*Dasein. * The Gerundialisation of Philosophy.
Heidegger's obsessive dissatisfaction with the historical, categorised
versions of *Being* was the compelling psychological feature that aroused him to
the frenetic action that drove him to conjure a unitary rendering of *Being.*
He always claimed - it was "his one idea." What was it that made him
dissatisfied with the traditional schema in the first place? Was it that Aristotle's
division of *Being* into nine categories struck him as being particularly
disorderly or implausible? In traditional metaphysics the contrasting varieties
or ways of being were attributed as categories of being, or simply
categories. For Aristotle these categories were the read-only-files of nature accessed
by man, and were not man-made categorial distinctions at all. This was a
major Aristotelian ontological blunder in my view. But one must not conclude that
Heidegger's desire to supplant it with a unified version of *Being* - a
transcendent oneness of *Being* was purely based upon an intellectual rejection
of it in principle, but rather that it did not embrace Heidegger's desire for
an ontological unity of *Being* on earth that would mirror and reflect, [some
would say replace] the ontological unity of the Supreme Being above. As
Heidegger always insisted - throughout his life he was a theologian and we all
know what theologians do - they theologise.
Some ontological categorical schemes have admitted non-existent or even
impossible objects. Some of the more lunatic-fringe ontologists have even posited
that we can talk with seriously with existential meaning about
non-actualised objects, such as the golden mountain of Meinong. To accept the category
*physical object* seriously as a category of *Being* is to proclaim that the
concept of tangible objectification cannot be reduced to, or formulated in, any
other terms - not, for instance, in terms of clusters of *properties.* In
this way, as it turns out, very many disputations of ontology can be
comprehended as contestations about exactly which categories should be considered as
the fundamental, irreducible, primitive categories. Traditionally, a being is
anything that can be said *to be* in the several senses of this word.
Therefore to examine the categories of *Being,* is to ascertain the most cardinal
senses in which things can be said to exist. More precisely, a category, is any
of the most comprehensive divisions of things. 'Thing' here signifies
anything that can be discussed and cannot be contracted or reallocated to any other
class. A full explanandum of the categories or everyday life the arts or the
sciences would be exhaustively difficult. Remember, that in most of what I
write here, I am developing Heideggerian or transcendentalist themes, that is
not to say that I believe a word of it.
I think anyone would agree that the subject of categories constitutes a
problem for philosophy, whether one is a scientist who relies on the
categorisation of entities and data, for his work, whether one is a mathematician with
his sets, if one is a Platonist holding a belief in the existence of forms, or
if one is [like me] a nominalist who holds that the whole idea of categories,
sets and subsets, classes, forms, sorts, do not exist, and are like *time*
but strategies we employ to bring order to our lives - such as rules and lists
and the like. Categories are of course essential for the organisation of
entities and ideas, and even nominalists have no desire to eliminate them. For
nominalists it is enough that people understand them to be organisational
conveniences, and not things in themselves - entities or quasi-entitic in any
way. Nominalists have no desire to *ban* or *eliminate* abstractions from the
English language, but only to point out the ontological pitfalls and risks when
one uses then thoughtlessly.
It is against this background that we now turn to Heidegger's frustration
with the various traditional categories of *Being,* and the ruse that he
eventually devised to give the appearance that he had managed to substitute this
ontological chaos with an organised, unified theory of *Being.*
For Heidegger multiple categories had to go - even Aristotle's Nine were
nine too many - but how? *To be* for traditionalists means to be a substance,
or to be of one the nine attributes of a substance. Because the quantities,
qualities and other attributional *properties* are the handiwork of humankind,
it follows that attributional biases are inbuilt cognitive biases, and the
same attributional biases still obtain when these attributions are unpacked and
exercised in the sensibilities of observing human beings.
A simple example of cognitive attributional property bias, or the dissonant
*reading-off* of existential phenomena in dissimilar ways, is the
multiplicity of perceptual variances amongst human kind regarding the apprehension of
the well known and often argued about human attributional abstraction:
*Beauty*.
Similar perceptual discrepancies can be found in just about any
attributional property you care to mention – but we will stick with this example for the
moment.
Khoisan women are famous for the huge fat deposits on the backsides of the
women, which amongst Khoisan men are considered to be extremely beautiful. The
buttocks are like a shelf, projecting rearwards. Until a Hottentot woman was
dissected, there was speculation that this ridge was bone, but it was fat.
The pattern of fat deposition is called "Steatopygia" One 19th century Khoisan
or "Khoikhoin" (Hottentot] woman, Saartjie Baartman, was actually exhibited
in Europe, so that smug white men with a European cognitive attributional
property bias could gape and snicker at her large ugly buttocks. The point I am
trying to make is that *properties* are in the eye of the beholder, and that
Aristotle was WRONG in his belief that they are simply distinctions contained
in the nature of things, to be *read-off* nature by attributionally
concurring human beings I f any Aristotelian *reading-off* takes place one thing is
sure - everybody *reads-off* properties in different ways. This is why
Heidegger's concept of *Dasein* if a failure. *Dasein* is deliberately designed to
minimise such attributional bias, linking millions observers into one
corporate: *being - there*, but it is doomed to failure, for *Dasein* is a
representation of *humanity* - and *humanity* ain't in the business of understanding
beings and their *properties* in the same way - we disagree on more things than
is supposed - even on the level of preferring one McDonalds over another.
Attributional bias can be defined as being the differences in the understanding
of an observing human being when it is engaged in the perception of another
being, or an attributional partiality that prevents objective agreement in
the consideration of a being, an issue or a situation. (See incessant arguments
on minor points of doctrine on any Heidegger list.)
Now as Heidegger's whole phenomenology is based upon the human act of
perceiving and understanding {the object - givenness] as the way in which the
*Being* of a being is uncovered. It goes without saying that the multitude at a
ball-game do not perceive the qualities of the players, nor their actions on the
pitch in the same way, or in the same version of a perceived
object-givenness. The mass of humanity do not instantiate a unified perception of the beings
they observe, whether that be in the nature of the participants and their
actions in the Iraq war, or the players on a football field, or the observation
of a black woman with large buttocks. All men and women are different. This
entitic difference of beings extends to the appropriate art of knowing, which
in the view of some other beings may be extremely inappropriate and limited.
They are different in their perceptions of others, and they are perceived
differently by others. The notion of a unified Being which can be talked about
as Being rather than aspects, categories and ways of Being is utter nonsense
and Dasein is a sham. Heideggerian conception of Weltlichkeit in its full
phenomenological determination, which lets beings come to appear as they are in
the world is an ontological nonsense, for all beings appear in the world in
accordance with the individual understanding of the human observer who
perceives a given object in some existential act or state.
We shall examine Heidegger's claim that there is a *unified *Being* of all
beings, in which it is possible to speak of in the manner of a proper noun,
[as it is used in the book title: Being and Time], and that a mass-read-off
[understanding] of the massed band of Daseins, by the massed ontological
*proceeer* *Dasein, * distinguished as a singular in the guise of a Daseinic
total and universal *being there,* and as the *mass-processing* whereby *Being*
is uncovered, which is capable of instantiating a *unified phenomena* that
can be labelled with the exclusive, universalistic, linguistic label *Being.*
The whole concept is utterly ridiculous cognitive codswallop. The position
is that there are no partly or imperfectly understood second-class beings,
which are victims of a human observer lacking the Heideggerian attributes,
which qualify *Daseinhood,* which seems to be the unique and questionable ability
to constantly remind himself that he's going to die eventually.
Entities exist in the way that they exist, whether they are mediated and
cogently transacted by the lesser [non-Daseinic] human understanding or ignored.
Entities exist neither in the meaning of having more or less *Being* or a
completely uncoverable *Being* than some other, nor in the sense of having
more, or a superlatively perceived *Being* that is a derived via the
superordinate Daseinic function of the *perfect understanding* of *Dasein* - a faint and
risible* dumbed-down *Daseinic echo* of the poor, mad, Nietzsche's silly
notion of the superman.
The Unity of Being thesis is an ontological prosthesis - a crude attempt at
a cognitive corrective consisting of a universal gerundial replacement with
a abstract, unreal, unworldly, non-interactional whole, substituted in the
place of a multiplicity of individual *real world* beings who exist in an
actual being-to-being interactional human society. The whole of Heidegger's oeuvre
is a crude attempt at the replacement of the traditional Aristotelian
ontological crudity with the even more vulgar gaucheries of Dasein. As far as
Aristotelian reality is concerned, in spite of his ancient limitations, which we
perhaps could excuse in the knowledge we have of the era from which he sprang,
he is at least nine times [the 9-catergories,] nearer to an understanding of
reality and a comprehension of the methodology of our understanding of
*Being* than ever Heidegger was - and Heidegger has no historical excuse.
Heidegger had vast libraries pregnant with information at his disposal, learned,
knowledgeable colleagues and companions with which to discuss, but still he
brought forth a dead foetus.
If *Being* WAS unified [as a featureless intangible unification] - there
would be no beings, which would entail no human beings to instantiate *Being*
via the usual Heideggerian metaphysical route of the cognitive perception of
beings, which [according to Husserl and Heidegger] are needed to be observed,
perceived and understood in order to instantiate *Being* - localised or
universal.
The *Being* and the beings that instantiate it* notion have about as much
credibility as the mythical serpent that swallowed its own tail and eventually
consumed itself. It is just an entertainment - a philosophical version of the
Jerry Springer Show, ephemera, not to be taken too seriously, and something
of the type that if you zap it off with your remote, or choose to close the
book and go and make yourself a cup of tea - you are not going to miss much at
all.
To be continued.
Regards,
Jud
Personal Website:
_http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/index.htm_
(http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/index.htm)
E-mail Discussion List:
nominalism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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Heidegger's obsessive dissatisfaction with the historical, categorised
versions of *Being* was the compelling psychological feature that aroused him to
the frenetic action that drove him to conjure a unitary rendering of *Being.*
He always claimed - it was "his one idea." What was it that made him
dissatisfied with the traditional schema in the first place? Was it that Aristotle's
division of *Being* into nine categories struck him as being particularly
disorderly or implausible? In traditional metaphysics the contrasting varieties
or ways of being were attributed as categories of being, or simply
categories. For Aristotle these categories were the read-only-files of nature accessed
by man, and were not man-made categorial distinctions at all. This was a
major Aristotelian ontological blunder in my view. But one must not conclude that
Heidegger's desire to supplant it with a unified version of *Being* - a
transcendent oneness of *Being* was purely based upon an intellectual rejection
of it in principle, but rather that it did not embrace Heidegger's desire for
an ontological unity of *Being* on earth that would mirror and reflect, [some
would say replace] the ontological unity of the Supreme Being above. As
Heidegger always insisted - throughout his life he was a theologian and we all
know what theologians do - they theologise.
Some ontological categorical schemes have admitted non-existent or even
impossible objects. Some of the more lunatic-fringe ontologists have even posited
that we can talk with seriously with existential meaning about
non-actualised objects, such as the golden mountain of Meinong. To accept the category
*physical object* seriously as a category of *Being* is to proclaim that the
concept of tangible objectification cannot be reduced to, or formulated in, any
other terms - not, for instance, in terms of clusters of *properties.* In
this way, as it turns out, very many disputations of ontology can be
comprehended as contestations about exactly which categories should be considered as
the fundamental, irreducible, primitive categories. Traditionally, a being is
anything that can be said *to be* in the several senses of this word.
Therefore to examine the categories of *Being,* is to ascertain the most cardinal
senses in which things can be said to exist. More precisely, a category, is any
of the most comprehensive divisions of things. 'Thing' here signifies
anything that can be discussed and cannot be contracted or reallocated to any other
class. A full explanandum of the categories or everyday life the arts or the
sciences would be exhaustively difficult. Remember, that in most of what I
write here, I am developing Heideggerian or transcendentalist themes, that is
not to say that I believe a word of it.
I think anyone would agree that the subject of categories constitutes a
problem for philosophy, whether one is a scientist who relies on the
categorisation of entities and data, for his work, whether one is a mathematician with
his sets, if one is a Platonist holding a belief in the existence of forms, or
if one is [like me] a nominalist who holds that the whole idea of categories,
sets and subsets, classes, forms, sorts, do not exist, and are like *time*
but strategies we employ to bring order to our lives - such as rules and lists
and the like. Categories are of course essential for the organisation of
entities and ideas, and even nominalists have no desire to eliminate them. For
nominalists it is enough that people understand them to be organisational
conveniences, and not things in themselves - entities or quasi-entitic in any
way. Nominalists have no desire to *ban* or *eliminate* abstractions from the
English language, but only to point out the ontological pitfalls and risks when
one uses then thoughtlessly.
It is against this background that we now turn to Heidegger's frustration
with the various traditional categories of *Being,* and the ruse that he
eventually devised to give the appearance that he had managed to substitute this
ontological chaos with an organised, unified theory of *Being.*
For Heidegger multiple categories had to go - even Aristotle's Nine were
nine too many - but how? *To be* for traditionalists means to be a substance,
or to be of one the nine attributes of a substance. Because the quantities,
qualities and other attributional *properties* are the handiwork of humankind,
it follows that attributional biases are inbuilt cognitive biases, and the
same attributional biases still obtain when these attributions are unpacked and
exercised in the sensibilities of observing human beings.
A simple example of cognitive attributional property bias, or the dissonant
*reading-off* of existential phenomena in dissimilar ways, is the
multiplicity of perceptual variances amongst human kind regarding the apprehension of
the well known and often argued about human attributional abstraction:
*Beauty*.
Similar perceptual discrepancies can be found in just about any
attributional property you care to mention – but we will stick with this example for the
moment.
Khoisan women are famous for the huge fat deposits on the backsides of the
women, which amongst Khoisan men are considered to be extremely beautiful. The
buttocks are like a shelf, projecting rearwards. Until a Hottentot woman was
dissected, there was speculation that this ridge was bone, but it was fat.
The pattern of fat deposition is called "Steatopygia" One 19th century Khoisan
or "Khoikhoin" (Hottentot] woman, Saartjie Baartman, was actually exhibited
in Europe, so that smug white men with a European cognitive attributional
property bias could gape and snicker at her large ugly buttocks. The point I am
trying to make is that *properties* are in the eye of the beholder, and that
Aristotle was WRONG in his belief that they are simply distinctions contained
in the nature of things, to be *read-off* nature by attributionally
concurring human beings I f any Aristotelian *reading-off* takes place one thing is
sure - everybody *reads-off* properties in different ways. This is why
Heidegger's concept of *Dasein* if a failure. *Dasein* is deliberately designed to
minimise such attributional bias, linking millions observers into one
corporate: *being - there*, but it is doomed to failure, for *Dasein* is a
representation of *humanity* - and *humanity* ain't in the business of understanding
beings and their *properties* in the same way - we disagree on more things than
is supposed - even on the level of preferring one McDonalds over another.
Attributional bias can be defined as being the differences in the understanding
of an observing human being when it is engaged in the perception of another
being, or an attributional partiality that prevents objective agreement in
the consideration of a being, an issue or a situation. (See incessant arguments
on minor points of doctrine on any Heidegger list.)
Now as Heidegger's whole phenomenology is based upon the human act of
perceiving and understanding {the object - givenness] as the way in which the
*Being* of a being is uncovered. It goes without saying that the multitude at a
ball-game do not perceive the qualities of the players, nor their actions on the
pitch in the same way, or in the same version of a perceived
object-givenness. The mass of humanity do not instantiate a unified perception of the beings
they observe, whether that be in the nature of the participants and their
actions in the Iraq war, or the players on a football field, or the observation
of a black woman with large buttocks. All men and women are different. This
entitic difference of beings extends to the appropriate art of knowing, which
in the view of some other beings may be extremely inappropriate and limited.
They are different in their perceptions of others, and they are perceived
differently by others. The notion of a unified Being which can be talked about
as Being rather than aspects, categories and ways of Being is utter nonsense
and Dasein is a sham. Heideggerian conception of Weltlichkeit in its full
phenomenological determination, which lets beings come to appear as they are in
the world is an ontological nonsense, for all beings appear in the world in
accordance with the individual understanding of the human observer who
perceives a given object in some existential act or state.
We shall examine Heidegger's claim that there is a *unified *Being* of all
beings, in which it is possible to speak of in the manner of a proper noun,
[as it is used in the book title: Being and Time], and that a mass-read-off
[understanding] of the massed band of Daseins, by the massed ontological
*proceeer* *Dasein, * distinguished as a singular in the guise of a Daseinic
total and universal *being there,* and as the *mass-processing* whereby *Being*
is uncovered, which is capable of instantiating a *unified phenomena* that
can be labelled with the exclusive, universalistic, linguistic label *Being.*
The whole concept is utterly ridiculous cognitive codswallop. The position
is that there are no partly or imperfectly understood second-class beings,
which are victims of a human observer lacking the Heideggerian attributes,
which qualify *Daseinhood,* which seems to be the unique and questionable ability
to constantly remind himself that he's going to die eventually.
Entities exist in the way that they exist, whether they are mediated and
cogently transacted by the lesser [non-Daseinic] human understanding or ignored.
Entities exist neither in the meaning of having more or less *Being* or a
completely uncoverable *Being* than some other, nor in the sense of having
more, or a superlatively perceived *Being* that is a derived via the
superordinate Daseinic function of the *perfect understanding* of *Dasein* - a faint and
risible* dumbed-down *Daseinic echo* of the poor, mad, Nietzsche's silly
notion of the superman.
The Unity of Being thesis is an ontological prosthesis - a crude attempt at
a cognitive corrective consisting of a universal gerundial replacement with
a abstract, unreal, unworldly, non-interactional whole, substituted in the
place of a multiplicity of individual *real world* beings who exist in an
actual being-to-being interactional human society. The whole of Heidegger's oeuvre
is a crude attempt at the replacement of the traditional Aristotelian
ontological crudity with the even more vulgar gaucheries of Dasein. As far as
Aristotelian reality is concerned, in spite of his ancient limitations, which we
perhaps could excuse in the knowledge we have of the era from which he sprang,
he is at least nine times [the 9-catergories,] nearer to an understanding of
reality and a comprehension of the methodology of our understanding of
*Being* than ever Heidegger was - and Heidegger has no historical excuse.
Heidegger had vast libraries pregnant with information at his disposal, learned,
knowledgeable colleagues and companions with which to discuss, but still he
brought forth a dead foetus.
If *Being* WAS unified [as a featureless intangible unification] - there
would be no beings, which would entail no human beings to instantiate *Being*
via the usual Heideggerian metaphysical route of the cognitive perception of
beings, which [according to Husserl and Heidegger] are needed to be observed,
perceived and understood in order to instantiate *Being* - localised or
universal.
The *Being* and the beings that instantiate it* notion have about as much
credibility as the mythical serpent that swallowed its own tail and eventually
consumed itself. It is just an entertainment - a philosophical version of the
Jerry Springer Show, ephemera, not to be taken too seriously, and something
of the type that if you zap it off with your remote, or choose to close the
book and go and make yourself a cup of tea - you are not going to miss much at
all.
To be continued.
Regards,
Jud
Personal Website:
_http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/index.htm_
(http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/index.htm)
E-mail Discussion List:
nominalism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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