The fall of immortals

First posted: 24 march 2010

Philosophy is dead and we killed it, apart from some gleam of men appearing here and there (although a missing person) within the decay we are passing through.

Even at the universities, during the lessons, we can feel the burden of this immense loss. We study informations (dates and datas), occasionally, if we’re lucky, we can attend at “teachers-driven” lectures about a doomed attempt to persuade students to accept the tutor’s truth, who is forcing, squeezing and crumbling authors extrapolated from their context. We try to dig into the ground written words pushing them into a self-misunderstanding, disrupting and forcing to reshape themselves and to betray their own author.

Where – I wonder then – has the real question vanished? I’m searching for the man, but where is the man if the question has disappeared? Philosophy is a continuous asking, interrogation, collision, confront beyond the so-defined dogmas, that is beyond the certitudes we build around us due to a personal choice or to find a sort of comfort, but nowadays how many of us are willing to test themselves, experiencing their limits, taking the risk of getting lost along a forest? Although everyone tends to feel the elected, the demiurge of the situation, with arrogance, only few of us understand that it’s not important to know and learn something with an absolutly certainty but it’s more important searching, changing, not being static and having the courage to change our mind.

But how can anyone get surprised by anything in the very present period of time? We believe that the desensitization makes us stronger, but it makes us more schizophrenic than we are: the thrilling of emotions, the one that frees us from all these self-imposed chains made by society that builds cyborgs, is considered as something to remove from ourselves.

We can’t dream anymore: we just schematize everthing, even the feelings. We fall in love with someone by various calculations: as in a schedule, we choose our partner, according to her/his qualities without really thinking about what we’re feeling for that person. We choose our work because of money and according to the easiest way to advance along the career. We watch a movie and, instead of letting ourselves experience it, letting the heart beat following the rhythm of the sounds that floods us, listening to the flow of the film streaming in front of our sight, we ask about the meaning of the plot to understand the moral teachings, that “something” able to fix all the fruition into an interrupted and detached frame, something able to stop the film from provoking our emotions, teaching us to give an interpretation of the worlds where it is moving on (and while I’m writing this, I’m thinking, for example, of a filmmaker like David Lynch).

Art tries to rape us and we stand by impassively: nothing can touches us if it can’t hurt us physically, what an horror! (“The horror… the horror” Kurtz said at the end of the book “Heart of Darkness” by Conrad or, if you don’t know it, in the movie “Apocalypse Now” by Coppola).

We are proud to become like stones, to prove being strong in front of people eyes who, like us, are believing in the power of impassibility without the comprehension that, nowadays, the strongest person is who has got the courage to show his tears, because he frees himself from cages that make people repressed in a mental mechanism holding them in a vise and more and more leading to apparently senseless panic attacks.

We use tricks to withdraw from ourselves and to feel something we are unable to perceive anymore. We’re drugging our senses to feel us omnipotent and, at the same time, to feel that something we lost: but without heart and pain, dreams and tears… Does it make any sense that we try to exist as if we were immortal gods? Suddenly an aporia stifles us.

Some notes about the philosophy on "Parmenides" by Martin Heidegger

First posted: 12 march 2010

“Now, i will explain to you – and you’re supposed to keep listening and receive my speaking –

Which are the paths of knowledge (=the searching for the knowledge),the ones we can think of:

The first that “is”, and it’s impossible to define this “being” as non-existent

- this is the path of persuasion, because he follows the truth –

The second one that “is not” , and it’s a  necessary event that it “is not” (being non-existent).

And I will tell you that the last one is a path where nothing can be learned.

In fact, you could never learn the non –existent( what “is not”),

Being something that cannot be accomplished,

And you could never express it (by meanings) […].

Thus thinking and being is the same”.

(Excerpts by PARMENIDES’ «Fragments»)

It’s not a simple practise to make translations, “faithful, loyal”, mirroring  the original text, without altering or “corrupting” it and, in the meantime, making it suitable for a different time, context, culture, fitting it into a language, completely different than the original one.

In my opinion, the most important thing, while starting a new translation, isn’t  trying to understand the specific meaning of the word (term, idiom, etc.) we are going to translate, but searching for the inner significant concept beyond the mere literal text. So we could easily seize and “capture” the importance of those concepts, considered by a social, cultural, mental, textual point of view, focusing on the “environment” the text itself was composed in.

Let’s analyse the ancient greek word “αληθέια”: we usually translate this term with the correlative, corresponding  form “truth”. But, as the german philosopher Heidegger notices and explains in some of his essays and lessons dedicated to and entitled “Parmenides”  that  we should pay attention, keeping our intellectual efforts rooted over the initial prefix, called “alpha privative”, recalling the authentic etymology of the lemma itself.

In many modern and contemporary translation into different indo-european languages (or other families of languages), some interpreters and scholars neglect the importance of the “alpha privative”, making the text lose its original meaning, depaupering the core of the wisdom.

Heidegger suggested and offered a different type of translation, using the term “Entbergung “, in order to evoke the substantial theoretical background hidden underneath the evident textual reference; we could attempt to link the Heidegger’s translation to the concept and process of  uncovering and disclosing a concealed perennial truth. This effort oriented to the seeking of  “αληθέια” could also be connected to the process of “unveiling”; in fact, the ancient greek word “αληθέια” comes from the verb “λανθάνω”, meaning to hide, to conceal, etc. The “alpha privative” marks the effect of UN-veiling, of DIS-closing, of UN-covering the truth, a pregnant coexistence of obscure veils and shining clearing into forest “wege” (hidden paths).

At this turning point of Heidegger’s argumentation there are four points to underline and consider regarding this greek term:

1. Something “UNveiled” is given (as a precondition): if something “UNveiled” does exist, then there must be something “veiled”, but we are not allowed or supposed to know. Here the “Unveiled” is something to be preserved, as an occult covering of an original truth.

2. Coming back to the “alpha privative“,  we have to notice how the Un-veiling here is meant as an entity that can delete, cover or wipe out what is veiled, Un-disclosing it, or, in a paradox, it could even mean that the veiled doesn’t properly exist, but it’s the correlative side of the metamorphosis of the UN-veiling, that necessitates the veiled content .

3. So it’s originated a conflict, that is present and active in the essence of truth. According to sections of western modern philosophy based upon post-aristotelian rationalism, the annihilation of the veiled content is inconceivable, because the “nihil”, the void are included among the categorizing divisions of the negative topics.

Heavily conditioned by our scientific network of dogmas, we often forget that our western viewpoints are just a way to ponder over subjects . There are different perspectives, such as the eastern wisdom, taught by other philosophies, masters, forms of knowledge. For example, Schopenhauer tried to bring some studies about eastern traditions to the west, enlightening nineteenth century philosophers. He explained that a common human being could reach an ideal condition – called “Nirvana” – revolting against the “Wille”, the omnipresent “Will” that rules the events of human existence and dominates our fates. Through the fighting against this “Wille” we could proceed towards an alternative state of being, symbolized by the “void”. This sort of vacuity is not blamed as a negative condition, according to Schopenhauer tought. (It’s most of the western philosophical tradition that stigmatizes this “Void” as a totally negative degeneration).

The “Un-covering” has nothing to do with the systematic axioms of Hegel’s philosophy. German philosophical “idealism“ has elaborated a scheme to classify their conclusions. We find the triad structured by thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis. Other thinkers seem to match their reflections with Descartes’ studies. Here everything is subjected to the strict “law” of the so-called “Cogito ergo sum“. This “Cogito” is the divine self-awareness, so the divine transcendence of God states its perennial, immortal existence by accomplishing the act of thinking itself. Thinking is the logical dogma that justifies the existence of a divine God that declares its own power. This opposition between the mundane and the transcendent, between the augustinian “civitas dei“ and “civitas mundi”, between the perfection of the self proclaming god and the transitory human existence, between the “res cogitans” (god itself) and the “res extensa” (= reality, the world, the existence) is deeply confuted by Heidegger. He disagrees with Descartes about the Subject separated from the Object. The Subject is the “Dasein”, that is the human existing across time and space, and this Subject, when starts to care about an authentical type of existence, should attempt to listen to the “Being” itself, the UN-veiled “αληθέια”. This is the peculiar path an authentic human being should follow.

(“The concept of a self-aware Subjectivity, sure of its «ens» -entity- , doesn’t belong to the spirit of ancient greek philosophy. But it’s surely true that in the modern essence of the «subjectivity of the spirit» – that, if considered in a correct way, has nothing to do with the subjectiveness – is evoked the sound of the changed essence of greek αληθέια“)

4. “No other echoing resembles to the original echoing. The initial beginning is directed only towards the initial beginning. One isn’t the same as the other. And nevertheless both are the Same (Das Selbe), even when they seem to separate one from the other into the unmatchable divergent” (Taken from “Heidegger’s Parmenides”).

Here Heidegger means to refer to Parmenides toughts, quoted in the fragments i transcribed in the incipit. Reading both these philosophers we can notice how they state that, even if the veiled and the UN-veiled are separate and divided, nevertheless they merge and they are interconnected because they can exist only if they share a mutual relation

We all know that the light is opposed to the obscure darkness. They are two opposite poles, two different concepts and experiences. So we distinguish them and we think they are not compatible or specular. But ancient greeks (and most of eastern wisdoms and knowledges) explain that the shining light and the abyssal obscurity shouldn’t be differentiated. The “αληθέια” is a “coincidentia oppositorum”, not a dogma.