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 ---
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