Date: Sat, 4 Jul 1998 16:07:01 -0400 (EDT)
From: TMB <tblan-AT-telerama.lm.com>
Subject: Re: Mind & Body, One More Time 



On Sat, 4 Jul 1998, Robert V. Scheetz wrote:

> 
> don't listen to em, tom.
> these fellers 'r un-de-structured...  
>  plying the everyday comportment of their trade
> (wordswordswords)
> ...all this grammato-philologico-linguistico lumber 's the
> same old modernist swindle...
> 
> the rarefied heights of todtnauberg
> coheres somehow with the mud 'n th'blood 'n th'beer of messkirch/frieberg?
> (wherein, sure, the koine figures somehow integrally with
> the entire  life-world...
> eye of newt 'n toe of frog ... hell's broth,
> which it is the normal business of mad pedagogs to tease out)
> but, for think'n,
> polemic 's the item...
> dialectically sloggin the forestpaths...
> and whatever's to hand for method


For think'n polemos, however, one must, as one finds the tools and what
not, also find, form, refine the hand, arm body for them at the very same
time; there is no "tool" for either thinking *or* nonviolence. 
Nonviolence/thinking is the "tool", so to speak. And anyhow, isn't that
*really* what Heidegger means, or should mean, by "thinking": not just:
finding the tools, but finding the hands for the tools. Doesn't that hit
off what is especially "hard", channenging, provocatove, tantilizing (for
those with the taste for it), difficult, transfoming, about "thinking"
(and many other arts as well), that whatever we try to "grab with our
hands" leads back into the "ready to hand" and never quite into something
else, never quite into what calls for thinking, never into thinking? 

Good to say this again: Thinking is like reaching for a tool and trying to
use it only to find that the whole complex (tool, hand, person) is a bit
of a trap, one is not yet thinking. Thinking reaches out beyond the
particular paradigm of this or that tool and hand.

> re nationalism/nazism:i'd match the nihilism of our tobacco road bill's
> bottomless narcissism gainst all commers, quick 'r dead... 

Is it narcissism? Thought might give us to think otherwise...

> as also our pop/lumpen cult  (hip-hoppers'd make skinheads blush) .

Not clear, but just how far should blushing go? Who really has the courage
even to ask? What is token'd out with each blush? One shouldn't stop at
first blush, I think. Of course, so many would like to take as blush what
is far too red to be blush. What does the makeup cover?

> ...but as with H & co it is yet the banality of nihilism, not its
> fearsomeness, that impresses. 
> 
> july 4 salutations
> bob
> 

Cheers,

TMB



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