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Verzonden: dinsdag 6 juli 2004 19:13
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Onderwerp: Heidegger's Preposterous Asumptions (1)
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
Hahaha Jud. Matter/energy is Aristotelian. Thanks for showing more clearly,
what all do. There comes one saying: Kant's distinction of analytical
and synthetical judgments is untenable, etc. But instead of being original,
they're just a footnote to Kant's distinction. Of course they treat him with
respect - your scolding is more frank - but actually this respect is nothing
but disdain.
[Ah...the blinking! They cannot help to be tied to sthing essential. The fuel
of widerwille.]
- 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.
Like with Aristotle above, you would not be able to say this without the word
'existence' having been given to you. Have you ever remarked that grammar and
logic as disciplines only originate after metaphysical activity? They're like
computers: you have to put sthing in it; once that is secured, they're the boss.
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*.
I'd say your ontogenesis is more wonderful than all omnipotent beings together.
On behalf of the whole world: thanks Jud.
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]
Da-sein, to-be-the-Da - as cleared once more by Emad - is an infinitivus.
Heidegger has made it clear that he has nothing to do with existentialism
and humanism.
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.
You make a point. Everything essential is harmed. For instance the adagium:
only a god can save us. Immediately this 'god' is a lunatic, and who wants to
be saved by a lunatic? But really, it is not harmed, it is PROTECTED this way
from insolency. No trespassing for those who already know.
'Philo-sophers': those who ALREADY know. Their first contradiction.
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.
That's not what Heidegger discusses. Everything dealing with death is
everyday business - the streets of London or of Oxford. Zum-Tode-sein
has nothing to do with death.
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 thought the curious smile of a Schwarzwald peasant, who notices a newly
invented object, closer to wisdom than the engineer of the thing. In fact, all
intelligence that has come loose of the ground, becomes abstract. Dear Jud,
you're a Heideggerian.
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.
True, everything before the hyphen 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.
He knew that too, Jud, and saw the trouble (for us) begin there. So, the
Christian-Latin translation of Greek metaphysics cannot be taken seriously
enough, that's what he was saying: the opposite of what you say, which
therefore is the real 'utter rubbish'. You - as the grownup Arab streetboy -
even have not seen the problem of the historic - so: there is still hope,
that you see, that you don't see! That's the only thing Heidegger can 'give'
to me or you.
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.
Again a misjudment. The removal of intelligentsia is almost solely a 20th
century affair. Ergo belonging to an era, in which modern science has been
definitivey established. But that's not enough, more is to be willed: not
only reign, but terror. The massacres are scientifically precalculated.
Your scientific credo is just after keeping us within the twilight zone
of possible massacres. (Jaja Petzet, so ist es.)
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?
He has explained that: Christendom is the only onto-theological religion.
Once God is the highest being and first cause of everything being, the
enquiry cannot be stopped. Ockham, Luther and Nietzsche proved that ex
negativo.
And now that Heidegger has arrived in the wild west, he cannot be stopped
as well. All widerwille is clinging more to him. That's almost funny.
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? *
Not even the medieval philosophers did that, but they built on natural reason.
They, for instance, felt the necessity to ask for the being of the creator of
all beings - not an easy question, and only answerable by a starveling....
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."
That explains a lot, when things (people) are left like that. Here is the
origin of your nihilism, but which is at the same time the lifeline to escape.
(only where danger, there saving)
Either being-in-the-world is already sthing radically different from the
occurrence of a thing, or they'll remain the same forever. All reasoning
is nothing. Decisions are made at the beginning, at a point where philosophers
are still fast asleep.
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.
I think his modesty is endless, when one considers that all intellectuality
is just put before one, in order to be removed, so that the simple and one thing
he is saying, can ... arrive.
yours,
rene
Cheers,
Jud Evans
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