The Flash-Bang of Quick Reading

25 Feb, 2024

I've probably spoken elsewhere, and more than once, about the experience I had early on in grad school, where a misreading of the syllabus caused me to rush in a panic one night through 258 pages of Hegel's notoriously dense Phenomenology. At some point in that round of mental gluttony, my brain felt as if it'd been cracked open by some greater understanding from the beyond, and for maybe a second, I saw everything with crystal clarity. Then it all disappeared, I forgot pretty much everything I'd read, and I wound up in class the next day suffering from some undefined emotion resulting from the realization that I was only supposed to have read maybe twenty pages at most, ending on p. 258.

That episode left me with nothing useful in terms of understanding Hegel's assertions about coming into self-consciousness, the movement of the spirit, etc., etc.—but at the same time, it was not without its admittedly amusing worth, some small, unintentional glimpse into what Ralph Waldo Emerson may have been getting at with his own assertion that "The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory, and to do something without knowing how or why," and not via "[d]reams and drunkenness, the use of opium and alcohol," which Emerson called "the semblance and counterfeit of this oracular genius."¹

Whatever my wayward experience was with that first foray into Hegel, it at least provided the cautionary reminder, among other things, to slow down, and to double-check the instructions you've been given. Well, that and the obvious: that just because you've read something does not mean you've understood it.

And so it's with sort of a sense of shame that I've been trying this weekend to buckle down and get to the end of Martin Heidegger's collection of essays, Poetry, Language, Thought.² I'd gotten started on it months ago, and was reading ever so slowly through its frequently comedic (though maybe not needless) difficulty—but I've reached that point where, much as I'm intrigued by a lot of what Heidegger says, I just need to get it done and out the door. Hence, I've entered into another round of rushed reading, which even if not as frantic as my first encounter with Hegel, also doesn't allow for the full consideration Heidegger requires—but which, again like the previous episode, also has its own rewards.

Because I picked up the previously slogging pace that was getting me through the philosopher's exposition of poetry via a deconstruction of some Rilke—a lead brick of an investigation that would turn anyone wondering if poetry was for them off the genre completely—I ran into Heidegger's assertion about the "singer," who seems to grab hold of and run with the metaphysical force Heidegger sees in language itself, and more "venturesome[ly]" or truly than any even above-average human "say in a greater degree.... Their singing is turned away from all purposeful self-assertion. It is not a willing in the sense of desire. Their song does not solicit anything to be produced.... The song of these singers is neither solicitation nor trade." And probably predictably, this singing "happens only sometimes."³

There's quite a lot here that I'm not explaining about saying and singing and its/their relationship to "say[ing] worldly existence,"—only that it's all propelled me into one of the really fun aspects of philosophy: namely, figuring out how to relate what often seem like big, unalterably abstract ideas to the real world. The task is especially entertaining when you have the thought of someone like Heidegger, who could at times really dig in to the "thingness" of things, the way concrete things are or appear or function in everyday existence—but then who also often went so far into the hidden depths of his very big brain that you're no longer sure the metaphors he uses are meant to refer to any tangible or practical example of what he's talking about. I count his disquisition on the song as somehow constructing one of these metaphors—because just plain old singing or humming to yourself doesn't seem to cut it, and nor, on the other hand, does the output of any pop luminary. Even a hardcore fan for whom Taylor Swift can do no wrong would have a hard time denying that what she's engaged in "is neither solicitation nor trade."⁴

Where's a Heideggerian singer to be found, then? I'd imagine such a singer is more or less unknown, given the difficulty the philosopher says (true) singing is, resulting in "a song whose sound does not cling to something that is eventually attained, but which has already shattered itself even in the sounding, so that there may occur only that which was sung itself."⁵ I'm guessing as well that "that which was sung itself" can't be contained in a recording. So maybe this is the purview of some sort of liturgical singer or cantor? Who's to know? But in a world filled with so much technical and forgettable song, I can at least buy into Heidegger's assertion that the real stuff, the real song that is existence, only occurs "sometimes."⁶

Here's the other bit I've thoroughly enjoyed reading, even if still all too quickly. Toward the beginning of "Building Dwelling Thinking," one of the more reader-friendly pieces I've encountered by Heidegger, I came across the assertion that "dwelling is never thought of as the basic character of human being."⁷ Damn straight, I thought; you can take one look at a LinkedIn feed for support of that argument, and find endless ways in which it's simply not OK ever to sit still, or cease from broadcasting your least accomplishment, or even be something akin to merely human.

Of course, Heidegger goes on to develop what he sees as the thick meaning of dwelling, which itself involves (equally thick and particular) meanings of building, space, location, and so forth. It's his examination, though, of what a bridge is and does—essentially pulling together "a primal oneness... [of] earth and sky, divinities and mortals," that I found intriguing, and equally counter to the tossed-off commentary that prevails over on that networking site. In building things like bridges, Heidegger says, we're not (or shouldn't be) just making things plain and simple—and we're not doing it with the understanding that the techne, or technique or technology, involved in construction is just a means of "bring[ing] something made... among the things that are already present."⁸

I unfortunately have neither the time nor the space to do justice to this essay, and to the ways in which it wants us to look fully at what it means to dwell, not just in a home or building, but upon the earth. But Heidegger's assertion that "Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build,"⁹ in the sense of completing something that creates a space in which that oneness mentioned above is allowed to appear—that made me return again to the bland hell of LinkedIn, and to the sort of thoughtless tech-bro entrepreneurialism it celebrates, in which simply putting shit out there (whether virtually, as in crypto, or in less-virtual, though weird and ridiculously useless, gadgets like the Rabbit, for those who're too lazy even to use the apps on their phone or decide on their own what they'd like to eat) seems to be the end-all-be-all of human existence. No divinities here, or even earth and sky, and certainly not the careful thinking Heidegger says is an essential part of dwelling; the Rabbit will look at the sky for you and tell you whether it's worth even acknowledging.

Yes, I'm cynical, and too old to be of relevance to the movers and shakers these days. And yes, I'm tempted to remove this post because of the hastiness of thought on which it was based (and hence, its susceptibility to charges of hypocrisy, given the very thoughtlessness I bash at a site not meant to be a platform for great thinking). But that quick reading has now given rise to matters I want to go back and investigate more thoroughly, at least partially by returning to the work that inspired it. I do have some hope of doing that, even if not immediately. A few years after that first Hegel flub, I was lucky enough to land in a doctoral seminar in which we spent the entire semester on the Phenomenology—and in which the instructor hesitantly admitted that after thirty years of close study of said text, he might finally have been developing some meaningful insight into it. After my rash vomiting of maybe-not-trustworthy discernment of this round of Heidegger, then, I know there's plenty of time left to go back and get it, if not right, at least more nuanced.

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