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Chapter 7 Nicholson: Through Self-loathing to Philosophy
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C 7 Nicholson: Through Self-loathing to Philosophy Alexandra Morrison In his contribution to a collection honouring his fellow Heidegger scholar William J. Richardson, Graeme Nicholson explains why the preposition “through” governs the title of his essay “Through Phenomenology to Concealment.”1 Nicholson explains his choice by describing how Heidegger persuaded Richardson to change the subtitle of his book, which initially read Heidegger: From Phenomenology to Thought, but which came to read Through Phenomenology to Thought.2 As Nicholson points out, this seemingly minor alteration “helped to shape a whole generation’s reading of Heidegger.”3 The preposition “through” emphasizes that phenomenology is not le behind, that it is not simply a phase one passes through on the way to thought. Practised a ention to pre-theoretical engagement is fundamental for philosophical thought, and theoretical contemplation that ignores its unavoidable influence is distorted. It is precisely this distortion that Merleau-Ponty has in mind when he speaks of certain philosophies as engaged in pensée de survol, “high-altitude thinking.”4 Phenomenology is a “method” for thematizing our pre-theoretical understanding, the mundane, non-philosophical being-in-the-world that forms the pre-theoretical “bedrock” that philosophy watches and interprets. However, in carrying out this method there is always the risk that the pre-theoretical character of our everyday understanding will be occluded. Thus, a critical aspect of phenomenological practice is a profound reticence regarding its own methodology. This reticence is one of the defining features of “continental” thought since Heidegger, and, in a peculiar way, reticence about method is something akin to a method. Reticence is a way of a empting to remain open to our pre-theoretical engagement, our most basic way of being-in-the-world. The poet Louise Glück offers a warning that might function as a mo o for phenomenologists: “When response becomes policy it has ceased to engage directly with circumstance.”5 Similarly, Nicholson insists that philosophy “cannot deny its own matrix,”6 that is, thinking must be informed by our circumstance, by our being-in-the-world. Thus, pre-theoretical engagement is necessary for thought, both because it is the pathway to thought and because it “leaves its mark permanently on thought.”7 When philosophy thematizes this engagement it points to the fundamental and irreducible nature of an overarching context of significance. It finds that we never encounter pure “data,” and that everything is only ever encountered within a referential nexus. Thus, the thematization of pre-theoretical engagement also reveals the importance of the latent or hidden moments of all experience. The “fact” of this hidden mark N 83 is the peculiar factuality of that which is not seen, of that which withdraws from our understanding. Nonetheless, these latencies are just as constitutive of experience as the visual or “actual” moments. Where this insight about concealment goes unnoticed there is oen a drive toward the development of a more “scientific” and “rigorous” philosophy, which is oen accompanied by antipathy toward the kinds of projects pursued in the humanities. One of the philosophical insights informing this paper, though I do not here a empt to develop it explicitly, is the recognition that such antipathy is ultimately traceable to an uneasiness with human finitude. Since the recognition of the latency inherent to understanding is simultaneously the recognition of human limitation and of the fragility of the human, finitude is a topic that work in the humanities contends with in some way, even if only implicitly or indirectly. Thus, it is not surprising that “continental” philosophy is distinguished by its active conversation with other disciplines. Nicholson too is an active participant in conversations with literature (including poetry) and fine art. For his entire career Nicholson has encouraged his students to venture outside the received, rigidly defined discipline of academic philosophy and to take up philosophical questioning as the task of a life. Nicholson’s own philosophical inspiration is Heidegger’s uncovering of the forgetfulness of being, that the notion of “being” in our civilization has gradually devolved into a one-dimensional concept. Following Heidegger, Nicholson is responding to interpretations of being that reduce “being” to “presence” in the sense of the German Anwesenheit, the sense of being in a present time excluding the past and future, the sense of a thing or substance, and the sense of the Heideggerian notion of Vorhandenheit or presence-at-hand.8 The interpretation of being as presence-at-hand, whether it...