Date: Sat, 2 Oct 1999 05:16:50 +0800
From: Malcolm Riddoch <riddoch-AT-central.murdoch.edu.au>
Subject: Re: Philosophy of Being/trans.


>As a writer (rather than a philosopher) I see the essence of the joke being
>that "indissoluble truth" always settles into indissoluble paradox. Paradox
>is a fine place from which to participate in the saying of being. One
>thinks of Nietzsche's remark that "all language is metaphor."

A metaphor for a paradox ...? For lived experience maybe, or the 
supreme plenitude of life. But yeh, that's why I like researching 
Heidegger and Husserl. They try and talk about something that is 
itself the ground for stating truths or representing things. I'm not 
sure what an indissoluble truth might look like, or in what sense it 
doesn't dissolve. In phenomenology all experience originates in lived 
time or temporality which is constantly differing, but does that mean 
all truth is paradox? The OED describes it as a "seemingly absurd 
although perhaps really well founded statement" ... or as something 
that goes against the common opinion, which certainly includes 
Heidegger's paradoxical question of being. But then he makes a 
distinction between mere opinion, conceptual truth, representations, 
beliefs, deduction etc., and the truth of being which is something 
one has to authentically live through in order to 'pre-conceptually' 
understand it. His early existential transcendental writing was an 
attempt to outline the structures of this 'fundamental experience' in 
order to work out the conceptual meaning of being, a task he failed 
to complete. So a text like Being and Time apparently provides 
transcendental truths about something truly paradoxical, about 
something which isn't itself a concept or doxa.

I'm a writer as well, I'm just in a niche market. I like the way 
Heidegger writes, and I think he's writing about something similar to 
what other great writers write about, like Henry James, or Joyce ... 
and one of my favourites, Philip K Dick. Generally I prefer the early 
Heidegger's phenomenological texts, the style is very 
'pre-empirically scientific' which kind of suits me, but the theme 
remains the same throughout his career. As a writer how do you 
approach the paradox of writing about 'life'?

Regards,

Malcolm Riddoch



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