Back to Elder: http://www.arte-fact.org/untpltcl/sclpwrgv.html#7.
This author is not easy to read and I don’t think I agree with him but he’s nevertheless important because he is looking at the question from a place that desperately needs addressing. I’ll try to make comments as I go along.
7. Sharing the truth of being powerlessly in interplay
Is the powerlessness of rhetoric as a technique for bringing the other around through talking, a powerlessness arising in the face of the ontological otherness of the other with whom there must be interchange and some sort of process of recognition — as sketched above in Section 2 and in more depth elsewhere —, itself related in essence to the powerlessness of being itself? That is to say, is it not the case that the other human being as an other individual site of the openness to being is beyond the reach of technically conceived productive power and machination? Does the merging of the openness of being as shared individually by each and every human being require an essentially different approach to the question of specifically social and political power? Does the question concerning the possibility of constituting a We at all (cf. Chapter 11 of my Social Ontology) have to be posed anew from a perspective that has clearly taken leave of the traditional, one-sided, mono-archic metaphysical conception of power? Within such a conception of power, a social power such as rhetoric is regarded as a technique that (mis)understands its powerlessness over the other as merely an impotence that could be overcome through improvements in technique, and not as an ontological powerlessness.
As Heidegger points out, powerlessness has to be distinguished from impotence. Powerlessness is situated outside the dimension of power altogether, whereas impotence is a lack, a deficiency of power. "Power-lessness is not im-potence that, lacking power and having to do without it, still remains related precisely to power." (Das Macht-lose ist nicht das Ohn-mächtige, das immer noch und gerade auf Macht — sie entbehrend und sie missend — bezogen bleibt. Besinnung GA66:188) Even when an other human being is coerced through (the threat of) the use of physical force to obey a command, such subjugation under duress does not impinge upon the other's freedom, which, as we have seen, remains in essence untouched by such subjugation. Such subjugation through the use of physical force or its threatened use is based on force directed physically, i.e. ontically, against the other's body or property or the bodies of persons close and dear to the other. The other's body or the other's property can be physically restrained or confiscated or injured and damaged, or even destroyed by a superior force, but the other as another human being is situated ontologically in a nothingness altogether outside the realm of exercise of such violent power which is thus altogether powerless, and not merely impotent, in this respect. Why is this? Because the other as another human being is an individual site of the clearing for being. In other words, the other in his or her otherness is essentially, inherently ontological, that is, free in how the world shapes up in their understanding.
The individuality of this site means inter alia, as we have seen in the previous section, that the world opens in its truth individually on this site of the other. How the other holds the world to be in the openness of the clearing for being's truth is essentially individual and therefore untouchable by means of violent force. Holding the world to be within the open clearing for being's disclosure and concealment is constitutive of human freedom, which is always essentially and ultimately individual freedom, even when practical consensus has been attained through some kind of deliberation, or certain truths, as we shall see below, are necessarily shared, 'common property' in any given epoch. The truth of being is situated outside the reach and scope of any possible one-sided exercise of political or other social power, which is directed at another being, but not another being in its being. That is why the means of rhetorical power are primarily words, and these means come up against and are faced with the essential limit of the other's very being in its freedom, i.e. of the other human being's essential individuated situatedness within the openness of being in its truth and its corresponding practical self-movement within this openness emanating from it as a point of origin. All the means and techniques of rhetorical persuasion, no matter whether they reside in the arguments presented to enter and sway the heart and soul of the audience, or in the reputation and charisma of who is speaking and how the speaker projects his character and who-standing to the audience, or in the way in which the arguments are delivered through the tone, inflection and drama of the voice, have to win the confidence and trust of the audience and somehow mesh with its worldview to have their effect. Such winning of confidence and trust is thus always essentially a free reciprocation that depends on the willingness of the audience to go along with the speaker in an implicit exchange of views on how the issue at hand is to be seen.
Elena:
In relation to cults and politics, the above paragraph is faulty basically because we live in a time in which the status quo does not need leaders to maintain itself. People are brainwashed enough to accept the status quo without inspiration and control its reproduction without conscience. A little “comfort” goes far. The questions that the issues raised here should pose are, what is it in us that longs to experience the free reciprocation and trust and go along with each other but the human within our selves? The human essence? Why should we go about the world distrusting everyone and everything? Should children be born distrusting their parents and everything in society? Is that what we wish to impose on the new generations or is that what has been manipulated by some on new generations to justify the status quos deployment of power?
THAT IS NOT HUMAN NATURE and the nature of distrust and the foundation of evil as the only reality on which we should base our lives is the justification for the mandatory authoritarianism of power.
Human beings are not evil by nature. Human beings are by nature, loving and lovable.
Crime today, most forms of crime against one’s self or others are coherent answers to a world that in itself is dehumanizing individuals not because it is evil but because it is part of a process. People do not turn criminal overnight and the study of crime would show clearly how the criminals involved were themselves brought up in criminally suffocating environments. That is precisely why it is so important to understand the phenomenon of random suicide and homicide in public places without a political or social agenda, because in these phenomenon we are seeing a social response to the status quo, a “lunatic” response of a mass of vulnerable people who are the first to sacrifice their self in the impotence to deal with it: a mass of victims. If we do not stop this tendency before it acquires real force, it will be much more difficult to stop it later. Self-destruction is a much more powerful destructive force than any other destructive means. Self-destruction in suicides has moved beyond the recognition of itself or the other. That is what we are seeing in cults as organized institutions for self-destruction and what we are seeing in the random deaths. It is a state beyond connectedness, a limbo in which only the experience of pain is a reality that needs to be stopped no matter how.
Social and political theory can no longer avoid the reality of individual’s psychology to understand the human realm. The different social sciences are One: the human being. All the sciences are One: the human being. Without the human being the sciences are not sciences but instruments at the service of a status quo that is not taking the human being into consideration. Without US, what ever it is that is taking place, will run US over.
No comments:
Post a Comment