Will D. Desmond

The article is a reflection occasioned by an impression of Aristotle’s irritation at the views of the Heracliteans. It offers a reflection that is inspired by, companioned by Heraclitus. It looks at aspects of the approaches of Hegel and Nietzsche as also taking a companioning approach. There is something resistant in Heraclitus’s mode of articulation that makes one diffident in claiming that now at last one is the privileged one to understand him. Heraclitus offers us striking thoughts that strike one into thought—that open up philosophical porosity to the deepest perplexities. In more detail, the author considers what is intended by flux-gibberish and how this bears on the determinacy and constancy of intelligibility. If some pervading sense of the flow of becoming must be granted, how does this bear on the constancy of intelligibility? How can we think the flow and the constancy together?

This is a reflection on the gift of beauty and the passion of being in light of the fact that today we often meet an ambiguous attitude to beauty. Beauty seems bland and lacks the more visceral thrill of the ugly, indeed the excremental. We crave what disrupts and provokes us. Bland beauty seems to be the death of originality. How then be open at all to beauty as gift? In fact, we often are disturbed paradoxically by beauty: both taken out of ourselves, hence disquieted, yet awakened to our being at home with beauty. Beauty arouses enigmatic joy in us, and we enjoy an elemental rapport with it as other. Surprised by beauty, our breath is taken away; we are more truly there with the beautiful yet taken outside of ourselves: both at home with ourselves and not at home, in being beyond ourselves. We are first receivers of the gift of surprise and only then perceivers and conceivers. My attention to the passion of being stresses a patience, a receptivity to what is other. What happens is not first our construction. Our being disarmed by the beautiful I hold to be in tune with our being as marked most deeply by what I call a primal ‘porosity’ to being. Beauty sensuously communicates in and through this awakened porosity. We are a patience of being before we are an endeavour to be. In modern aesthetics and culture, originating receptivity tends to be downplayed as a depreciation of our claims to creative power. The predominant stress often falls on human autonomy, such that we love only what we construct ourselves, not what we receive. By contrast, I argue there is something of the godsend in what is truly beautiful. This might not be a fashionable way of talking but the vocation of the philosopher is not to be fashionable but to be true.

ZusammenfassungEs ist eine gängige Praxis ethischer Reflexion, zwischen verschiedenen Systemen moralischer Werte zu unterscheiden und dann die einen gegen die anderen auszuspielen. Im Text wird eine Reflexionsform vorgestellt, die gewissermaßen einen ‚Schritt zurück‘ von derartigen vordergründigen Wertsystemen tritt und stattdessen die Quellen des Ethischen betrachtet, Quellen, die wir in unserer alltäglichen ethischen Praxis oft genug nicht beachten oder für selbstverständlich halten. Zu diesen Quellen oder Potentialen des Ethischen zähle ich das, was ich als das Idiotische, das Ästhetische, das Dianoetische, das Eudaimonische, das Transzendentale, das Transzendierende und das Transzendente bezeichne. Ethische ‚Systeme‘ manifestieren diese Potentiale in der einen oder anderen, je eigenen Ausformung. Die ethischen Potentiale gehen auf mancherlei Wegen in ethische Systeme ein, ohne je ganz in einem einzigen System aufzugehen. Der ‚Schritt zurück‘ ist ein Rückgang auf die vielfältigen Quellen des Ethischen in den Potentialen. Er kann uns auch dabei helfen, etwas über die Zukunft der Ethik zu sagen.

Desmond: Talking to Richard on the way over, I proposed that our discussion would focus on the theme of autonomy and embeddedness or relatedness. This is a recurrent concern in all of Richard’s writing. I thought it would be a good idea to look at this issue of autonomy and embeddedness in a variety of different forms, in relation to different philosophers that have influenced the work of Richard, but also in a variety of different domains such as ethics, aesthetics or literature, romanticism.In the latter the question of the interplay between art and religion also comes up as a very important consideration. Another central theme in Richard’s work is the tension between aspiration and disappointment, between longing and the failure to reach a desired completion. Disappointment and the fact of failure are not, I would say, absolutized. Disappointment becomes the occasion of a possible renewal of striving or aspiration rather than marking a sceptical outcome in a merely negative sense.

There is a sense of doing justice prior to the juxtaposition of theory and practice, accounting for an ontological vulnerability prior to both social power andsocial vulnerability. Justice in the sense of “being true” involves fidelity to truth that we neither possess nor construct, preceding all efforts to enact justice. The charge to be just precedes any just act. There is a “patience of being,” or a receiving of being before acting, which we must then actively take up. All this has implications for the practices of philosophy, including transcending the will to power by not clinging to one’s own place in History. The philosopher stands back and enters the void space of the human soul which is vulnerable, both terrorized and capable of terrorizing. This void is a “porosity of the soul” rather than pure nothingness. Though it is no particular project or activity, it allows all openness, receiving, and self-transcendence, and out of it comes the practical energy that feeds activity. The poverty of philosophy means relinquishing meaningless activity of construction in a purposeless universe by a willingness to be nothing, understanding the patience of being before servility and sovereignty, and the justice beyond them.