You will remember perhaps that I am generally anti-Aristotelian? In addition
to that I hold that there is only matter/energy in the cosmos - matter in
the form of energy and particles and energy in the form of matter and that even
things like thought is matter/energy produced by synapsal activity which is
stored in the mind/brain as energy matter.
In my universe there is nothing metaphysical — nothing above or beyond the
physical. For me even the word 'metaphysics' is a misnomer. Discussing
problems of morality and ethics as I see it is not a metaphysical discourse but
rather a dialogue concerning the ins and outs of consensual or inadmissible
social behaviour within or without the framework of rules if they are or are not
recognised or considered necessary.
Even a discussion on the origins of the universe is to me not a metaphysical
discussion. Having read and studied comparative religion, noticed the
developmental similarities and borrowings — the constant updating of doctrine and
abandonment of shibboleths and the adaptation of new ones to keep up with
science, etc., I have arrived at a satisfactory conclusion. In my universe
there is nothing supra-natural about existence, and furthermore nominalistically
'existence' doesn't even exist.
The purely physical unfolding of events involved in objects and organisms
changes gradually from a simple to a more complex level and this ontogenesis is
not the work of an omnipotent *Being*. Now I know I haven't been asked to
explain my position about these things - I'm just voluntarily stripping away my
own surrounding tanglewood and setting out my stall before saying a few
things about Heidegger and Sartre and the way they attempted to interpret the
world in which they found themselves and the way they set about describing it to
others like you and me.
Before stating my position about the generally non-predicational nature of
*Being* [is etc.] and the way that Heidegger confused sequential Homo sapiens
sapiens existing with a gerundial grammatical construct, [Dasein] I would
like to say a few things about existentialism in general. To my mind, (and I
don't want to sound offensive to anybody,) most of what is propounded by
existentialists can be found in the plethora of mass-market cheap paperbacks on the
shelves of everybody's local bookstore. Of course I'm not suggesting that the
whole body of Heidegger's philosophy is encapsulated in one particular
volume, but rather that a dredging and trawling of the various meretricious
'Do-it-Yourself Psychology,' and 'Know Your Own Mind,' and 'The Way to a Better
You,' books cover all of the subjects addressed by Heidegger and Sartre and
company.
Because these books are written for a generally non-academic market, they
are usually a lot more easily understood, and are not chivvied by a mass of
obfuscatory verbiage and extraneous classical references and needless
Germanisms. There is one subject that they don't usually cover, and that is an
investigation of the nature of existence itself. There are however lots of books on
*How Your Brain Works* - *The Nature of Consciousness, * , etc. which do touch
on this subject.
For me all the terminology and neologisms of the existentialists are jejune
- I use the word jejune deliberately not through a wish to offend, but
because it was my experience that the questions posed in the existentialist genre
are those that usually occur to teenagers as they first begin to examine their
surroundings and the interrelationships with the people that share this
adolescent milieu.
For me and my scruffy mates in the streets of Liverpool in our teenage years
— although we had never heard of existentialism — the ideas of
existentialism — the hesitant fumblings and gropings for understanding of the world as it
was unfolding were part of our 'rites of passage,' a process that we all had
to go through to reach an understanding of who we were, and what the world
was, and the ways in which other people thought the way we did — or did not.
Our thinking wasn't structured in any academic way — there was no body of
study that we referred to or quoted from — we were basically experientialist
street Arabs - poor children in donated rags running around way after our
bedtime finding out about life. In our own rough English regional dialect we
discussed our own isolation — we shared the wonder of discovering new objects —
objects we had never seen before — the only time in one's life when one
experiences the true phenomenological occurrence — when there is no need to imagine
oneself into a situation where the object has no provenance or developmental
history — because for you at that age — it simply hasn't one.
Heidegger was dreadfully wrong as usual — for we discussed the
inescapability of death even at that age. We gazed at the faces of our dead relatives in
open coffins and tried to come to terms with mortality. We found it difficult
to put into words — like most working-class people we were to a large extent
inarticulate. It is only now in old age that I realise that one of the
greatest mistakes of the educated, particularly the academic establishment, is to
interpret the inarticulacy of the uneducated as evidence of a lesser
intelligence. Because it is such an important truth - I will repeat that again-
"One of the greatest mistakes of the educated, particularly the academic
establishment, is to interpret the inarticulacy of the uneducated as evidence of
a lesser intelligence."
Heidegger tells us that the question of the inevitability of death and the
subject of *Being* is not addressed in the minds of ordinary people — this is
utter rubbish. Heidegger goes on to say that the philosophical tradition has
ignored the question of *Being* since the Greeks, and that there is a huge
historical gap in ontological enquiry since those times. This also is utter
rubbish, for Aquinas and other scholastics dealt with the subject extensively
from a Christian perspective. As children we were fearful of Catholics. They
had these strange beliefs and if you went to St Francis de Sales church with
them, you would see these horrible statues and pictures of a man with a beard
with all his chest opened so his bleeding heart was exposed. It was all very
frightening and the whole atmosphere was spooky. It's a bit like you think
about vampires nowadays. It was all mystical, dimly lit and frightening.
Due to the viciousness of the Medievalist church, a sensible discussion of
the nature of *Being* was too dangerous a subject for most, and a freethinker
could end up tied to a post surrounded by piles of kindling wood. One would
have hoped that in view of Heidegger's Jesuitical training he would have been
aware of these ignorant and igneous obstacles to philosophical enquiry — but
then again, perhaps his black robed tutors failed to mention the leading part
played in the barbaric Auto de Fe spectacles by their gothic fraternal
forerunners — soon to be re-enacted by Heidegger's Nazi goons.
I'd have thought that humanity has been considering the question of
**Being** and **being*s* pretty seriously for the last two thousand years, at least
as far as Christianity is concerned, and for longer if we take into
consideration the older religions that predate the birth of Christ - plus the religions
that have emerged since Jesus. If as Christians we accept that God is
responsible for **Being** and **Being*s, * why do we need to question the nature of
**Being*? * As a Christian, why did Heidegger need to pursue the enquiry?
Why did Heidegger create 'Dasein' instead of pursuing his colloquy with God
through prayer and contemplation like his Jesuit teachers and ask his questions
directly to the creator of **being*s* and **Being*ness? *
Being-in-the-world* is in one sense '*being* the world,' while in an even
more real sense *being* absolutely nobody in that world. You have no identity,
ergo no essence. You are 'essentially' just a thing alongside all the other
totally useless things in the world whose importance derives only from what
the 'They' selves says about you and them. And that is called "common sense."
Yes, that's how it was for me and probably for you if you think back to your
early childhood. We kids soon found out about things like loneliness,
depression, exultation, ennui, and most of all political reality and power. Yes,
the really irritating thing about Heidegger is, that when in an effort to
understand what he's getting at, one rummages around in the slippery, wriggling
mass of epistemological entrails and gallimaufrien giblets of his writings, one
realises that he is addressing concepts and concerns that exercised one's
mind during the most basic developmental stage of one's existence. He just puts
things in an extraordinary complicated way - things that my old teenage pals
and I would discuss around a lamppost and dispense with using our limited
scouse, (Liverpool,) vernacular - that is if you removed the unneccessary
Greek and Latin quotations and rather pathetic German neologisms.
Cheers,
Jud Evans
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to that I hold that there is only matter/energy in the cosmos - matter in
the form of energy and particles and energy in the form of matter and that even
things like thought is matter/energy produced by synapsal activity which is
stored in the mind/brain as energy matter.
In my universe there is nothing metaphysical — nothing above or beyond the
physical. For me even the word 'metaphysics' is a misnomer. Discussing
problems of morality and ethics as I see it is not a metaphysical discourse but
rather a dialogue concerning the ins and outs of consensual or inadmissible
social behaviour within or without the framework of rules if they are or are not
recognised or considered necessary.
Even a discussion on the origins of the universe is to me not a metaphysical
discussion. Having read and studied comparative religion, noticed the
developmental similarities and borrowings — the constant updating of doctrine and
abandonment of shibboleths and the adaptation of new ones to keep up with
science, etc., I have arrived at a satisfactory conclusion. In my universe
there is nothing supra-natural about existence, and furthermore nominalistically
'existence' doesn't even exist.
The purely physical unfolding of events involved in objects and organisms
changes gradually from a simple to a more complex level and this ontogenesis is
not the work of an omnipotent *Being*. Now I know I haven't been asked to
explain my position about these things - I'm just voluntarily stripping away my
own surrounding tanglewood and setting out my stall before saying a few
things about Heidegger and Sartre and the way they attempted to interpret the
world in which they found themselves and the way they set about describing it to
others like you and me.
Before stating my position about the generally non-predicational nature of
*Being* [is etc.] and the way that Heidegger confused sequential Homo sapiens
sapiens existing with a gerundial grammatical construct, [Dasein] I would
like to say a few things about existentialism in general. To my mind, (and I
don't want to sound offensive to anybody,) most of what is propounded by
existentialists can be found in the plethora of mass-market cheap paperbacks on the
shelves of everybody's local bookstore. Of course I'm not suggesting that the
whole body of Heidegger's philosophy is encapsulated in one particular
volume, but rather that a dredging and trawling of the various meretricious
'Do-it-Yourself Psychology,' and 'Know Your Own Mind,' and 'The Way to a Better
You,' books cover all of the subjects addressed by Heidegger and Sartre and
company.
Because these books are written for a generally non-academic market, they
are usually a lot more easily understood, and are not chivvied by a mass of
obfuscatory verbiage and extraneous classical references and needless
Germanisms. There is one subject that they don't usually cover, and that is an
investigation of the nature of existence itself. There are however lots of books on
*How Your Brain Works* - *The Nature of Consciousness, * , etc. which do touch
on this subject.
For me all the terminology and neologisms of the existentialists are jejune
- I use the word jejune deliberately not through a wish to offend, but
because it was my experience that the questions posed in the existentialist genre
are those that usually occur to teenagers as they first begin to examine their
surroundings and the interrelationships with the people that share this
adolescent milieu.
For me and my scruffy mates in the streets of Liverpool in our teenage years
— although we had never heard of existentialism — the ideas of
existentialism — the hesitant fumblings and gropings for understanding of the world as it
was unfolding were part of our 'rites of passage,' a process that we all had
to go through to reach an understanding of who we were, and what the world
was, and the ways in which other people thought the way we did — or did not.
Our thinking wasn't structured in any academic way — there was no body of
study that we referred to or quoted from — we were basically experientialist
street Arabs - poor children in donated rags running around way after our
bedtime finding out about life. In our own rough English regional dialect we
discussed our own isolation — we shared the wonder of discovering new objects —
objects we had never seen before — the only time in one's life when one
experiences the true phenomenological occurrence — when there is no need to imagine
oneself into a situation where the object has no provenance or developmental
history — because for you at that age — it simply hasn't one.
Heidegger was dreadfully wrong as usual — for we discussed the
inescapability of death even at that age. We gazed at the faces of our dead relatives in
open coffins and tried to come to terms with mortality. We found it difficult
to put into words — like most working-class people we were to a large extent
inarticulate. It is only now in old age that I realise that one of the
greatest mistakes of the educated, particularly the academic establishment, is to
interpret the inarticulacy of the uneducated as evidence of a lesser
intelligence. Because it is such an important truth - I will repeat that again-
"One of the greatest mistakes of the educated, particularly the academic
establishment, is to interpret the inarticulacy of the uneducated as evidence of
a lesser intelligence."
Heidegger tells us that the question of the inevitability of death and the
subject of *Being* is not addressed in the minds of ordinary people — this is
utter rubbish. Heidegger goes on to say that the philosophical tradition has
ignored the question of *Being* since the Greeks, and that there is a huge
historical gap in ontological enquiry since those times. This also is utter
rubbish, for Aquinas and other scholastics dealt with the subject extensively
from a Christian perspective. As children we were fearful of Catholics. They
had these strange beliefs and if you went to St Francis de Sales church with
them, you would see these horrible statues and pictures of a man with a beard
with all his chest opened so his bleeding heart was exposed. It was all very
frightening and the whole atmosphere was spooky. It's a bit like you think
about vampires nowadays. It was all mystical, dimly lit and frightening.
Due to the viciousness of the Medievalist church, a sensible discussion of
the nature of *Being* was too dangerous a subject for most, and a freethinker
could end up tied to a post surrounded by piles of kindling wood. One would
have hoped that in view of Heidegger's Jesuitical training he would have been
aware of these ignorant and igneous obstacles to philosophical enquiry — but
then again, perhaps his black robed tutors failed to mention the leading part
played in the barbaric Auto de Fe spectacles by their gothic fraternal
forerunners — soon to be re-enacted by Heidegger's Nazi goons.
I'd have thought that humanity has been considering the question of
**Being** and **being*s* pretty seriously for the last two thousand years, at least
as far as Christianity is concerned, and for longer if we take into
consideration the older religions that predate the birth of Christ - plus the religions
that have emerged since Jesus. If as Christians we accept that God is
responsible for **Being** and **Being*s, * why do we need to question the nature of
**Being*? * As a Christian, why did Heidegger need to pursue the enquiry?
Why did Heidegger create 'Dasein' instead of pursuing his colloquy with God
through prayer and contemplation like his Jesuit teachers and ask his questions
directly to the creator of **being*s* and **Being*ness? *
Being-in-the-world* is in one sense '*being* the world,' while in an even
more real sense *being* absolutely nobody in that world. You have no identity,
ergo no essence. You are 'essentially' just a thing alongside all the other
totally useless things in the world whose importance derives only from what
the 'They' selves says about you and them. And that is called "common sense."
Yes, that's how it was for me and probably for you if you think back to your
early childhood. We kids soon found out about things like loneliness,
depression, exultation, ennui, and most of all political reality and power. Yes,
the really irritating thing about Heidegger is, that when in an effort to
understand what he's getting at, one rummages around in the slippery, wriggling
mass of epistemological entrails and gallimaufrien giblets of his writings, one
realises that he is addressing concepts and concerns that exercised one's
mind during the most basic developmental stage of one's existence. He just puts
things in an extraordinary complicated way - things that my old teenage pals
and I would discuss around a lamppost and dispense with using our limited
scouse, (Liverpool,) vernacular - that is if you removed the unneccessary
Greek and Latin quotations and rather pathetic German neologisms.
Cheers,
Jud Evans
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