Date: Fri, 2 Aug 2002 08:21:56 EDT
Subject: Heidegger's Animism



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Content-Language: en


Dear Tudor,


Heidegger may well have proceeded in the formation of his ideas about "Being"
via the residual elements of animism to be found amongst the beliefs of the
ancient Jews and Greeks. His animistic beliefs no doubt helped him explain
and to come to terms with the nature of death, (the inevitable being
towards-death) =E2=80=93 a subject with which he appears to have been more than
overly obsessed for a Christian; considering that those people are the ones
that are said to end up in paradise or heaven. One would assume that a
preoccupation with death would be more of an atheistic concern - but
strangely perhaps this doesn't appear to be the case.

There has always been a belief that a soul, being or spirit existed in every
entity, even if the entitative object, (a river, a stone or a mountain) was
inanimate, and Heidegger's early exposure to Jesuitical mysticism developed
his notions of "Being"  from those more ancient primitive religious ideas
which were incorporated into Christianity via the Judaic desert religion,
based on mystical communion with an ultimate reality, recast and stiffened
with elements of Platonism and Aristotelianism into one that depicts objects
as having what he called "Being," which provides them with the curious
ability to hide "themselves" and show "themselves" to humans.

Whether this weird activity of self-exposure and self-concealment is shared
with other inanimate objects =E2=80=93 whether one tree will show itself or=20hide
itself from another tree for example, is not made clear, and if this is not
the case then no explanation is offered as to whether trees confine or share
their revelatory activities only to or with  humans, or extend this process
to squirrels and birds and earwigs and the rocks and streams of the forest.
Some entities (mountains in particular) are given the ability and (perhaps
the desire) to perpetuate themselves, [to protract" themselves (as one
leading Heideggerian has recently proposed,] and to indulge in all kinds of
other existential shenanigans and modalities usually reserved and  associated
with the activities of human beings.

For Heidegger entitative self-referentiality seems  to be an open house, in
which anything from bed knobs to broomsticks can join in the fun, with
various objects popping up and down all over the place in a continual  
frenzy of  existential peek-a-booery.

There is among cult members an unremitting and repetitive use of the
reflexive from of "it" "- "itself," which is a personal pronoun compounded
with "-self" to show the agent's action affects itself. In other words for
Heidegger inanimate objects are "self affecting," which is but a short step
from "self awareness." Hence for Heidegger and his disciples the notion of a
mountain or a lighthouse suddenly "showing itself," does not seem curious or
even eerie.
The view is that there abides within existing inanimate objects, [a stone
lying on a river-bed for example] an additional sequential form of existence
called "being" which can be discovered by members of the cult on the odd
occasion when the stone decides to reveal itself. This occult
self-referential and self-enacting ability is seen to reside in everything=20=E2=80=93
even things like the weather and paper-clips, and even the "Being" of that
mysterious syntactical phantasm of his ontological imagination: "Being-There"
[dasein] itself has a "Being," which no doubt shimmies from present to future
into the fantastic realms of his imagination in a series of existential
simultaneous, doppel-gangers or multiple reflections of the "Being" which
inhabits the hall of mirrors which is his mind.

One of the foremost characteristics of this eldritch philosophical leftover
is the return to the ancient idea that there is no distinction between the
spiritual and the material. In the troubled depths of this strange Nazi mind,
everything is still one, as it was to  primitive man. I have often wondered
if when writing this transcendentalist rubbish in the quiet of his study, his
body underwent all the usual changes that happen to a medium or native-style
witch-doctor in an actual spirit communication scenario, such as altered and
heavy  breathing, facial ticks and contortions, profuse sweating and even
sexual orgasm - or was the latter restricted to the visitations of certain
teenage female students?

Keep taking the pills.

Jud Evans.


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