[I must say I'm enjoying the spirited dialectic of this list, almost too
much, feeling obliged to reply to all the discussion occasioned by my
spectral presence... Please forgive my sporadic querulousness].
Robert Scheetz responds, on the topic of chaos:
>Doesn't this precisely illustrate the point? the image
>is the womb, mother Ge, the chthonic. Aren't we in aggreement
>then that H's is a myth-logos?
Sure, but the mythic chthonic force or element remains wrapped up and
impervious behind its veil, as it were; Heid's gaping origin shows itself,
reveals itself, just as it hides itself. Take it from another angle, one
about which Heid. has pronounced reservations, but let's see what aid it
can provide us: the *transcendens*, the condition of the possibility of
Dasein's Being-in-the-world, is itself not reducible to Dasein. It is
anterior and exterior but intrinsically related to Dasein -- it needs man,
as the later formulation runs. Idealists of any stripe (including the
post-Fichtean Sartre) have trouble stomaching this claim; positivists grow
irate, wielding pillory such as 'mystification'. The ego has no
self-reflexive recourse to secure its own foundations -- no cogito, no
synthetic unity of apperception, no interiorizing Aufhebung. If
transcendental philosophy thereby lapses into dogmatism (as Adorno
charges), then we are indeed trodding the path of 'myth' in the bad sense
of regressive pre-rational modes of explanation. I like to think otherwise
when it comes to Heidegger, that there is a specific exigency to his
thinking of Being that cannot simply be called mythical; a-letheia as
un-concealment names the condition which both enables the thinking and
doing of human being, and disables immediate access to this condition,
withdrawing mysteriously whilst granting access to entities.
on the history of subjecticity:
>For what? 3 million yrs, until Thales this was not the case;
>and tradition accords the prestige of "liberatory enlightenment"
>to the tiny fraction of human existence since. It's hard not to see
>the inversion of this judgement as sectarian, reactionary, perverse....
But we residents of the so-called global village hardly comprehend
pre-Thales Dasein, and cannot comprehend it if Heid's history of Being is
right. That is, we are metaphysically oriented ('destined') from the start,
a situation culminating in the anthropocentrism endemic to liberatory
enlightenment.
on the poet vs. the statesman:
>And this, the Ideal is the really real, is a cardinal Romantic
>thesis, no?
Though Heidegger emphatically spurns the claim that poets trade in the
Ideal; the 'transcendence' specific to artworks is not that they
epiphanically grant access to the heaven of eternal ideas, but rather that
they hold open possibilities of encounter across time, enabling future
'preservers' to attend to the truth disclosed (or, better, truth as
disclosure) in the work.
Robert, I hope this makes some sense. Heidegger can indeed be irksome --
I'm no high priest of Heideggerianism ... my primary hope is at least to
understand him, and to learn from others who have the 'sense'.
Best regards,
Paul N. Murphy
--- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---
much, feeling obliged to reply to all the discussion occasioned by my
spectral presence... Please forgive my sporadic querulousness].
Robert Scheetz responds, on the topic of chaos:
>Doesn't this precisely illustrate the point? the image
>is the womb, mother Ge, the chthonic. Aren't we in aggreement
>then that H's is a myth-logos?
Sure, but the mythic chthonic force or element remains wrapped up and
impervious behind its veil, as it were; Heid's gaping origin shows itself,
reveals itself, just as it hides itself. Take it from another angle, one
about which Heid. has pronounced reservations, but let's see what aid it
can provide us: the *transcendens*, the condition of the possibility of
Dasein's Being-in-the-world, is itself not reducible to Dasein. It is
anterior and exterior but intrinsically related to Dasein -- it needs man,
as the later formulation runs. Idealists of any stripe (including the
post-Fichtean Sartre) have trouble stomaching this claim; positivists grow
irate, wielding pillory such as 'mystification'. The ego has no
self-reflexive recourse to secure its own foundations -- no cogito, no
synthetic unity of apperception, no interiorizing Aufhebung. If
transcendental philosophy thereby lapses into dogmatism (as Adorno
charges), then we are indeed trodding the path of 'myth' in the bad sense
of regressive pre-rational modes of explanation. I like to think otherwise
when it comes to Heidegger, that there is a specific exigency to his
thinking of Being that cannot simply be called mythical; a-letheia as
un-concealment names the condition which both enables the thinking and
doing of human being, and disables immediate access to this condition,
withdrawing mysteriously whilst granting access to entities.
on the history of subjecticity:
>For what? 3 million yrs, until Thales this was not the case;
>and tradition accords the prestige of "liberatory enlightenment"
>to the tiny fraction of human existence since. It's hard not to see
>the inversion of this judgement as sectarian, reactionary, perverse....
But we residents of the so-called global village hardly comprehend
pre-Thales Dasein, and cannot comprehend it if Heid's history of Being is
right. That is, we are metaphysically oriented ('destined') from the start,
a situation culminating in the anthropocentrism endemic to liberatory
enlightenment.
on the poet vs. the statesman:
>And this, the Ideal is the really real, is a cardinal Romantic
>thesis, no?
Though Heidegger emphatically spurns the claim that poets trade in the
Ideal; the 'transcendence' specific to artworks is not that they
epiphanically grant access to the heaven of eternal ideas, but rather that
they hold open possibilities of encounter across time, enabling future
'preservers' to attend to the truth disclosed (or, better, truth as
disclosure) in the work.
Robert, I hope this makes some sense. Heidegger can indeed be irksome --
I'm no high priest of Heideggerianism ... my primary hope is at least to
understand him, and to learn from others who have the 'sense'.
Best regards,
Paul N. Murphy
--- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---