Reply to: Re: Philosophers: Dead or Alive?
Daniel McGrady wrote:
>Message text written by INTERNET:heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
>Allen Scult wrote:
>
>>I've been reading recently about the Talmudic Rabbis' insistence that
>their discussions with their >students not be dependent on written texts of
>earlier rabbinic commentaries but be based entirely in an oral "remembering
>together" of those texts. It was felt that only by grounding their
>discussions shared oral discourses could they bring these texts alive to
>their students in a transformative way. They seemed to have learned this
>in part from the Greco-Roman rhetorical exercises where originally written
>texts were performed/interpreted and so given extended life in the orality
>of living community. In this regard, it is interestiung that one of
>Heidegger's most powerfully performed interpretations of Aristotle is SS
>1924 where he grounds much of his discussion in Aristotle's Rhetoric. The
>course begins with an eloquent "induction" of the students into a shared
>"Hingabe" before the Aristotelian text. And just as the Rabbis also
>insisted on not writing down their own texts, so we have no
>Heidegger-written version of SS1924, but only the two sets of student notes
>in the archives at Bochum and Frankfurt. All of this also reminds me of
>Plato's insistence that the discourse of philosophy cannot be written but
>only spoken "live" into the individual soul of the disciple.<
>
>>Indeed philosophers can onle be "alive."<
>
>Excellent stuff Allen. I agree with this one hundred percent. Do you see
>any connections between this and the Christian doctrine of the
>Resurrection? Or any doctrine of Resurrection. How is Christ
>resurrected? Only through performance? Does this mean that the
>traditions of the fathers are passed on through the practice of the law? >But even in performance it is easy to slip from the spirit of the
>performance to the letter of it. A vain repetition. When does
>repetition become authentic?
Daniel,
It's interesting that the resurrection of the dead is affirmed every day in the traditional morning service. One imagines it ( resurrection of the dead) is insured by the continual engagement ( in discourse, study and observance) with God's law. An essential aspect of rabbinic sayings and teachings regarding especially liturgical observances is that they never become empty, dry repetitious performances( Entleben). Here, a strong parallel with heidegger's insistence on the practice of philosophy being a live encounter with the "sacred texts" of the Greeks, and his showing of the appropriate "Hingable" to make it so. The rabbinic word for the appropriating hingabe torwad the sacred liturgical texts is "kavannah" connoting an intentional directionality, but also containing the root for "meaning."
One might say that this sort of focus on the law as a living organisim, always developing torwad the will of God from which it first emanated, constitutes a kind of "hermeneutical phenomenology" which obviates the resurrection of the word-as-flesh.
Allen
Allen Scult
515 271 2869
http://www.mac.drake.edu/s/scult/scult.html
--- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---
