Date: Fri, 29 Jan 1999 12:06:51 -0500
Subject: Re: Heidegger in Germany




I'm sorry to hear your personal living conditions are not well.  Hopefully
'fate' will send you some good luck this year...  I've personally been
through a number of severe depressions (manic-depressive disorder
unfortunately) and empathise as much as possible in this medium with that
plight.

A good friend of mine whom I often converse with on these topics is heavily
involved in Japanese traditions and I find her comments often illuminating.
At times though I'm not sure if she is misinterpreting something or I am
misinterpreting her but there seems to be some sort of comprehension
problem when those ideas get rephrased in a western context.  I hope I
didn't put you off by using the word 'suspicion', as having thought about
it later I would rather get across that it is my own comprehensive ability
with regard to such ideas,  western and even more so  non-western, that I
entertain doubts about.

The 'double negative' of non-violence doesn't bother me as such.  But how
to think non-violence without a relation to human being, and thus to being,
is the problem that has concerned me in the past about your posts.  Rage
and malice are, as you rightly point out, not themselves simply due to
'forgetting of being', and I have not read anything in Heidegger that
analyses or discusses things like rage and malice in an originary fashion,
but I think Heidegger's point (to the degree he took it) was that the
indifference of the majority that allows the rage and malice of certain
people to have such widespread effects in modern society, could be
construed as a forgetting of the concern and care that constitiute our own
being.

Take care,
Andrew






"Tom Blancato" <tblan-AT-telerama.com> on 28/01/99 12:56:06 PM

Please respond to heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu

To:   heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
cc:    (bcc: Andrew Glynn/Information Systems/CFI)
Subject:  Re: Heidegger in Germany






----------
> From: aglynn-AT-idirect.com
> To: heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
> Subject: Re:  Heidegger in Germany
> Date: Wednesday, January 27, 1999 9:35 PM
>
> In <Pine.BSI.4.02.9901271954340.15506-100000-AT-frogger.lm.com>, on 01/27/99

>    at 08, TMB <tblan-AT-telerama.lm.com> said:
>
>
> I'm interested in how you think non-violence, as in the West non-violence
> has mostly been thought through the concept of 'peace', which ultimately
> doesn't seem a properly non-violent mode (of what? of existence? of
being?
> - you see the beginning of the problem).

Well putting it simply, the concept of peace as such is founded on a naive
positivity. People *hate* the negativity of nonviolence, and usually
complain about its being a "negation of a negative", to boot. It's just a
bit naive. It is, indeed, part in parcel with just how it is that
nonviolence, as such, gets covered over.

I am somewhat suspicious also of
> attempts to appropriate other thinking (Indian, aboriginal, Chinese, etc)
> into a western context, as in many cases I find that I disbelieve the
ease
> with which thoughts inspired by complex and fascinating traditions can be
> "incorporated" into that context.  And it does do well to remember that
> the author of "Zen and the Art of Archery" became a committed Nazi ...

Well, I keep the business of incorpration secondary. For some, like Gandhi
(to whom reference pretty much has to be made in any serious discussion of
nonviolence), it was all very "new age" at the time, as well as being, of
course, bound up in the "ahimsa" tradiditon of Jainism and some other
aspects of Hinduism, I suppose. It was also very bound up in Tolstoy's
radical Christianity, and odd experiments in diatetics. Such is life.
Generally, the only strong in corporations I make in my own thinking is in
dialogue with people like Heidegger, Derrida, Levinas, Foucault, etc.
That's rather Western, I guess. Gandhi is there, too. Don't know what to
say about that vis a vis your worries here.

There was no particular opening of nonviolence as such in Pirsig's book, as
far as I can see.
>
> Looking forward to your future posts ...

I post about this a lot, sporadically. I post a bit, there are some
interested folk, some who dialogue in favor of this thinking, some who
don't, some who respond responsibly, others who clearly don't. I might post
some more, I might not. I'm rather depressed. My personal living conditions
are less than ideal.

TMB


>
> Andrew Glynn
>
>
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