Date: Sat, 11 Jan 2003 05:22:32 -0800 (PST)
From: "Gary C. Moore" <gospode-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: CATCHING UP ON ABSTRACTIONS


--0-998000642-1042291352=:95339



Gary: 
I love "individuate anarchism." That perfectly describes my mind and soul. 

Jud: 
The word "individuate" has more punch I think - the word individual has lost so much of its power nowadays being so overused. 
Anyway and "individuate anarchist" is redolent of a completely isolated self which in effect we all are in spite of being surrounded by people. 

1-11-03 GCM:

Yes, it has more punch. Think of this -- add a "d" at the end and you have a very interesting verb. It would describe what Heidegger is trying to do in BEING AND TIME but more clearly while at the same time opening up the problems involved that he is well aware of (sometimes it seems he is fumbling for the 'concept' he wants, and  yet IN the same moment or movement of explication covers over his tracks, gives slightly misleading clues, introduces complicated jargon which would be alright if, after exploring the 'concept' adequately, says, "Let us discard the jargon and call it for what it really is," which, to be truthful, sometimes he does but not in a clear and consistent fashion that Sartre and Merleau-Ponty do. Jacques Derrida started out (SPEECH AND PHENOMENA, INTRODUCTION TO HUSSERL'S HISTORY OF GEOMETRY (?)) with a blazingly clear philosophical style, derived from but improving Husserl who can be quite to the point and publically precise, i. e., communicate in the best scientific prose -- but starting with OF GRAMMATOLOGY his style has become more and more like Heidegger's mystification -- and yet can still blaze out in a paragraph here and there that puts what you are reading back into perfect coordination with the 'real' world you actually live in. With Heidegger as translated into English, you are always uneasy in the understanding of any term. Yes, it is always easy to come up with a jargon definition, but that is where it stays. I may see greater clarity in Heidegger if I understood German, but the German commentators on Heidegger I have read so far sometimes are even worse than Heidegger, or, pursuing a special interest blind to not only what is actually in or not in Heidegger, commit embarassing blunders -- like accusing Heidegger of stealing all his philosophy from the Chinese Lao-tzu. Lao-tzu is so fuzzy you could accuse anyone whatsoever of stealing 'thoughts' from him. And Lao-tzu was actually more of a magician and alchemist than a philosopher in the style we are use to in the West. In his own context, he is fascinating. Trying to make him a Western philosopher is just stupid. So, as far as my limited experience goes, even those who know German as their primary language are possibly even more off the track than Heidegger as translated in English. With Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, you nail down a Heideggerian 'concept' to flesh and blood. Heidegger criticizes both French philosophers in the ZOLLIKON SEMINARS but more in a name-calling and dismissive fashion. Yes, he does add fascinating subtleties of possibly great depth to what they did, but essentially does not contradict their work but expands upon it, and without knowing their work you can get very little that is solid to think about in the SEMINARS. One must remember when Heidegger first read Sartre's BEING AND NOTHINGNESS he was terribly enthusiastic about it and really wanted to personally meet the author. So his later antipathy may simply have a personal and not philosophical basis. Of course, Sartre never hesitated to 'popularize' his philosophy. But Heidegger did that several times too, and some of those times, like the NIETZSCHE lectures, he did some of his very best work and did some nailing down to flesh and blood himself. And yet even there a fascinating line of thought is pursued for a while, like the primordiality of hate, and then sort of drifts off into total ambiguity. And it is precisely there one might be able to see this "ambiguity," instead of being a failure of thought, an unintentional mistake, a petering out of intellectual inspiration, but rather as deliberate policy following a precise design -- one that only he clearly understands. I will repeat Hannah Arendt's little fable about Heidegger since it applies so well right here. She said Heidegger was a fox who fell into a trap that was a hole dug in the ground that, once in like a Chinese finger trap, one cannot get out again. But, instead of yelping or barking for help to get him out, he sings a Siren song to lure others into the trap with him.

 


Jud: 
 That's why I ended up preferring Shostakovitch to Tchaikovsky whose music I find so predictable I keep anticipating the next note before I hear it. 

GARY C MOORE:

That is fascinating isn't it? It has been a very long time since I studied music theory, but once I read about and then played on a piano the seven basic chords of classical music. The structure's inevitability is incredible. You have a recognizable beginning as beginning-as-such (don't ask me to explain - you just HEAR it), a structure of sustaining interest, and then a structure of resolve that gives you a solid sense that it can never ever be any other way. It is literally the ur-melody and harmony from which all other melodies start from and necessarily go back to IF THE MUSIC HAS AN ENDING THAT 'SOUNDS' LIKE AN ENDING! Anticipation is perfectly satisfied. It is discovering the living form of logic without words, the whole right-full structure of a human life. Trying to really philosophically understand music is actually more important than logic, metaphysics, ethics, and politics. It is like you have the very 'thing,' the essence of Aristotle's "golden mean" right in your hands, that 'concept', that 'form', that 'movement' of Aristotle's that you must put inbetween things, to connect things in balance which in the essence of real "understanding" and yet is much more ambiguous than an abstraction because, when bringing clarity it must be used by specific words that bring it down to earth and demean it by making it specifically "here" between "this" and "that" when it is beyond "this" and "that" and "here" and yet can be heart-breakingly sensual in a way you can't identify, can't point to, and cannot ever even find except by degrading it. I think I have just slipped into Plato's PHAEDRUS. And Plato is as much or as little a philosopher as Lao-tzu is. He is a magician with words and charm that makes you see real things that are not at all there yet without them life is meaningless, degraded, truly worthless and just downright evil -- as a whole, in all human relations. Maybe the only real and meaningful decision in life worth making at all is to either be Prospero or Caliban. I, unfortunately, have chosen to be Caliban. But even he could hear the sprites sing at times and it tortured him terribly. Even he knew there was something better, and he would grab for . . . But . . . what? . . . Was there something? Anything at all? Was there even an image? Even something imaginable? As the pain goes, one cannot even imagine any longer what could have possibly have caused the pain . . . And now --- was even the pain real? And then one is in the incredible position of regretting the loss of pain. One just feels . . . normal . . . and suddenly that is something very dirty and very ugly. 

ARIEL: 

Come unto these yellow sands,

And then take hands: 

Courtsied when you have and kiss'd

The wild waves whist:

Fot it fleetly here and there,

And sweet sprites bear

The burthen. Hark, hark.

[burthen dispersedly] Bow-wow.

The watch dogs bark:

[burthen dispersedly] Bow-wow.

Hark! Hark! I hear

The strain of strutting chanticleer

Cry

[burthen dispersedly] Cock a diddle dow.

FERDINAND:

Where should this music be? i'th' air or th'earth?

It sounds no more: and, sure, it waits upon

Some god o'th' island. Sitting on a bank,

Weeping again the King my father's wrack,

This music crept by me upon the waters,

Allaying both their fury and my passion

With its sweet air: thence I have followed it,

Or it hath drawn me rather. But 'tis gone.

No, it begins again.

ARIEL:

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:

[burthen] Ding-dong.

Hark! Now I hear them, - Ding-dong, bell.

********************************************

MIRANDA:

O, wonder!

How many goodly creatures are there here!

How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,

That has such people in 't!

PROSPERO:

                                        'Tis new to thee.

JUD:

Or maybe Hannibal the cannibal has come to terms with the way he is? 

1-11-03 GCM:

O definitely.


Jud: 
Have you heard about the Australian Aboriginal rite of "Pointing the Bone?" 

1-11-03 GCM:

No. Tell me.

Gary: 
>From this short portion you should see I have no disagreement with you even about Heidegger. 

Jud: 
Being "on the inside" so to speak provides you with an extra critical possibility - nobody knows a cult better than an escapee from the cult, and nobody is a better counsellor for the troubled souls who are still entrapped by the gossamer bonds of transcendentalism. But then again, perhaps I am misjudging you and you never WERE an adherent, but merely a merry homeward-bound reveller nose flattened against the asylum window? 

1-11-03 GCM;

Rather, I have never had a need to idealize or make heroic or saintly any philosopher I liked. They can be nasty, mean, and petty as Heidegger is, as I am. Most of the time knowing about their lives just gets in the way. You want to get into the heart and guts of what they say ans motive most often in reality has nothing to do with that specific thing created to exist for a wholly other, the reader who reads it and makes it wholly their own as they read. The philosopher's personality, if it exists at all, is scrubbed out or replaced by a surrogate. It is a big mistake to take this 'surrogate' seriously. Even when one can definitely contect acts and public statements to specific philosophic texts, that becomes history and one is standing, then, outside the philosophy that maintains, that has to maintain a developing dialogue of developing urges like personalities as when one is absorbed in reading THE TEMPEST where the ugly is necessary for the beautiful to exist, the evil for the good to exist, each gives life to the other through a very complex causuality while at the same time no one is going to confuse Caliban with Prospero. But Prospero needs Caliban to maintain being Prospero. There is no magic without mud. And if abstraction itself is a magical formula that connects together things to make great wonders, the human being who creates those abstractions still needs to shit. One dismisses shitting has being of fundamental and profound and even totally overwhelming importance in life, of equal importance to air, to water, to food, to survival all around, one ignores and treats as trivial, belittles it, erases it with utter disgust, banishes it out of one's 'proper' life altogether -- until something goes wrong with one's shitting. If the problem is severe, all ambition, all love, all hate, all philosophy and liturature and music  are forgotten until the problem is resolved. I am an authority on shit. I could be registered and certified in it if I wanted to. Don't ask me about love. And I am like everybody else, I would rather think of nobler things all of the time than shit. But shit is more fundamental than philosophy. If it wants your attention it gets all of your attention. "Existence" is a nice word to write beautiful poetry about but it is "existents" that gets the real pen put to the real paper to make real writing. "Of his bones are coral made." 

Jud: 
. I must revisit  the Sheenhan site - tell me about Sheenhan - is he still alive? If so have you ever corresponded with him? 

GARY C MOORE:

He is alive, last I heard at Stanford University in California. Someone recently on the lists corresponded with him, definitely not me, but I fogot where and they really didn't say what they discussed.

JUD:
I am just about to post my introduction to a longish piece on ousia, which will have an account of its historical background, an overview, some comparisons with other tongues and a bit about the chronology and significance of the scholastic exist-word, which came later and saved the metaphysical bacon. 

GARY C MOORE:

I just saw the time. Must go. Gary.

--0-998000642-1042291352=:95339

HTML VERSION: