File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_2003/heidegger.0304, message 499


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.



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