From: "David Stanway" <david.stanway-AT-easynet.co.uk>
Subject: Help..
Date: Wed, 23 Sep 1998 00:06:02 +0100



After the drubbing I received about Jemeinigkeit, I decided to try and learn
something about Heidegger, but I am already confused. Roughly, here is what
is swirling through my mind.

(a) Heidegger talks about a sort of metaphysical reflex, an historically
nurtured tendency to think erroneously.

(b) Heidegger criticises the notion that truth consists of assertions which
correspond to the facts. Such a view entails the privileging of artificial
constructs.

The division between natural and artificial. While Heidegger believes that
his approach is natural, or tries to undercut the artifices instilled since
Plato and Socrates, his approach actually feels to me to be an artificial
construct. My (erroneous) "natural way of thinking" is in fact the way of
thinking he spent his entire life trying to undermine; my "natural way of
thinking" is, to him, unnatural.

To summarise another point crudely: when we think of an entity like a
hammer, we do not think of its predicates: we think of its function. Thus,
it makes no sense to interpret a hammer primarily as a piece of wood with a
lump of metal or stone on the end. This interpretation is a secondary
abstraction.

But why, in this case, does Heidegger privilege what he believes to be a
natural reflex of thought? Why does he favour the interpretation of a hammer
in terms of its function (or its place in the world) over a supposedly
abstract interpretation in terms of its predicates?

Why, to me, does philosophy always come down to a division - in the
philosopher's mind, between what is natural and what is unnatural? It
reminds me of Nietzsche and his statement against the Stoics:

"while you rapturously pose as deriving the canon of your law from nature,
you want something quite the reverse of that, you strange actors and
self-deceivers! Your pride wants to prescribe your morality, your ideal, to
nature, yes, to nature itself, and incorporate them in it; you demand that
nature should be nature 'according to the Stoa' and would like to make all
existence exist only after your own image - as a tremendous eternal
glorification and universalisation of Stoicism!.. But this is an old and
never-ending story: what formerly happened with the Stoics still happens
today as soon as a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates
the world in its own image, it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is the
tyrannical drive itself, the most spiritual will to power, to 'creation of
the world', to causa prima."

Now, the greatest lessons are gained through one's mistakes. Can anyone tell
me what mine are?


Thanks

David






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