----- Original Message -----
From: "michaelP" <michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>; <analytical-indicant-theory@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, August 26, 2004 7:29 AM
Subject: Re: PHILOSOPHY AS THE DENIAL OF PHILOSOPHY
MICHAELP: Interrupting Gary talking to Richard on the other (yahoo) heidegger list:
GCM: Interuption is not a distraction but rather a concentration of attention on the situation as it is, the facts of the matter, or real life.Handling interuption shows that one can think.
> > Now, a certain Jud Evans claiming to be a nominalist on another list has
> > been accused of a philosophy of denying philosophy altogether as if he had
> > killed his father and slept with his mother. Now, to me, as a nominalist, I
> > would think a philosophy that denies philosophy entirely appropriate. Jud
> > denies any objectivity to wholeness per se. He would say, like a
> > commentator on the TAO TE CHING I just read, there is no being, there are
> > just beings. This correlatively denies objective existence to all abstractions
> per se.
>
MICHAELP: MichaelP has claimed over and over that being (as in Heidegger) is NOT an ab-straction, rather the most concrete.
GCM: Yes, I understand. That is indeed what Heidegger is aiming at. Now -- look at the construction of your sentence (not that there is anything wrong with it at all). The knee-jerk reaction is to ask, The most concrete . . . . what? Now, I understand that // emotion (desire, PASSION // is the fundamental urgrund in Heidegger, though extremely under-rated and un-analyzed even by Heideggerians. It is rather explicit and overly obvious in Heidegger but no one wants to handle it. "The truth? You can't handle the truth!", a good movie wrecked. The truth is, Our logic is motivated and determined by our emotions. However, the standard philosophical approach to emotion is to make it look like Famine amongst the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. But it is everything in Heidegger JUST as it is everything in David Hume. Why would Heidegger so emphasize Nietzsche, Holderlin and the Greek tragedians if there were not overpowering currents of emotion pouring through him? Now, I did not say what kind of emotion. Heidegger himself seems to make it clear in the first volume of his Nietzsche lectures, THE WILL TO POWER AS ART, that it is HATRED that flows like a great river in the depths of the soul, and even brings in Aristotle's first chapters (the first 11?) of Book II of the RHETORIC to support him, that book which most thoroughly defined for Heidegger what "everydayness" was to him. What project a concrete life through the everyday into the future? Hatred is a good, solid, believable answer. However, it is one few Heideggerians are going to like.
My point is, your sentence cries out, in its everyday usage, for a What? However, if the What? is an always already pre-existent, sort of, emotion, there is a . . . sort of . . . object . . . . but you cannot possibly know right off hand what possible ?object? there is to that always already here emotion. It makes you, you don't make it. You are its possession, not it yours. It is hard, maybe impossible to talk about these things. And Heidegger doesn't make it much easier except to show it is a difficult subject because IT IS A SUBJECT THAT CANNOT BE A SUBJECT! The same thing happens to Hume with his A TREATISE OF HUMAN NATURE even though he brings in passion and the urgrund of thought in the very first paragraph and then on top of that writes a whole book in the TREATISE on emotion. The so-called philosopher wants to be in complete control when the real philosophers are saying they have no control whatsoever! The very essence of temporality is pure emotion, but in such a context it is logically impossible, except in bits and pieces, to identify and object.
And how much more demonstrably concrete can you get than that?
MICHAELP: It is the (be)way(ing) each being is in its being the being that it is.
GCM: But that is a // universal // definition. It apllies to every person without distinction of education in every possible emotional state. It exists in the keen distinctions of the philosopher, the experience of infinitely empty stillness in the saint, the emotional ectasy wrought by the poet, the turgid words of hatred mouthed by the dictator wanting his words to create rivers of blood. There is always the impersonal, perfectly still observer within us observing everything with // be-way-ing // detachment while the finite personality in the physical body is in the act of killing those he loaths. Almost every great mystic in every religion has talked about such realizations of two different observation points within oneself that, in the "everyday" world, seem identical. They both see exactly the same thing, but the contexts of those experiences are universes apart, exist in every person, and only in extreme cases come to be seen as different. That is why William James, for instance, deliberately seeks out EXTREME EXPERIENCES to study in religion. The same thing, but without the weird language, has been discussed a thousand times by mystics such as Meister Eckhardt of which Heidegger was keenly aware. And it, in actuality, gets much more complex than that because // the Self // is a wholly fictional creation when there are a number of different selfs involved in one person, not at all of the same type or the same power, and none of them -- if the person is ?sane? -- want themselves differentiated from a supposedly solid personal idemtity. However, that is political, and propaganda, and not at all how things really are.
If emotion is the primary key, then all of this must be true. There is no logical identity, there is no object as experienced self. The best you can do is establish a field of whiling away where there are these (many different kinds of violent) personality, identities, that there can become detached objects of serene study. Which of course . . . . DAAAAH!!! . . . changes their nature.
MICHAELP: Nothing [literally] could be less an ab-straction than be-ing. To see be-ing as an ab-straction one would have to proceed from beings, calculate their
> common-ness, work out what was most general, shared,
GCM: No! No1 No1 No! This was precisely what Heidegger worked against in the essay "The Origin of a Work of Art". Van Gough's shoes are unique. The particular ability of Van Gogh to make his dirty work boots sensually unique is precisely what makes it a work of art. Can you see now why Heidegger could see himself in sympathy with Karl Marx in "Letter in Humanism"? Unique hands make a unique object. Generalization is escapism.
That is enough now or SPOONS will have a seizure!
'Sincerely'
Gary C. Moore
either empirically or
> through the ex-traction of some principle(s) that all things/beings were
> grounded in, etc; thus extracting be-ing from beings. Then we would not in
> any way whatsoever be dealing with anything Heidegger means by be-ing:
> precisely HIS critique of all previous metaphysics (including empiricism and
> positivism), that be-ing is identified with 'beingness' (what is
> common/general/shared amongst all beings) if it is not identified with some
> highest (god(s)), most common (matter/energy), ubiquitous ('society'), etc,
> particular being. So, briefly, if you label be-ing as an abstraction, then
> you can not be speaking of what Heidegger means by "be-ing"; of course, you
> can speak of other conceptions of being as abstractions. Note, I am not
> talking of what and what does not exist -- that is a problem for
> nominalists, not for me -- just concerning the business of labelling be-ing
> as an abstraction (which would effectively be 'deriving' be-ing from (an
> ex-traction from) beings, which would make be-ing equivalent to a
> common-ness of beings, or beingness; whereas, _on the contrary_, it [is]
> be-ing that grants beings their being (that being) at all).
>
> Hope this is clear (and helps).
>
> regards
>
> michaelP
>
>
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