Tuesday, April 12, 2005
Sein und Name
Dave has asked me for an essay on the functional similarities of a person’s name and her being. On one hand, this question is not fair. Consider the 250-word requirement: he asks me to tell him about something, but he does not ask me to tell him whatever I know about it; instead, he says, “Tell me this much: no more, no less.” The topic, also, is not one I have chosen but one forced upon me by Dave’s inquisitive mind and questions that are important to him (but perhaps not important to me). He either assumes that there are similarities between a person’s name and her being (itself a problematic construction), in which case he is asking me to walk sans guide into a land he has visited before, or he does not believe there is any connection, in which case he has led me into a trap. You can see why I have “every right” to refuse Dave’s question. Or do I? The question is, unarguably, something forced upon me, something of which I had no participation in the formulation or even whether it would be formulated. It is presented to me unexpectedly, and I am left standing alone with this question and, strangely enough, the responsibility to respond. And this is exactly the similarity shared by a person’s name and her being: she receives both “gifts” or “questions” unsolicited from an other, and she finds herself in an undeniable position of responsibility to respond.
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21 comments:
Hmmm. Coye has left me with quite a puzzle, for though his created body fit the requirments of the essay to, as they say, a T, and though he had a beautiful turn at the end which jumps out at the reader like a moving corpse, his essay presents us with a formal quandry in the sense that it represents a beautiful answer, and yet, if I am ridgid with my own nasty guidelines I must cut its head off: i.e. the title must be ditched. For there's the rub: if I count the title, I count a total of 253 words!
But Coye will say, "Injustice! The title cannot be included in the count!"
"What?" I say, "On the contrary,if we neglect to contain the metanym with the larger work itself--and not just any work, but a work that clames to represent in itself the form of an answer to the question of name and function--if we do this, what have we done? We 'count' only the body, and overlook the name as--what? Not a part of the whole? Something outside, seperate, Other? And what then becomes of the formal answer? Has the name itself then dislocated and left the turning corpse to fall back in a tragic end? No, I must leave the head in place: for this is just, is it not?"
But if I leave the head in place, I cannot justly give the author the pink reward toward which he quested all his writing time! Still, I am sure that he who rises to the occation will yet outdo me in this colored battle of wits!
I cut three words. I want pink.
ask and it shall be given!
FANTASTIC!!!
Dave, you know I have nothing but respect for you... but pink?... again?... for Coye??
He did write me a beautiful full bodied essay of 250 words.
And what are you saying about pink? Are you so caught in your invisible masculine norms that you can't handle the way some substances relate with light? Huh? Huh? Huh! Ha ha! That's what I thought!
If Andy doesn't like the pink, perhaps he should barter a deal to change the format for an essay.
Yes! And the essay should have to make sense both fowards and backwards!
and rhyme
and it should explain the line between rhymed essay and poem
articulating, in effect, the definition of a rhymed essay, because I don't think they exist
and the meter should be a form of morris code, and it should say something profound-- both ways, backward and foward-- rhyming.
he he he! Long live pink!!!!
Ok, I think this has crossed well beyond the line of justice (or reason, or possibilitiy). Dave should have to write an essay as penance.
o you of little faith. Imagine if Einstein said the same thing to me when I told him to, as I put it, "bend the world with one equation!"
Wow. Sorry, Dave. I didn't realize.
I was hoping he would write something on the Rykensian vs the Kensian view of leisure. 250 words?
coye, this is a message from central command: submit a 250 word essay on the nature of time (that is, time betty crocker style) no, no, I mean t-i-m-e, not thyme, yes, t-i-m-e bettie c-r-o-c-k-e-r style.
While you write this, you must balance a thimble of thyme upon your nose.
the end.
This message was co-written by david jones and TEFKAMS
AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Is that a thimble filled with thyme or a thimble constructed of thyme?
Hey! Grady's here, too! [music]Welcome back, to the same old place that you laughed about...
Anyways, while the comment stream has been rather lighthearted, the post itself is dead serious. While there is a certain amount of play in my 250 words, there is no joke. It is a sort of interesting topic, although I still think it's a strange one (would I expect anything else from Davey?).
I think Grady has some interesting things going on in his addition, especially the "limitation of self-expression" in the last paragraph. I do, however, want to ask a couple of rigorous questions [not an attack, but an attempt to see more clearly...Dave's got ME interested in this now].
Dave asked a question about a person's being and her name, and Grady answers by talking about knowledge of a person. This is an interesting direction to take (I once again point to the last paragraph and self-determination), but we have to be careful not to confuse someone's being with knowledge of that person['s being]. Grady talks about someone's being as a thing-in-itself, but he also thinks our knowledge of that person through their name alters her being in a cause-and-effect way. It is far from clear how this action takes place. I fear that there may be some conflation of epistemology and metaphysics, and we must keep that distinction clear.
I also want to know if Grady thinks that a person's unique nature is entirely unknowable in its particularity [a strong claim], or if he only means that we cannot know a person's particularity in its totality [a weak claim]. I, and probably most people, would agree with the weaker claim, but the strong claim raises the old question about a noumenal world existing behind the curtain of experienced phenomena (and the critique that "a something I know nothing about is as good as a nothing", or "if there were an unexperienced reality, how would you know about it?").
Oh, and, Mr. Satan, I don't want to write about zeit.
Wow, yeah. That's some really good stuff, Grady. I need some more time to think over it, but I'll get a response back to you. This conversation is becoming much more fun than I thought it was going to be when Dave started barking commands. hehehe.
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