Date: 14 Aug 96 00:20:37 EDT
From: robert scheetz <76550.1064-AT-compuserve.com>
Subject: the Q of V


Dr. Eldred,

"...I was unfolding various aspects of the word "charge" in an 
"attempt to see what has been worrying me about the moral charge of the "issue 
"of violence (I prefer 'issue' to 'question') that Tom Blancato has "introduced.

"You know very well yourself what kind of charge the words "Auschwitz" and 
""Hiroshima" carry; I think these words should be handled with care and "maybe 
"even humility instead of with accusational undertones. 

First, I deny that mine (this time anyway) bears the vulgar accusatorial
interpretation you're imputing to it; I took care to pair it with
Hiroshima; thereby achieving the morally neutral "everybody's
guilty, therefore..." condition. They are certainly charged, 
but isn't everything? even Aristotle's "dry" instantiae? degree
is all.  It's as if you were insisting we do chemistry with 
only the lightest elements on the periodic chart. So I could
make nothing positive of this response..., it seemed
oblique and at best fortuitously freudian....


"As far as primal violence goes, the question is: What does this have to do
"with 
"philosophy? Let me elucidate.
"You refer here to Greek tragedy, Homer, the Bible, Christianity, "Heraclitean 
"fire and end up asking whether these lines of violence running through "Western

"history "bring to language the primordial truth of being more lucidly than "his

"[Heidegger's] stilted formal indicators?" 

I believe I wrote "of", not "than", "H's formal indicators".
And this characterization, rhetoric,  doesn't capture my intended argument.
Aren't you maybe being  too cursory? too lofty?



1.It is my understanding that H (perhaps, Phenomenology)distinguishes
  his method as hermeneutical/intuitive as opposed to the traditional
Aristotle/DesCartes logical/abstractive.  He thence begins from an existential
concretum (an epoche?), separates the adventitious, and proceeds to
de-articulate its manifold significations thereby to 
  uncover, encounter, elucidate, wrest...the substrate "Being".

2.I was pointing to a structural congruency between the above
  and the method implicit, for example, in the ritual structure of attic
  tragedy, say "Oedipus", which progresses thru a radical destruction (holocaust
seem to me a fine word here) to the stark clarification,
  increment by increment, of the profound and profoundly 
  hidden meaning (primal violence) of the plague in(human
  existentiality of) Thebes (the world).

3.I wanted to consider that the violence of the sparagmos is realized
  linguistically in H's "destruction" and toward the identical goal:
  uncovering truth, or meaning, being,...and with the seeming identical
  outcome, death, annihilation,...the burden or meaning of Dasein.

4.And that, therefore, Violence is the dynamic of the truth of being, 
  and the dynamical truth of being....

Finally, It's clear I'm still struggling along the shallow end of
the curve...and I have to come at H from where I am....
The disparity may be insuperable...but even in the ideal symposium there were
lapses all round from perfect civility,...eh?.

Thanks,
Bob Scheetz



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