----- Original Message -----
From: "michaelP" <michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, July 22, 2004 11:25 AM
Subject: Re: [NeoplatonismDamascius] Perception
MICHAEL P: Gary, glad to see you're still around: I thought you might have
become one
> of the disappeared. Thanks for the below on materialismus; if we
substitute
> 'will' for 'passion' in your deliberations below, then we are also on the
> royal road to Nietzsche and Heidegger, who surely belong in your depiction
> of 'materialism' (which collects together the likes of Hegel, Hume, Marx,
> Sartre, etc: interesting how you bring the whole of modern thinking into
the
> realm of an extended materialism that some might not recognise as such,
but
> more's the pity for them).
GCM: ON WILL AND PASSION: The comparison is correct. Obviously any passion
has an object, and therefore 'intent', but this would immediately bring into
question what an "object" is. I am glad you got me thinking upon this. It
relates to an important chapter in the first volume of Heidegger's
NIETZSCHE, WILL TO POWER AS ART. Will is not at all "objective" or studious
but primarily creative. Any concept of reality in 'will' is merely is merely
a tool to accomplish something more important, one's wishes. This in turn
brings "importance" into a terrifying sort of questioning because then life
and death issues, whose primary 'object' is dealing with materialistic,
determined reality, are not only sidetracked but turned into mere paint
brushes and canvasses for bringing to light something more important. If I
remember Heidegger's chapter right, he brings up the notion there are many
different 'wills to power'. Constructing these thoughts into a connected
ascending scale -- ascending to what is REALLY important to . . . whom?
oneself?
But with many wills taking over consciousness of reality for their own
purposes one becomes a savage democratic crowd as Hume logically describes
in the TREATISE ON HUMAN NATURE and Heidegger has a dialogue with Jacob
Burckhardt in PARMENIDES about how the savage politics of the Athenian agora
was the was the birth place and prime motivation for Plato's and Aristotle's
philosophy as well as the dramas and commedies of the Dionysia festival. The
imaginary unity of the self is utterly degraded to infantile nonsense. The
"I know" and "I reason" become mere statements of a will or passion
pronouncing at one particular moment immediately distorted into the next
moment by other wills/passions to their own purposes. The only thing that
retains any reality of 'self' is the personal, individual, material body
which all these wills and passions are trying to escape in order to become
divine powers terrifying to their enemies, many of those enemies being
within that inadequate notion of 'self' that has become mere personal
history open to a thousand different interpretations by each of one's wills
and passions that make the possesive "one" utterly ludicrous.
The only real "one" is the material body. It contains and produces all these
wills and passions but 'one' has been raised to believe, the primary impact
of religion, that the body is suborninate to will in every aspect, with each
will presupposing it is the true monotheistic god and all other wills mere
demons to be destroyed. And this is what truly constitutes self! And how can
one suborninate the fantasies and whimsies of will to the 'true'
materialistic importance of the body? It is impossible because passion
drives all logic, reason, thinking, the very formation of the concept of the
body, a concept that divides immediately into various political parties of
will/passion into the physiological body of scientific textbook so that the
body is suborninated to the scientific medical gaze of Focault and into the
personal body of Sartre. One's 'self' is the scene of continuous
revolutionary turbulance dominated by a tyrant or groups of tyrants working
as an oligarchy. The line I imagined above, if one remains 'sane' -- and
think how profoundly that concept is now thoroughly compromized! -- AT BEST
becomes frayed, and at worst breaks the line of string apart into an
incohrent babble of lines, as will/passion, each going to its own purpose.
How does one retain oneself as one? By creating an official mythology or
theology of the self. You are one's own officially established church
preaching correct doctrine. But just like Christian theologians confronting
the reality of what the BIBLE actually is, a library of tremendously
discordant points of view -- from pagan to the mirror connected opposites of
monotheism and athiesm, one must force a unity of agreement as illusion
since such unity cannot possibly exist under the circumstances.
The primary motivation to what 'you' are is announced in Sartre definition
of emotion as "magical". Though magic does not exist in any way in a
materialistic reality, yet it is the desire for magical creation of the
desires of one's passions that drives every single bit of that materialistic
reality. There are no exceptions. Lenin is not excepted. Marx is not
excepted. The passion to grasp a more accurate concept of "reality" may seem
to accomplish some of its ends but it is still passion first and foremost
trying to stand outside that mater in order to describe it accurately. There
can be no truth because each truth is an assertion of passion. There can be
no material reality since those words indicate an inclusive whole and common
sense tells us we experience this thing and that thing and this other thing
and there are all sorts of other things all over the place, and each of
these experiences occur in each their own moment, and each is dominated by
an emotion or various kinds of emotion so that the concept of material
reality disolves itself from the powers of its own observations if all the
trivial, 'unimportant' truths are actually taken account of. As one goes up
the line of thinking, the line of thinking unwinds itself. One must tell
oneself a lie to think one has found the fundamental truth. One must go back
to and validate childish realities while covering up the fact they are
childish. The child dominates by calling itself an adult. Remember the end
of Heidegger's THE PRINCIPLE OF REASON? Heidegger takes the child of
Heraclitus and pictures that child as making all of history and reality as a
game.
MichaelP: I think I agree that the whole modern movement
> from Descartes onwards shares in this centring of will/passion
(terminating
> in sociologics and economics and logistics as theorising models for the
20th
> and 21st century, precisely the constellation of Heidegger's gestell).
It's
> there in Einstein (relativity) and Heisenberg (quantum mechanics) too; all
> this warlike factioning of 'idealism' and 'materialism' not to mention
> 'realism' etc is such that it hides the essential unity of them all;
GCM: Or does the dream of "the essential unity" try to hide the fundamental
aspect of reality AS "warlike factioning"?
MichaelP: and I
> think Heidegger brings this out (with Derrida) more than anyone. The great
> swathe and sweep of modernism (as a revolutionary response to Aristotle
and
> Plato and Christianity) has many avenues that cover their essential unity
> and belongedness together. The 'war' should be against the unthinking
> commonsensists and assorted philosophy-hating simpletons if indeed it need
> be against anything.
GCM: As Marx found it NECESSARY to the very creation of dialectical
materialism to turn the dialectical idealism of Hegel upon iys head in order
to think at all any coherent theory at all, one sees both the historical
necessity of idealism, its falseness as a metaphysics, and yet the only way
to construct concepts in dialectical materialism is to use Hegel's
dialectical idealism as a tool box. Marx would agree with you insofar as he
thought "essential unity" a necessary goal but this becomes in Marx theology
just as Lenin showed it necessarily in Berkeley (and therefore all idealism
after Berkeley was a mere muddling of what Berkeley said plainly and up
front with full honesty -- Lenin admires him) and Hegel also demonstrated as
necessary in his system and thereby necessary and deliberately confusing the
notions of self and God as exactly the same. However, Marx is thinking
dialectically, and Sartre shows this is a necessary stage in order to
present any kind of philosophy at all.
However, the Hume that was so belittled by Hegel because his philosophy did
not get anywhere or accomplish any 'important' purpose is even more
revolutionary because he demonstrated in great detail any philosophy acting
like it was a metaphysics was mere self-important tail chasing. That all
real importance was solely the domain of passion. Reason is its lowly
servant -- if passion is wise and doesn't exterminate it altogether. That
all morality is a fiction constructed by passion through the use of reason.
Science is not the highest standard. Logic is not the highest standard.
Passion has "always already" MADE ITSELF the highest standard. And the unity
of passion is a political lie. Hume saw that in the reality one actually HAS
TO exist in with one's material body that "the unthinking commonsensists and
assorted philosophy-hating simpletons" have always in the past, do now, and
always will in the future control everything in the only real world, the
material world. That the wisest thing for a philosopher to do is to clearly
realise this as an undeniable and unchangeable given (es gibt) and work with
this using philosophy as a servant to the truly important endeavors --
history, politics, and economics. Marx came to a similar conclusion but
wanted "essential unity". Hume knew this was a lie and described real
history, as he did in his ESSAYS and the HISTORY OF ENGLAND which were the
dominating passions of his life after he gave up philosophy as being
'important' till the day he died.
Donald W. Livingston has demonstrated in his books PHILOSOPHICAL MELANCOLY
AND DELIRIUM: Hume's Pathology of Philosophy, University of Chicago Press,
1998, has demonstrated all the viable elements of Hegel "always already"
existed in Hume but without providential pre-ordained purpose. Hume's
philosophy trivialized itself to a mere "What you see is what you get" and
Livingston shows the tortured human path how one gets there, that end where
one started as a child without philosophical preconceptions.
'Sincerely'
Gary C. Moore
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