From Word To Word

Truth must be known, not as facts are known, but as lovers are known, partially, fleetingly, uncertainly, overwhelmingly, undeniably, impossibly.  It can be known only with a knowing that never defines or delineates or delimits, that never assures or guarantees or promises.  It can be known only so far as we are in it.  This is why we can never have the truth, why we can only ever be in the truth, and even this is beyond all guarantee.

Heidegger says, “Every thinker thinks one only thought,” and again, “The thinker needs one thought only, and for the thinker the difficulty is to hold fast to this one only thought as the one and only thing that he must think.”

This idea of the one only thought reminds me of Kierkegaard when he says that “Purity of heart is to will one thing.”  Of course, it would not do to conflate Kierkegaard with Heidegger here, and it would be very hasty indeed to assume that willing one thing and thinking one thing are necessarily related, but I am tempted nevertheless to say that thinking one thing might require a certain purity also, not a purity of heart perhaps, because the heart’s purpose is to will, but a purity of mind.  If purity of heart is to will one thing, then perhaps purity of mind is to think one thing.  Perhaps holding fast to the one only thought is just such a purity.

Would it be too daring to suggest now, as I deliberately refrained from suggesting just a paragraph ago, that the one only thing to be willed by the pure heart and the one only thing to be thought by the pure mind are one and the same?  This is, I think, an audacity that would remain unjustified even after much patient work.  Even so, I will say it, unjustified as it may be, and I will say also, though it dares much more, that a purity of heart and a purity of mind require each other to become fully what they should be.

Yet, how does the thinker come to think this one only thing, come to encounter it, come to recognize it?  Will it consent to be named?  If I was to give it a name, if I was to call to it by name, to call it love, perhaps, or to call it hospitality, or to call it justice, or even, surely in a moment of great rashness, to call it God, how much would these names, one or another, deform the one only thought that I must hold fast, the one only thought that these names try but fail to name?  Is this why Heidegger goes on to say that the thinker must keep saying the one only thought in the manner that befits it, in a manner that lets the thinker be claimed by it?  Is it that the thinker must keep saying, again and again, in whatever ways seem best, this one only thing that is always the same thing?  Is it that this one only thing must claim the thinker precisely because the thinker can never claim the one only thing?

How then does the thinker hold fast to this one only thought that must be thought, and must be said, but can never be claimed, like a desire, a discipline, a lust, a commandment, a will, a need, a perseverance?  How is it that we are to think this one only thing?

As I return once more to Martin Heidegger’s What Is Called Thinking?, I am stepping away from the thread of his argument for a moment to take up some comments that he makes on the the nature of teaching.  “Teaching is more difficult than learning,” he says, “because what teaching calls for is this: to let learn.  The real teacher, in fact, lets nothing else be learned than – learning.  His conduct, therefore, often produces the impression that we properly learn nothing from him, if by ‘learning’ we now suddenly understand merely the procurement of useful information.  The teacher is ahead of his apprentices in this alone, that he has still far more to learn than they – he has to learn to let them learn.  The teacher must be capable of being more teachable than the apprentices.”  Then, a few pages further on, he returns to the subject, saying, “Learning, then, cannot be brought about by scolding.  Even so, a man who teaches must at times grow noisy.  In fact, he may have to scream and scream, although the aim is to make his students learn so quiet a thing as thinking.”

The question of teaching and learning is one that continually preoccupies me, as my longtime readers will know, and I am particularly concerned with how to teach, not literature as such, but learning through literature.  I am interested, to use Heidegger’s language, in how to teach students to learn, in how to provoke them to learning, in how to draw them into learning.  The difficulty is that I must accomplish this within the constraints of institutional education, according to the demands of grades and credits and degrees, demands which remain operative on students generally even if they are alleviated, at least to some extent, in my own class?

In response to these questions, I am toying with several ideas for my fall class, and I am interested in Heidegger’s claim that to teach is to let learn, but that this letting learn is not necessarily a quiet or a passive thing, that it sometimes involve a good deal of noise, a good deal of screaming.  In other words, if Heidegger is interested in what provokes us to thinking, I wonder whether we might take another form of this word and suggest that he is interested also, at least to some degree, in the provocative, insofar as it relates to thinking, and the question for my own teaching becomes about how to provoke learning, how to provoke reading, how to provoke reflection, how to provoke conversation, how to provoke writing, and to do so entirely apart from the entirely artificial and deformative stimuli of grades and credits.  How would a teacher be provocative in this way?  Would it require a certain noisiness at times, as Heidegger suggests?  What would be required for a teacher to provoke in our school stoday?

In What Is Called Thinking? Heidegger says, “What must be thought about turns away from man.  It withdraws from him….  But – withdrawing is not nothing.  Withdrawal is an event.  In fact, what withdraws may even concern and claim man more essentially than anything present that strikes and touches him….  What withdraws from us draws us along by its very withdrawal, whether or not we become aware of it immediately, or at all…. To the extent that man is drawing that way, he points to what withdraws.”

In my last post on this book, I was asking about what it is in us that recognizes that we are still not thinking.   The above quotation relates to this question, I think, in that it gives agency to what must be thought, to the question of why we are not yet thinking, rather than to we who would think it.  The reason that we are not yet thinking is not solely because we fail to reach out to what must be thought, but also because what must be thought turns itself away from us, withdraws from us.

This withdrawal, however, is not nothing, and Heidegger is insistent on this point.  Though the withdrawal of what needs to be thought means that we never encounter it as something present that strikes us or touches us, it nevertheless draws us along, makes us follow after it, pulls us in its wake, and we therefore point to it through our own motion in relation to it.  We may not recognize that we are drawn in this way, but we are nevertheless drawn, and we point towards what draws us, for ourselves and for each other.

In a sense, this answers the questions of my previous post, because we are no longer required to recognize that we are not yet thinking despite the fact that we are not yet thinking.  Rather, what must be thought, the question of why we are not yet thinking, is itself actively drawing us, and we need only to recognize that we are being drawn.  Even so, at least this much is required of us: that we realize that we are being drawn, that this drawing must point toward something that withdraws, and Heidegger himself acknowledges that some do not ever make this realization.    So what is it, to reformulate my previous question slightly, that causes some to make this realization and not others?

There is also the question of the agency that Heidegger ascribes to what must be thought.  After all, in what sense can we speak of something to be thought as active, as withdrawing, as drawing us after it?  What kind of agency can an object of thought actually exercise, especially when it is really only an object of thought in relation to the human capacity for thinking?  If it is the question of why we are not yet thinking, and if it is what must be thought by us, then it is what it is only in relation to us.  How, then, can it act upon us?  How can it draw us after it?

Can we speak, perhaps, of a structure of human being in the world that itself produces what must be thought as an essential by-product of its being in the world, whether consciously or otherwise?  Does the human mode of being in the world, in other words, somehow essentially and structurally presuppose the question of why we are not yet thinking?   If so, do we cast this question ahead of ourselves, so to speak, setting in motion the very thing that will withdraw from us, that will draw us after it?  Are we simultaneously driving this question before us and being drawn after its withdrawal?

How then would we understand thinking?  What would our relation to it be?  Is it this question itself that puts us on the way to thinking?

Graham Ward’s The Politics of Discipleship -  I really enjoyed Ward’s earlier book, Barth, Derrida, and the Language of Theology, a careful and insightful work that responds to Derrida’s thinking with a respect that I have not often found in Christian thinkers, so I was expecting something more than I got from The Politics of Discipleship.  It still carries itself with a certain care and respect in its more philosophical sections, but much of its argument ventures into sociology and economics and politics in ways that I thought were less convincing.  I frequently found myself wishing that Ward would move more slowly, more cautiously, more precisely, more rigorously.  Each of the book’s sections needed its own book, needed to take its time, needed to make some time for what it had to say. Even so, there was much in it that I found useful, and I have quoted one section of it on several occasions now, so it is probably worth a read.  Just moderate your expectations.

John Gardner’s Grendel – I first read this book a number of years ago.  I liked it very much then but even more now on my second reading.  It is short, and it reads quickly, so it can feel deceptively simple, but it rewards an attentive reading with profundity.  I am addicted to the Beowulf legend, so I read or watch every adaptation that I can find, but I am almost always disappointed by portrayals of Grendel.  Everyone seems to want Grendel to be more human.  They try to develop sympathy for him by humanizing him, and they fail to understand how essential it is that he be evil, essentially and absolutely, in order that Beowulf might become the sort of hero that he is.  If Grendel is humanized, then Beowulf’s heroism is ambiguous, and this might make a perfectly good story, but it is no longer the story of Beowulf.  Gardner’s Grendel does not fall into this error.  Though his Grendel does inspire a certain sympathy, it is a sympathy for the role that he must play as monster rather than a sympathy for a humanity that is simply hidden behind a monstrous appearance.  This Grendel is never anything than a monster, and it is precisely this that inspires our sympathy.  He is my favourite portrayal of the Grendel figure outside of the original.

Charles Williams’ The Greater Trumps – I never understand a Charles Williams novel.  I only experience it.  I experience it as a mystery and as a pleasure and as a wonder.  My capacity for description is always beggared by his writing, and I can only ever tell others to read him for themselves, so I will say it once more: read Charles Williams for yourselves.

Margaret Atwood’s  Oryx and Crake – I read this book on the recommendation of a friend, though I have never been a big fan of Atwood’s.  It is not a bad book.  If I had not known who the author was, I would even have said that it was a fairly good book, on the higher end of the science fiction genre with respect to its writing, though not much by the way of science fiction, seeing as it represents a futuristic world in which people are still using CD ROMs.  Yes, I said CD ROMs.  Unfortunately, it is not the work of some middling science fiction writer but of the most recognized name in Canadian literature, and so it stands as one more example of why Atwood simply does not deserve this status.  The story is mostly interesting.  The characters are sometimes engaging.  The plot is well structured.  All well and good, to be sure, but none of this sets Atwood above any of a dozen genre writers I have read over the years, and she offers precious little else.  There is not a single sentence in the whole of the book worth savouring as a sentence, as language, as literature.  It is not a bad book, as I said, and maybe it was intended to be nothing more, which I can respect, but I do wish people would stop telling me how wonderful a writer she is.

John Porcellino’s Thoreau at Walden – If I had ever imagined the story of Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond being told in cartoon, which I assure you is a thing I have never imagined, I would have been very doubtful about the wisdom of such a project.  I would have suggested that the very fine balance between romantic ideal and practical wisdom in Thoreau, a balance that too often teeters in one direction or another even in the original, would have been impossible to maintain in something as simple as a cartoon.  I would also, it seems, have been wrong, since Porcellino’s book maintains the sensibility of Thoreau’s writing admirably, though its art is very simple.  It was only a matter of minutes to read, but it’s effect lingered much longer.

I have been reading Heidegger’s What is Called Thinking? and I am realizing very quickly that it is not the kind of book that can be read and then summarized after the fact, a problem that I encounter again and again with the more philosophical books that I read, but that I am feeling acutely now with respect to this particular book.  So I will try to write a little differently about it as I am reading, as a kind of experiment.  I will offer a quotation from the book, or perhaps a brief summary of a section, and then I will add my own questions and reflections, and I may write more than several times about the book over the course of a few weeks.  Hopefully there will be those who are willing to think these things with me, or, as Heidegger might say, hopefully there will be those those who are willing to journey with me on the way to thinking.

Heidegger says, “What of itself gives us most to think about, what is most thought-provoking, is this – that we are still not thinking.”

If we are not yet thinking, what is it in us that recognizes this ’still not”, this thinking that might be but is ’still not’?  What is it in us that recognizes that we are still not thinking, that we are perhaps not yet even on the way to thinking?  What is it in us that undertakes, or perhaps does not undertake, the way to thinking?  What is it in us that would make an ideal of thinking, that would desire to learn how to think?

This recognition of thinking, this desire for thinking, this will to thinking, cannot be said to belong essentially to all human being in the world, since there are many who refuse it and who are no less human for this refusal.  It cannot even be said to belong potentially to all human being in the world, since there are many who are not even capable of thinking in this way and who are no less human for this lack.  Yet there is something, something that appears only in relation to human being in the world, something that nevertheless, in some cases, perhaps only here and there, but again and again, recognizes, and desires, and wills thinking.   What is this thing?  Though I may not yet know how to think, though I may not yet even have undertaken the way to thinking, why is it that I desire to undertake it?  Why do I want to know what is called thinking?

I was supposed to give a weekend of talks on home and the threshold last year about this time, and I promised a reader that I would post my notes, but the talks were subsequently postponed until the fall, and then I forgot about posting them entirely. I ran across them this afternoon, however, as I was going through a completed notebook before filing it, so I thought I might still post them here, though it is now long after the fact. They are not notes in the sense of an outline for any talk or talks in particular, because I do not really speak in this way. Rather, they are the short reflections on the home that informed my thinking going into those talks. I am posting them merely as I wrote them, almost unedited.

The limits of the home are defined by the beyond of the home, by the street, by the neighbourhood, by the town or the countryside. The home is the home because of what is not the home, because it divides the space of the world into the at home and the not at home. In a significant sense, therefore, the home can only know itself as home to the degree that it knows what is not home. The home is defined by what is beyond the home.

To say this most radically, I can perhaps become at home only through my practice of being not at home.  The home is always, by definition, distinct from what is not home, but the practice of home begins when I am not a at home.  The practice of the home begins as a practice of the street and of the neighbourhood.  It is a practice of  the road.

The practice of the road is a practice of openness to encountering the other person.  It is an openness to being moved by the other person.  It does not try to manufacture an encounter through its own activity.  It maintains an active openness to what may encounter me.  It is an active passivity, an active waiting.  It maintains an availability to the approach of the other person, a kind of hospitality in advance.

The practice of the road is pedestrian.  The driver is transported and so is closed to the other person. The pedestrian is not transported.  The pedestrian is always potentially open to encounter.

The road is the image and the metaphor of what is not the home.  It leads to and from the home.  It begins and ends at the doorway of the home.  There is no home without a road, no home from which one does not depart and to which one does not return.  Without this coming and going, without this journeying to and from the home, there is no home, not of any kind.

My journeying is always in relation to the home.  I circulate around this pole, around this center.  It remains before me and behind me, an object of my longing and my nostalgia.

When I am encountered on the road, I am always encountered in relation to the home, in relation to my coming and going, in relation to my longing and nostalgia, in relation to my ground and my center.  My response to the other is grounded precisely in this relation to home.  The home determines how I turn myself toward the other, how I hold myself open to the other, how I maintain myself in anticipation of the other.

The road is the place where I encounter the other, always, without exception.  There is no other place where I am confronted by the other.  If I am confronted by the other, I am on the road, no matter where I am.

The confrontation, the encounter, brings me alongside the other, even if only for a moment.  It turns me in the same direction. It causes us me walk with the other.  The road makes us companions, fellow travelers, strangers walking in the same path.

The place of the threshold is the limit of the home and the not home.  It is the membrane.  It is the hymen.  It is the sacred curtain.

The door cannot be left open, not always.  Only the home can be always open.  If the door is always open, if anyone can enter the home at any time, the limit between the home and the road is erased.  The home ceases to exist as a home.  It ceases to be distinguishable from the road.  Its intimate space is no longer distinct from the public space of the world.

The open home is not the home that has its doors open to the other always and in every case.  It is the home that is always open to the possibility that the door might be opened to the other always and in every case.  It is the home that desires that the door might indeed be opened to the other always and in every case, though this desire always remains impossible.

The open home always anticipates the other’s approach.  It always receives the other at the threshold, even if, for whatever reason, the other cannot be invited across the threshold at this time.  It is a home that always welcomes the approach of the other, even if this welcome cannot become an invitation across the threshold.  The open home is not an absolute hospitality.

At the same time, the practice of the door expresses itself as a desire for the invitation.  The open home may not be able to extend an invitation to the other in every case, but it always desires to do so.  It is always broken-hearted when it cannot do so.  The open home is always characterized by a willingness to lay aside whatever it can in order that an invitation might be extended.  It delights to sacrifice itself in order to receive the approach of the other with an invitation.

The open home is essentially, but not absolutely, hospitible.  It does not make of one the host and of another the guest.  Its desire  is to make everyone at home, to whatever degree it is able.  It does not reserve the invitation for an occasion, because its invitation is not to an occasion.  Its invitation is to the home, as it is at that moment, as it is striving to be at that moment.

When an exile reaches the foreign shore, it is not an arrival, for only a return to the native shore can be an arrival for the exile, but neither is it a departure, for the departure was accomplished the moment that the exile left the shores of home. The foreign shore, therefore, is neither a coming nor a going. It is an eternal between, a place that is never here and a time that is never now.

We are all exiles in this way, however much we succeed in forgetting it.  We are all out of place and out of time.  We all inhabit this eternal between, exiles from home, haunting a foreign shore.

Since I posted on the work of writing in the age of digital replication, I have begun, finally, to read Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media, part of which relates to what I was addressing in that post.   My argument was essentially that a digital copy of a digital object “is always entirely identical to its original and to every other copy,” but Manovich proposes, among his several principles of new media, a principle of variability, which states that “a new media object is not something fixed once and for all, but something that can exist in different, potentially infinite variations.”

What Manovich means by this is that the same digital object can be, and often is, altered and modified according to the specifications of each user, so that each user has, at least in potential, access to many variations of the same digital object.  For example, the digital object of this post will be used to produce many variant digital objects by different users.  Some will read it through one or another feed reader.  Some will read it through this site itself.  Some will see it first in a search engine’s display.  These people will be using various browsers, various graphics drivers, and various operating systems.  All of these things will manipulate the original digital object and create a variation of it for the end users.

Now, Manovich’s principle and my own are not mutually exclusive, but they do emphasize two apparently opposing characteristics of the digital object, and they do raise the question of how exactly digital objects are related to the copies and the variations that are made from them.  In this respect, I would suggest that it is necessary to refine the idea of the copy as such, whether it is being used to describe digital objects or physical ones, and I would argue that every copy is distinct from its source object both in space and in time.  Whatever continuity there may be in the content of the object, in the words or the code or the images that it bears, it is always temporally and spatially discontinuous from every other copy.  Whether I am printing a new edition of a book or copying a file for a friend, the copy is always discontinuous from its original.

This distinction may seem obvious, but it is necessary to insist on it in order to realize the difference between how digital objects relate to their copies as opposed to how physical objects do so.  When I take a physical object, I can mark it, individualize it, make it more unique.  When I do so, I create an object that is new, in a very real sense, but one that is not temporally and spatially discontinuous with the one that it replaced.  When I add notes in its margins, or spill coffee on it, or put a dedication on its flyleaf, or bend the corners of its pages to mark my place, I make that object different from the object that it was, but this object is not discontinuous in time and space from the previous object.  This is what allows the user to fetishize the physical object, what makes it available to the user as an object of nostalgia or obsession. It is a new and unique object, but it is physically and historically continuous with the object of the user’s memory.  It takes a place in history.  It is, in fact, entirely irreplaceable.

When I make changes to a digital object, however, these changes do not modify an object that remains continuous with the one that was changed.  Instead, they always create an entirely new digital object.  There is never any way for the digital object to be changed except to be created as entirely new.  It can only be the source for a new object that is in every case entirely discontinuous spatially and temporally from the one that preceded it, and this new object can only be identical with the source object or not.  It has no other way to appear.  There will never be the digital equivalent of coffee stains or bent corners, because any such interventions become embodied in the new object itself.  Even if it replaces the object that preceded it, it is a new and discontinuous object.  Even if it maintains a history of the changes that have been made to it, it is a new and discontinuous object.

It is precisely because digital objects function in this way that they can be made identical, producing copies that are able to replace their originals in every respect.  One copy is a good as another.  So long as they are copies, any one will do.  This is why, while it is still possible to fetishize the function and the history of a digital object, it is never possible to fetishize one copy of this digital object over another.  It is possible for me to have nostalgia for a digital song or computer program, but one copy of these objects will always be as good to me as another, because they will always be entirely interchangeable.  They will never have dog ears or creases or stains that make them identifiably mine and identifiably a part of my history.  They will always remain invisible to my memory and to my history and to my nostalgia.

What Manovich’s principle of variability recognizes, therefore, is the ability of a particular digital object to be manipulated endlessly, but what it fails to recognize is that these manipulations are not variations of the original digital object at all, but entirely new digital objects in themselves.  Though they have used the original object as a source, they are no longer continuous with it spatially or temporally.  In other words, exactly counter to what I quoted from Manovich in my opening paragraph, a new media object is indeed fixed once and for all, however many further objects might use it as a source.  It cannot, as Manovich claims, exist in potentially infinite variations.  It can only be a source for a potentially infinite set of new objects.  While a physical object might potentially exist in many ways as it becomes subject to the alterations of time and space, this is precisely the thing that the digital object can never do.

There is a way of being between that is a balance, that is a caution and a calculation and a measurement, that is a careful poise on the edge of every possible direction, that is a walk on a line, foot in front of foot, to prove one’s sobriety.  This between is a refusal of any extreme, of any discipline or extravagance, of any sacrifice or excess.  It is a moderate moderation, a balanced balance, a considered consideration.  It is a swallow of warm water.

There is also a way of being between that is a suspense, a tautness and a tensity, a pulling and a straining, that is a dangling in the void, that is a stretching on the rack, inch by inch, to prove one’s faith.  This between is a desire that is both lascivious and ascetic, both wanton and austere, both carnal and sacred, simultaneously.  It hangs between these things.  It is drawn and quartered.  It is agonized and exaltated.  It is a live coal on the tongue.