We can compare this to the lover of the princess. Four characteristics emerge:1. There is in the lover an extraordinary concentration of desire. Though most of us try to rationalize desire, diversifying, or choosing objects we can hope to attain, the hero does not.2. The lover faces squarely the impossibility of satisfying his desire.3. The lover refuses to either surrender this defining desire, or substitute something else for it.4. We get to the movement of infinite resignation. This is the moment of the aesthetic self, the moment of metaphysical self-knowledge. The self sees that it can submit to the laws of practical reason, but also sees, within this desire, the love for the Form exemplified by the lover. He now recognizes his true good is in willing the good. By renouncing his earthly happiness he finds his true good.

Scene from HBO’s True Detective

The Early Heidegger

Heidegger’s work offers a thorough critique of this ego-subjectivity.

The main metaphysical question in philosophy has been the question of “being.” What “makes it possible” for this (kind of) thing to be just the determinate and self-identical (kind of) thing it so definitely is, and that I can recognize it as being? What is the source or origin of a thing’s determinate identity, of its self-identical “Being,” as precisely the thing it is?

Heidegger thought that the best way to get at the being question was to interrogate ourselves. We are that being —Dasein (Being-there).

For Heidegger Dasein is being that asks itself what Being is.

Dasein is therefore a self-interpreting being; existence is self-interpretation.

Dasein is, first and foremost, the being that says “I.”

It has a sense of “mineness.”

Average everydayness is the normal mode of existence for Dasein. Living in this way it’s like my life is living me, not the other way around. But in certain moments I may be forced to reflect on why I am living in this way; if I resort to some kind of argument that it is somehow “necessary,” I am living as inauthentic Dasein because I’m sloughing responsibility off on some kind of higher power or principle. Such consolation is the defining mark of inauthenticity.

But most of Dasein’s existences is neither authentic or inauthentic, it is lived in average everydayness.

Heidegger thinks most conceptions of the subject go wrong by converting the subject into an object. He believes that the alternative is to see it as “Being-in-the-World.”

This environment is one in which Dasein is filled with things, not objects. (Pragmata, not res). A thing has meaning or significance in two sorts of assignments, or references:

first, it is what it is in terms of the projects(s) within which it appears

second, it is what is is in relation to other things also involved in such projects. So things are Zeug, or gear, for the accomplishments of such projects. As Zeug it has a particular kind of being: readiness-to-hand. In Heidegger’s account, then, the being of a thing is given to it (as that particular kind of thing) by the holistic context of back-and-forth references created both by some project of Dasein and by the other things likewise involved in that project. . . Things always already are what they are as a result of their place within a referential totality of other things given alongside them.

Dasein as the “They-self.”

Dasein would be this maker of meaning only if Dasein were itself the ‘pure indivdiual’—the fully self-present, unitary entity—that could serve as the significance-granting subject, and it is not. We don’t normally think of Dasein this way because it seems to us that “I” stands alone, even if nothing else exists, and because Dasein’s individuality seems to offer a unique kind of perspective. But this is a flawed perspective. Dasein is always in relationship to other things. It is always a world inhabited already by other beings. Normally I thoughtlessly make use of a whole tableau of public understandings to get through life forgetting that those things are there for anyone to do or use. The gear is for others, too. My language, words, and projects are not for me alone. Dasein is they-self.

The “call of conscience” is what happens when Dasein is shocked into the value of existence, the publicness of they. It understands its life is a life into which it has been thrown by various contingencies. This produces a kind of “uncanniness,” a feeling of not being at home, a groundlessness.

When this happens the inauthentic response is to make claims to some sort of metaphysical warrant for identifying oneself with some particular set of one’s constitutive social practices. It conceals one’s own contingency.

Authenticity would require acknowledging their Being as practices; that is as contingent ways of Dasein’s being that are always ranged alongside an indefinite number of other actual and possible ways of Dasein to Be. But most practices are self-concealing.

Poetic Dwelling on Earth as a Mortal

One important motive behind the “turn” in his thinking was to find a way to be true to his critique of transcendental subjectivity while at the same time escaping the diminished Pathos of Dasein’s world and life.

He looks at technology, arguing that technology itself is a way of revealing things, a way of letting something come to presence. For Heidegger, truth is not fundamentally the correspondence of some representation with the reality it represents; truth is the coming into presence of something in such a way that it can be seen for what it is. Truth is dis-closure, un-covering, un-concealment.

Bestand are those things that are ready for use, what makes them what they are is their smooth surface, their interchangability. Technology is related to ordering. It orders the world into standing reserve.

Three techniques of erasure help secure the dominance of these technological practices.

1. There is the erasure of the particular frame itself. They tend to obscure the fact that they are our practices. Through power and rhetoric they make them seem like common sense.

2. They tend to bind us to the necessity of their being “ways of revealing” at all. As Nietzsche points out, perspective is the necessary condition of any seeing at all.

3. Technological practices erase the particular conditions of the particular things they bring to presence.

To be in practices is not to reflect on them.

Gathering the Fourfold:

For H. dwelling is the basic form of human life.

A “thing” gathers the fourfold:

Earth:ｷ the stuff out of which a thing is made, material.

ｷ dark physis, which rises up out of itself to confront us with its brute reality; it is that mystery which challenges us to respond to it by trying to draw it out into the light of our common understanding.

ｷ To speak of the earth is to be remind of that always unilluminated darkness from which arises whatever we can see and thus learn to give words to.

ｷ Any life is a life lived on earth.

Sky:ｷ The sky is the source of light; it is only under the sky and its varying degrees of luminance that anything can be seen as the thing it is.

ｷ In this way to speak of the sky is to speak of those ongoing social practices—in full flower or in decline; bright as day or dim as the dusk—within which things come to presence as the things they are.

ｷ The weird subdivisions with their design concepts, forget that they are “under the sky.” They are designed and built to conceal the conditions of both their building and their occupancy. (I could add SoCal landscaping to the list.)

Divinities:ｷ These are whatever hold the promise of healing transformation.

Mortals:ｷ To die means to be capable of death as death.

ｷ Death is not an accident of human life; it is its very condition.

“To dwell is to dwell as a mortal, and to dwell is to build; so the things one builds are things that--either by way of fullness or by way of privation--show the conditions of the dwelling that produced them. Death is Heidegger’s trope in this essay for conditionality itself. To know oneself to be mortal is not (merely) to know that one will oneself die; it is to know that all one knows and most cares about--everything: every thing--is contingent upon a constellation of circumstances that will someday no longer hold together. . .

“Most of the things brought to light by our ordinary technological practices do not show the condition of our mortality in that sense. They are not things that acknowledge ‘death as death.’ Quite the opposite: things like my coffee mug and my television set conceal not just their ends but my own. With their ready availability and their featureless surfaces, they ease me into my everyday practices; in the normal case they offer me no friction, no impediment, nothing to remind me of my incapacities and of my final inability to sustain myself . . . a contemporary coffin has the metallic sheen and boxy strength of a Lexus . . . the conditions of the life that produced the thing are covered over in the thing itself.”(Edwards, 173)

To dwell is to build, to build is to build things, and things gather the fourfold.

The things of technology are things that (largely succesfully) cover over the most general conditions of the life out of which they come.

The nature of building is letting dwell. Building accomplishes its nature in the raising of locations by the joining of their spaces. Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build. Let us think for a while of a farmhouse in the Black Forest, which was built some two hundred years ago by the dwelling of peasants. Here the self-sufficiency of the power to let earth and heaven, divinities and mortals enter in simple oneness into things, ordered the house. It placed the farm on the wind-sheltered mountain slope looking south, among the meadows close to the spring. It gave it the wide overhanging shingle roof whose proper slope bears up under the burden of snow, and which, reaching deep down shields the chambers against the storms of the long winter nights. It did not forget the altar corner behind the community table; it made room in its chamber for the hallowed places of childbed and the “tree of the dead”--for that is what they call a coffin there: the Totenbaum--and in this way it designed for the different generations under one roof the character of their journey through time. A craft which, itself sprung from dwelling, still uses its tools and frames as things, built the farmhouse.” (BDT, 157-58)

So the dwelling life is a life that brings to presence things that carry on their faces the conditions--both particular conditions and the overall conditionality--of the life out of which they come. All human lives are lives of dwelling, but not all such lives dwell fully.

Not all our practices bring forth things that are radiant with the conditions of the life that brought them to being.

Those that do, Heidegger calls poetic.

“The image of the clearing is [Heidegger’s] way of attending to the unpresenceable final condition of any presence and its specific conditions. Think, as the German word Lichtung happily encourages, of a bright and open space in the evergreen forest. Into that clearing the light pours, and in that gathered light one can see emerge the animals and plants that are at home there. ‘But light never first creates openness. Rather, light presupposes openness.’ Without the light there could be no seeing, but without first the clearing there could be no confluence of light to make that seeing possible. And now think of that clearing as an event rather than as an enduring feature of the landscape; hear the word ‘clearing’ as a gerund rather than as a noun. In that clearing-event whatever appears, appears. The clearing (clear-ing) gathers the light in virtue of which whatever is seen--the thing----can be seen for what it is.” (Edwards, 181)

To measure oneself against the godhead is to give attention to the unrepresentable and ultimate condition of all our (conditional) presentations of things. God is the background (like the sky) against which we see whatever we see.

Things can now be evaluated in terms of how they draw attention. Like the Faberge eggs, they draw a kind of direct awareness of particular kind of life. But there is a second kind of attention, the one that draws attention to the human condition—it gathers the fourfold. The farmhouse is thus more truthful.

But some “things” can also draw attention not only to the specific conditions of the particular life that produced it; the thing may, in its explicit features, draw attention to (what one might call) the general and universal conditions of human life itself.

The greater the degree to which a life “gathers the fourfold,” the more truthful that life is.

So . . . we can imagine a third kind of practice producing a third kind of thing:

(1. things that seek to obscure conditions)

(2. things that insistently reveal those conditions)

3. Those practices that bring to presence their own presencing, and call attention to the metacondition of that presencing. “These are things that call attention to the conditioning condition of conditionality itself” (Edwards); what Heidegger called, “Clearing.”

“They remind us that whatever we have is given, given not by a god or by a mysterious cosmic event (since those notions are themselves just particular figures appearing on the lighting ground) but by something that cannot be represented as a “something” at all but which nevertheless is really and necessarily “there.” Es gibt: “It gives/There is.” (Edwards, 190)

Poetic dwelling on earth is to live the kind of life that accepts fully the contingency and conditionality of whatever there is. In fact, these linguistic and behavioral practices make a virtue of producing things--words, houses, jugs--that exhibit that conditionality in unmistakable ways.

The things produced by this kind of life are not anonymous and interchangeable.

This poetic dwelling, because it emphasize contingency as a mark of its production, does not lose pathos in the face of conditionality.

It retains a pathos for its own practices because they are contigent.

So how can we be authentically religious in an age of normal nihilism?

By Poetic Dwelling on Earth.

Men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the last man. In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us. The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then.

--Thoreau

The poet makes poetry only when he takes the measure, by saying the sights of heaven in such a way that he submits to its appearances as to the alien element to which the unknown god has ‘yielded.’ Our current name for the sight and appearance of something is ‘image.’ The nature of the image is to let something be seen. By contrast, copies and imitations are already mere variations on the genuine image which, as a sight or spectacle, lets the invisible be seen and so imagines the invisible in something alien to it. Because poetry takes that mysterious measure, to wit, in the face of the sky, therefore it speaks in ‘images.’ This is why poetic images are imaginings in a distinctive sense; not mere fancies and illusion but imaginings that are visible inclusions of the alien in the sight of the familiar. The poetic saying of images gathers the brightness and sound of the heavenly appearances into one with the darkness and silence of what is alien. By such sights the god surprises us.

--Thoreau

Although young men died like squirrels in Mann Gulch, the Mann Gulch fire should not end there, smoke drifting away and leaving terror without consolation of explanation, and controversy without lasting settlement. Probably most catastrophes end this way without an ending, the dead not even knowing how they died but sill “alertly erect in fear and wonder,” those who loved them forever questioning “this unnecessary death,” and the rest of us tiring of this inconsolable catastrophe and turning to the next one. This is a catastrophe we hope will not end where it began; it might go on and become a story. It will not have to be made up--that is all-important to us--but we do have to know in what odd places to look for missing parts of a story about a wildfire and of course have to know a story and a wildfire when we see one. So this story is a test of its own belief--that in this cockeyed world there are shapes and designs, if only we have some curiosity, training, and compassion and take care not to lie or to be sentimental.

Maclean, 37.