Douglas Mercer
May 25 2024
Nietzsche decided not to continue to write footnotes to Plato, instead he cut the whole endeavor to ribbons and put an end to philosophy proper. By the time he was done he assumed it was finished, that he was in the icy air of the glacial heights, and his question mark or exclamation point was eternal. But it turns out that for all of his high octane and really rather impressive self-aggrandizement he had not reached the mountain but had fallen into the ditch. When he looked into the abyss it was not abyss that was looking back at him but only his own image, like Narcissus looking into a deep well. It turns out philosophy, or whatever you want to call it at this point, had a couple more rabbits to pull out of the hat, an endless number of rabbits in fact. Look, I see one running now.
When it comes to God or the gods even the pedestrian viewpoint is that it could go either way. If the notion of a creator seems strange even us being here seems strange so it would not be strange to find something stranger still. Were the images we see now all there is that would be strange too; so strangeness cannot exclude anything from consideration. Indeed whatever the final answer is strangeness will have to be its hallmark, it’s an axiom which requires no corollary.
Nothing comes from nothing. So if there was ever nothing there would always be nothing. Since there is not nothing now there was never nothing, there was always something. What (or who) it is of course is the question. The answer to to be or not to be is simpler: to be.
So far so good.
Nietzsche was still doing philosophy, if just barely, or at least from time to time as a sidelight. What we want to call what Heidegger was doing after his linguistic turn is anyone’s call. Joyce called it “splitting the etym” and that is as good a try as any, perhaps playing with words or juggling with them like a sorcerer trying to see what he could ply loose as he traversed backwards to the mouth of the philological river. But even his bold adventure was still born and he closed his days rocking in his cradle. What I have done is easier to define: what I am doing is something yet again. Goethe may not have been omniscient but that was never my problem, my formal training was in megalomania. Why, if Caligula could make his horse a senator why can't I be divine?
There is the parable of the man who set out on an adventure from home and wandered the world in search of his aim only to return home dejected to find that it was right outside his door all along. Language is like that, it’s the element we live in, but like the fish who does not know he is in water we don’t realize we are swimming in it.
They say we have five senses and each of them can make an impression on the wax of memory. But when we think we create memories as well; the words we say to ourselves join the storehouse of memory; but are we seeing the words? Are we hearing the words? No and no. Through what sense then do we gain those memories? Through no sense. It is not a sixth sense though it leads to impressions, intimations and presentiments. Mind is an old English word as is eye. Then one fine day in Hamlet Shakespeare decided to combine the two (mind’s eye) and he did it two times in the play, being a showoff, that is the one who showed the way.
The irony of course is that Nietzsche was a professor of philology but left it as he thought it was pettifogging bean counting. It was a golden opportunity missed, as had been said. Of course to patiently traverse the semantic field did not suit his swashbuckling temperament, more the grand flourish than the step by step careful and painstaking meticulousness was his preferred style. Heidegger on the other hand was something of a lumberer, a plodding scholar with infinite amounts of patience to pore over, go back over, and then pore over again. But the problem was that once he established the ground that was no ground, the method, the right royal road, one needed the flamboyant once again to put the finishing touches on it, but the third time is a charm as they sometime say.
Nietzsche said that no philosopher, including himself, has had the courage to say everything that he knows. That has never been my problem, my problem being that I don’t have enough time to say it. After all if one falls flat on one’s face one falls flat on one’s face, and where else would one want to fall other than into the deep well of the river of memory where the Rhine’s gold lies? Nowhere, that’s where.
Speech therapists speak of “pragmatic speech” speech that is speech which is just a means to an end: Basic English, pedestrian communication. Language certainly has that aspect. But language also harbors within it something else, and it is this aspect which is the gift from the gods, the gift par excellence, the gift sine qua non, the gift that never stops giving and never stops living. It is this real language which make non gifted speakers into what Heidegger decisively and derisively termed “sounding boxes” meaning they speak a kind of pidgin babble; they essentially use language as a mere tool rather than a holy streaming and gleaming profusion and effusion. To them the radiant language might as well be, as it were, Sanskrit, that is it’s Greek to them. But then a bird of paradise did not drop onto their shoulder and begin speaking holy utterances, nor did they dip themselves in the eternal river where the words flow in torrents unendingly. The trick is of course to make these basic or pragmatic users learn our language, as best they can.
To the common understanding language can be nothing but a social construct, indeed it must seem the paradigmatic social construct. After all language is a tool invented my mankind, right, something we made for a purpose, in this case human communication. But linguists and brain scientists have found that the human brain is prepared for language in the womb, before any words are uttered to it; that is individual words may be pure imitation but the interstitial grammar is in-built; and this configuration in the human brain preceded the appearance of language. That is it preceded human utterance, is wholly natural. Nietzsche said that we shall never be rid of the gods until we get rid of grammar; he said it as an exhortation to get rid of grammar but good luck with that. You can no more be rid of grammar than you can with the human capacity to see or hear. And so you will never be rid of the gods any more than you will be rid of reality itself.
Novalis said that language is only concerned with itself. It is true that it does have the snake eating its tail quality, to be self-conscious and self-referential. But even so this is not true, strictly speaking or speaking any other way. Language emanates from the concepts and generates the images. And once the images (streaming and gleaming) are in place the concepts and the words will fall away, finally; there is nothing behind the images, it is an impersonal world of the imagination and the perfect playground of the will; if you can conceive it you can see it, if you can think it you can live it, if you are it you can be it; not a simulacrum or a simulation or a second life; but life itself and unalloyed consciousness and sight. Eternity is an image after all, or a streaming profusion of them; not a reflection of images; there are mirrors there but transparent ones. Nietzsche said that being was the last wisps of an evanescent reality; wrong again; it is the first glimmering iridescent shimmering sinuous glimpse of the gleaming and streaming future.
In Human, All Too Human Nietzsche was on a tear and in chapter 11 he calls Language the presumptive science, that is the science that thinks too well of itself, is presumptuous, and puts on airs, or in the vernacular, is too big for its britches. As a deconstructionist avant la lettre (there is nothing before or after the letter), or the founder of deconstructionism, he saw through everything, and accused the language purveyors of making promises they could not keep, of having premises that were shot through with holes. But in the avalanche and landslide he went one bridge too far; in the chaos of becoming the gods gave us one element of order and stability: language itself. To be sure it is a moving system of many moving parts and rotating galaxies, but nevertheless within its own becoming has an imperious stability, the stability of meaning in that language, when properly meshed with and internalized and appropriated, can begin to speak a language all its own, that is it is not speaking our language but we are speaking its. And there is no presumption here; I’ve seen it with my own two eyes; I didn’t find it; it found me.
“By means of language man mistakenly placed one world, his own, alongside another, a place of leverage that he thought so firm as to admit of his turning the rest of the cosmos on a pivot that he might master it.”
Here the obvious if unstated reference is to Archimedes, that with a fulcrum or a place to stand he could move the world. The irony is there is no place to stand for in eternity there is no ground but we hang around; there it is bottomless and has no height nor depth either; it is not a dizzying look into the abyss because here logic and proportion never fail and never fall; for you need no pivot or fulcrum to stand when the world begins to move on its own in response to our cues. For there we are in the nexus of the web and we never lose control.
“Very tardily (only now) it dawns upon men that they have propagated a monstrous error in their belief in language. Logic itself rest upon an assumption that nothing in the world corresponds to.”
This is the howler of howlers; logic itself is the world, is reality, or is rather the key or the means to it; it does nothing but correspond, words are the vocalizations or the calls to which reality responds to, in a never-ending series of call and response; it is the answer itself, the answer that swerves. And every position or site is privileged when the faculty has been got together, then what you are looking at is that high royal road that has no destination because it never ends. That is there is logic, albeit a stony logic, but stony logic is logic nonetheless, indeed the only one there is. Just so you know you find it by reading and writing with patience and care, and out of the blue out in the wild blue yonder; you have only to free your mind. Of course you only have my say so, my ipse dixit, but then you could do worse; in the vernacular a grammar after it has semantically skidded is a lexicon, a rule or guide book, and the map is the territory; and when you learn how to read it you can impose your fantasy life on the world; indeed your fantasy life becomes the world, a world of pure radiance. But this side of the veil we may well ask: Is it true? It’s always a good question and one we give up to the gods and their tribunals. We’ll see as they say. Let me say that again, with the right emphasis on the right syllable: we’ll see. If aught of weird or wild wonder you are looking for cease your search. Any questions?
