Our thoughts on memory remind us that there is no possibility of transcendance, by which I mean, that everything we do, feel, or say, everything we experience (everything, and not merely the intellectual) or even perceive (all historical events, all natural events) is not immediate, we are never able to come into contact with the source. There is no possibility of ever breaking through into science, to the extent that science attempts to explain the unknown by means of the knowable, to bridge the gap between reality (the unknown) and perception (the knowable). Not even as a hypothesis -- we can't even make a hypothesis that can then be tested. It's certainly an admirable effort to attempt to reduce everything to the bare, material, minimum, but it's also a faulty effort. We can never make the leap from things as they really are, to perception, perception bears no knowable relationship to things as they are.
A relationship with objects we can call reading. Reading is an activity that takes place without transcendance but, on the other hand, without understanding either. Reading takes place on the edge of comprehension, it is just before us or just outside of our reach. In other words, reading is that which we can think, since thinking is precisely the attempt to deal with the just before. Now, we must not understand this too literally, thinking is not a journey or a transport, thinking does not actually follow a thought. But rather, all thinking deals with an abstract space...
What is the 'just before', if not transport?
Comments (2)
I totally agree with your first paragraph. But I wonder why you chose the word "reading" to represent this grim picture? Seems an odd choice.
@herzog3000 - Hey herzog, I consider the primary error of thinking to be transcendence, which includes both the usual sense (thinking that one has heard divine knowledge, that one has come upon a source of truth) and the materialistic sense (that one has stumbled upon a pessimistic truth or knows the lowly inner workings of things, like science). Reading is that kind of thinking that avoids transcendance, in other words, it is characterized by its finitude. Unfortunately, finitude is not definable as a set of rules or methods, but it can only be practiced. It involves pursuing that which is "just before". Reading practices finitude and discovers a finitude in the works that it reads. I guess another way to think about reading is a relationship to objects (literally, like a book, table, picture, house, etc.), one relates to objects or one speaks to objects in their finitude. This means that one disposes of the anthropological method, which tends to see objects as mystical, religious, etc., or a product of some mystical milieu or time. But this is to assume beforehand that the objects are transcendental thinkings. But finitude is a kind of responsibility to the object, it is an intimate relationship with something as a thinking. For example, a naive person might look at a gravemarker and say that it is based on some mystical or religious understanding of death. But reading will attempt to try to work out this relationship, it will try to ask how this gravemarker is a thinking.
In the next few days, I'm going to be arguing (probably with Keats) that a relationship to some particular object will always come across a moment of difficulty -- an 'unreadable moment'. The reading of an object is a kind of engagement with an object that will understand it to some extent, and understand it's thinking. But it will also come across a moment of difficulty. This moment of difficulty, I will argue, is not a transcendental moment or a departure from finitude (or simply saying whatever it wants to), but it will be an event in thinking that we have to respond to. It will be a moment when someone has spoken seemingly from beyond finitude, but it will not be transcendental, but it is a difficulty that we have to respond to. In responding to this moment, and in working out the implications of this moment of difficulty, we will seem to approach the essence or the truely original moment in thinking -- that which is most difficult, that which is (just barely) outside of our understanding, but also that which is most essential. I will try to argue that that most essential/difficult moment in thinking is an attempt to name the kind of ultimate pursuit of thinking (which is...?), that which a life of thinking is after.