In a message dated 29/09/2004 16:04:32 GMT Standard Time,
R.B.M.deBakker@xxxxxx writes:
Rene:
What is that reality? Sometimes, when i see the tree in front of my window,
when it 'catches my eye', i ... don't know what it is.
Jud:
That is a good experience. You should rejoice in such good encounters, for
it lifts [for a brief moment] the dark damask behind which your
transcendentalism has you smothered. In that brief moment of revelation you see the object
as a nameless entity shorn of all the modalic baggage
that the name "chestnut-tree" [kastanjeboom in your case] drags in its wake.
The object outside your window simply exists as it exists [in the way it
exists] but the "as it exists" and the "way it exists" and the "way it is being
a kastanjeboom" doesn't exist as anything — nor as something *ontologically
different* from the object outside your window. The way we utter words to
register the presence of the tree are no more than the linguistic devices we
employ to remark on the fact that the tree is there rather than not there. The
fact that you perceive of the object as being a being, or [if you remember
what it is when your eye catches it] being a kastanjeboom, does not ENDOW the
thing with another humanly conceived level of *Being.* The kastanjeboom is
oblivious to man's attributional ontological psychologisms. It is simply there
[Da] as the entity it is — an entity which Dutch-speaking humans have
identified as a *kastanjeboom.*
Rene:
Yesterday i was phoned that it would be removed. It takes shadow away and
makes the
street dirty in autumn. I said: with that argument all trees should be
eliminated.
Jud:
Bravo Rene!
Rene:
Under me lives an old man. He had till now a fine garden. Recently he
completely rooted it out, and my tree was to be next. Now, sthing must
have happened to him, because for a long time he enjoyed his garden.
Jud:
Maybe he has turned religious like the Welsh Presbyterians who won't allow
flowers in church
because their beauty distracts the mind from a contemplation of God? Their
churches have slanted
windowsills so that it is impossible to place flower-vases upon them. Such
things make me shudder in revulsion.
See my *Gwrach* [Welsh for witch]
_http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/writinggwrach.htm_
(http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/writinggwrach.htm)
Rene:
When old people get depressive, people say: you should have light,
take away the somberness.
Jud:
That is why I find your affinity with Heidegger so strange.
His preoccupation with death and National Socialism is so weird, so sombre,
- so creepy and depressing?
Rene:
To be short: we have the right to purify
'our' surroundings from all terrorist elements. Result: the desert grows.
I'm not talking ecologically.
Jud:
Then we should cleanse our universities of those that teach
transcendentalism,
for terrorism is a creature of transcendentalism, and even the apparently
dotty version
of Heideggerianism adds to, and renders a certain cache to, and offers an
intellectual imprimatur
to the notion of an ontological or spiritual difference being ACTUALLY
POSSIBLE.
It undermines the people of the west and is the philosophical equivalent of
the cultural
disintegration that led to the downfall of Rome. Heideggerianism is a vapid
nihilistic individualism
that destroys any chance of a common defence against the forces of
transcendentalist terror from the East.
The transcendentalistic enemy is within just as much as without.
Rene:
It's just plain that when you tile the ground,
nothing will grow there anymore. And what is spread is human sterility,
which is everywhere, and has dire consequences for our topic: reality.
"You too have the right to possess, to happiness, to pleasure."
So 'what is now around the earthball' is nothing behind or on top of things,
it 'is' ALREADY. And all your anti-transcendalism, however noble in itself,
keeps attention away from the decay that is inherent in to what we call
reality.
Jud:
The transcendentalism IS the decay — is a symptom and
cause of the spreading cancer of disinterest and unconcern.
My way of fighting such horror is to fight against Judaeo-Christian
transcendentalism [in all its forms] which brought it all about in the first place,
and has insinuated itself into our centres of power, either openly or with
idiot placemen like B-liar and B-lush.
Heideggerianism is a sanitised version of Christianity, fine-tuned by
Heidegger as a two-finger gesture to the Catholic church which [he felt] had
humiliated him.
Rene:
Because the simple existence of things, that should not be questioned
according
to you, is precisely their objectivity, manipulability.
Jud:
Rene - I have been saying for years that there is no such thing as *simple
existence*
it is a physical and ontological impossibility. When an entity exists it HAS
to exist in some
particular way. It HAS to BE something — it has to exist AS something.
Entities CANNOT exist simply as ideas — that is a Meinongian madness.
You Heideggerians believe that *Being* is a reality JUST BECAUSE you happen
to THINK about it.
You conjure it up in your imagination and believe that the act of doing so
automatically instantiates it
as an actuality. Basically this puts you in the same ballpark as the
terrorists, in the sense that they too
objectify an idea and act in ways which they believe will please that
objectivisation. It is an emotional crutch
and *God* and *Being* are emotional prosthetics which fit under the cranium
and are used by philosophically
disabled persons while thinking. In the case of Heideggerians there is no
desire to harm anyone, and it is easy to
think that the only people they are harming is themselves. Sadly this is
not the case.
Rene:
The now born children think that not only the sun and the stars belong to
the sky, but airplanes
as well. "The sky is just the sky"
Jud:
Stone-age children thought that not only the sun and the stars belong to the
sky, but battle-clubs
as well. It's just that we moderns have upped the anti of mutual destruction
thanks to the proliferation of evil transcendentalist
fantasies. Muslim good - Jew bad. Muslim good - Hindu bad. Catholic good -
Protestant bad. Teuton German good - Jew German bad, etc.
Rene:
But then nature IS terror. Not only 9/11
Jud:
*Nature* doesn't exist — only that which exists exists.
* Terror* doesn't exist — only that which is considered terrible by the
terrified exists.
The eagle doesn't consider itself to be terrible as it seizes the fieldmouse
in its talons.
The car-bomber doesn't consider himself to be terrible as he detonates the
car, he believes
that Allah is the terrible one, visiting his vengeance on the western
transcendentalists who dare to worship *Him* in another way.
Why are desert Gods always so angry — is it because the sand gets in their
sandwiches?
Rene:
but also the Ister movie: the homeless Aussies write: "Heidegger lectured on
the Danube in 1942, the same year the Nazis decided the final solution."
And: The first line of Hoelderlin's Der Ister: "Now, fire, come!" What?
O, the phosphor... And so on and so on, it's sickening. But who questions
and
shows, is the brute.
Jud:
The secret of questioning is to first question the questioning questioner.
Questioning the questioning can often reveal more about the questioner than
the question.
Rene:
You wished to know why i warned, this is why.
The 'sense of being' has nothing to do with claiming a meaning for this
world.
There is NO meaning to being, as there is no to time, which must belong to
the
secrets of our existence.
Jud:
If there is no meaning to the curious notion which you name with the word
*Being*
then why did Heidegger write page after page about the *meaning of *Being*
and *the question of *Being?
Why didn't he just put an announcement in the Freiburg Zeitung;
Herr Professor Heiddegger ist froh zu verkünden, daß es keine Bedeutung zu
*Being " gibt.
Herr Professor Heiddegger is happy to announce that there is no meaning to
*Being."
Look at the thousands of marks it would have saved - look at the hundreds of
trees that would not have been sacrificed to
provide the paper for the industry that Being and Time fostered.
There are no *secrets to our existence* for *existence* doesn't exist — only
that which exists exists.
Rene:
And which is taken into account by the myths of
Persephone, in which the youngest and freshest life appears to be already
touched
by death. One cannot have one without the other, though the merciless
strategy of
democracy and freedom successfully convinces the masses of the opposite.
But it's just death on credit.
Jud:
Speaking Persephonically I believe that we are all aware of the inevi
tability of death. I challenge Heidegger that a constant preoccupation with it is
either useful or mind-enhancing. In fact on the contrary I find a constant
rememberance of death to be debilitating and pathological.
That doesn't mean that I hold that we should make a conscious effort to
forget it - or that we should embark on diversional strategies to put it out of
our thoughts, for those diversional strategies can often be more damaging and
bring death nearer than actually thinking about them.
We ask the alchoholic:
"Why do you drink like that?"
"I drink to forget."
"To forget what?"
"To forget that I drink like this."
We can ask the same question of a Heideggerian:
"Why do you think like that?"
"To forget."
"To forget what?:
"To forget that I think like this."
Does that mean that some alternative form of *undemocratic government,*
where the citizens do not enjoy the freedom
for which we human kind have fought over the millennia would prove to be
superior?
Which model do you propose to replace the present one Rene - I'm genuinely
interested?
I'm interested because although [as you may have perceived] I agree with
much of what you say {I have my own way of saying it]
you have never volunteered a replacement system for the one which we both
abhor?
Cheers,
Jud.
Personal Website:
_http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/index.htm_
(http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/index.htm)
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