On Fri, 16 Jun 1995, Iain Thomson wrote saying that this is what
interested him in our recent discussion:
> the implicit (even explicit) ethical content of
> ontological thinking; the attempt to deconstruct the metaphysical
> tradition by subverting the Cartesian subject with the
> phenomenological-existential analyses of Da-sein
(snip)
and perhaps even the
> motivations underlying Heidegger's thinking of the authentic in B&T
> as those motivations evolve in the later writings, all intersect
> around a theme which your very dialogue both presupposes and
> contributes to--the construction of the self that takes place in this
> technological medium of communication.
(snipped an account of Heidegger's feeling that typewriters distanced
authors from their writing)
> But here it is useful, for heuristic purposes at least, to
> distinguish between Heidegger-the-man and the tools of thought and
> critique which he left behind. So here I guess I am calling for a
> little Heideggerian reflexivity: what sort of selves are we
> constructing through this technological medium?
(snip)
And, finally the reason for the perverse element of
> my fascination with your exchanges, why is hostility always on deck
> (if not ready to hand)?
Indeed. I ponder these issues myself. I am inclined to believe that the
inclination to flame has to do with the modern identification of oneself
with one's writing when writing is published on paper and subject to
secondary referencing, when it becomes who one is. Here, our texts are
much more fluid. It will be easier to disidentify if we change our
minds, or to take in another's thoughts without treating them as the Other's.
I hope we can shift to a less agonistic and more collaborative
intraction, such as Lyotard (The Postmodern Condition) suggests.
Can the propensity to the flame be
> understood simply as a loss of the face-to-face
...
> or does this ready rage not bespeak a more
> inarticulate, if not ineffable longing, the longing for, and
> readiness to battle for, a new self-understanding, a
> post-metaphysical understanding of self articulated precisely
> through this technological medium, a desire to seize the positive
> potentialities of technology, perhaps achieving some measure of the
> homecoming through alterity for which Heidegger called?
Where do you read Heidegger calling for alterity?
..Lois Shawver
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