Date: Sun, 4 Aug 2002 09:03:40 -0700 (PDT)
--0-29722420-1028477020=:72890
PART 3
"The observer may, in spite of the indifference of the two sides to one another, set to work to determine correlations, supported partly by the general rational principle that the outer is the expression of the inner, and partly by the analogy of the skulls of animals – which may doubtless have a simpler character than men, but of which at the same time it becomes just so much the more difficult to say what character they do have, in that it cannot be so easy for any man's imagination to think himself really into the nature of an animal. Should the observer do so, he will find, in giving out for certain the laws he maintains he has discovered, a first-rate means of assistance in a distinction which we too must necessarily take note of at this point. [Miller: “Should, however, the observer do so, he will find, in assuring us of the certainty of the laws he claims to have discovered, an excellent aid in a distinction which must necessarily occur to us here too.”] ( ¶ 337)
"The being of mind [Miller: “The being of Spirit”] cannot be taken away at any rate to be something completely rigid and immovable. Man is free. It will be admitted that the mind's original primordial being consists merely in dispositions, which mind has to a large extent under its control, or which require favorable circumstances to draw them out; i.e. an original 'being' of mind [Miller: “Spirit”] must be equally well spoken of as what does not exist as a 'being' at all [Miller: “does not exist qua being”]. Were observations to conflict with what strikes any one as a warrantable law, should it happen to be the fine weather at the annual fair or on the housewife's washing day -- then dealer and housewife might say that it, properly speaking, should rain, and the conditions are all really that way. So too in the case of observing the skull, it might be said when those contradictory observations occur, that the given individual ought properly to be what according to the law his skull proclaims him to be, and that he has an original disposition which, however, has not been developed: this quality is not really present, but it should be there. The 'law' and the 'ought-to-be' rest on observation of actual showers of rain, and observation of the actual sense and meaning in the case of the given character of the skull; but if the reality is not present, the empty possibility is supposed to do just as well." ( ¶ 337, pp. 360-64)
[Now this ought is operative in Crifasi since he trying to find the modern scientist objectively studying nature as an objective scientist of his stature ought too. But it is ridiculous to think of Aristotle as anything even remotely like the modern scientist even in the purely idealist guise Crifasi sees such in, much less the grubby reality of manipulating figures to get a grant, or cutting costs (and quality assurance, and the disinterested status of the experiment itself) to affordably produce economically, or just downright lying in a fashion difficult for others to double check such a one’s results. Aristotle was primarily caught up in the wonder of perception, and then trying to understand it in a web of rational words. He certainly had no ulterior motives whatsoever as the modern scientist has to aim towards any goal, but to simply find out what is. In one sense, yes, this is an “empty possibility” because he plans to do nothing with it. But on the other hand, he in no way mistakes the rational web of words he himself creates with the independent reality of experience which is the final and unbending line of any one’s experience, including a modern scientist’s.]
Old Gary:
Actually, phenomenology does share a fundamental basis, i.e., direct experience, phrenology. Phrenology is direct experience of a specific object, the bumps on the top of the head, whereas phenomenology is previous to any conceptual identity as conceptual object which Aristotle so clearly defines at POSTERIOR ANALYTICS, Bk II, chapter 19, 99b15-100b17, trans. Johnathan Barnes, Princeton/Bollingen pp. 165-66. The G. R. G. Mure translation, made sometime before 1941.
SLIGHTLY OLDER JUD:
I can certainly see the connection. We still have a disparaging saying over here: “He needs his bumps feeling” in the sense that a person is considered to be silly or stupid. I can see the phenomenological reference clearly, for many is the time in my hard drinking days of yore that I have stood swaying before a pissoir convinced that the stone had some strange entitive significance, that it was just THERE and had no production history or background of transportation to the pub toilet for installation and being connected up to the plumbing. It was as if it had stood before me, and I stood before it that way forever, and neither of us had any former existence at all - in some curious way it was as if we were both JUST BEING THERE. :-)
GARY REDUX:
I think you may be being felicitous, but actually in a very literal way you are perfectly right. Being so drunk, you for once lose all the conceptual, word-based references one has constantly with one all the time, that actually tells you, no, commands you how to think. The everyday ‘They’self Crifasi so values (to the point of again utterly ignoring my quotation from B&T Stambaugh 243/M&R 307-8/SuZ 263).
Once, when I was at Oberammergau at Army supply school (1968?), one night the guy I was with (a salesman from International Harvester, a real asshole) got me to drink close to a dozen bottles of German beer. Now you know the Germans have their beer in refillable bottles (they can put their empties on the doorstep to be replaced by full ones in the morning like back in the real old days they did milk in the US) the same size as their wine bottles, and they have twice the alcohol content of at least American beer. What is much worse it is so damn good! I knew I was drinking way too much, but it went down so nicely, and stayed down nicely. I could never do that with American beer. After four cans it all tastes metallic and acid. Anyway, the time came to discover the magical path to the urinal, which, unfortunately, was down two flights of stairs (German revenge?). I went through a fantastic landscape of dragons and whirlpools and Cyclops and arrived at this beautifully shaped white porcelain object of exquisite shape and charm and a terribly inviting emptiness of nothingness. I certainly appreciated fully its uniqueness, and, even as an object it became very personal to me. In certain states, one can get very close to a urinal. Anyway, the point is thaumazein, to wonder (METAPHYSICS, Bk 1 or A, 982b10-983a11, the most divine of human efforts), not that it is this or that pitifully ‘objective’ thing, cut off from all passion, but rather why and that it is at all, that it is there and I am here and that this living experience is absolutely and solipsistically unique. That is what Aristotle is all about – thaumazein – and NOTHING else. Aristotle had no other fundamental motive. Just like in the first sentence of the METAPHYSICS: “All men, by nature, desire to know” or, as the word for “know” here is #949;#953;#777;#948;#941;#957;#945;#953; – eidenai – #928;#940;#957;#964;#949;#962; #940;#777;#957;#952;#961;#969;#960;#959;#953; #964;#959;#965; #949;#953;#777;#948;#941;#957;#945;#953; #959;#961;#941;#947;#959;#957;#964;#945;#953; #966;#973;#963;#949;#953; – Pantes anthropoi tou eidenai oregontai phusei – which synonymously means “to see.” Perception is fundamental, unique, and primal. Aristotle is a solid phenomenologist. And he could have been a good phrenologist too if he had had Hegel’s sense of humor. Crifasi has no sense of humor. And, totally without a sense of humor, how could any one possibly understand another person’s point of view as in, “Well, let’s see how this will fit – I know it won’t fit – but let’s give it a fair chance anyway.”
OLD MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN JUD:
And there you have it. My Heideggerian interlocutors are probably under the impression that I am incapable of phenomenological experiences or in some way lack the sort of sensitivity that is necessary to experience or understand what Husserl or Heidi was getting at. It is not so. I understand it - and in understanding it - reject it.
DECREPID GARY:
Well, Jud, it’s too late for that! You have already been sucked into the vortex and taken down to the mermaids. Or would you really just land on dull old Crifasi’s dry land? Drunkeness is a fundemental phenomenological experience.
OLD GARY (8-1-02)
[Mure] is thoroughly in accord with Anthony Crifasi's interpretation whereas Barnes' translation is thoroughly based on experience where Aristotle talks of "the principles - how (methodology) they become familiar and what is the state that becomes familiar with them . . . " (99b17-18). There Aristotle speaks of "the principles' as something we simply have or come to acquire but as something "we have some capacity" for (99b32) much as in Kant's CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. That is immediately followed by the statement "And this belongs to all animals; for they have a connate discriminatory capacity, which is called perception" (99b35-6). And it is precisely from the persistence of 'sensual' perception that one derives principles and concepts ('sensual' is in scare quotes because that is essentially an illegitimate judgment requiring one to stand outside perception to describe perception). Aristotle then describes the creation of the "primitive universal" (99b21, 100a16) as an action of the animal, specifically taking up a stance or position toward it (100a15-100b5). However, all of this may be of only trivial and very petty interest to you or anybody.
Jud (8-1-02)
I agree with the above regarding perception etc., and though our cognitive systems inform us (if they had apprised us incorrectly then the human race would not have developed or survived) in a commonsense way, that objects exist, [though as seen through the eyeglass of our own distinctive sensory apparatus] there is no way that one can prove this, and I am about to write a conciliatory message to Anthony admitting it is indeed impossible for one to stand outside perception to prove the validity of that perception and the objects that are so perceived, and agreeing that he was quite right. That is not to say that I accept what he says about “purpose” of course, for it doesn't logically follow that I accept that purpose is nothing else that a human existential notion.
Gary: (8-1-02)
But I like your "peek-a-boo characteristics"! I will have to think more about this, but it does have the notion of an act of nothingness or rather a puppet-play representation of 'nothingness'. The question is, then, does the Wicked Witch of the East or the Good Witch of the North represent "nothingness/being"?
Gary: (8-1)
The ‘real’ point of the letter: Are you familiar with the actor Robert Shaw?
Jud:
Yes of course I am a long-time admirer of his and I once saw the Glass Booth play years ago. He comes from my neck of the woods.
I remember and have seen most of his films (most famously “Jaws”).
GARY (8-4-02)
Yes, he was great in that! The crotchety, absolutely independent New Englander. He did a great job of that. A critic once said British actors could do Southern Americans better than any American actors, referring specifically to Albert Finney. Shaw did the same with the New England Yankee. Winslow Homer, a 19th Century American Yankee painter once painted a famous scene of a black man in a dismasted fishing boat with very expressive shark swimming toward him, a water spout coming towards him, and a ship going in the other direction. The black man did not have a happy expression on his face, and in that regard Winslow Homer was much more advanced in his understanding of fellow human being than others of his nationality at the time. One day, after the painting had achieved its fame, a friend came to his door and said a fisherman had brought a shark he caught so he could paint one from ‘real life.’ Winslow replied, “Tell him to go to hell.” Homer knew what he wanted.
Jud:
As you know I was a member of one of the British Trotskyist Parties in my youth, (there were 3 or 4} but there was never any communication for us rank and file members at a lower level with the US comrades.
We had our own “Fourth International,” which was the Trot equivalent of the Stalinist organisation. As you know I grew out of it, and during my frequent trips to the Soviet Union I lost any sympathy for the “Permanent Revolution”
I briefly became a Stalinist sympathiser and then broke away completely.
OLDER GARY:
I have been re-assessing Stalin lately. I think it totally illegitimate to compare him to Hitler. He was far, far more intelligent in truth. It was his micromanaging of the USSR that made him seem stupid at times because how can one man know and control everything going on? And that is what he tried to do. He was the only person he trusted. When he saw Part II of Eisenstein’s IVAN THE TERRIBLE – an obvious gloss upon himself – he was furious and called in Eisenstein on the carpet. He said, “Of course, Ivan was cruel. But you must show why Ivan was cruel!” The man had no illusions about himself.
Thank you for the information about Robert Shaw.
‘Sincerely’
Gary C. Moore
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PART 3
"The observer may, in spite of the indifference of the two sides to one another, set to work to determine correlations, supported partly by the general rational principle that the outer is the expression of the inner, and partly by the analogy of the skulls of animals – which may doubtless have a simpler character than men, but of which at the same time it becomes just so much the more difficult to say what character they do have, in that it cannot be so easy for any man's imagination to think himself really into the nature of an animal. Should the observer do so, he will find, in giving out for certain the laws he maintains he has discovered, a first-rate means of assistance in a distinction which we too must necessarily take note of at this point. [Miller: “Should, however, the observer do so, he will find, in assuring us of the certainty of the laws he claims to have discovered, an excellent aid in a distinction which must necessarily occur to us here too.”] ( ¶ 337)
"The being of mind [Miller: “The being of Spirit”] cannot be taken away at any rate to be something completely rigid and immovable. Man is free. It will be admitted that the mind's original primordial being consists merely in dispositions, which mind has to a large extent under its control, or which require favorable circumstances to draw them out; i.e. an original 'being' of mind [Miller: “Spirit”] must be equally well spoken of as what does not exist as a 'being' at all [Miller: “does not exist qua being”]. Were observations to conflict with what strikes any one as a warrantable law, should it happen to be the fine weather at the annual fair or on the housewife's washing day -- then dealer and housewife might say that it, properly speaking, should rain, and the conditions are all really that way. So too in the case of observing the skull, it might be said when those contradictory observations occur, that the given individual ought properly to be what according to the law his skull proclaims him to be, and that he has an original disposition which, however, has not been developed: this quality is not really present, but it should be there. The 'law' and the 'ought-to-be' rest on observation of actual showers of rain, and observation of the actual sense and meaning in the case of the given character of the skull; but if the reality is not present, the empty possibility is supposed to do just as well." ( ¶ 337, pp. 360-64)
[Now this ought is operative in Crifasi since he trying to find the modern scientist objectively studying nature as an objective scientist of his stature ought too. But it is ridiculous to think of Aristotle as anything even remotely like the modern scientist even in the purely idealist guise Crifasi sees such in, much less the grubby reality of manipulating figures to get a grant, or cutting costs (and quality assurance, and the disinterested status of the experiment itself) to affordably produce economically, or just downright lying in a fashion difficult for others to double check such a one’s results. Aristotle was primarily caught up in the wonder of perception, and then trying to understand it in a web of rational words. He certainly had no ulterior motives whatsoever as the modern scientist has to aim towards any goal, but to simply find out what is. In one sense, yes, this is an “empty possibility” because he plans to do nothing with it. But on the other hand, he in no way mistakes the rational web of words he himself creates with the independent reality of experience which is the final and unbending line of any one’s experience, including a modern scientist’s.]
Old Gary:
Actually, phenomenology does share a fundamental basis, i.e., direct experience, phrenology. Phrenology is direct experience of a specific object, the bumps on the top of the head, whereas phenomenology is previous to any conceptual identity as conceptual object which Aristotle so clearly defines at POSTERIOR ANALYTICS, Bk II, chapter 19, 99b15-100b17, trans. Johnathan Barnes, Princeton/Bollingen pp. 165-66. The G. R. G. Mure translation, made sometime before 1941.
SLIGHTLY OLDER JUD:
I can certainly see the connection. We still have a disparaging saying over here: “He needs his bumps feeling” in the sense that a person is considered to be silly or stupid. I can see the phenomenological reference clearly, for many is the time in my hard drinking days of yore that I have stood swaying before a pissoir convinced that the stone had some strange entitive significance, that it was just THERE and had no production history or background of transportation to the pub toilet for installation and being connected up to the plumbing. It was as if it had stood before me, and I stood before it that way forever, and neither of us had any former existence at all - in some curious way it was as if we were both JUST BEING THERE. :-)
GARY REDUX:
I think you may be being felicitous, but actually in a very literal way you are perfectly right. Being so drunk, you for once lose all the conceptual, word-based references one has constantly with one all the time, that actually tells you, no, commands you how to think. The everyday ‘They’self Crifasi so values (to the point of again utterly ignoring my quotation from B&T Stambaugh 243/M&R 307-8/SuZ 263).
Once, when I was at Oberammergau at Army supply school (1968?), one night the guy I was with (a salesman from International Harvester, a real asshole) got me to drink close to a dozen bottles of German beer. Now you know the Germans have their beer in refillable bottles (they can put their empties on the doorstep to be replaced by full ones in the morning like back in the real old days they did milk in the US) the same size as their wine bottles, and they have twice the alcohol content of at least American beer. What is much worse it is so damn good! I knew I was drinking way too much, but it went down so nicely, and stayed down nicely. I could never do that with American beer. After four cans it all tastes metallic and acid. Anyway, the time came to discover the magical path to the urinal, which, unfortunately, was down two flights of stairs (German revenge?). I went through a fantastic landscape of dragons and whirlpools and Cyclops and arrived at this beautifully shaped white porcelain object of exquisite shape and charm and a terribly inviting emptiness of nothingness. I certainly appreciated fully its uniqueness, and, even as an object it became very personal to me. In certain states, one can get very close to a urinal. Anyway, the point is thaumazein, to wonder (METAPHYSICS, Bk 1 or A, 982b10-983a11, the most divine of human efforts), not that it is this or that pitifully ‘objective’ thing, cut off from all passion, but rather why and that it is at all, that it is there and I am here and that this living experience is absolutely and solipsistically unique. That is what Aristotle is all about – thaumazein – and NOTHING else. Aristotle had no other fundamental motive. Just like in the first sentence of the METAPHYSICS: “All men, by nature, desire to know” or, as the word for “know” here is ει̉δέναι – eidenai – Πάντες ά̉νθρωποι του ει̉δέναι ορέγονται φύσει – Pantes anthropoi tou eidenai oregontai phusei – which synonymously means “to see.” Perception is fundamental, unique, and primal. Aristotle is a solid phenomenologist. And he could have been a good phrenologist too if he had had Hegel’s sense of humor. Crifasi has no sense of humor. And, totally without a sense of humor, how could any one possibly understand another person’s point of view as in, “Well, let’s see how this will fit – I know it won’t fit – but let’s give it a fair chance anyway.”
OLD MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN JUD:
And there you have it. My Heideggerian interlocutors are probably under the impression that I am incapable of phenomenological experiences or in some way lack the sort of sensitivity that is necessary to experience or understand what Husserl or Heidi was getting at. It is not so. I understand it - and in understanding it - reject it.
DECREPID GARY:
Well, Jud, it’s too late for that! You have already been sucked into the vortex and taken down to the mermaids. Or would you really just land on dull old Crifasi’s dry land? Drunkeness is a fundemental phenomenological experience.
OLD GARY (8-1-02)
[Mure] is thoroughly in accord with Anthony Crifasi's interpretation whereas Barnes' translation is thoroughly based on experience where Aristotle talks of "the principles - how (methodology) they become familiar and what is the state that becomes familiar with them . . . " (99b17-18). There Aristotle speaks of "the principles' as something we simply have or come to acquire but as something "we have some capacity" for (99b32) much as in Kant's CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. That is immediately followed by the statement "And this belongs to all animals; for they have a connate discriminatory capacity, which is called perception" (99b35-6). And it is precisely from the persistence of 'sensual' perception that one derives principles and concepts ('sensual' is in scare quotes because that is essentially an illegitimate judgment requiring one to stand outside perception to describe perception). Aristotle then describes the creation of the "primitive universal" (99b21, 100a16) as an action of the animal, specifically taking up a stance or position toward it (100a15-100b5). However, all of this may be of only trivial and very petty interest to you or anybody.
Jud (8-1-02)
I agree with the above regarding perception etc., and though our cognitive systems inform us (if they had apprised us incorrectly then the human race would not have developed or survived) in a commonsense way, that objects exist, [though as seen through the eyeglass of our own distinctive sensory apparatus] there is no way that one can prove this, and I am about to write a conciliatory message to Anthony admitting it is indeed impossible for one to stand outside perception to prove the validity of that perception and the objects that are so perceived, and agreeing that he was quite right. That is not to say that I accept what he says about “purpose” of course, for it doesn't logically follow that I accept that purpose is nothing else that a human existential notion.
Gary: (8-1-02)
But I like your "peek-a-boo characteristics"! I will have to think more about this, but it does have the notion of an act of nothingness or rather a puppet-play representation of 'nothingness'. The question is, then, does the Wicked Witch of the East or the Good Witch of the North represent "nothingness/being"?
Gary: (8-1)
The ‘real’ point of the letter: Are you familiar with the actor Robert Shaw?
Jud:
Yes of course I am a long-time admirer of his and I once saw the Glass Booth play years ago. He comes from my neck of the woods.
I remember and have seen most of his films (most famously “Jaws”).
GARY (8-4-02)
Yes, he was great in that! The crotchety, absolutely independent New Englander. He did a great job of that. A critic once said British actors could do Southern Americans better than any American actors, referring specifically to Albert Finney. Shaw did the same with the New England Yankee. Winslow Homer, a 19th Century American Yankee painter once painted a famous scene of a black man in a dismasted fishing boat with very expressive shark swimming toward him, a water spout coming towards him, and a ship going in the other direction. The black man did not have a happy expression on his face, and in that regard Winslow Homer was much more advanced in his understanding of fellow human being than others of his nationality at the time. One day, after the painting had achieved its fame, a friend came to his door and said a fisherman had brought a shark he caught so he could paint one from ‘real life.’ Winslow replied, “Tell him to go to hell.” Homer knew what he wanted.
Jud:
As you know I was a member of one of the British Trotskyist Parties in my youth, (there were 3 or 4} but there was never any communication for us rank and file members at a lower level with the US comrades.
We had our own “Fourth International,” which was the Trot equivalent of the Stalinist organisation. As you know I grew out of it, and during my frequent trips to the Soviet Union I lost any sympathy for the “Permanent Revolution”
I briefly became a Stalinist sympathiser and then broke away completely.
OLDER GARY:
I have been re-assessing Stalin lately. I think it totally illegitimate to compare him to Hitler. He was far, far more intelligent in truth. It was his micromanaging of the USSR that made him seem stupid at times because how can one man know and control everything going on? And that is what he tried to do. He was the only person he trusted. When he saw Part II of Eisenstein’s IVAN THE TERRIBLE – an obvious gloss upon himself – he was furious and called in Eisenstein on the carpet. He said, “Of course, Ivan was cruel. But you must show why Ivan was cruel!” The man had no illusions about himself.
Thank you for the information about Robert Shaw.
‘Sincerely’
Gary C. Moore
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