It's 75 and sunny, and I'm inside thinking about infinity, selfhood, and being. Oh, and the Other (the other, L'autrui). I'm trying not to think I'm stupid, but it's hard. What follows is my attempt to cram two or so years of the study of philosophy and Greek logic into two days, and to synthesize all of these with my understanding of the 45 pages I read last night and my own concerns about rhetoric and literature and Christianity. Forgive me for its length and absurdity.
Last night, sitting crosslegged on the floor while Stargate Monday dragged on to its own infinity, I came to a realization: I don't give a damn about ontology (study of being/Being).
Which, considering the dude I'm supposed to be reading about wants to disregard the idea of "Does existence exist" and move onto "How do things exist and what are the signs of existing?" this is probably not a bad thing. Levinas, unlike our friend Plato and everyone thereafter, assumes a certain "modality" or kind of being--after all, there are things, we interact with them, we either love them or hate them, and sometimes we use these things to kill each other--to end the Other's being. Proving self-being (Dasein) or Being in general isn't Levinas's project, and because of that, he can disregard a lot of the things most philosophers who deal with Being worry about. Like Aristotle's proofs.
There are four proofs coming out of the Aristotlean tradition, four laws we adhere to when discussing anything "logically." They are the foundation of all logos. These proofs were the main mode of mathematical thought until the 1800s; for more than 2000 years they held. Euclid, in particular, used these to think through geometry, plains, and lines--in other words, things that exist in space. Position equals presence equals being. And there can thus be only one line through point p outside a given line that is parallel to that given line. Anything else will not be parallel, or it will not be a line, or it will not be on the same plane as the first given line. Likewise, two parallel lines will never meet--they are defined by their continual separation at a fixed distance from one another. This is Euclid's fifth proposition, the one that was never proven, the one that had to be destroyed before we could think about wormholes and relativity and gravity as the result of space/time's shape (spacetime IS shape).
Non-Euclidean geometry says that several lines can be parallel to a given line, even when they are passing through the same given point outside that original line. We have a hard time imagining that--the drawings I've found online are counterintuitive and, in fact, cannot really be drawn (drawing occurs on a 2-D surface). However, in curved space, these multiple lines through the same point are possible, and are both the same and not the same as one another. They defy the Greek laws of both Identity (A cannot be Not A) and Non Contradiction (If two opposite statements are given, one of them must be false).
To speak of infinity, the other, ethics, and being, we have to return to a point prior to all of that Greek logic, Levinas says. To a point before our ideas about being were dependent on a self contained self which is either the Self or the Other (law of NonContradiction). Something can be neither being nor non-being--it can be something else. This is different from the "third term" Burke proposes as the "grounds" of oppositions. Burke is still working within identity there. When Burke says that there is a grounds of war and peace that is neither war nor peace, but that in this space war is a type of peace and peace is a type of war, he is still working with a set of dualities that must be one or the other (Ad Bellum Purificandum). Levinas posits a space that is neither Nothing nor Something--not that Nothing is a type of something or that Something is a special condition of nothingness. This space is what we all come from, this fabric of possible being and possible not being which has contradictory elements of both. Like Gravity, which is a noun and yet not a thing, a force and yet not generated by anything, Beingness emerges from this space. Gravity is the result of spacetime's curve. Humanity's self-knowledge of being is the result of this Il y a environment. It's almost accidental, being. And the Il y a is terrifying to us, because it is netiher/nor/both/and being and nothing.
What is the limit of being if we have three modes of it? It is not Death, as Heidegger says. To say that Death or Time (same damn thing) is the limit of being is to ignore the fact that we are constituted by the Other. Death is intimate, individual. It is the self becoming "unable to be able." But the rest of our natures are not so solitary. The limit of our Being is our relationship to the Other, Levinas says. Our infinite responsibility for/to the other.
Again, to even begin to grasp this I have to think about Aristotle and Burke. Both ascribe to entellechy as the culmination of the character of an existent, a thing that is (in itself "existent" is a strange word: Ex--outside ist--being---our existence is always materialized externally). In an entellechial mindset, we know a thing is by the way it ends up--instead of looking the process that thing (or person) took to get to this end, we define the thing by how it ends, assuming the end is the perfect form (see Frieza and Cell from DragonBall Z). Levinas argues that we can never see this end, anyway. That, if as Heidegger claimed in his later ontology, an object or person's being emerges from our encounters and experiences with the person or object, then we can never be finished knowing that thing/person, because experienced time prevents us from sensing everything about that object all at once. Being is not in the END then, but the means (to use an Aristotlean construction)--Being is in the way something makes itself known.
Thus the Other--that idea of a person who is not us that helps us define our Self--is never known except through our encounters with him/her/them. The existent that emerges from the Il y a only experiences being through his or her encounters with an Other. It is only through the Other's death and suffering that the Self can Be. And it is only through that experience with the Other that one can fear the unknowable Il y a (death--which is not NotBeing, but a return to that undifferentiated fabric).
Only through suffering the Other ("suffer the little children come unto me"?), by not just sympathizing with the pain of hte other, but by understanding Pain itself through our encounters with the suffering Other who is so near that frightening Il y a can we know time and being.
Right.
*pause for shooting self*
Which is not suicide, by the way, because Suicide is not possible. We do not ever kill ourselves, but Death Comes.
Right.
In the time it took me to type that out, the white bus went by twice. A freakin hour. And that was just from 25 pages of the Levinas I was supposed to have read for today.
Ontology is not my strong point. I have a hard time thinking through being/Being and Selfconsciousness because, like the fish who doesn't know or care that it's surrounded by water, I can't see that which constitutes me. Not that water constitutes the fish.
Never mind.
Time to synthesize.
Rhetoric isn't really concerned with ontology, except those places where ontology intersects with epistemology (knowledge of knowledge). Rhetoric is almost always concerned with epistemology, and if we need to think about whether something exists, we rhetoricians tend to worry more about whether we can *know* if something exists, and what textuality allows us to encounter that knowledge. Literature, I'd imagine is somehow connected to this mess because it is an object whose character reflected to us comprises its Being and helps us see our own Being. Literature, in making claims of presence, in attempting to make present the absent, points to Death, the Other, and Being but not, Levinas says, in an "ethical" way. Instead, because literature is, as Derrida notes, dissemination, not dialogue, it is not concerned with a continual encouter with an Other, it could care less about its responsibility to an Other. It is instead a social existent, encouraging us to act not toward or for the Other, but as one large mass, where occassionally, someone isn't suffered with.
I hesitate to agree here. Yes, literature is part of the civil, the "plastic" world, but it also, as Burke says, encourages consubstantiality--its representative anecdotes and the act of reading itself asks us to practice response-ability, identification, and sympathy. While literature may fail to be a one-on-one connection, it encourages such relationships and in the case of subversive literature, can even help us recognize that the civil society which we live in is flawed in that it does not, as Levinas says, even allow for an intimate relationship to the Other.
Not just literature, I would argue, but all communications try to cross or at least make visible the Self/Other divide. Imagine Kinneavy's commuication model--this looks frighteningly similar to Levinas's model of how the Self comes into Being--by first approaching the Other, in encoded and material ways (phenomenological ways), and then returning to the self (feedback) changed, with new realizations of the original message. To assume communication is a forcing of some cogito/ego onto an Other is to assume that all rhetoric and speech is "persuasion"--which Burke wants to deny. Rhetoric and speech is a coming to the Other, an approaching the third term between self and other for the purposes of benefiting both. The persuasion, if ther is any, is in convincing the Other to meet you halfway, convincing the Other to respond.
And all of this is connected to Girard and Jesus because....um...
Okay, I can do this.
Because Girard says that humanity, without "revealed" or "modern" religions will always try to destroy the Other because the Other does in fact remind us of the Il y a. Christianity (and the other four) shows us this structure of being quite explicitly (if we read like J Denny). Instead of killing the Other, we recognize our selves in the Other, we suffer the Other's frightening presence. Mimetic violence stops when we allow the Other to exist, when we finally face our own ability to *not be able*. We do unto others then, not because we hope they won't kill us in turn, but because we see our own suffering and death within the Other's suffering.
I think.
But I am not.
You are, therefore I am.
