File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_2001/heidegger.0111, message 37


From: "Jud Evans" <Jud-AT-sunrise74.freeserve.co.uk>
Subject: heidegger-AT-lists.village. To Onta.
Date: Thu, 8 Nov 2001 01:09:35 -0000


----- Original Message -----  From: Brendan O'Byrne  To:
heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu  Sent: Wednesday, November 07, 2001 1:
39 PM Subject: Re: To Onta.

Jud,
Greetings. I accept that it was a typo (which you repeat further on) and I
pretty much knew that at the time. I took 'To onta' to be emblematic of
everything that follows, i. e. a bizarre and cavalier misreading of
Aristotle (or at least Ross' translation) in the service of an
anti-Heidegger rant. So now I must substantiate this charge.
Heidegger begins Sein und Zeit with a quotation from the Sophist 244a: delon
gar hos humeis tauta (ti pote Boules the semainein hopotan phthengesthe)
palai gignoskete, hemeis de pro tou men oometha, nun d' eporekkamen. When
Heidegger expresses perplexity (something quite different from 'confusion')

Jud:
Greetings to you too! At least you refer to my alleged misreading as
'cavalier' rather than 'roundhead.' :-)
My online dictionary gives me: 'Perplexity' as: mental confusion, disarray,
trouble or confusion resulting from complexity. The Oxford renders:
bewilderment. Webster's gives us: confused, bewildered. Perhaps you have a
different dictionary? I do hope that in your pro-Heidegger rant you will
excuse me if I mention that it sounds equally bizarre to a non-believer?

 Brendan:
 . . . about 'is' in the text you adduce (the leaf is green etc) he is
merely attesting to the aporia that the Eleatic Stranger finds himself in
the Sophist passage above.

Jud:
So he is repeating the confusion of the Eleatic Stranger? But why did he not
allude to the stranger's confusion  in the critical passage - and why did he
make it painfully obvious that he just couldn't understand the 'is' word
[and by extrapolation the 'Being' word too and all the other members of the
BE conjugation?]
 In fact he repeats he is ignorant of the meaning of the 'Being' word in a
later paragraph, [below] and what may I ask is the mitigating circumstance
that you are trying to introduce by way of defending the poor man by
dragging in the ES? Is the fact that he shared a lack of understanding on
the same question with some fictional stranger in a book over two thousand
years ago to be taken as some sort of defence?

"I'm sorry your honour but I am attesting that I was unaware of the speed
limit, as was Nathaniel Noggs on the same road in August of 1927 as is
attested in this newspaper cutting that I have of his court appearance at
the time."

It is hardly a defence that inspires sympathy or support?

Brendan:
In that passage the situation begins from a presumed clarity about the
matter at hand (delon gar; for it is clear or obvious), a clarity that is
claimed by his predecessors, the phusiokoi and even the Eleatics themselves,
the sentence finishes with a confession of aporia by the ES. This follows on
from a necessary critique that the ES must carry out on his own master,
Parmenides. This pseudo parricide is absolutely necessary if the sophist is
to be denied the cover of Parmenides sayings about the futility of
investigating non-being. Without this overcoming there can be no philosophy
only sophistry. This is the immediate context and it is vital, because the
problem posed by the sophist necessitates the distinction between being and
non-being (to on and to me on).

Jud:
There is no evidence for the connection that you make in Heidegger's
infamous text, where the dreadful confession is made that he doesn't
understand 'is.'
The long passage is a PERSONAL struggle which he has with the 'is' word, no
allusions are made by him either directly or indirectly to the ES or anybody
else... which is in a way painful to read.
It is somewhat redolent of Hamlet's tussle with the problem of whether to be
alive or put an end to it.  Heidegger sits alone with his leaf looking for
its 'is.'
That such a scholar was reduced to this!  That such a scholar had such a
BASIC incomprehension of grammar!  His misunderstanding of 'BE [is] and
Being' is the sandy Grundbegriffe upon which he erected his whole
metaphysical tottering house of cards. And then to proceed to write a book
on the subject!  His cheek is breathtaking.  I quote a further passage of
his a little further down in this piece, where he confesses ignorance of
'being' too, and pleads that it may cause no 'harm' to be so 'perplexed.'
Tell that to the Reich's Marin.

Brendan:
Previously, and here is the source of the perplexity, those who find no
difficulty in explaining being - by referring to 'hot being mixed with cold'
or the other various pronouncements as to what is meant by 'that which is',
are trying to explain being by referring to other beings or ontical modes of
being (air, water, mixture etc).

Jud:
In your effort to clarify you only succeed in further obfuscation. The word
'being' in the partially elided sentence you quote: "Hot being mixed with
cold" is a verb of the continuous present, the 'being' points or alludes to
the action taking place - the action of the mixing of some [unnamed entity -
water perhaps]  - being mixed with some other unnamed liquid having a lower
temperature. Here the 'being' word refers to the existential state (or in
this case, the ongoing change of state) of whatever it is that is hot,
mixing with whatever it is that is cold. The word 'being' itself' has no
'state' of its own, but merely attributes and points to the existential
modality of the omitted subject of the sentence. If I said to you or you
said to me  - out of the blue: "The hot being mixed with the cold," then it
would be meaningless, for it is out of context.  If however in discourse we
had been talking about the subject of the sentence moments before, and we
had been discussing a certain liquid, [say olive oil] then the sentence:
"The hot being mixed with the cold," would be meaningful, for the
subject-depletion would be known to both speakers, and the absent subject
could be mentally substituted where there was none. Hence: "The hot olive
oil being mixed with the cold" would have meaning. The sentence still
contains ambiguity however, for if the meaning is that the action
[existential mode] is taking place now, then the 'is' word needs to be added
to indicate that the action of mixing is taking place right now, for it
could be construed or taken out of context as you have done, that the action
is over and completed in the sense that: ": "The hot olive oil being mixed
with the cold we can now proceed to mix it with the pastry."

There is no such thing as "That which is." a sentence which would normally
result in the response: "That which is WHAT?"  constitutes bad English, for
a predicate needs to be supplied in order for it to make sense: "That which
is lying on the table," though slightly old fashioned, would be understood,
but "That which is." would only be understood on a similar basis to the
previous sentence, but whereas it was the subject that had been left out
[the water or the oil] on the first occasion, this time, in this incomplete
sentence, not only is the predicate missing, but we are ignorant as to
exactly what the diexic pronoun: 'that'  refers to, regarding the person or
thing indicated, named, or understood as the real or reificantal sentential
subject.
Does it we wonder refer to: "The other one from this?" or does it act as a
pronoun standing in for perhaps "The entire contents of the universe?
Whether it is in fact a word deputising for all the matter in the universe,
or whether it signifies a locative dimension: "That which is on the table"
or "That which is in the universe" rather than: "This which is in the
universe or on the table?"
Perhaps you can clarify this confusion [I mean perplexity?] :-)
You might find it fruitful to employ completely unambiguous examples when
trying to make a point - even such an obscure one as this.

Brendan:
It all still begs the question. Both Plato and Aristotle take up the
question of being as a cluster of aporiai,

Jud:
Being cannot be a 'cluster' of anything, although some people including me
sometimes refer to the BE conjugation as a 'cluster' or a 'constellation'
in a functional, classificatory sense, for being is the third person
continuous state of the 'verb' IS, and any entity can only exist once.
Being doesn't come in bundles - though it is often employed to indicate that
other entities come in bundles or clusters as in the sentence: "The
joss-sticks are being wrapped up into bundles of twelve."  Or the Pleiades
are known for being clustered in a particularly obvious pattern." But the
'is' and the 'are' and the 'being' cannot be wrapped in any bundles or
clusters.

Brendan:
. and, their solution to these aporiai is, broadly speaking, metaphysics or
the episteme tis he theorei to on he on (Met, G, 1, 1003a 21) - the science
that contemplates being as being. It turns out that this science establishes
a modality concerning the question of being, being is manifold (to d' on
legetai men pollachos; Met. G

Jud:
Firstly it is NOT a science by any stretch of the imagination.  One can
hardly call any activity a science that because it doesn't understand the
childishly simple operation of a basic syntactical component of language,
wanders off into a metaphysical world of Alice in Wonderland pondering the
meaning of 'Being' when they only have to open any children's grammar book
to see the answer staring them right in the face?  Surely you mean their
'guesses' to the meaning of their tangle of aporiatic confusion, not their
SOLVING of the problem? Who said they 'solved' the problem?  Remember it is
THEIR aporiatic confusion - their 'problem' - not ours - it is Heidegger who
is the perplexed one alone with his Eliatic strangers  and his leaf - not
us.  The so-called 'problem of being' is a fraud,
In Greek 'aporia' means a tangled path blocking the way, but the term has
often been used in a literary context to describe a logical problem or
inability to settle to a course of action. This is what we witness in
Heidegger's agony of misapprehension. Against that background his "I hope it
won't cause any harm?" seems pretty pathetic to me.

There is ABSOLUTELY no evidence for your claim regarding Aristotle's meaning
of the term:  'the being of being'.  You are merely extrapolating what YOU
would like it to mean.  If you have definite evidence for this claim of
yours, you should publish immediately, and it will be headlines all over the
world, for it is a question of interpretation that scholars have argued over
for centuries. Kahn in his great work: 'The Verb To Be in Ancient Greek'
concludes that Aristotle left us with an unanswered conundrum that can never
satisfactorily be resolved, when he spoke of 'the being of beings.' if you
have evidence you will make your fortune and your paper will be a best
seller snapped up by scholars all over the world. If you lack this vital
evidence then your interpretation is just as 'cavalier' as anybody else's
including Heidegger or anybody you care to mention - including me if you
wish..


Brendan:
2, 1003a 33). Heidegger is recovering the aporiai concerning being from the
self-evidence that comes to mark the tradition

Jud:
What EXACTLY do you mean when you say: " Heidegger is 'recovering' the
aporiai concerning being"? He recovers nothing at all, but merely raises the
question?  Aporia means: the tangled doubt - the confusion - so how exactly
does one 'recover' doubt?
Heidegger admits to deliberately confusing the meanings of being as the
following confessional passage forcefully demonstrates:

Heidegger:
When I consider the whole of beings, or even just attempt to think about it
in a vague way, I leave what I envisage for the most part indeterminate and
indistinct, whether beings or being, or both of them alternately and
indefinitely, or each separately but in a barely comprehended relation. From
here originates an old confusion of speech. I say "being" and really mean
beings. I talk about beings as such and mean, at bottom, being. The
distinction between beings and being seems not to obtain at all. If it does
obtain, ignoring it seems not to cause any particular "harm. "

Jud:
He says: " Ignoring it seems not to cause any particular 'harm?" But his
self admitted confusion has set back Western philosophy fifty years!


Brendan: -
 the same kind of self-evidence that P and A encountered.

Jud:
What 'self evidence?"  Where IS this marvellous 'self evidence?' The floor
is yours.

Brendan:
Either you recognise the aporiai or you regard the meaning, the
signification (semainein) of 'being' or 'is' as self-evident or a matter
that can be cleared up through the study of grammar or linguistic analysis.

Jud:
The function of the BE conjugates is now well known and understood and it is
quite simple even for a non-linguist to understand. - it is purely a
mechanism for the introduction of modes, manners and existential states of
entities. IS and BEING  is NOT A THING or a STATE in itself and never has
been and never will be - it CONFERS STATEHOOD - certainly not something to
be found hiding beneath a leaf like some shy caterpillar.

Brendan:
To refer the whole matter to grammatical confusion is to beg the question
because grammar as we know it is largely devised by Renaissance humanists
(the study of 'grammar' by, for example, Dionysius of Halcarnassus, is a
somewhat different affair) using Latin as the paradigm and their immediate
purpose was textual criticism and pedagogy. Its implicit categories and
modalities are, according to Heidegger's account, metaphysical, and I think
this can be demonstrated.

Jud:
I'm afraid you're getting yourself into an aporiatic tangle between your
Dionysius and your Dionytsus, which demonstrates a certain cavalier attitude
towards your subject.
Unless it's a typo of course which I would understand?
 If you have found some hitherto unpublished work or manuscript by Dionysius
of Halcarnassus apart from his piece on word order and prosody, you'll make
yourself another million dollars on top of the million you make over your
'Being as being'  shock -horror - sensation! - for he wrote no grammar -
for the man that did that we had to wait for Dionysius Thrax, in the 2nd
century BC, who produced the first systematic grammar of Western tradition;
[Panini and the Indians were light years ahead of the Greeks in both
quantity and quality, [regarding grammar] it dealt only with word morphology
and made no reference whatsoever to 'being' whether as a noun, a verb or a
gerund.  In fact neither of those two guys touched on the copula or the BE
cluster or 'is' at all.  For the study of sentential syntax we had to wait
for Apollonius Dyscolus, of the 2nd century AD.  This  Apollonius Dyscolus
was the first man to pronounce that BE was a verb of existence [rather than
a marker of existential modality.]   It was the medievalist monks who later
made it worse by compounding this wrongful misinterpretation by spreading
the virus throughout Christendom via the all pervading and dominant  Latin
language.

Brendan:
To criticise Heidegger on grammatical terms is to beg the question as well
as being completely inappropriate.

Jud:
But this grammatical mess is at the very core of his thinking  - if we are
to go along with his confusions: When Heidegger asks:
"What is being, what is beingness in its being?" he would have us say
absurdities like: "What is dancing, what is dancingness in its dancing?"
You cannot play mayhem with language and think that you can get away with it
just because Aristotle & Plato couldn't discern the real meaning of the
'being' word and opted for some spurious metaphysical. what was the word you
used now...Oh, yes.'solution.'

Anyway in Heidegger's daft question above - a question which reminds me of
his other daft question "Where is the is?" this time he turns his attention
to another conjugate of BE - this time 'being.' itself.  "What is being,
what is beingness in its being? Here he is using the 'is' word to attribute
the modality of existence to the 'is' word itself, for 'is' is merely
another tense of 'being,' introducing the very double decker existence that
he desperately created Dasein to avoid.
If a thing 'is' - then it must already be in some existential state or mode,
and that existential state or mode can't be attributed to  'being,' because
'is' means that the thing [whether real or reificantal] already IS
something, and as the only thing hanging around the sentence is 'being' and
being refers to something that already exists too, then the poor man has
walked blindly into the same tanglewood where Plato and Aristotle were
flailing around in the undergrowth seeking a way out before they finally
spotted the  sign which said:  'Metaphysics this Way." and made their
escape.
In Heidegger's case the sign he saw said: 'Dasein This Way,' but it led to
nowhere, like the first sign in those woods in Greece so long ago.


Brendan:
You move on to discuss Gamma 1. I quote:  Jud: This means that certain
investigators are studying being [to onta = material beings in the original
Greek: see definition above]- in other words they are studying 'the nature
of the material' from which beings are constructed or formed.

This must be one of the most peculiar readings of Gamma 1 I've ever come
across. 'Certain investigators' not mentioned in the text but you can only
mean Aristotle himself and probably Plato (because no one else knew of such
an episteme before them),

Jud:
 You learn something new every day.  Only a blind man who had drunk the
entire contents of a whisky bottle  could fail to see that I was
paraphrasing Aristotle with the words 'certain investigators.'  I was of
course referring to Aristotle's mentioning of the fact that there are
certain people studying the 'being of beings.

Brendan:
. No real problem so far, but "'the nature of the material' from which
beings are constructed  . . . '. Where do you get this from? Even the highly
problematic Ross translation that you are using does not say this or
anything remotely like this. Aristotle clearly announces that the focus of
this episteme is on the being of being(s) and how this relates to the archai
and the aitiai.

Jud:
Precisely that -  'the being of beings' - the 'being' refers to the material
from which beings are formed - the corporeal substance of which beings
[entities] are composed. If they had been studying the same subject as what
Aristotle himself or Plato was dealing with at the time - the existence of
beings - then it would have gone unregarded, unless that is they had had a
radically different take on the matter.

Brendan:
You then quote the whole of Gamma 1 (Ross). For you 'it is absolutely
crystal clear' (cf Soph. 244a) that Aristotle is describing a 'general
scientific branch of knowledge' - I say not at all; he is leaving aside the
branches (to meros or perhaps species) of episteme, he is here concerned
with the epsiteme of on he on and acquiring the archai and the aitia. In the
analysis of the epistemonikon in the Ethics, Aristotle makes it clear that
episteme cannot grasp the archai, that is the function of sophia (Nic. Eth.
VI 6-7). Under these circumstances Aristotle is concerned with what about
being can be grasped epistemically (see the Ethics for what is involved
here) for there is much about being that can only be grasped through sophia.
You then say that it is 'evident' that Aristotle is referring to the
ultimate substratum, which is no longer predicated of anything else' and so
we are suddenly propelled into Eta. This is a dogmatic assertion and so you
will have to demonstrate this because it is not 'evident' in the way you
suggest.

Jud:
Like the rest of mankind I cannot provide any substantial evidence any more
than you can or any person.  I base my analysis on the semantic dimensions
inherent in the text and my knowledge of the mechanics of language - the way
in which the BE works in all the languages of the world both modern and
archaic. In this way I maintain that Aristotle's meaning when he used the
word  'being' [of beings] he is alluding to the 'the constituents of
existing things' so the 'being of beings ' means the constituents of  beings
[entities]

Brendan:
You even have Aristotle as some kind of grammarian; he is ' . . . talking
about the plural neuter noun 'to onta throughout (i. e. this passage). Which
passage; Gamma 1? Not at all. A is not talking about onomata at all, he is
talking about being, to on, and he uses the singular form throughout except
at one point - ' . . . ta stoicheia ton onton . . . ' (the  elements of
beings; Ross: 'the elements of existing things' - dodgy; 28-29). And to on
is the substantivised verb. This is the glory of Greek; all verbs and
adjectives can be substantivised into (not quite the same thing as nouns in
modern grammar; I say verb and adjective for convenience sake).

Jud:
The question of whether he refers to a single being or a number of beings is
not the crux of the matter philosophically  as long as it is understood that
he is referring to entities 'that which is something'  and not some spurious
stand in for serial existential modality.   What you refer to by 'onomata'
are gerunds or gerundives - a common feature of all languages of the world -
there is nothing unique about Greek in this respect - it is the lexicon of
Greek which is glorious not the grammar  -which is quite ordinary. And so -
'the elements of existing things' - what are they but the instaurated
material - the substance of what existing things are MADE of.
The mistake that you make along with Heidegger is to believe that once a
verb is gerundised - 'onomatasized' - if I can provide a neologism - the
mistake is in believing that it then magically EXISTS. Being, dancing,
talking, skiing DON'T EXIST they are reifications of an act or acts. This is
the trap into which the unwitting Heidegger fell. Remember that the
translation of the meaning of  to on has come through an  interlingual
rendition from the Latin - Seneca gives 'on' as 'quod est [what is] we might
ask him 'What is what?  So the 'what is of beings ' to me quite plainly
means "the nature of the material of beings."

Brendan:
You concluded by returning to Heidegger and BT. 'Beings can show themselves
from themselves in various ways, depending on the mode of access to them.
The possibility even exists that they can show themselves as they are not in
themselves'. You call this 'transcendentalist jaw-jaw' and say that it has
nothing to do with Aristotle.  This is completely wrong. Or, if it is true -
that it is just jaw-jaw - then it is Plato and Aristotle who are guilty of
'jaw-jaw': the modes of being? to on legetai polachos (Gamma 2
1003a, 33; c. f. Brentano) and beings 'showing themselves as they are not in
themselves' - read Plato's Sophist esp. the passages about the non-being of
being and the nature of phantasia.

Jud:
Whether it is Heideggerian jaw-jaw or Platonist jaw-jaw or Heideggerian
jaw-jaw or Brentanoesque jaw-jaw doesn't alter the fact that it is jaw-jaw.
Plainly a rock doesn't 'show itself' or a 'barber's pole' show itself when
you turn a corner and suddenly come across it.  YOU SEE IT!  The stone and
the barber's pole are incapable of any action of revealment  whatsoever -
they have no consciousness  - and even if they had I am sure they would not
be the least interested in you or I or anybody else.  As to a tin-opener
showing itself from itself the idea is preposterous.
Objects are apprehended by the perceiver when the reflected light from their
surface travels by way of photons to the retina of the observer, from when
the image is reproduced in the brain.  It is first year level physics. The
added rider: "...depending on the mode of access to them..." gives the game
away,  for here we see that the mode of existential activity is that of the
beholder and NOT the beheld.

Brendan:
You end by accusing me of nit-picking (understandable if typos were the real
problem) and ignoring the rest of your post. And so I have answered the
second charge. As for nit-picking, well, I can only quote a friend and
colleague of mine who is fond of the old saying: 'the devil is in the
detail'.

Jud:
As to your 'detail,'  I am impressed with your knowledge of Greek and of the
writings of Plato and Aristotle and your eye for detail. It is a shame that
you chose not to pursue the 'so-called' problem of being to its easily
understandable and logical conclusion, instead of throwing in the towel like
Heidegger, and heading  for the hills along the yellow brick road to
metaphysical Oz with the Sartrean Tin Man and the Husserlian Frightened Lion
to meet the rather unwonderful Wizard. of Freiburg.

Jud.




     --- from list heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---

   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005