Colin and Chris. Thanks for the posts. Your reflections on ethics and
ontology push on a thread that I was involved in last year with Tom
Blancato and Robert Moskal on this list, and I'd like to try to go
further with it if I can.
Lemme get rid of this other thing first. Babich has now used this space
three times to publish personal attacks against me, my lack of ethics, my
inept reading of philosophy, and so forth. I have no intention of
answering her here, but wish the list members to know that I have asked
her to use private email to share with me, if she must, her personal
reflections about me. The last two posts in which she mentions me have
come after I requested her to leave this bandwidth free for the sort of
discourse for which it is intended. Thanks to everybody who's
communicated privately with me about this. I'm sorry you got brought
into it and am sorry that this abuse of the list apparently must be
prolonged.
Colin, thanks for your insight re the two basis for Aristotle's system.
I was, as you or somebody else suggested, thinking of the broader sense
of ethics -- not local moralizings but, as Flannery O'Connor used to like
to say Habits of Being. So, the series of moves I am trying to tease out
of Heidegger's reading of Aristotle would be to go somehow from the way
in which Dasein finds itself or comes to itself in-or-as Being to that
kind of Being proper to the "political animal," which finds its highest
essence in community.
I don't know if I can express this just right, but it has to do with the
way Heidegger will in, say, the lecture course on Aristotle's Metaphysics
Theta, try to show how "dunamis" expresses the grounding principle of
"logos." This is what I was going for earlier when I mentioned
Taminiaux's chapter on praxis and authenticity. If the ordering
principle of entelichia, "dunamis" or potential works into something like
what German Idealism will call "possibility" -- which in its turn is the
essential ingredient of praxis, which for Aristotle was the highest form
of human being, the pre-condition for the polis -- then ethics and the
polis must necessarily look to fundamental ontology for their grounding.
There's a lot of big moves here, I guess, but somehow I think they can
all be made to hang together. Here's a final thought, Heidegger's
epigraph from Neitzsche to the Aristotle book:
The inner will of this course can be characterized by a word from Neitzsche:
Perhaps some centuries later one will judge that all German philosophy
finds its authentic worth in that it is a gradual recovery of the soil of
antiquity, and that each claim to "originality" sounds trite and
laughable in relation to the higher claim of the Germans to have
reestablished the apparently broken link with the Greeks, up until now
the highest type of "human being." [--Will to Power, 419]
Michael Harrawood
--- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---
------------------
ontology push on a thread that I was involved in last year with Tom
Blancato and Robert Moskal on this list, and I'd like to try to go
further with it if I can.
Lemme get rid of this other thing first. Babich has now used this space
three times to publish personal attacks against me, my lack of ethics, my
inept reading of philosophy, and so forth. I have no intention of
answering her here, but wish the list members to know that I have asked
her to use private email to share with me, if she must, her personal
reflections about me. The last two posts in which she mentions me have
come after I requested her to leave this bandwidth free for the sort of
discourse for which it is intended. Thanks to everybody who's
communicated privately with me about this. I'm sorry you got brought
into it and am sorry that this abuse of the list apparently must be
prolonged.
Colin, thanks for your insight re the two basis for Aristotle's system.
I was, as you or somebody else suggested, thinking of the broader sense
of ethics -- not local moralizings but, as Flannery O'Connor used to like
to say Habits of Being. So, the series of moves I am trying to tease out
of Heidegger's reading of Aristotle would be to go somehow from the way
in which Dasein finds itself or comes to itself in-or-as Being to that
kind of Being proper to the "political animal," which finds its highest
essence in community.
I don't know if I can express this just right, but it has to do with the
way Heidegger will in, say, the lecture course on Aristotle's Metaphysics
Theta, try to show how "dunamis" expresses the grounding principle of
"logos." This is what I was going for earlier when I mentioned
Taminiaux's chapter on praxis and authenticity. If the ordering
principle of entelichia, "dunamis" or potential works into something like
what German Idealism will call "possibility" -- which in its turn is the
essential ingredient of praxis, which for Aristotle was the highest form
of human being, the pre-condition for the polis -- then ethics and the
polis must necessarily look to fundamental ontology for their grounding.
There's a lot of big moves here, I guess, but somehow I think they can
all be made to hang together. Here's a final thought, Heidegger's
epigraph from Neitzsche to the Aristotle book:
The inner will of this course can be characterized by a word from Neitzsche:
Perhaps some centuries later one will judge that all German philosophy
finds its authentic worth in that it is a gradual recovery of the soil of
antiquity, and that each claim to "originality" sounds trite and
laughable in relation to the higher claim of the Germans to have
reestablished the apparently broken link with the Greeks, up until now
the highest type of "human being." [--Will to Power, 419]
Michael Harrawood
--- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---
------------------