From: "Anthony Crifasi" <crifasi-AT-hotmail.com> Subject: Re: God inside me Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2003 16:17:50 +0000 Kenneth Johnson wrote: >bots are as bots do so, as opener, tell me, bot anthony, did you, as a >timely once upon a time sceptic, ever and at that sceptic time have your >magically golded bot minded rosary beads assayed >yet???????????????????????? > >what was their karat???????????????????????????????? > >was this pure or 13 or???????????????????? > >so fly your levinas apologetics here, First, as if it would matter to you were Nietzsche himself the assayer. Secondly, as if such scientific bases had anything to do with Levinas. So when you ask: >btw, how in L could on truth & lie ever possibly legitimize your self >debotting playactings? For the THIRD time, THIS: ===================================>SO WHY DON'T THE LEGION BE LEAVERS EVER READ "ON TRUTH AND LIE IN AN >EXTRA-MORAL SENSE" EH?? Good reference. First, about the origin of truth and lie, he says: "The liar uses the valid designations, the words, to make the unreal appear as real; he says, for example, "I am rich," when the word "poor" would be the correct designation of his situation. He abuses the fixed conventions by arbitrary changes or even by reversals of the names. When he does this in a self-serving way damaging to others, then society will no longer trust him but exclude him. Thereby men do not flee from being deceived as much as from being damaged by deception: what they hate at this stage is basically not the deception but the bad, hostile consequences of certain kinds of deceptions. In a similarly limited way man wants the truth: he desires the agreeable life-preserving consequences of truth, but he is indifferent to pure knowledge, which has no consequences; he is even hostile to possibly damaging and destructive truths." But is that necessarily the origin of the difference between truth and lie? Why not truth as a coincidence between words and reality, and lie as a divergence between words and reality? Well about that he says: "What is a word? The image of a nerve stimulus in sounds. But to infer from the nerve stimulus, a cause outside us, that is already the result of a false and unjustified application of the principle of reason. If truth alone had been the deciding factor in the genesis of language, and if the standpoint of certainty had been decisive for designations, then how could we still dare to say "the stone is hard," as if "hard" were something otherwise familiar to us, and not merely a totally subjective stimulation!" which is exactly what Hume said, almost word for word. So if the relationship between word and image is not one of coincidence, then what is it? "One designates only the relations of things to man, and to express them one calls on the boldest metaphors. A nerve stimulus, first transposed into an image—first metaphor. The image, in turn, imitated by a sound—second metaphor." So he concludes: "What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms" But what about all the scientific and mathematical laws of nature that we have discovered? Isn't that a correspondence between concept and reality? About this he says: "All that we actually know about these laws of nature is what we ourselves bring to them—time and space, and therefore relationships of succession and number. But everything marvelous about the laws of nature, everything that quite astonishes us therein and seems to demand explanation, everything that might lead us to distrust idealism: all this is completely and solely contained within the mathematical strictness and inviolability of our representations of time and space. But we produce these representations in and from ourselves with the same necessity with which the spider spins. If we are forced to comprehend all things only under these forms, then it ceases to be amazing that in all things we actually comprehend nothing but these forms. For they must all bear within themselves the laws of number, and it is precisely number which is most astonishing in things." which is exactly what Kant said, almost word for word. The point is, THIS is the kind of truth that Nietzsche is criticizing - the kind that tries to correspond word to reality, knowledge to "thing in itself." So when someone like Heidegger or Levinas explicitly say that they do NOT mean this, then you can't just kick back and assume that they do, which is what you did in your flippant dismissal of the Levinas text I gave you. For example: >anthony, i must ask, do you have even the remotest clue of what the fuck >"SUBJECT.IVITY" IS?????? I guarantee you it has not one whit to do with >ethics, which is only arti.fice. If you mean the kind of truth that Nietzsche criticizes above, then YES, ethics is only artifice. BUT, look what Levinas said about that: "In the book, the proximity of the Other is presented as the fact that the Other is not simply close to me in space, or close like a parent, but he approaches me essentially insofar as I feel myself - insofar as I am - responsible for him. IT IS A STRUCTURE THAT IN NOWISE RESEMBLES THE INTENTIONAL RELATION WHICH IN KNOWLEDGE ATTACHES US TO THE OBJECT - to no matter what object, be it a human object. Proximity does not revert to this intentionality; in particular it does not revert to the fact that the Other is known to me." In 20th century phenomenology, Kenneth, that is like a big bright neon sign saying, "I AIN'T TALKIN ABOUT WHAT NIETSCHIE'S CRITICIZIN!" They KNOW what Nietzsche said, and they implicitly agree with Nietzsche's criticism of truth as coincidence between subject and object, so they specifically AVOID this. That goes for both Heidegger AND Levinas. So don't just assume from the start that they fall under what Nietzsche had in mind in ON TRUTH AND LIE IN AN EXTRA-MORAL SENSE. _________________________________________________________________ STOP MORE SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail --- from list heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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