From: "Anthony Crifasi" <crifasi-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: the o/o gulf
Date: Tue, 25 Mar 2003 01:34:18 +0000


John Foster wrote:

>Anthony, you seem to have taken a 'mystical' approach to
>this subject. Mitsein means 'being-with' and the connotative
>meaning is 'being-along-side  another'. The word United as
>in United Nations means 'being-alongside-in-the-world' under
>a Charter.

John, read:

"...Being with Others belongs to the Being of Dasein, which is an issue for 
Dasein in its very Being. Thus as Being-with, Dasein IS essentially for the 
sake of Others. THIS MUST BE UNDERSTOOD AS AN EXISTENTIAL STATEMENT AS TO 
ITS ESSENCE. EVEN IF THE PARTICULAR FACTICAL DASEIN DOES NOT TURN TO OTHERS, 
AND SUPPOSES THAT IT HAS NO NEED OF THEM OR MANAGES TO GET ALONG WITH THEM, 
IT IS IN THE WAY OF BEING-WITH." (SuZ 123)

So Being-with has absolutely NOTHING to do with the kind of FACTICAL 
being-with that you are talking about above. As Heidegger explicitly says 
here, even if a particular factical Dasein acts unilaterally in the factical 
world, "IT IS IN THE WAY OF BEING-WITH" ALREADY. Being-with is a basic way 
of being-in-the-world, and therefore underlies BOTH factical unliteral 
action and factical consensus.

Rene (sorry John, just a second...), do you see what John is doing here? You 
cannot possibly defend this in the way you did, by characterizing this as 
the ultimate ambiguity of the o/o distinction. John is blatantly confusing 
even the PRELIMINARY use of the o/o distinction. That is not what Heidegger 
was talking about in the text you cited.

>In that Charter are statements which member
>nations have agreed to such as
>
>'no nation shall attack another nation'
>
>The US chose to abandon the United Nations, act
>unilaterally, and attack a sovereign nation which has not
>attacked it.
>
>The US has mixed, or impure motives, for attacking Iraq. One
>motive is to change regime, another is to remove weapons of
>mass destruction, and another is to liberate Iraqi citizens,
>and so on. There is no clear objective for this refusal to
>work within the United Nations Security Council. The US is
>acting in a 'one-sided' and unilateral nature in dealing
>with political and humanitarian situation. It is in fact in
>violation of the Geneva Conventions (another example of
>'mitsein').

Again, mitsein (as the text I quoted above explicitly states) underlies 
factical unilateral action as much as factical consensus, like the Geneva 
Conventions. You are interpreting mitsein completely non-ontologically, when 
Heidedegger himself explicitly warns in the above text that mitsein "must be 
understood as an EXISTENTIAL STATEMENT AS TO ITS [Dasein's] ESSENCE," not a 
factical statement.

>What about you anxiety over the failure of the Security
>Council to reach consensus? This anxiety has lead your US
>Republican Party wage a saturation bombing campaign on 4
>million innocent lives.
>
>Don't you feel anxiety as a result. A state of mind is a
>mood, and Heidegger writes this elsewhere.

John look at your very words - "Don't you FEEL anxiety..." That is blatantly 
ontic and factical, John! (Rene, do you see this?) Heidegger explicitly says 
that anxiety is not about any definite factical entity at all. You are 
talking about factical ontic anxiety, not ontological anxiety! And you are 
basing your whole anti-war worldview on this twisted interpretation!

Anthony Crifasi


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