Date: Tue, 6 Aug 2002 02:26:56 -0700 (PDT)
--0-146434143-1028626016=:65138
PART 1
On ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS Theta 1-3 by Martin Heidegger
Anthony Crifasi wrote:
From: Anthony Crifasi
To: heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Subject: Yo, Gary
Date: Tue, 06 Aug 2002 01:48:28 +0000
Gary C. Moore wrote:
>>We cannot use experience itself to justify our words to others (i.e.,
>>"Ive been there," "Ive actually have been in such a situation and really
>>know all about it," etc.), but we can use rational discourse that makes
>>sense to others based on the hypothesis we generally in form ("contour" of
>>action would be a good definition of form and would fit in with the
>>phenomenological Aristotle, certainly with Hegel, and definitely with the
>>segment of Heidegger I quoted from his ARISTOTLES METAPHYSICS Theta 1-3 I
>>quoted for Crifasi and he completely ignored)<<
I hope you got my previous message in which I said that I had a hard time
figuring out what you were saying in that part of your post. If you could
explain it again, I could address it.
GARY C MOORE:
I must apologize. I have many good excuses but they would bore you to death. I have not kept up with the correspondence and you have a righteous gripe. What I was trying to say that Heidegger said in that passage was that MOVEMENT is what Heidegger says is the basis of Aristotle's 'concept' of concept. On the one hand, that goes back to "You cannot stand outside of yourself to study yourself." This is a basic in Heidegger for understanding what "Da-sein" means because it incloses everything, and as such rationally it cannot be strictly 'conceptualized' at all, i.e., "stood outside of". That is why not only the 'subjective' individual "I" is not this true 'self' - and that is a very poor word for it as Heidegger himself says but, at times, he still speaks that way himself because that is the only way to point at what he wants to indicate. And "point" here is not symbolic in any sense but is meant to actually serve as a kind of reflection or surrogate of movement.
In ARISTOTLE'S METAPHYSICS Theta 1-3 Heidegger deals with capacity to move as he thinks he finds it in Aristotle. This is the same as "possibility" in BEING AND TIME. He is not talking there of a concept of "possibility", but of the possibility as actual action, of different kinds of movement towards . . . and, as I'm sure you realize, he is NOT interested in any 'something' that Da-sein is movement towards . . . In his Aristotle lectures, he is specifically concern with 'physical' movement, except, once again, "physical" is the wrong word because it requires your stance as an outside observer of yourself. I hope you understand now some of the other things I have said that may be obscure to you. If you take that stance seriously, consistently, and thoroughly reason it out in all of its consequences,you discover the “existential solipsism” Heidegger talks about in BEING AND TIME.
On the one hand, as you well know, he acknowledges the primal and literally overwhelming power of the ‘They’ self that is literally the basis, and from which even the assertion of the so-called ‘individual self’, derives its motivation. The “They’ self wants to assert itself as an individual because that is what ‘one’ should do. But this is merely conceptual and abstract thinking of the same sort that Hegel makes fun of in the fair dealer and the housewife with her washing. What Heidegger wants out of Aristotle is what conceptuality points to and can never itself express. And that is the capacity to act. You mentioned in another letter as though amazed that I seemed to be referring to the beginning of the universal in the stance of the animal in Aristotle’s POSTERIOR ANALYTICS, Bk II, 99b6-100b17. This is quite explicit in both of Johnathan Barnes’ translations and you need to read it. Mure’s old translation treats Aristotle as if he were a modern scientist which is absurd on a number of fundamental points. Aristotle could not possibly have had anything whatsoever like the viewpoint of the modern scientist. It might derive from him, but, as Richard Sorabji as shown over and over again, this ‘modern’ view of science actually came about in the attacks of the Christian (heretical: just slightly irrelevant, since his heresy involved viewing the members of the trinity each as independent and equal gods which, in turn, casts a strange light on his polemics against the pagans) Philoponus against the pagan view of the eternity of the world. Sorabji quotes Galileo referring directly to Philoponus as the originator of his mathematical way of thinking through science, especially the study of movement.
In ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS Theta 1-3, Heidegger much more clearly deals with Aristotle’s conception of the ‘animal’ than he did in FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS OF METAPHYSICS: World, Finitude, Solitude which is heavily loaded with Nietzschean twists and ironies where, on the one hand, he describes the animal as being “world poor” as if that were a deficiency, and then, on the other hand, in what seems an off-hand and very casual fashion says, But what can we really know about an animal’s experience? For all we really know it could very well be much greater than a human being’s -- and even at one point implicitly, but very clearly, compares an animal to a god. He says it is absurd to consider a god capable of speech which is exactly the same issue he raises with the animal. Being world-poor or world-rich revolves around the capacity of language. On the one hand, it seems to give the human being a far superior advantage. But on the other hand, it is also a severe limitation and diminution of a human being’s ‘animal’ experience.
I am certain Heidegger is referring to the passages in the first book of Aristotle’s POLITICS where he himself is being somewhat ironic in the denigration of the a-political, un-social human being as being the lowest of the low, as being “either a beast or a god.” Heidegger, without irony, analyzes in ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS exactly how an animal differs from human being. He explicitly says an animal can discern and reason wordlessly, use judgment, krinein, and that essentially the only difference between animals and human beings is the use of a fully developed system of language. It is merely a matter of degree, not kind. THAT is why he so heavily concentrates on the capacity of movement in that lecture series. The difference between human being and animal is negligible whereas the difference between a self-moving being and something, like a rock, that does not have that capacity is what is truly fundamental and most important. IT IS MOVEMENT ITSELF THAT IS MOST DIFFICULT TO THINK!
That is one of the reasons he wants to delimit Galileo’s mathematization of movement into its proper and relatively small region. As Wittgenstein said of the calculus, it is fundamentally based on an irrational premise that the scientist and mathematician accept, but do not wish to discuss, because that is the only way they can proceed to measure movement. AND HOW SO MUCH FARTHER FROM THAT IS A SELF-MOVING BEING! It is certainly not ‘something’ one can stand outside of and study. As Da-sein, one exists it. Thomas Sheehan in his papers, whose website location I have sent to the heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia, say the same thing, and says so even more explicitly in his book KARL RAHNER: The Philosophical Foundations, Ohio University Press, 1987 where he compares the ‘objective’, static, and Scholastic stance of Rahner, even though heavily influenced by Heidegger, with the dynamic ontology of movement he finds in Heidegger. It is a book well worth reading, though, because it seems a book to most people about an out of fashion theologian, is going out of print. But Sheehan’s contrast of Scholastic thinking with Heidegger helps to greatly clarify what Heidegger actually says, one of the main keys to which Sheehan points out is how one reads the lecture “What is Metaphysics?” which you will find his own translation of at the website I mentioned.
end part 1
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PART 1
On ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS Theta 1-3 by Martin Heidegger
Anthony Crifasi wrote:
From: Anthony Crifasi
To: heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Subject: Yo, Gary
Date: Tue, 06 Aug 2002 01:48:28 +0000
Gary C. Moore wrote:
>>We cannot use experience itself to justify our words to others (i.e.,
>>"Ive been there," "Ive actually have been in such a situation and really
>>know all about it," etc.), but we can use rational discourse that makes
>>sense to others based on the hypothesis we generally in form ("contour" of
>>action would be a good definition of form and would fit in with the
>>phenomenological Aristotle, certainly with Hegel, and definitely with the
>>segment of Heidegger I quoted from his ARISTOTLES METAPHYSICS Theta 1-3 I
>>quoted for Crifasi and he completely ignored)<<
I hope you got my previous message in which I said that I had a hard time
figuring out what you were saying in that part of your post. If you could
explain it again, I could address it.
GARY C MOORE:
I must apologize. I have many good excuses but they would bore you to death. I have not kept up with the correspondence and you have a righteous gripe. What I was trying to say that Heidegger said in that passage was that MOVEMENT is what Heidegger says is the basis of Aristotle's 'concept' of concept. On the one hand, that goes back to "You cannot stand outside of yourself to study yourself." This is a basic in Heidegger for understanding what "Da-sein" means because it incloses everything, and as such rationally it cannot be strictly 'conceptualized' at all, i.e., "stood outside of". That is why not only the 'subjective' individual "I" is not this true 'self' - and that is a very poor word for it as Heidegger himself says but, at times, he still speaks that way himself because that is the only way to point at what he wants to indicate. And "point" here is not symbolic in any sense but is meant to actually serve as a kind of reflection or surrogate of movement.
In ARISTOTLE'S METAPHYSICS Theta 1-3 Heidegger deals with capacity to move as he thinks he finds it in Aristotle. This is the same as "possibility" in BEING AND TIME. He is not talking there of a concept of "possibility", but of the possibility as actual action, of different kinds of movement towards . . . and, as I'm sure you realize, he is NOT interested in any 'something' that Da-sein is movement towards . . . In his Aristotle lectures, he is specifically concern with 'physical' movement, except, once again, "physical" is the wrong word because it requires your stance as an outside observer of yourself. I hope you understand now some of the other things I have said that may be obscure to you. If you take that stance seriously, consistently, and thoroughly reason it out in all of its consequences,you discover the “existential solipsism” Heidegger talks about in BEING AND TIME.
On the one hand, as you well know, he acknowledges the primal and literally overwhelming power of the ‘They’ self that is literally the basis, and from which even the assertion of the so-called ‘individual self’, derives its motivation. The “They’ self wants to assert itself as an individual because that is what ‘one’ should do. But this is merely conceptual and abstract thinking of the same sort that Hegel makes fun of in the fair dealer and the housewife with her washing. What Heidegger wants out of Aristotle is what conceptuality points to and can never itself express. And that is the capacity to act. You mentioned in another letter as though amazed that I seemed to be referring to the beginning of the universal in the stance of the animal in Aristotle’s POSTERIOR ANALYTICS, Bk II, 99b6-100b17. This is quite explicit in both of Johnathan Barnes’ translations and you need to read it. Mure’s old translation treats Aristotle as if he were a modern scientist which is absurd on a number of fundamental points. Aristotle could not possibly have had anything whatsoever like the viewpoint of the modern scientist. It might derive from him, but, as Richard Sorabji as shown over and over again, this ‘modern’ view of science actually came about in the attacks of the Christian (heretical: just slightly irrelevant, since his heresy involved viewing the members of the trinity each as independent and equal gods which, in turn, casts a strange light on his polemics against the pagans) Philoponus against the pagan view of the eternity of the world. Sorabji quotes Galileo referring directly to Philoponus as the originator of his mathematical way of thinking through science, especially the study of movement.
In ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS Theta 1-3, Heidegger much more clearly deals with Aristotle’s conception of the ‘animal’ than he did in FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS OF METAPHYSICS: World, Finitude, Solitude which is heavily loaded with Nietzschean twists and ironies where, on the one hand, he describes the animal as being “world poor” as if that were a deficiency, and then, on the other hand, in what seems an off-hand and very casual fashion says, But what can we really know about an animal’s experience? For all we really know it could very well be much greater than a human being’s -- and even at one point implicitly, but very clearly, compares an animal to a god. He says it is absurd to consider a god capable of speech which is exactly the same issue he raises with the animal. Being world-poor or world-rich revolves around the capacity of language. On the one hand, it seems to give the human being a far superior advantage. But on the other hand, it is also a severe limitation and diminution of a human being’s ‘animal’ experience.
I am certain Heidegger is referring to the passages in the first book of Aristotle’s POLITICS where he himself is being somewhat ironic in the denigration of the a-political, un-social human being as being the lowest of the low, as being “either a beast or a god.” Heidegger, without irony, analyzes in ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS exactly how an animal differs from human being. He explicitly says an animal can discern and reason wordlessly, use judgment, krinein, and that essentially the only difference between animals and human beings is the use of a fully developed system of language. It is merely a matter of degree, not kind. THAT is why he so heavily concentrates on the capacity of movement in that lecture series. The difference between human being and animal is negligible whereas the difference between a self-moving being and something, like a rock, that does not have that capacity is what is truly fundamental and most important. IT IS MOVEMENT ITSELF THAT IS MOST DIFFICULT TO THINK!
That is one of the reasons he wants to delimit Galileo’s mathematization of movement into its proper and relatively small region. As Wittgenstein said of the calculus, it is fundamentally based on an irrational premise that the scientist and mathematician accept, but do not wish to discuss, because that is the only way they can proceed to measure movement. AND HOW SO MUCH FARTHER FROM THAT IS A SELF-MOVING BEING! It is certainly not ‘something’ one can stand outside of and study. As Da-sein, one exists it. Thomas Sheehan in his papers, whose website location I have sent to the heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia, say the same thing, and says so even more explicitly in his book KARL RAHNER: The Philosophical Foundations, Ohio University Press, 1987 where he compares the ‘objective’, static, and Scholastic stance of Rahner, even though heavily influenced by Heidegger, with the dynamic ontology of movement he finds in Heidegger. It is a book well worth reading, though, because it seems a book to most people about an out of fashion theologian, is going out of print. But Sheehan’s contrast of Scholastic thinking with Heidegger helps to greatly clarify what Heidegger actually says, one of the main keys to which Sheehan points out is how one reads the lecture “What is Metaphysics?” which you will find his own translation of at the website I mentioned.
end part 1
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