What Do You All Think?

This is a speech I made for the class Classical Literature & Philosophy with prof. Emanuela Bianchi.

In the first class, our professor wrote guidelines for our oral presentation and told us that we need to kick off the class discussion with a thought-provoking question at the end, but to avoid overly broad questions such as “So what do you all think? I then wondered if the question was really that broad. But I finally decided to use this question as the centerpiece of the discussion, and my presentation would inevitably end the class discussion with this question. Even if my motivation at the outset was resistance to the father’s injunctions - anti-Oedipus on a Freudian level.

In fact, the more dogma there is about the father’s injunctions, the more the idea of the child rebelling against the dogma is created. Jacques Lacan’s conception of Law is almost exclusively related to desire; Law commands the subject to “enjoy as little as possible”! But the dialectic between Law and desire emerges: Desire is to transgress, to transgress prohibition (Seminar VII). And meanwhile, there is another pleasure of being prohibited. A very, academic naming for masochism.

So, back to our topic. The first thing I would like to discuss is hermeneutics, a term originally derived from the Greek myth of Hermes, the messenger of the gods, whose duty it was to deliver the words of the gods to the earth. He then necessarily needed to interpret the words of the gods. That’s why we need a question session, where the speaker asks, “Any questions, or what do you all think”? In the millennia that followed, hermeneutics served as a separate discipline for interpreting Scripture, as Augustine explained, where God communicates with believers through the sign of Scripture. In the days of the Reformation, Protestants had attacked the Catholic interpretation of Scripture by hermeneutics. As you can see, there can be so much dispute about the true meaning of the exact same text - but whether there is such a transcendent thing as true meaning is uncertain.

Nietzsche had his own opinion about antiquities. Those antiquities are so far removed from us that we cannot find in everything that has become history any relevance for our modern life. But when we try to find the meaning in antiquity, we begin to ask questions. We reconstruct it in the arrogant words of our vision. What is mine? All these things are so far from me. How are the trivialities going to pull me into their reality? When I am confronted with the mountains of antiquities, I marvel at their richness and complexity. So I can’t help but ask, I want to speak directly with the great Plato, Socrates. To talk to them at length. I kept on asking questions, asking questions, asking all the questions I encountered in my limited knowledge and hoping for some answers. And so, as I read antiquity. Questions, I couldn’t pull away to keep me from asking questions.

Now, let us consider the question. For example, when Parmenides asked the question of being, he asked, “Being is, non-being is not.” It’s very understandable, but why is non-being not? When we ask the question, the question becomes the answer. We go and consider why non-being is not present, we go and consider why nothing is not present. You can feel that something is lacking in it. Being is, but why? Non-being is not, but why? Parmenides did not ask these two questions, but merely made a statement, he said these two statements. But we will inquire, and ask why this is so and why not. The answer to this question is secondary to the realization that there is a problem here. In this way, the statement, and the question, become one in a sort of dialectic. They are both presuppositions of some kind. To say that Being is, for example, non-being is not, is a statement that does not explain why. We would then go and ask questions with Parmenides, saying why being is, why non-being is not. And subsequently, we would realize the problem in the questions we ask. Why being is not non-being. The existence of non-being turns out to be a prejudice in this question. That is, if non-being is not, there is no question of why non-being is not. There is still something less than non-being there, something less than nothing, and this discourse is artistic. To initiate a question in a way that itself contains the answer, to ask it back is an artful game of discourse.

So, if I ask the question, “What do you all think?” The question contains a certain presupposition, the question implies a certain context, that you all need to be there, and you are all thinking. Of course, it is possible to think in a drunken state. I ask the question, and I look forward to your answers, perhaps in my favor, perhaps in my opposition. I expect your answers, not a lack of interest in them. This kind of prejudice is precisely the existence of a certain contradiction. If I did not have any prejudice, I would not have asked the question. And I would simply be here stating my uninteresting opinion. Our prejudice instead puts us into a loop, into a Q&A as a whole. The Q&A itself, goes in a constant loop. Closures, occurrences, and breakthroughs. ontology is hereby constantly renewed, extended. In this way, such a process of consciousness is what Gadamer realizes, the fusion of horizons. Through infinite questions and answers, subjectivity is treated as a consciousness that ask questions that desires a certain symbolization. However, after the question is posed, the response given by the answer is lacking. The answer is not enough because the question contains the answer, and the answer is itself a question.

No matter how we go about discussing the great Plato, Socrates. We try to enter their historical context, but I am using my modern horizon to understand, to reconstruct. I’m using my horizon to go back through his questions, to problematize his answers, and I’m carrying my own sense of questions in this moment. I am cut in with his history. History, in this moment, is no longer something static. We can feel history as an interstice, which has an openness. But the fact that our fusion of horizons is always going to carry our respective prejudice does not mean that this prejudice is problematic. Rather, on the contrary, it is the carrier of the problem, and the loss of the prejudice also breaks the cycle. My prejudice is, precisely, historical, precisely inherited. We can see that history breaks up static continuity with a penetrating force, where a temporal gap is created. Such history is effective history.

Charles Martindale in his essays constantly goes into the question of how we are going to deal with those classics. In his book he mentioned Nietzsche’s view, ‘Antiquity has in fact always been understood from the perspective of the present—and should the present now be understood from the perspective of antiquity?’ Martindale quoted plenty of authors, from Jauss to Pater, Baudelaire and Plutarch. And he pointed heavily on the term “reception”. But even though Charles Martindale discussed many of different philosophers’ opinions about classics, antiquities, he barely gave an answer. About how are we supposed to treat antiquities. About what exactly shall we treat Reception? Does receipting those classics do anything about modern days queer theories? It is that he raised questions even more than he answer them. And this is exactly the point he wrote his book.

The final nobility of philosophy lies precisely in its sense of problem. In the most basic adherence to consciousness that ask questions, in the most open-ended horizon to which all is viewed, all that remains in the end is time. For the modern people, the modern is such an exclusive description. That which is past is history. Yesterday is yesterday, and tomorrow will be yesterday the day after tomorrow. But it is in this process that history is resurrected. History is constantly being resurrected so that it will eventually become the future. Modernity, always in the process of flowing, is constantly renewing itself. Being then is, becoming. We catch eternity in classics. Time here becomes a sort of textualized, historical distance. It means that our prejudice comes from history and from our hermeneutics, and how, we say, are the outdated theories put forward by those silly ancient Greeks going to solve the brand-new social problems of our time? We read with questions and with prejudice. We can only restore our questions to the ancient Greek context, and with the tension of my symbolization, reintegrate them. With prejudice, we will arrive at the truth. Such openness is philosophical inquiry. Philosophical inquiry is in constant motion, constantly asking questions, answering them, and then overthrowing itself. You can see that what seems to be Nietzsche’s eternal return, in Gadamer’s case, arrives at a completely new cycle, a great existential quest to press eternal return into one single moment, a hermeneutic cycle. After having aufheben (sublated) all the presuppositions of cosmology in the eternal return, one arrives at a place where there is only the consciousness of a question that is being pondered. A passion for dialog.

Catch only what you’ve thrown yourself, all is

mere skill and little gain.

but when you’re suddenly the catcher of a ball

thrown by an eternal partner

with accurate and measured swing

towards you, to your center, in an arch

from the great bridgebuilding of God.

Why catching then becomes a power–

not yours, a world’s.

–Rainer Maria Rilke

In this way, I am also able to pose my questions, to see with my consciousness that ask questions, with my prejudice, the differences and tensions that exist in the questions themselves. With my questions, I penetrate history. But keep in mind that when you answer, with your prejudice, with the answer that I desire, you will merge your passion for dialog, for the cycle of questions and answers. What exactly do I want to go and ask, and why exactly would you want to answer that way. Why I need to ask questions. To the point where the answer itself is no longer an answer of any kind, where your answer, at this point, will become my question. Here the act of asking a question is even more important than the specific question. So, my question is, “what do you all think”.