-----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
Van: owner-heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:owner-heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]Namens bob scheetz
Verzonden: donderdag 11 november 2004 17:31
Aan: heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Onderwerp: Re: The Non-God in Heideggerian Thought
Rene writes:
> One could add metaphysics itself. It cannot come lose of its (Greek)
> origin, even when it is turned upside down by Nietzsche.
> Heideggr though, as in Principle of ground, suggests that the Romans
> brought a different tone into philosophy when they translated from
> the Greek. (arche - ratio)
> While all you say might be true, the tone might have changed everything.
> At the same time the tone is not objectifiable, which could indicate
> to the impossibility to knwo the change one is oneself in.
>
> Actually, it is Hoelderlin who brings Christ and Dionysos very close,
> a.o. in Der Einzige/The only one, a strange title for a poem, which
> shows that Christ is NOT the only.
> Spontaneous wineflowing was not unfamiliar in Greece as it was in Cana.
> Christ, showing his wounds to the apostles, the "heroes" as Hoelderlin
> calls them rightly, and Dionysos Zagreus, who is torn to pieces himself
> as well, both depart and come back, born again. Even Dionysos name is
> ambiguous. It can mean: born from Zeus, or born-again. (or both: after
> the dangerous birth by Semele, protected from the heat of the lightning
> by cool ivy, he is implanted into Zeus' leg.)
> Nietzsche saw the two together, in the context of the overcoming of
> widerwille.
yes, the greeks assimilated jesus to their old corn god forms. but did
either, certainly nietzsche, who labels every cry for justice,
'resentiment', have any sense for jesus, his teaching for the little ones,
the powerless and despised, ..."slaves"?
We see the 'slaves' at work, Bob.
After the corruption by and of the priests, first the Augeas stables
must be cleaned. In Zarathustra is a tale of the spirit: first it is
camel, carrying the 'thou shall', then lion ('i will'), and only then
child. Only the child is capable of creating new values.
jesus is more than a corn god,
Also the Greek gods, as Otto argues, are never just agricultural.
Everything about them falls prey to the banality of religion science,
pure quantification at last)
(again: this is by no means a critics of science. When the gods
are gone, first the priest, and at last the scientist take their place.
Otto argues, that the earlier cannot and should not be understood from
the later. Therefore everything historical is secundary, and
Hoelderlin's and Nietzsche's 'religious' efforts also not to be measured
historically)
so that to equate them, and then to prefer dionysos, as in nietzsche,
seems not only retro, but wilfull formalism.
I don't think it's a question of preference. Hoelderlin, who loves
Christ "too much", says others are needed. Hardly Olympic gods.
Herakles, Dionysos, Christ. All human mediators
> (i saw that Negri (Empire) has written on Dionysos. Filled some of the
> marxist deficit..)
i should read this.
From 1994: Labor of Dionysus : a critique of the state-form /
Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri.
He also worked with Guattari, so it's probably a postmodern
Dionysos, connected with the state- and classless cyborg-worker,
More Negri on Spinoza.
but what's the marxian "deficit" to which you refer?
The too easy Feuerbachian anti-religion stance, and the contaminating
consequences of it: theological remainders in the ideology. Nietzsche
would say: continuation of their slavery. And indeed, all proletarians
went into the trenches, according to their nation.
> Without a Dionysos or Christ or Mohammed, sexuality and brutality gain
> free space. American fundamentalist Christianity leads to the Animal
> house, so much is clear.
i don't think so, rene. Merkan fundamentalist xianity is a primitive stage
of religiosity. It is this naivete', not xianity, which is easily led down
the garden path.
Yes, i've argued the same to others. But one should not forget that it
is Christ and xianity which are turned into their opposites.
They're not turned down and replaced by satanism. So still the inhuman
comportment needs a christian backing. Really it is Baal and Sodom,
Aztecs, cannibalism.
Even Hoelderlin confesses that he is too attached to Jesus. And "the root
of all evil: to be at one, is good and godly. Then whence the craving amidst
people that only One and The One must be?"
One could answer: because avoiding the good and godly is only possible as
denial and destruction. To bring oneself a god (Hoelderlin), to create
a new god (Nietzsche), they're not capable of. So they transform their god
into a plutonic oilgod who sows discord and egoism. And this Christian
decadence rhymes extremely well with the Jewish desert god, who now lives
in New Desert, where Martin and Hannah appear on Broadway. I can go on for
hours like this, it's as easy as starting a war.
I have always been stunned by Nietzsche's saying, that not the 20th century,
but the 21th would be his. Maybe i see a bit clearer now. Nietzsche's
philosophy centers at the thought that truth can be is no longer a thing in
itself. Already the WILL TO truth is now comprehended as the consequence of
an illusion.
Now, one could maybe still interpret the disasters of the 20th century as
the works of a raving will to truth: capitalism vs communism, west vs east,
left vs right. Heidegger writes in 1936: it is necessary to ask for the Wesen
of Wahrheit, as for the Wahrheit des Wesens. But today nobody wants Wahrheit/
truth. This or that truth, yes, that's what one needs, but not truth.
"We want truths, not truth."
But following the whole episode since 9/11, and prepared by the Clinton
mendacity, now the danger not of truth itself, but of true facts/statements
themselves is felt. See Bush clowning to the public while naive Kerry displays
his 'truths'. Truths weaken, only trust in God strengthens.
So we can witness for the first time a mankind, that deliberately embraces
illusions to write history and achieve greatness.
And this situation is for Nietzsche a hopeful one, for he sees in it the
ground for 'the great style' and 'great politics'.
So how could Nietzsche outreach a century? By calculating the tenacity
of the will to truth, and herewith he was all too familiar.
> That the Dionysic, like the Germanic or the Arabic, is itself
> blackened and attacked, is, for those who have discovered the mechanism,
> only natural. SO it was the opposite: the incorporation of the negative
into
> the whole - philosophical examples: Spinoza, Hegel - and not its
exclusion,
> which is so typical of one-sided thinking, and which leads to the
ueber/unter
> mensch gigantomachia.
>
> America is gonna be very ugly, as ugly as they had never thought they
could
> become. They really have no idea, to what degree they're already hated
to-day.
> When Friedrich the Great was teasing his ambience once again with
atheistic
> jokes, a clergyman protested: but Sire, there is absolute proof ot the
existence
> of God. What then, Friedrich asked. The Jews, sire, the Jews! It's a
German
> legacy, so the facts fill in automatically.
the "ugly american" is pretty ugly, that's true enuf, ...and no doubt will
be as ugly as he has the power to be; but it's still no more than the law of
nature, the strong eat the weak, ...the real "abysmal- sensuous", no? and
america has its racist legacy, equally virulent and more real.
Yes, also in 'Mosh'. But that racism is abendlaendish too.
Hoelderlin says, we 'should conserve "the holy wilderness". The wild
cannot and shuld not be put aside. Or it enters through the backdoor.
It must be located, accepted, turned towards the salutary, like a Chinese
dragon put on the sky.
What the "real" abysmal-sensuous is remains to be seen, we are it ourselves,
and insofar as we conceive of it (post)metaphysically, incl fundamentalist
Christendom, it is missed. But then, instead of the house of Being, the
house of the animals, "Big Brother", the inside out turning, tearing of
everything hidden and in need of shyness (Scheu). Here is that raging of
the banal, which STILL is Entbergung (dis-covering), and we STILL the
asked: do you want the total Entbergung?
> as is
> the aristotelian conception embodied in scholasticism, and which very
early on gained the ascendancy over the pauline (jewish) via crucis.
> One can also, with Nietzsche, consider Christianity itself the Jewish
> religion gone global.
again, christ is greek; so christianity is greek religion gone global!
Of Plato is said that he has been in Egypt. Nietzsche writes: maybe
he went to the Jews...
But i agree on the Greek-Judaeo-Christian origin of the West. All
elements - Greek metaphysics, Jewish monotheism, Christian equality -
combine, stimulate each other historically in (still) unforeseeable
ways. One but could also ask about German metaphysics what its origin
is.
...
> True. In fact, Hoelderlin's 'essences' are at the heart or the bone of
> sensuousness. He, and Heidegger, took the impossibility of the
> aistheton-noeton distinction seriously: no gods without the abysmal-
> sensuous. Maybe i'll bring some parts of the eveninglandish
> conversation on Hoelderlin. Starting point is Nietzsche's insight that
> with the end of the supernatural, also ends the natural insofar it is
> the natural opposed to that supernatural. Hence the new alienation of
> the sensible, its transformation within the realm of the technological),
> for which there are still not names, let alone understanding.
what about marxian "alienation" (all that is solid melts into air), and
fixed capital, and "reification" and "commodification"?
You're right. I was already thinking further: holy, or more moderate:
positive names. Even Heidegger's most important one: Ereignis, is not
yet one, still preparing.
> Who could be the modern Stauffenberg in the era of the Worker?
this isn't a proletarian era. le stil stauffenberg is insider business,
then as now it would have to be an insider elite
As an isolated act it would probably worsen things once more.
> Juenger, in his 1939 book, already put a nobleman as hitman on the
> stage. That appeared to be good intuition, 5 years later. Clergy
> and bourgoisie were already too weak.
> But who now? Only individuals are left. Still, they might become more
> powerful than the current centres of power. I must think again of both
> Dionysos' and Christ's incredible victory tours.
> (Also Juenger in that vein in: "The coming Titans.")
...
> I'm only arrogant as to Heidegger, and only negatively: to those who say
they
> know, i say: no you don't, you can't. As to the positive, still a long
way off,
> i say: all help is welcome. I seem to try to find a way from extreme
individualism
> to Dionysos, to a fundamental change of everydayness, of 'das Man'
itself. Hence
> the taking back of subject-object into openness. If this is not done,
power rules
> subject, object, everything, and easily. One can clearly see now, that
there's no
> resistance left, and maybe that's not coincidental. (no Dasein, no
possibility
> left, only the weight of the actual, and fear to meet it)
i think i somewhat understand, rene, but tend to find this same less
mystically within the tradition of marx (labor theory of value, not power)
and jesus (fellow feeling, solidarity, sympathy with the invisible ones, not
power), ...tho perfectly happy and eager to take what i can from heid, and
even to observe the congruencies.
I too think they are there, Bob. As long as the time does not seem ripe
for an actual movement with more or less inner greatness, i see room for
discussion, preparation. Especially with the sort of flexibility and
empathy, and critics, shown by you every time again.
rene
bob
--- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---
--- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---