Date: 10 Aug 96 12:44:38 EDT
From: robert scheetz <76550.1064-AT-compuserve.com>
Subject: The Q of V


Tom Blancato & Paul Murphy,

1.  My operating assumption, conceptualizing this list, is 
    that most of y'all are, or to be, teachers.  My posts
	are honest questionings of a student, perforce naive;  
    why ought an honest "doctor" find them exceptionable?
	
2.  We recently had a seeming concensus disquisition on the
    virtue for thinking of pre-grammatical, pre-logical,
	kindergarten-blocks type, linguistic constructs
	of heroic prolixity.  P'raps y'all, in your turn,
	might discover a little sympathy for how this could
	tend, even for the most pious Wagner, to apoplexy.
	
3.  Finally, and most important, having had the experience of
    stiff doses (yes, plural,...indeed) of ghetto 
    theology, I'm unpleasantly aware of how an hermetic system of 
    discourse works: how it precludes thinking by imperiously 
    re-casting and thereby emasculating or diffusing all exogenous
    inquiry into idiosyncratic (i.e. w/o reference to the communal/
    historical set) forms. And, have acquired a firm will against being
    bullied, even at the risk of ostracism from list of Being....

At first blush Tom's "q of v" struck me as melodramatic too; but
as I stewed on it, and warmed to it, while the discussion's got
ever more attenuated and exotic, it's got for me ever more
concrete and exigent...all the way from my own community's "lords
of the flies" to Oedipus-Laius, to Auschwitz/Hiroshima...to
Ted Kaszinsky.  Heidegger is able to think thru a picture of
peasant's shoes, or a poem on memory, to the substance of authentic
being, the clearing along the path in the woods; but, seems
wilfully insouciant to the circumambient dark. My intention was
to prick the discussion back to looking thru what lay so massively
in front of it, as Tom's Desert Storm invocation had kicked it off.

Bottom line, I very much appreciate especially Tom's wrestling for a hold
on this slimey devil (along with his generous disposition)...for provoking
the plodding dull grey mass for a time.





     --- from list heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---