Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2002 19:45:27 +0000
Subject: Re: Plato:Heidegger:the metaphor of light
From: "Michael Pennamacoor" <pennamacoor-AT-enterprise.net>


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Allen just now:

>if Heidegger did "collapse suns" into the same light, it's because that's 
>the way it is for us in Legein which when it shines on Sein is the only light we can see:
>
>" Sometimes the light is shinin' on me. . .
>Other times I can barely see. . ."

Ok, but I am concerned that this collapsing of the two suns, of physis, logos and genesis,
implies that the emergence and submergence of things (physis) and their being pointed
out/displayed (logos) are one and the same. This might be an equating of dasein and sein,
and, I cannot accept this. I think it necessary to found a difference between physis (the
coming to pass of things), logos (the pointing out of things as the things that they are)
and techne (the lending of a hand to things that they might be fashioned as such and
such). The monistic collapsing (co-lapse-ing) of these seems to lead to a massive nihilism
or a silent non-differentiation between showing and hiding, a Parmenidean perfect sphere
of being (and nothing besides) that is indistinguishable from its absence... A decision to
only look at the light itself rather than that which the light enlightens, or to identify
the light with the enlightened seems to beg the blindness that Plato warned against: that
of a passive acceptance of facticity, a submission to fate (history)... is this why
modernity seems to lead to a hopeless hope in the future as being more valuable than the
past and the present as the presence of a non-basis for supporting the upcoming (but never
present, always already deferred) hoped-for future? I.e., Marx (communist mankind),
Nietzsche (the reign of the ubermensch), Heidegger (gelassenheit)... and all of these in
different ways are fired by a notion of the radically historical essence of being (mode of
production, will-to-power, ontological difference, resp.). But such being seems to be both
collapsing and differentiating at the same time and in the same way and one can make no
distinction between it and the saying of it, between its coming and going, etc. This
worries me as much as it excites: somehow a single 'process' seems right, but it equally
seems to demand another, an other, missing from these thinkings.

"... you say hello, and I say goodbye, hello hello, I don't know why you say hello I say
goodbye...." [Beatles, 'Hello Goodbye']

bye

michaelP

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