Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2002 20:39:42 +0800
From: Malcolm Riddoch <gezeugt-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: heidegger-AT-lists  Shall we Dance?


>Jud:
>There is a repeated emphasis upon the so-called 'inception' of the 
>Greek heritage and it is obvious that he sees the occurrence that is 
>a beginning; a first part or stage of subsequent events - those 
>ongoing events being the establishment of National Socialism, in 
>which he sees the German people as the torchbearers of the Greek 
>flame with the Fuehrer's Berlin as the new Athens (or perhaps Rome.) 
> He was a right-wing trannie and so was Plato  - and there we have 
>it..... For Heidegger there was only one sun  and that shone out of 
>Hitler's arse.

... and so on. Hi Jud, I don't disagree that Heidegger's nazism is 
monumentally problematic, although I think 'for Heidegger there was 
perhaps only one sun and that shone out of his own arse', especially 
as he seems to have set himself up as the spiritual Fuehrer of German 
destiny on the threshold of a new beginning for the world history of 
being... and so on.

At least, that's one way of reading him, kind of socio-biographical 
but what do you think might be the philosophical implications of his 
nazism? And I guess that's a personal question about your own 
interpretation of the texts cos we all have different readings, or 
allow different senses of the term 'being', but I was just interested.

>Heidegger didn't write any 'History of Being' for there is no such 
>thing as 'Being' he wrote a lot of gimcrackery about nonsense.

Your sense of 'being' is one of nonsense then, but he demostrably 
wrote a 'History of Being' cos you can read it in a number of texts. 
I like the shorthand version in Stambaughs 'End of Metaphysics' (I 
think?).

>If we are to accept that Heidegger's meaning of the term 'Dasein' 
>stands for 'a human being's existence' then it should be possible 
>(if the term is to be taken at all seriously) to substitute the term 
>with what it stands for.

I use the term 'human being', or even just 'life', for Dasein but in 
rather qualified senses and dependent upon the context. I like to at 
least sound grammatical. 'Existence' is another translation of 
Dasein, but as with all translations it's a philosophical 
interpretation of a German word that Heidegger also went to great 
pains to delimit in terms of its everyday usage and with respect to 
his philosophical tradition. I guess I don't really understand your 
problem here cos there's the grammatical structure of a text and then 
there's what the text is about or is trying to say. Why get hung up 
on grammar?

>Patently it is the human being which exists and not the human 
>being's existence, and a human being that dances and not the human 
>being's dancing?  Hands up anyone who has been to a dance-hall and 
>seen a dancing dancing?
>
>Jud.

Yeh, the rest is poetic 'nonsense' but what does it mean to say that 
'it is the human being which exists'? That's the main question of 
Being and Time, what's a 'human being' and how does it exist?

Two simple questions, what do you make of them?

Cheers,

Malcolm


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