From: GEVANS613-AT-aol.com
Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2003 19:47:21 EDT
Subject: Dear Martin Heidegger


Dear Martin Heidegger,

What came first, the chicken or the egg? At a recent weekend retreat, I came 
to the solid conclusion that a chicken always comes from an egg, but an egg 
may come from an animal other than a chicken, so, therefore, it must be the egg 
that comes first. An egg could be laid by, say, an alligator, and hatch a 
chicken due to some process of genetic mutation, but that which is born an 
alligator is not just gonna wake up one day a chicken. This theory, of course, 
assumes that no act of god may intervene to place a full-grown chicken on earth. 
Still, some of my compatriots beg to differ. What came first? Please solve this 
age-old conundrum for us.


-- Concerned Citizen

> 

Dear Concerned:
This seemingly obvious question confounds one upon reflection. Keep in mind 
that we reach those things with which we are originarily familiar only if we do 
not shun passing through things strange to us, and bear with me. Origin 
always comes to meet us from the future: It is our background in certain ways of 
thinking and specific academic disciplines that enables us to enter onto paths 
of thinking that we happen on later in life. Thus the two, origin and future, 
call to each other and reflection makes its home within that calling. Without 
my firm grounding in religion and philosophy, I could never have entered upon 
the path of Chicken Thinking.A chicken is a living, "present," being, and in 
the egg one can sense the presence of the future chicken. Thus our problem is 
twofold: chickens exist, eggs exist, we know not which came first; and, chickens 
exist at the same time as eggs, and in each we can sense the presence of the 
other. None of this can be explained in terms of presence, nor in terms of 
present beings, nor in terms of the relation of the two, because it is only the 
twofold itself which unfolds the clarity, that is, the clearing in which 
present beings as such, and presence, can be discerned by man, who by nature stands 
in relation to, that is, is being used by, the twofold. We may not discuss any 
"relation of the twofold," because the twofold is not an object of mental 
representation, but is the sway of usage, which we never experience directly as 
long as we think of it as the difference which becomes apparent in a comparison 
that tries to contrast present beings and their presence.Chickens may have 
their own methods of inquiry due to their originary familiarity with 
Chickenness. But we cannot communicate with them. Our thinking today is charged with the 
task to think what Chickens have thought in an even more Chickeny manner, by 
which I mean that if to be present itself is thought of as appearance, then 
there prevails in being present the emergence into openness in the sense of 
unconcealedness. This unconcealedness comes about in unconcealment as a clearing; 
but this clearing itself, as occurrence, remains unthought in every respect. To 
enter into thinking this unthought occurrence means: to pursue more 
originally what Chickens have thought, to see it in the source of its reality. To see 
it so is in its own way Chickeny, and yet in respect of what it sees is no 
longer, is never again, Of Chickens. It seems to me that no answer to this 
question is incumbent on us. Nor would an answer help us, because what matters is to 
see appearance as the reality of presence in its essential origin.What before 
all else has been entrusted to our nature becomes known to us only at the last 
-- in this is veiled all that is worthy of thought as such and as a whole. It 
has been said that I pay no heed to the the current ideas of my fellows -- 
this is not true. Nor should you castigate your fellows for their seemingly 
naive ideas about the origin of Chickenness -- every thinking step only serves the 
effort to help man in his thinking to find the path of his essential being. 
Hence the reason for my reflections on poultry, though the prospect of the 
thinking that labors to answer the nature of Chickens is still veiled.
> Sincerely,
> > 

[scribed by Jill Stauffer, ©1995]
    


Cheers,

Jud.

<A HREF="http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/ ">http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/</A> 
Jud Evans - ANALYTICAL INDICANT THEORY.
<A HREF="http://uncouplingthecopula.freewebspace.com">http://uncouplingthecopula.freewebspace.com










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