The Problem of Distraction - Hardcover

North, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804775389 ISBN 13: 9780804775380

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

We live in an age of distraction. Contemporary analyses of culture, politics, techno-science, and psychology insist on this. They often suggest remedies for it, or ways to capitalize on it. Yet they almost never investigate the meaning and history of distraction itself. This book corrects this lack of attention. It inquires into the effects of distraction, defined not as the opposite of attention, but as truly discontinuous intellect. Human being has to be reconceived, according to this argument, not as quintessentially thought-bearing, but as subject to repeated, causeless blackouts of mind.

The Problem of Distraction presents the first genealogy of the concept from Aristotle to the largely forgotten, early twentieth-century efforts by Kafka, Heidegger, and Benjamin to revolutionize the humanities by means of distraction. Further, the book makes the case that our present troubles cannot be solved by recovering or enhancing attention. Not-always-thinking beings are beset by radical breaks in their experience, but in this way they are also receptive to what has not and cannot yet be called experience.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Paul North is Assistant Professor of German at Yale University.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

THE PROBLEM OF DISTRACTION

By Paul North

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2012 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7538-0

Contents

Acknowledgments.............................................................xiPrologue: Primal Distraction................................................11 Not-Always-Thinking / Aristotle...........................................172 A Face for Distraction / La Bruyère..................................373 Labyrinth of Pure Reflection / Kafka......................................744 Dissipation&mdashPower&mdashTranscendence / Heidegger.....................1095 Time Wears Away / Benjamin................................................143Epilogue: Distraction and Politics..........................................175Notes.......................................................................185Works Cited.................................................................219Index.......................................................................229

Chapter One

Not-Always-Thinking / Aristotle

No one who wasn't already convinced that asking what thinking means counted as thinking would ask such a question. At the same time, no one who didn't also intend from the outset to suspend or abandon this conviction would bother to ask. Either the most profound question in thought is also the silliest, or else something essential about the constitution of thinking is revealed here, or both. Am I thinking when I think about thinking's meaning, or do I put the act, receptivity, or spontaneity&mdashhowever I may mean it or will mean it&mdashinto suspension, in order to inquire into its sense? If I suspend the sense of it, can I trust the outcome? Won't the thought of thinking's meaning for all intents and purposes be illegitimate, a result of faulty method, fickle? In short, the thought of thinking's meaning is a tangle that produces something more like not-thinking. If thinking seems to stumble when it makes its act into a question, its approach to distraction should be even more precipitous.

How many understandings of this activity or passivity&mdashthinking, penser, noein, denken&mdashand its ambiguous seat or faculty&mdashmens, mind, intellect, nous, Geist, esprit, and so forth&mdashhave been posited, and how various the attempts to cut through the tangle! The stubborn "problem of the moving principle of our thought," so Franz Brentano summed it up in his brilliant 1867 study of Aristotle's De anima. Brentano was struck by the large variety of responses to what he perceived as a single problem with a single solution. "How different the paths that different minds have traveled!" in order to arrive at thought thinking thought (The Psychology of Aristotle 157). How different indeed, and how strongly Brentano wanted to send the paths back to their origin, to minimize the confusion and show their primordial convergence, which could be found, he contended, in Aristotle's account of nous. Not returning to Aristotle had been the kernel of the problem. "How many of those who indignantly shunned this thought were driven to the most extravagant assumptions by the difficulties of the problem...." Aristotle too likes to list errant paths taken by his predecessors. Brentano and Aristotle agree on this methodological ideal: there is one original and unified description of thinking, representing the only solution to the problem of thought, and the different thoughts of different minds on the subject, when taken together, although they apparently point away from the origin, in pointing away simultaneously point back to the primordial path from which their minds strayed. They share the assumption that thinking is in essence whole, transparent, stable, essentially separate from the variety of ways in which one might try to gain access to it, a complex unity, to be sure, yet despite its complexity lacking nothing; thought is, in short, eminently thinkable. Diverging articulations of the meaning of thought prove the underlying unity. Brentano accepts the multiplicity; he has a plan for it: "is there not rather more unity where one begins with a multiplicity of assumptions, but where layer is securely placed upon layer, and the uniformity of style and coherence of all parts is skillfully preserved from top to bottom?" (159). The history of thought can be peeled away to reveal Aristotle, the skilled preserver who pioneered the layering of parts (in the soul) to engineer their coherence. After an afterlife of further layering, Brentano returns the parts to their proper strata.

Under the last layer, following this logic, lies the active intellect, the hen and haplos beneath the manageable complexity. No doubt it too is layered, encrusted with the false opinions of philologists and interpreters. The Aristotelian image of nous poietikos is riddled with conceptual problems that Brentano sets out to simplify in a reading of De anima, perhaps better than Aristotle did or could possibly have done. Aristotle, after all, does not use the phrase "productive thought," nous poietikos, which nonetheless came to represent his thought of thought for millennia, up to and including in Brentano's study.

We will also start from a problem in Aristotle's account of nous, although it doesn't seem to have become diverted or layered over with opinion, and so it may not be a problem in Brentano's sense. Like Brentano, we will return to a beginning in De anima, but instead of the lofty arche of a tradition that degenerates into extravagance after "this thought," Aristotle's pure thought of actual thinking, ours will stop short at a trouble that might have prevented him from beginning. In the beginning there is the beginning of something that would arrest him, but it is not carried through. Aristotle addresses the arresting trouble in his treatise on the psuche, when he calls for an investigation into a peculiar disturbance in noesis. "Of not-always-thinking the cause must be investigated" (tou de me aei noein to aition episkepteon) (De anima 430a5-6). An urgency sounds in this phrase, a fury to pinpoint a cause, and yet at the same time the strangeness and precariousness of the demand is also audible. With this sentence Aristotle enjoins us to find insight into the cause of an irregularity in the concept or experience of noesis. In the general order of the argument in this section of the text, the demand seems to come out of nowhere. Unlike other problemata or aporiai in the theory of nous, this one is not contextualized; it is not integrated into the network of psychic capacities&mdashperception (aisthesis), comprehension (dianoia), imagination (phantasia), and intellection (noesis)&mdashnor does it find a proper place in the ontological schema&mdashpotential/actual (dunamis/energeia)&mdashthat operates here. A sign of the peculiar difficulty inherent in making this demand is its sudden appearance and its even more precipitous disappearance from the argument. Once the productive aspect of nous has been determined to be actual, one, apart, and unchanging, Aristotle forgets or ignores the demand just as abruptly as he announced it.

The demand hangs suspended without a response, and in this suspension, and suspense, questions arise: why would a thinking whose time signature was not always, me aei, present itself to Aristotle as requiring, let alone being susceptible to, causal investigation?...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804775389
• ISBN 13: 9780804775380
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 233
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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