Well, I don't any longer have the time to explore what it was I set out to in the begin of this thread, but I can at least touch on where I was going with all of this.
In my last post, I was talking about Descartes' I think therefore I am, and how it establishes truthfully or not, an interval of the forgetting and remembering being. While I personally don't think it touches on the being it claims, its interval no doubt, still has its usefulness...
Quote: 1
To breed an animal that is entitled to make promises—is that not precisely the paradoxical task nature has set itself where human beings are concerned? Isn’t that the real problem of human beings? . . . The fact that this problem has to a great extent been solved must seem all the more astonishing to a person who knows how to appreciate fully the power which works against this promise-making, namely forgetfulness. Forgetfulness is not merely a vis interiae [a force of inertia], as superficial people think. Is it much rather an active capability to repress, something positive in the strongest sense, to which we can ascribe the fact that while we are digesting what we alone live through and experience and absorb into ourselves (we could call the process mental ingestion [Einverseelung]), we are conscious of what is going on as little as we are with the entire thousand-fold process which our bodily nourishment goes through (so-called physical ingestion [Einverleibung]). The doors and windows of consciousness are shut temporarily; they remain undisturbed by the noise and struggle with which the underworld of our functional organs keeps working for and against one another; a little stillness, a little tabula rasa [blank slate] of the consciousness, so that there will again be room for something new, above all, for the nobler functions and officials, for ruling, thinking ahead, determining what to do (for our organism is arranged as an oligarchy)—that is, as I said, the use of active forgetfulness, a porter at the door, so to speak, a custodian of psychic order, quiet, etiquette.
From that we can see at once how, if forgetfulness were not present, there could be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hoping, no pride, no present. The man in whom this repression apparatus is harmed and not working properly we can compare to a dyspeptic (and not just compare)—he is “finished” with nothing. . . . Now, this particular animal, which is necessarily forgetful, in which forgetfulness is present as a force, as a form of strong health, has had an opposing capability bred into it, a memory, with the help of which, in certain cases, forgetfulness will cease to function—that is, for those cases where promises are to be made. This is in no way a merely passive inability ever to be rid of an impression once it has been etched into the mind, nor is it merely indigestion over a word one has pledged at a particular time and which one can no longer be over and done with. No, it’s an active wish not to be free of the matter again, an ongoing and continuing desire for what one willed at a particular time, a real memory of one’s will, so that between the original “I will,” “I will do,” and the actual discharge of the will, its action, a world of strange new things, circumstances, even acts of the will can be interposed without a second thought and not break this long chain of the will. But how much all that presupposes! In order to organize the future in this manner, human beings must have first learned to separate necessary events from chance events, to think in terms of cause and effect, to see distant events as if they were present, to anticipate them, to set goals and the means to reach them with certainty, to develop a capability for figures and calculations in general—and for that to occur, a human being must necessarily have first himself become something one could predict, something bound by regular rules, even in the way he imagined himself to himself, so that finally he is able to act like someone who makes promises—he can make himself into a pledge for the future!
Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, essay two Genealogy of Morals
What I have been trying to touch on, is the apparent juxtoposition between the active mind, (which I have previously described as language), and what we understand as the order of an arising mind, (previously, its reconciliation with evolution).
What is this interval; or "actively" considered, what is this apparent inversion, that Nietzsche seems to describe as forgetfulness? How is our rational animal - or is it animal rationale? What is the relationship between "humans", and their own/owned "animality"? What is the human to animal?
I also wanted to work up and through Derrida's address The Animal That therefore I am, which as you can see in the title, is an exploration into these depths, particular in the order of their arising.
In reading through this address, it is first of all important to understand the amount sort of trust we must put into his words, and what this trust is to what he is describing. Its something he calls "nudity". Here is a little bit from that address I typed up.
Quote: To begin with, I would like to entrust myself to words that, were it possible, would be naked. Naked in the first place - but this is in order to announce already that I plan to speak endlessly of nudity and of the nude in philosophy. Starting from Genesis. I would like to choose words that are, to begin with, naked, quite simply, words from the heart. And to utter these words without repeating myself, without beginning again what I have already said here, more than once. It is said that one must avoid repeating oneself, but in order not to give the appearance of training [dressage], already of a habit or a convention that would in the long term program the very act of thanking...
...As for this conference, the third in something like a series, it seemed to me unimaginable, even excluded in advance. Last time, in 1992, when Didier Cahen alluded to its possibility in the attic on the last evening, asking me what the theme of a third conference would be, I still remember dismissing such a hypothesis: "This guy is crazy" I exclaimed. He wasn't so crazy, but the whole idea remains, like everything else that happens, and such is the condition for something to be able to happen, impossible to anticipate It is only after the event, reading the titles of these three meetings ("Les Fins de l'homme," "Le Passage des frontieres," "L'Animal autobiographique") with a feeling of uncanniness, that I perceived a sort of prescriptive arrangement, a preestablished if not harmonious order, a providential machine as Kant would say precisely concerning the animal, "als eine Maschine der Vorsehung," an obscure foresight, the process of a blind but sure prefiguration in the configuration: one and the same movement being outlined and seeking its end....later I began to hear in them, in these three kickoffs, what no one, least of all myself, had ever calculated, and what no one would be able to reappropriate, namely the outline or the temptation of a single phrase, a phrase offering more to follow.
It follows, itself; it follows itself. It could say "I am," "I follow," "I follow myself," I am (in following) myself." In being pursued this way, consequentially, three times or in three rhythms, it would describe something like the course of a three-act play or the three movements of a syllogistic concerto, a displacement that becomes a suite, a result in a single word.
If I am to follow this suite [si je suis cette suite], and everything in what I am about to say will lead back to the question of what "to follow" or "to pursue" means, as well as "to be after," back to the question of what I do when "I am" or "I follow," when I say "je suis," if I am to follow this suite then, I move from "the ends of man," that is the confines of man, to "the crossing of borders" between man and animal. Crossing borders or the ends of man I come or surrender to the animal - to the animal in itself, to the animal in me and the animal at unease with itself, to the man about which Nietzsche said (I no longer remember where) something to the effect that it was an as yet undetermined animal, an animal lacking in itself. Nietzsche also said, at the very beginning of the second treatise of The Genealogy of Morals, that man is a promising animal, by which he meant, underlining those words, an animal that is permitted to make promises. Nature is said to have given itself the task of raising, bringing up, domesticating and disciplining this animal that promises...
I'll upload this essay in its entirety for anyone interested.
That's it for me, though I'll certainly continue to look in if this thread has anywhere to go. I might have been able to work my ideas together, or maybe its better I end here, accepting that we are limited to such associations or allegories when we are pondering the tree of life.
Cheers
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