Abstract
To this point thresholding has been more adumbrated than articulated, more invoked than explained. This is not simply the result of our historical prematurity. It is not just that foundational reflections at the turn of the century may be slightly ahead of their time. Though we do dwell in a rapidly contracting (though nonetheless pervasive) “not yet,” and this contributes to the problem of presentation, there is another difficulty as well.
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Obviously plurality is involved here. The decenteredness so much upon us through Foucault and others need not imply some existential variant of a no occupancy theory of “consciousness.” Multiple voices are not only likely, but perhaps unavoidable. See in this connection, Jacques Derrida, “` Eating Well’ or the Calculation of the Subject,” trans. Peter Connor and Avital Ronell, in Who Comes after the Subject ed. Eduardo Cadava et al. (New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1991), pp. 96–119.
Note the Heideggerian reference to ausdruecken (expression) in Being and Time See especially pp. 190–191.
The Heideggerian struggle to connect the “call” of conscience and “wanting to have a conscience” is obviously a variant of this problem. In another context it might be argued that Heidegger is trying to find a way to give himself over to the “it,” from Being and Time to his belated interview, published posthumously, in which he says that “only a god can save us.”
Composers provide the most difficult examples for attacks upon psychologism to withstand. And yet to call music primarily psychological or to construe the content of music as the arrangement of feelings is quite counter-intuitive.
See in this connection “The Presence of the Present as Absence: Some Reflections,” Man and World Vol. 24, Fall 1991, pp. 355–72.
Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961) p. 149 and 151, 6.521.
I do not mean to imply that Wittgenstein was a thresholder in the sense in which we are pursuing it in this volume, but at the same time he might well have been one.
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© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Erickson, S.A. (1999). Philosophy and Meditation. In: The (Coming) Age of Thresholding. Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9271-0_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9271-0_5
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