Date: Fri, 3 Jan 97 17:17 +0100
From: artefact-AT-t-online.de (M.Eldred_artefact)
Subject: RE: Plural beginnings (3)


Cologne, 03 January 1997

Hi Diggers,

In response to my: 
>Some of the sillier ideologies coursing today about dwelling on the Earth make
>me a bit circumspect, however.
Iain Thomson writes:
>>Examples?   I should admit that I find in this sort of thinking one of the
more promising ways of extending Heidegger beyond himself.<< 

Since I was referring to the mundane everyday level, I was thinking of some of 
the New Age ideologies and, say, feminist moon-worshipping, i.e. more naive 
attempts to 'return' to living in harmony with the cycles of nature. 

But it must be said that scientific reasoning, especially the thinking of the 
physical sciences, is the much more dogmatic and insidious type of thinking 
holding sway today over humankind - dogmatic because it seems entirely 
unquestionable. Any thinking that is not in the mould of scientific reasoning is 
branded as 'metaphysical' and 'speculative' and pushed to the side. 

Iain: 
>>But there are often the resources within Heidegger's thinking to go beyond the 
conclusions he has reached,...<<

If we take Heidegger's insistence on questioning seriously, then there are no 
conclusions, only ever more questioning ways of questioning. History stays open 
all the time. Time is open-ended. 

ME:
>Can my PC thing as a thing?
Iain:
>>Not in its transparency to me in use, nor in its frustrating break-down state, 
but perhaps in it sitting-there, a little altar to technology, gathering a 
particular understanding of the contemporary world and my place in it?<<

If world is constituted by the interrelations between things in their usefulness 
for something or other, and reliability is an essential characteristic of a 
thing's thinging, then on that score my PC would be a thing thinging in the 
interplay of world. 

But a PC and all that it presupposes is a highly complex thing and the networked 
world of which it is a component is the manifest contemporary form of the setup. 

Michael Schwartz writes:
>>Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle are seen as having constituted a plural 
beginning to the questioning of being, a plurality that is by no means then 
recaptured in a neat synthesis (hence the hermeneutic labor of interpreting the 
ancient Greek texts in book-length formats).<<

This manifoldedness of the great metaphysical beginning, I think, is not the 
plurality spoken of in Heidegger's Hoelderlin where the roles are the great 
beginning and the other beginning, almost always without the thought of 
plurality. 

The plurality in the late Hoelderlin lecture is, it seems, a sign of a planetary 
view that recognizes other historical beginnings other than the great Western 
beginnng with the Greeks:

Here's another attempt at a translation of the relevant passage: 
"This small ring, however, can no longer remain in its occidental singularity. 
It opens up to the few other great beginnings which belong to the same dimension 
of the beginning of the un-ending relation, each with their own character, 
within which the Earth is withheld." ('Hoelderlins Erde und Himmel' in: 
_Erlaeuterungen zu Hoelderlins Dichtung_ 4th ed. 1971 S.177 English??)


Michael
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