December 29, 2004

primacy of the practical

For some reason I could not post this comment at this earlier post on Heidegger and Aristotle. I suspect that comments have been turned off due to a massive comment spam attack yesterday--over 1100 with 800 on this weblog alone.

The comments are in italics and, with more room, I've expanded the line of reasoning.


"Aristotle's practical ethical philosophy, which is concerned with a flourishing life well lived, promises a way to opt out of complete systematicity, without embracing romanticism, aesthetics and celebrating the non-conceptual and the subjectivity of inner experience. It opens up a return to the concrete.

Pointing to the idea of ethical life also provides a way to counter the dominant "postmodern" trend in “Continental Philosophy” which casts a stuffy Hegel, a unified Platonist notion of closed, rigorous, totalizing reason, and closure of the Hegelian dialectic, under suspicion in favor of a radical Nietzschean critique that opens the door to the thematics of difference.

Ethical life provides a different way to link theoretical and practical reason."


A lot of French philosophy that reacted against their construction of Hegel, the closed Hegelian circle, and theoretical reason of science getting the truth about the fundamental furniture of the world is dominated by aesthetic concerns, rather than ethical ones.

What we get on the aesthetic reading of the conceptual is a play around what is left over: variously the “night” that remains after the closure of the Hegelian dialectic; a return to nothingness; a presencing of absence, a murmuring silence, the void, that which cannot be said et etc.

Once God used to fill the gap of the other. But God is dead. So what is left beyond the categories of reason is the ineffable that has no linguistic status. It is seen as a romantic murmuring silence, non-knowledge, individual experience beyond the social, what is dissolved, as bodily sensations, flushes, and affects.

Often this conception of inner experience (eg., Bataille's mystical states of ecstasy and rapture or Klossowski's unconcious chaotic forces) reminds me of a dialectics in reverse. According to this aesthetic romanticism we face that which we cannot know. This renders as inoperative all attempts at comprehending. It is all about death.

Another way of reading what is remaindered or left over by theoretical reason is to makrk the leftover as practical reason--- what is suggested by Hegel's master-slave dialectic. The focus here is on the active, working body through which human beings act on, and shape, the environment they find themselves within. The categories of this practical reason do not represent reality as truth; rather they construct it in terms of making sense of our life by us as historically situated human beings shaping our world, and being shaped by it. Thinking is involved in the practical transformation of the environment we find ourselves within. Thinking is embodied thought.

The primacy of the practical is what links American pragmatism and Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology. The latter Heidegger does have a conception of our way of living being warped by a technological mode of being that lays waste to nature. His critique of technology has an ethical current, as he is concerned to relate to technology in a way that not only resists its devastation but also gives technology a positive role to play in our lives.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at December 29, 2004 11:06 AM | TrackBack
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