Thursday, May 30, 2024

Arche tou Euangeliou

Beginning of the good message of Jesus Christ, Son of God, as written in Isaiah the prophet: See, I send my messenger before your face, who will build your road, proclaimer's voice in the wilderness; ready the Lord's road, make level his rutted path.

There came John the baptizer in the wilderness, while proclaiming repentant immersion for release of sins, and there were going out to him all of the region of Judea and Jerusalem, and all were being immersed by him in the Jordan River, acknowledging their sins. And John was clothed in camel's hairs, with leather belt around the waist, while eating locusts and wild honey. And he was heralding, saying, The mightier-than-I comes after me, of whom I am not competent, having bent down, to loose the tie of his sandals. I immersed you in water, but he will immerse you in the Holy Spirit.

And it happened in those days, that Jesus came from Galilean Nazareth and was immersed in the Jordan by John. And at once ascending from the water, he gazed at the heavens splitting and the Spirit as dove descending on him. And a voice came from the skies: You are My Son, the Loved, in you I am pleased. And at once the Spirit casts him into the wilderness.

And he was there in the wilderness forty days, tested by the Adversary. And he was with the beasts and the messengers were attending to him.

[Mark 1:1-13, my very, very rough translation. Mark famously shifts back and forth between past tense and present tense; some of the more complicated syntax is my crude attempt to accommodate this in a readable form. He also uses the conjunction kai for almost everything, and in most of his sentences; I've translated it variously as 'and', 'while', and 'with'. He also famously has the quirk of using euthys (straightway, immediately, at once) a lot; he doesn't always seem to mean it chronologically, so perhaps we should take it as his figurative way of indicating that two events are closely tied together in some way or other -- perhaps less like 'at once' and more like 'Connected with this,...'.

The passage has several -angel- words, although interestingly they all do slightly different duty: euangeliou (of the good tiding, i.e., the gospel), ton angelon (the messenger, i.e., the prophet), hoi angeloi (the messengers, i.e., the angels). 

The fact that the comment at the beginning is attributed to Isaiah and not to the textually closer Malachi is sometimes dismissed by commentators as an error of memory, but when we go back and look at how these texts are reflected in this next several paragraphs, the textual interrelations seem to me to be far too complex to make this plausible; the author is not slipping but doing it deliberately. That is, the comment attributed to Isaiah is not a straight quotation but an interpretation, which seems (probably correctly even as a purely textual matter) to recognize Isaiah 40:3 as an allusion to Exodus 23:20ff. and as extended and interpreted by Malachi 3:1. All three passages seem to have some influence on the paragraphs to follow, which is not at all what you would expect from a simple error in memory. And it's a little odd that commentators never remember that the way people, across multiple cultures, read prophecy is by interpreting it in light of other prophecy. It's also worth reflecting that conjoining of multiple prophecies fits exactly with Mark's overall narrative style, with kai and euthys perpetually linking things together into unities of all different kinds.]

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Anonymous
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14 years ago

I have a hard time buying this sentiment as authentically Ryle's (and Google doesn't show anything substantiating it). Ryle wrote a generally positive review of "Being and Time", and when asked about SuZ later he didn't have much to say other than "Oh, yeah, I read that a long time ago and wrote a book review, which I worked hard on but no one ever asked me about. Haven't really thought of it since. Dunno whether it influenced me or not. I liked logical positivism more, at the time, but I might've found appealing anti-Cartesian/proto-behaviorist stuff in SuZ." (I paraphrase; the full quote is in the appendix on p. 290 of Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, which also reprints Ryle's book review from Mind.)

I also don't see what's wrong with the sentiment Ryle genuinely had about SuZ: There're helpful things to be gleaned from it, but the project as a whole isn't the way to go.

I don't know what his character has to do with whether, say, his criticisms of Husserl hit their mark, despite the fact that Being is all over the place in a lot of those; the fact that a Nazi says that everything he's done with his work had to do with his Nazism doesn't make it so. I've never seen a defense of Husserl which takes the form "But this criticism only holds water if you're a Nazi, ergo Husserl escapes the charge."

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Anonymous
0 points
14 years ago

I doubt it's Ryle's, as well; it's a Rylean-like summation, though, even if it's not Ryle's own opinion. But Polt doesn't get into questions of provenance.

Since Ryle's sentiment in the comment really doesn't tell us anything about how to handle the question of Heidegger's Nazism, I'm not sure how it's relevant. Likewise, whether or not Heidegger's criticisms of Husserl are untowardly connected is something that has to be determined, not assumed. The fact that a Nazi says something doesn't make it false, true, but it also doesn't make it non-Nazi in attitude, formulation, or substance; given that we are quite literally talking about a Nazi, that there is nothing about it that is Nazi has to be shown, not insisted upon a priori. As I say, it has to be unwound and then rewound in such a way as to show that there is no Nazi distortion in it. If we can do that, fine and dandy; before we do it, though, we have no license to pretend that all is obviously safe.

Much of the problem lies precisely in reasoning by analogy here, which generally involves merely fooling ourselves by glossing over obviously significant differences. Nazism isn't a limited foible like drinking too much or sexual perversion, that might affect some philosophical fringes here and there but no more. It is a large-scale commitment; and, contrary to the tendency to insist on it as 'politics', it's not a merely political commitment like deciding one will support the Green Party in local elections. It carries a vision of technology, society, humanity. And this is undeniably so in Heidegger's case; Heidegger's own characterizations of his involvement, vague and weasely though they often are, links it with some of this major philosophical concerns. We should not fall into the hubris of pretending to know prior to all evidence what distortions such a commitment may or may not introduce into a philosophical approach, method, position, or system.