/lit/ - Literature

>But here, this recollection—still aporetico-mythical in Meno, dogmatic after Phaedrus—can have as its sole "explanation" the immortality of the soul. "Immortal" means that which belongs to the world of being qua being, to the intelligible world, that of the stars, which is not a world of becoming. Mortality is nothing but the domain of the contingent, of forgetfulness, of becoming: passion, suffering, that which is not a principle unto itself. There can be no other access to being than as an access to what, belonging to the sphere of the fixed stars or that of divine beings, is not swept away in becoming, does not fall into the sublunary world of the artifice, of facticity (mimesis), that is, into error and ultimately corruption, denaturalization, nonbeing.

>All narratives of the origin take on a mythical turn, in that they speak what is: to speak what is qua what absolutely is, is always to endure Meno's aporia, to which a positive answer cannot be given. For there to be, in becoming (there can be an origin only when becoming is; the question of origin could never arise in a world of being), something after all, for being to be itself always the same, for it to have an identity in essence, a threshold should not be crossed but experienced. This is the difficulty Rousseau will encounter in thinking originary man as what he is in his nature, before any determination by his becoming. This will also be the very difficulty of our question: the human / the technical. When do(es) the human / the technical begin and end?

>Later, in Plato, the aporetic myth of recollection...will become a dogma, no longer the experience of a limit to be endured but the schema of an explanation of the origin that will be opposed to the fall. This dogma is, in Phaedrus, the myth of the winged soul, which is then transformed into a "metaphysics" whereby the opposition between the intelligible and the sensible becomes real; being is in reality opposed to becoming, the opposition of the soul and the body becomes the law of all philosophical discourse—and with it, the opposition between what will later be nature and culture, the human and the technical, as well as the question of technics qua writing. "Metaphysics" means retreat before the limit, negation of the aporia, a facility that philosophical thought accords itself, in the form of a dogma, in the face of the infinite number of questions opened up by it.

>This aporetic moment is one in which the aporia always ends up hardening into a mythology opposing two moments: those of purity and corruption, of before and after—the point separating them always already diluted. This is an excellent archetype of the discourse of philosophy on technics, relating through a fiction, if not by a myth, how the man of pure nature is replaced by the man of the fall, of technics and of society. This myth is the foundation, according to Claude Levi-Strauss, of modern scientific anthropology.