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Verzonden: woensdag 7 juli 2004 21:49
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Onderwerp: Re: 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.
Jud:
Matter/Energy belongs to nobody.
rene2:
They belong to who puts them into words. So they belong to the evening land,
which has gone global. But many people during long times, lived without.
Still, these are, falsely and mercilessly, regarded through the perspective
of these notions.
I noticed your use of the expression putting into words'. It looks like the best
translation of Heidegger's 'zur Sprache bringen', or 'ins Wort bringen'.
Heidegger uses both in the beginning hours of 'Principle of ground'.
He writes that, although Leibniz put the principle of ground as the first into
words, it had been asleep during more than 2000 years, its so-called incubation
period. Indeed, from Plato and Aristotle on, phenomena are related to a ground.
Since then, it has been so natural, that nobody during 2300 years feld the need
to say it, to put it into words. Leibniz responded to the hidden power of the
principle of ground by always calling it grande and magnum, To us, the power
of founding and objectifying is still something else: all dignity of it seems
gone, and only terror left.
As Aristotle he could hardly have avoided
noticing it like everybody else who has ever lived.
For those still unaware of matter and energy I recommend striking the head
against the wall until the penny drops.
Are you claiming that Aristotle believed that ONLY matter/energy exists? I
think you are batting on a very sticky wicket there Rene. ;-)
I mean very simply, Jud, that matter (hyle: woods) and energeia are words
philosophically coined by Aristotle. Leibniz noticed it, and without his
reflection on 'entelecheia' never ever would for instance cancer have been
discovered, hmmm.... created. You gotta know what you're looking for, otherwise
it remains forever hidden. Modern terror also has had a very long incubation time.
(that's what i meant with Kafka already present in Descartes, in non-chronological
history)
Jud: [earlier]
- 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,
I 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.
Rene:
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.
Jud:
There are lots and lots of words that I have been "given" by the tradition —
lots and lots of meaningless little silly little words which mean something to
some people and not to me. Take the word "God" for instance - I could not
even deny God's reality without using the term.
rene2:
But that's already an important limitation to autocratic subjectivity.
Philosophical onto-theology means: every time anew, the old god is denied,
but only by creating a new one, lastly Nietzsche's anti-Christ, Dionysos.
Just denying Gods is nothing. Even unwillingly, you have to replace your
old god by a new one too: your omnipotent existence, or gradual ontogenesis.
True, one cannot deny what's before one's eyes: it's sometimes too weird
really to 'cope' with (Dreyfus' way of putting it).
"Metaphysical activity — metaphysical activity! Well, THAT is a new one for
the books! Hahahah!
Grammar, logic, and the ability to play noughts and crosses comes from
THINKING and THINKING is very much a
PHYSICAL activity — it's done with a physical, material object called the
brain which is sometimes removed in Post Mortems and weighed in a stainless
steel dish. The brain and its words don't "boss" anyone around because the
"holistic proprietor" of the brain IS THE BOSS" — the brain and its words
don't boss the body about for brain, body, ideas and the words used to
communicate those ideas are ALL ONE UNIT.
rene2
When that would be true, everything one thinks can, in principle, be
objectified by brain-scanners. If one would think this through till the end,
one would have to commit suicide, turn off the switch.
[Nietzsche: eternal return is going to be the sifter of future mankind: those
not able to withstand meaninglessness, will become superfluous. We even have not
overcome Hitler and Stalin]
Jud:
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*.
Rene:
I'd say your ontogenesis is more wonderful than all omnipotent beings
together. On behalf of the whole world: thanks Jud.
Jud:
Thanks Rene - you're welcome!
No really. How can you be so 'critical' of gods, and so fundamentalistic
about scientific explanation? As if the mere assertion of the physical,
and the mere abdication of gods, puts one above suspicion. I consider
your way of thinking - as you do mine - extremely dangerous.
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]
rene:
Da-sein, to-be-the-Da - as cleared once more by Emad - is an infinitivus.
Jud:
Dasein is an abstract noun created from the gerund: "Being There" or "There
Being".
rene2:
??? It's a German infinitive. Howe you cope with it in English is your
problem.
"THERE" is an adjective and has no infinitive - Being { Sein] is an
irregular verb BE.
It used to have cognates in old English:
OE. sie, pl. sien, later si, sin, surviving till c. 1200 = OS., OHG. si, sin
(I?u. zij, z.iin, G. sei, seien)
~ L. si:m" ~~m, sint, Gr. eien, etc., Skr. sydt .-IE. S(i)Jem, -s(i)jenti.
There is nothing strange or difficult about it - except to those whose
grasp of grammar is tenuous like Heidegger and his "IST-lock" for which he
couldn't find a key, and so was condemned to solitary ontological imprisonment
for life.
So it must look to those, who live in the prison of modern common sense.
How can ONE man be so dangerous? What about the autocracy: maybe not so
self-confident as they think they are?
Rene:
Heidegger has made it clear that he has nothing to do with existentialism
and humanism.
Jud:
I am sure that humanists and existentialists all over the world will breath
a huge sigh of relief to hear you say that
rene2:
I don't know. Why are *you* her on the Heidegger list, and not with Sartre
or Gabriel Marcel? Would another title than 'The philosophy of Being' have
made Philipse as famous and rich as it did? Body-snatchers, that's what they
are. They even ruin their own philosophical departments. Oudemans, one of the
best, has even lost his professorate. Cui bono? Bitches and faggots.
Just like here: the best books are not bought. Instead, from the wild west
come packets with hopeless shit. They can be sent back, but that's probably
too costly, so it remains. It's really scandalous, but it is Gestell, so let's
not stimulate widerwille: the mechanization of the thought industry. One day
'they' will find out, that they're all alone with it, that all the time it was
autocratic self-degradation.
Jud:
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.
Rene:
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.
Jud:
If [and it's a BIG if] what Heidegger wrote was the truth,
It is fruitful even to refute your hypothetical admission.
Truth, according to him, is never waiting to be discovered,
truth is just not what can be agreed on.
what harm could it do if
his notions were to be taken up by the mass book market?
Who would be harmed by it?
Not someone. Being itself would stay out. And that is harmful only to
the few who notice.But because Being 'is' this staying out -
as you say: it is not a thing one can see or touch; still everything
touchable *is* - , it cannot be harmed. It only gets stronger.
Do you think that once "great" ideas are accessed
by the hoi polloi they are debased — if so why?
When Heidegger seems to talk like that, he always means the
academic polloi. But even they are a consequence of the way
technology is after dominating everything. And all protest
against these ridiculous professionals, or better: the paying
prison in which they are willingly auto-emasculated, cannot but
harm oneself. (i say this primarily to myself)
As i wrote to Bob Scheetz, the 'highest' that philosophy is after,
is nothing aristocratic, it only *is*, when everyone is touched by it.
Meanwhile one can only prepare one's preparedness, leaving what 'is'
now to itself. Say goodbye to it. I know and follow the rules, that's it.
In this I am NOT claiming that the 'Do-it-Yourself Psychology,' and 'Know
Your Own Mind,' and 'The Way to a Better
You,' books are based upon Heidegger's ravings, but that Heidegger's
rantings are the unneccessary reflection of what everybody in the world has been
aware of for millennia, but repackaged in a more esoteric and clumsy format
SNIP
We can witness where such a negativistic philosophical attitude leads to.
But you're talking again of things and times that are not given.
The philosopher of common sense creates his own world and history.
With what right?, one might ask. The only philospher that is being
watched is Heidegger, and all the others can do what they want.
'Crazy insane, or insane crazy?'
Jud:
Heidegger was dreadfully wrong as usual — for we discussed the
inescapability of death even at that age.
Rene:
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.
Jud:
Heidegger chunners on about the comportment towards death with more square
inches given to mortality than an undertaker's brochure. No wonder he didn't
get invited to many parties [other that Party parties} He must have been a
great bundle of laughs to go out socially with?
In a sense: yes. He was not as flamboyant as his brother, hard to get moving.
But when he felt they were after him, he could be demolishing. Like he was to
the interviewer, who asked him, what, as an 80-year old philospher, he had to say
to the people. I think that Gary got it: "What do you know about *my* loneliness?".
The real polloi-ness lies in the insolence of those 'interested'. Real, simple
people are normally reluctant to bespeak those things frontally, that is: they
still own that reluctance, that Heidegger considers necessary to treat extensively
and artificially, indeed. But he also explains why. As to himself, he would rather
have lived like a poete maudit, like Juenger, and not be hindered by vile aggression,
which he could not stand very well.
Zarathustra says it clearly: only when you have all betrayed me, shall i return.
And the necessity to hide one's gold: they'll slice your belly.
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."
Rene:
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.
Jud:
Oh! You ARE naughty! But I like you!
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.
Rene:
True, everything before the hyphen is utter rubbish.
Jud:
Congratulations - a good joke Rene you made me laugh.
Nevertheless most people are very well aware of their own inevitable
mortality- though most don't wish to be reminded of it by party-poopers like
Heidegger
It is NOT their mortality he is talking of. What he discusses under the
heading: finitude, is NOT perishability, of which man has been only
too aware since the oldest days (Gilgamesh). It's something else. But they'll never
find it, as long as they already know. It's not Heidegger who is in trouble
really, the rest is.
Jud:
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.
Rene:
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'
Jud:
You are wrong again Rene. Heidegger explicitly states at the beginning of B
& T:
I. The necessity of an explicit recovery of the question of Being.
"This question has today been forgotten-although our time considers itself
progressive
in again affirming "metaphysics." to me or you."
His implication is that Scotus, Aquinas and company made a hash of the
question of Being
and that the idea has lain neglected for centuries. I contest this fiercely
SNIP
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.
Rene:
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.)
Jud:
Tell that to Bruno, Gallielo and the rest — plus the hundreds of thousands
of protestants and catholics and Moslems and God knows what else who were
murdered because of their religious beliefs or lack of them.
The modern massacres were carried out by Christian societies - Hitler
boasted about being Christian.
If they weren't outright religionists they were political transcendental
loonies like the Communists under Stalin.
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?
Rene:
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.
Every religion is onto-theological in the sense that they each offer
ridiculously
childish explanations of creation. There is nothing really different about
Christianity
other than it is more bloodthirsty and inhuman perhaps.
Jud:
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? *
Rene:
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....
Jud:
Or a corpulent monk in his masturbatorium?
Jud:
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."
Rene:
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.
Jud:
The occurrence and experience of a human entity is all that happens
All right. But IN what is he, agreed that he did not *make* his world.
The question 'what is this' echoes through it, but we don't seem to listen
to this voice of 'conscience'. Really strange.....
— there is no concomitant
"Being" running alongside like some partner in a three-legged egg-and-spoon
race. ;-)
not that, no. but what then?
Jud:
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 unnecessary
Greek and Latin quotations and rather pathetic German neologisms.
Rene:
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.
Jud:
And what WAS this 'simple and one thing" he is saying?
That we HAVE arrived at Being, now that metaphysics has turned out to be
nihilism, but that we rather want the Nothing than (willing the) not-willing.
It's one big scandal. Sometimes somebody hesitates for a second. But there's
no more concentration. Not technique is the problem, but the technological
WAY of being (as a -blind- modus of Dasein) is the danger. Why ? Because not
a robot is needed to forbid, we do the forbidding permanently and always
more rigorous. And it's the EXLUSIVENESS of technology that is the danger,
threatening what becomes in us the ever shrinking possibility of reflection
(Besinnung) Without us ever being able to destroy that possibility completely.
Things are not like that 'without a reason', i guess.
That there is a weirdo unpindownable phenomenon called "Being?"
Yes it was certainly a "simple" idea all right. — exhibiting childlike
simplicity and credulity-
Lacking mental capacity and devoid of subtlety.;-)
i don't think so, so please go on, he's only getting stronger.
cheers
rene
yours,
Jud Evans
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