Abstract
There is an irreducible distance between pleroma and chronos. Essence will not reveal itself in time. So what is to be done? There is a suggestion that only revelation or religious insight can save us, or help us get out of this tension. But the chapter suggests a philosophical labor or praxis that bids thinking to voluntarily accept limits on its activity, is helpful in this regard. The hypostasis of thought has sunk the entire being figuratively into a ‘hole’ from which Being is now to be retrieved. A systematic regression to pre-conceptual or meditative thinking becomes necessary in which thinking acquires the necessary immanent limits. It must sort through the vast archaeological data to pick out the moments of insight, refraining from the desire to organize. It must learn to wait, without being seduced by the incessant movement that is its nature. The waiting is not a passive idling. It is an active waiting that requires thinking to remain ever watchful against crossing its limits. Through this active waiting, chronos slows down and momentarily comes to an end, making room for the new. Thought as time opens out to an indeterminateness that is the beginning of intuition. There is a stirring that is not of the energy of thought. The composite which had aligned itself exclusively behind thought as its guiding light, realigns itself on a balance between insight and representation.
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- 1.
Martin Heidegger , “Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten,” Der Spiegel, 30 (May 1976), pp. 193–219. W. Richardson, trans., “Only a God Can Save Us,” in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker , ed. T. Sheehan (1981), pp. 45–67.
- 2.
Heidegger , Being and Time , p. 375. Italics in original.
- 3.
Ibid.
- 4.
Ibid., p. 376.
- 5.
Aristotle cited in Heidegger , Being and Time , p. 386.
- 6.
Heidegger , Being and Time , p. 389.
- 7.
I Corinthians 7:29–32.
- 8.
Giorgio Agamben , The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 24.
- 9.
Ibid., p. 25.
- 10.
I Corinthians 7:20.
- 11.
A cognate notion is found in the Upanishadic idea of dharma; each one must act according to their dharma or inner truth or a given dispensation that guides. One must act within one’s dharma, even use it, to find truth.
- 12.
Agamben , op. cit., p. 26.
- 13.
Ibid., p. 69.
- 14.
Ibid., p. 70.
- 15.
Ibid.
- 16.
Philippians 3:13.
- 17.
I Corinthians .
- 18.
Ibid.
- 19.
“A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus ’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history . His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress .” Walter Benjamin , “Thesis on the Philosophy of History ,” in Illuminations, trans. H. Zorn (London: Pimlico, 1940/1999), pp. 245–255.
- 20.
Ecclesiastes 1:2, King James version.
- 21.
Ecclesiastes 1:3.
- 22.
Max Weber , The Essential Weber: A Reader, ed. Sam Whimster (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 273.
- 23.
In the Indian tradition , the Karmayogi engages in action not in order to bring about progress in the world, but as a mode of self-awakening of the different centers of consciousness in the body -mind system as well as a means of burning out his prarabdha or accumulated past. Hence the famous injunction in the Gita to act without being attached to the fruits of action .
- 24.
Describing Andrew Feenberg’s work, Iain Thomson writes: “Feenberg develops the critical theoretical charge against Heidegger’s thought first advanced by Heidegger’s former student, and Feenberg’s teacher, Marcuse. In effect, Feenberg appropriates one of Marcuse’s most powerful political criticisms of Heidegger, the charge that Heidegger succumbed to a “hopeless heteronomism,” that is, he lost faith in the Enlightenment understanding of freedom as the capacity for substantive rational self-determination, the ability to direct the ends as well as the means of human life. Hence, Feenberg also expresses this Marcusean criticism in a Marxist register, accusing Heidegger of being a “technological fetishist.” In the Marxist vocabulary, fetishism occurs when a “social relation between men” assumes “the fantastic form of a relation between things” (as Marx famously put it). For a Marxist (and we should not forget that “critical theory” is an interdisciplinary, post-Marxian development of Marxism), to fetishize something is to detach it from the human labor that produced it while continuing nevertheless to project human meanings on it, thereby mistaking these projections for an independent reality . The fetishist’s unconscious anthropomorphic projection endows a humanly created thing with the magical appearance of possessing a telos independent of human ends. Heidegger’s substantivism “fetishizes” the essence of technology, then, insofar as it treats a human creation as if it were beyond human control.” Iain Thomson, Heidegger on Ontotheology , p. 50. But Heidegger’s criticism of the technologization of being has little to do with fetishism. It concerns the “progressive technologization of intelligibility” and is focused on the nature and consequence of one-track thinking . Thought’s projections recovered as material processes or objects are not distinct from thinking itself. Hence, in truth, the real reason why thought cannot control that to which it has given birth (technology, in this case) lies in its ontological character.
- 25.
Ecclesiastes 1:8.
- 26.
Biblehub, Commentary on Ecclesiastes , Retrieved from http://biblehub.com/commentaries/pulpit/ecclesiastes/1.htm.
- 27.
Ibid.
- 28.
Ibid.
- 29.
Heidegger interview in Der Spiegel.
- 30.
Philippians 2:7, Standard English Version.
- 31.
G.K. Chesterton , St. Francis of Assissi (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1983), p. 4. The entire contents of this book are in the public domain.
References
Agamben, Giorgio. The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.
Benjamin, Walter. “Thesis on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt and translated by H. Zorn. London: Pimlico, 1940/1999.
Biblehub, Commentary. http//:www.biblehub.com.
Chesterton, G.K. St. Francis of Assissi. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1983.
Heidegger, Martin. “Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten.” Der Spiegel 30 (May, 1976): 193–219. Translated by W. Richardson as “Only a God Can Save Us.” In Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, edited by Thomas Sheehan. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2010.
The Bible, Standard English Version.
Thomson, Iain. Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Weber, Max. The Essential Weber: A Reader, edited by Sam Whimster. New York: Routledge, 2003.
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Roy, K. (2018). Philosophical Praxis. In: The Power of Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96911-4_6
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