Date: Fri, 12 Jun 1998 18:01:27 +0200
Subject: Re:  God and Being
From: artefact-AT-t-online.de (Michael Eldred)


Cologne 12 June 1998

Mike Staples schrieb:
> I'm not sure from your post if what you are saying is that their is no
> experience of purposfullness in the Universe outside the confines of a
> metaphysics (perhaps a Christian metaphysics). Take away the idea of God
> and you take away any sort of experience of purposfullness.

Michael, no, I’m not suggesting that only the “idea of God” provides a final 
purpose, nor is Nietzsche in the passage I cited, but the “purpose” of, say, the 
“greatest happiness for the greatest number” which Nietzsche adduces is a 
follow-on formula that has to be understood as a response to the absconding 
Christian god. All these formulae are metaphysical, even when those using them 
mostly do not know it. Why? Because they go beyond immediate sensual 
(‘physical’) experience to meta-physical meaning that lies beyond ontic 
experience. These purposes are part of the historical casting of beings as a 
whole in their being. 

The crucial point, in my opinion, is to realize that our everyday thinking is 
absolutely drenched in metaphysical thinking and thus tied and bound by what 
philosophy, in its deepest representatives, has kicked around and reshaped for 
two-and-a-half millenia. 

> What seems reasonable about Heidegger is his saying one way or another
> that we have these experiences that we interpret via some frame of
> reference like metaphysics. What seems still reasonable but needs to be
> scrutinized is saying that experiences are generated from thinking in
> metaphysical terms. I might, for instance, experience the sun comming up
> in the East. And I might then wonder about this, and decide that it is
> being dragged up into the sky by a charriot of the gods. This is an
> example of a conclusion following the phenomenon I experience. Now if I
> fix this notion of charriots and gods, and build upon it and elaborate
> upon it, I might create a way of seeing the world that colors my
> experience to the point where precisely what I experience at any given
> time may be more influenced by this way of seeing the world than by the
> phenomenon itself. Trying the ferret out what is what is, I take it,
> part of the phenomenological process. But what I hear you passing by is
> the experience of purposfullness. What I hear you saying is that the
> experience itself has only been generated by the way of seeing the world
> metaphysically. And I would like to question this. Is it really the case
> that the experience of purposefullness falls out of a metaphysical way
> of thinking, or has the metaphysical way of thinking simply thought
> about the experience of purposefullness in a particular way that needs
> adjusting. Certainly, you would not say that man's experience of the sun
> comming up in the morning is generated only by the thinking that thinks
> gods and charriots must be hauling planets and stars across the heavens?

Interesting question. To stick with the phenomenon, it has to be asked: what is 
the purpose of the sun rising in the East? The sun bears no label saying what 
its purpose is, so where can such a thing come from? Our phenomenal experience 
of purpose comes from human existing. Purpose = Zweck (German) = _telos_ 
(Greek), well, roughly anyway. We have been talking about the grand purpose of 
it all, the highest end or _telos_ that lies hidden behind the phenomena as the 
secret direction of the universe (this is what nihilism puts into question, 
according to Nietzsche), but our first experience of purpose is from everyday 
things, that they are good for our purposes. E.g. the shoe-horn is good for 
putting on shoes; its purpose is to aid shoe-putting-on. Shoes are good for 
walking in; their purpose is to aid walking. This is the way we understand them, 
in terms of purpose. Purpose itself is a category (more strictly speaking: an 
existential) which is part of our understanding of being. This understanding 
itself is granted by the opening up of being in its truth, something to which we 
are oblivious “at first and for the most part” (SuZ). (Seinsvergessenheit = the 
obliviousness to being) 

When we go beyond particular small purposes connected with shoe-horns, shoes, 
and the like, and ask ‘what is the purpose of it all’, we are asking for a 
_telos_ of existence. As long as we exist, the things and people that surround 
us are there ‘for-the-sake-of’ our own existence. This is not a formula for 
egotism, if sake is taken in its original sense as “issue”. Existence itself is 
the final issue for us, our _telos_ or ‘purpose’, but it is misleading to 
translate in this way, since “issue” has a more complex meaning than something 
so cut-and-dried as “purpose”. Things and other people are in our world and are 
thus an (open) issue for us, whether we like it or not. So we have to make the 
best of it, and this is _to agathon_ in Plato, or Aristotle’s _hou heneka_, 
interpreted phenomenologically (as Umwillen; SuZ). We exist for the sake of the 
Good (_to agathon_) in taking on existing as our very own issue. This is nothing 
so grand as a final purpose behind everything and no longer metaphysical in the 
traditional sense of a transcendence, but it is the beginning that comes from 
stepping back from such grand castings. 

Does this get any closer to what you are driving at, Michael?

Michael
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