Subject: RE: Not Even a Leaf Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2003 16:52:41 +0200 From: "Bakker, R.B.M. de" <R.B.M.deBakker-AT-uva.nl> -----Oorspronkelijk bericht----- Van: GEVANS613-AT-aol.com [mailto:GEVANS613-AT-aol.com] Verzonden: maandag 18 augustus 2003 22:35 Aan: heidegger-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU CC: GEVANS613-AT-aol.com Onderwerp: Not Even a Leaf In a message dated 18/08/2003 15:05:16 GMT Daylight Time, R.B.M.deBakker-AT-uva.nl writes: Rene: Heidegger's question for the nothing is the same question as the one posed in I&D: how did God enter philosophy? Jud: As far as the Judea-Christian God is concerned it is well-known that it came mainly via the Greekist Paul and the roustabouts and thinkabouts and think o' nouts ['nout' [naught] ='nothing' in northern English] of the early church, [also known as the 'Church Fathers'] Plato, [and later Aristotle via St Thomas] provided the requisite metaphysical sophist stiffening out of the theological model, and the back-up buckraming of believability for the theologically challenged. The fact that Platonism came pre-packed and bundled with the ousia-wheeze, meant that the concept of hierarchical 'Being', [the Almighty Being] at the top, with all the lesser beings of the fellaheen, the camel-drivers, the date-merchants, and sundry hoi polloi, etc., footling around beneath provided the perfect model for the type of graded and ranked society of the time, ensuring more power to the parasitical priesthood - and less to the beleaguered bleating genus ovi of their 'flock.' rene: this might be all more or less true, or funny, but does not touch the principal problem, what metaphysics is and why a creator God, that is originally believed in or not, enters it. Western metaphysics is unique in this respect, it cannot be compared with theological traditions elsewhere. They have at most holy wars, but we have conquered (the know-how to conquer the machines to conquer) the world. The Mongols of the East retreated at last, the Mongols of the West are there to stay, wherever they appear. ---- Rene: the reference to "What is metaphysics" is highly worthy-of-questioning) As the ground of everything that is, even as the principle of ground, this god, for whom one cannot dance or kneel down (H in I&D), reigns more absolutely than ever. The more so when reduced to nothing (killed). Jud: For me I already get the big picture, and most things and their relations are known to my satisfaction, or knowable in more detail and challengeable if desired. 'Metaphysics' holds no attraction for minds like mine. rene: again, that's not the point. The point, as i see it, is that the computer over against me is something so strange, that we have to go to the ground of metaphysics to see clearer. As long as we consider ourselves the actors, subjects, of science and technology, a fecund insight into what they are, whereto they lead us etc., is not possible. So while you have the illusion of being superior to 'metaphysics', you're embracing its moraines, the droning vacuum cleaners. While satirizing the Uebermensch, they're all around while you do do your shopping. You would have existents everywhere to point to, but would have in reality no idea of what and how it is that you point to. The sole [and to me ONLY remaining] area of metaphysics that commands my attention is the question of biological life. This afternoon [a beautiful English summer's day] I drove to the nearest public refuse dump with some bags of garden waste, [I have been cutting-back the blackcurrant bushes.] I backed the car up against the chute and lifted the bags from the boot. As I got the last one out something fell from the underside of the plastic bag, it lay there exposed on the hot tarmac, glistening in the sunshine, its black, shiny body oscillating with a rhythmic series of fluxes which manifested themselves as moving ridges along its elongated black slimy form. It was a big fat slug. As I carried the bags to the disposal area I began to wonder what was the ontological POINT of the slug's existence. Why was it there on the ground, why had it been born, why and what use are slugs in the world? I was tempted to rescue the slug and put it out of the path of the many cars, for without being moved it would surely die, either under the tyres of my own car, or certainty soon afterwards, for it is a very busy place. I regret to say that I didn't bother to rescue it on this occasion [as I usually do with most animals and insects] but climbed into my car and drove off leaving the slug to its immanent demise. Why I asked myself does inanimate matter metamorphose into living matter in the first place? What's in it for matter? Does there NEED to be a REASON? Having over the millennia transmogrified into a biological substance why does the substance proliferate? Why does it seek to survive and ensure its code mixes with that of its fellows and is made manifest and manifold? rene: i had something similar with a brown adder on a sand path recently, the first snake i met frontally. Some days before, i had quoted the snake hidden in I&D. Well, i'm not composing associative sentimentalities, but all in all i now believe things and animals and plants and the people in our lives have sthing to say to us. In fact, everything happening tells something, but one has to find out oneself. Hoelderlin speaks of "the divine language, the changing and becoming", the "Goettersprache, das Wechseln und das Werden". Nota bene: the divine is in the becoming, and not beyond or behind it! But not willing to listen is very human. And the rule is that one is blamed for what one sees, if one tells. Zarathustra: hide your gold, they'll slit your stomach open. So for me the ONLY metaphysical question is that one, and to be honest I am not even sure that there is a WHY-question there in the first place, it may be just another HOW-question after all. It is all well and good understanding the mechanisms of the DNA, the coding, and the mixing of the nucleotides and the logic of the double helix; and all the other shenanigans associated with the transmission of genetic information, and the fact that soon we will be able to go to the doctors bearing a CD with all our human architecture encoded - the question is 'IS THERE A REASON OR NOT FOR US BEING HERE?' There doesn't appear to be a reason, because the 'matter' [a short-cut word] that constitutes people and animals and vegetables forms itself into these entities and then disassembles itself once more back into its constituent bits [or modifications of them]. WHY? We already know HOW. Is it simply naive to suppose there is a reason in the first place? rene: No, it's a must. Could you get asleep in the evening, when tomorrow morning would have no causal relation to today? Contra Jeremiah, one does not have to be a Heideggerian, one better be not, if that only leads to the principle of ground, caged in a book. We, pomo's, cannot live 2 seconds without it. Rene: Or to say: you completely miss the distinction between the null-nothing and the nothing that resists all irony. To irony, when it fails to see this, t'is deadly. Somehow like when English ironists are talking seriously about themselves in a big chair on tv. Or when an older American humorist decides to get to know even more about sex, than he already knew in the seventies..... Jud: For me there can be no distinction between types of nothing. Nothing has no categories and can resist nothing - being non-resistant. I am reminded of the brilliant article on Heidegger and Heideggerians on the Ereinis site: 'Reflections on the Career of Martin Heidegger, Shepherd of Being' by Prof. Jeremiah Reedy, in which he says: "Let me say first of all that I am aware that Heideggerians have a number of standard strategies which they use to defend their master against detractors, of which there has never been a shortage. Two of the most interesting are: 1.) to argue that only those who are thoroughly acquainted with "the entire body of his thought" in the original German are qualified to criticize him, and even more interesting: 2.) to claim with Derrida that only those who are "bound up with Heidegger in an essential way" can measure "the full significance" of his work (Farias x). rene: Oh, no. Everyone can understand, everyone 'is'. Mr. Reedy is just trying to be clever, cos he's a professor, but if he would have the guts to appear here, and show his brilliance, i'd sweep the floor with him. In English. "H, the shepherd of Being, by Prof. Reedy". That's irony at its worst, and what looks funny might turn out to be merely cruel, the Jeremiah's won't give up. Otherwise thye have to see themselves in the face. They're the good guys a priori. But that is the overall lie of the Allied world. It's the only way they can manage. (Kelly) <A HREF="http://www.macalester.edu/~reedy/heidegger.html">http://www.macalester.edu/~reedy/heidegger.html</A> Irony is the employment of lingual tropes that involves incongruity between what is expected and what occurs. There is no such thing exists as 'irony' to 'see' anything at all - only the ironists exist, [English or otherwise, ] and this particular British ironist can discriminate between the so-called 'null-nothing' and the nothing-nothing of the ousia-freaks. It is not necessary, [and I repeat again what I have said many times] ... it is not necessary to be a Heideggerian in order to understand these beliefs and understandings in order to soundly reject them. There is NOTHING SPECIAL about the intelligence or sensitivity of those that believe such ideas that Prof Reedy criticises. [I don't mean this disrespectfully to anybody on this list BTW, but merely expressing my opinion culled from many years in converstion with metaphysicians. Jud: Better than the fool Heidegger who said [in his swinging brick] there is not no nothing - which is a way of saying that nothing is something.. I prefer there is nothing which is not something. Rene: All right. Heidegger's next question will be then: how do the nothing, that is still something, and the nothing that is no longer something, relate? Jud: There is no 'nothing that is no longer something' to relate to the 'nothing that is still something' for if nothing were something it wouldn't be nothing -so Heidegger's question is meaningless. rene: You already have an answer before the question has been asked properly. Nothing is as it seems, most of all the nothing. That's why there is questioning. One asks for something. That what is asked for must be somehow familiar, otherwise it cannot enter a question: it must be something. But that's only posing the question, the beginning of questioning. In real questioning the asked-for does not remain the same. You merely say: i am the boss, i do the questioning, and i decide what is sense and nonsense. But esp. that 'i' is most questionable. And not because it can be subjected to the human activity of questioning. Soon it won't be there anymore, as you wrote. Of itself. Rene: As to my theology: i've begun to read Wilhelm Groenbech's great work on the Germanics. Like Otto on the Greeks, he is determined to go for experience, not for superfluous proving. Jud: It is through experience that we are able to prove or disprove. Rene: More basically, it is experience (paideia), that tells where to go after reasons, and where they are out of place. Jud: Reasons, explanations, grounds, rationalities for me are never out of place rene: Why?! Because 'you' say so? All positivists are like that: they forbid and pay back with what looks like good sense, but is utterly arbitrary. Metaphysics is news from nowhere, but a framework makes sense. To Carnap, yes. Probably because it works. Jud [earlier] As far as Groenbech is concerned, I am envious of you surrounded as you are by books. Being able to lay your hands on such goodies and more or less take your pick of the bright jewels amongst the dross is a definite perk as far as I can see. Rene: An available library is indeed not nothing, but only a burden to who does not know an item to choose. If one has money, one can buy Groenbech, although there seems to be no English translation -is this the rule in the case of exceptional writings?- , but fortunately for Anglosaxons the original is Danish. Groenbech's scope is incredible: Germanics, Hellenism, Christendom, esp. mysticism, many biographies, and at last the Greeks. Jud: If the original is in Danish I could read it. [I'm reading Kierkegaard in the original dansk right now.] Personally I haven't got time to read any more just now about the Teutonic tribes and their Seigfriedian sylvan travails - - rene: Groenbech starts with revenge, needed for piece. Piece as a 'social' phenomenon: first there is the family (Sippe), not the individual. Relatives give strength, and strength they had. (they went as far as the Black Sea). Their fearlessness must have a ground, a reason, not? But maybe not a familiar (to us) one. Recently, in the middle of our conversation "god is dead for kids", my son (18) called and came to live with me. Another 'snaky' co-incidence. jud: I've got the whole of the Ring on video too Boulez/Chereau? That would be great. so I get plenty of chest-beating and sword brandishing as it is. However the other stuff sounds very interesting and juicy. Rene: Jud: Klinik-Fuehrer: not bad, Jud. The last camp where there is still some concentration left... Jud: Perhaps not - for there is one in Guantanamo Bay [home of the kangaroo court] I think. As for Heidegger, his days of 'concealment' within the white walls, thinking that there is, or is not, no nothing or not no nothing; didn't seem to benefit him much. When he eventually 'uncovered' himself, he came out just as kooky and just as great a liar as when he went in as far as I can see? ;-) Rene: I have, more and less kindly, answered all your misunderstandings about the great little man. But you choose to go on inflicting yourself with that silly brown page. It's far below your level. I can only advise you to get rid of it. With an eye to the future. Jud: Future? My future, or the future of Heideggerianism? ;-) My future is rapidly running out, and it won't be all that long before my atheistic A-Train hits the big buffers of non-being. As I twiddle my thumbs and await the boat-train which will ferry me across the River Styx Heidegger acts as an avatar for me, (the manifestation in human form of all that is un-philosophical, antihuman and humourless - he is an icon that if clicked opens up an old page of sepia-coloured memories of thirties unreason made needlessly bitter for millions by him and his buffoonish brothers in Berchestgarten brown. You make a lot out of him, or out of your antipathy. He's not so much. Lately, i was in the Elzas. Very bitter history, like the other former German regions. I saw Heidegger twice, so the ground, the humus, is the same as a bit more East. When I see his photograph with its dead-eyes I react to it automatically, as if in a computer-game, or firing at a drogue on an army pop-up target firing-range, I can't resist taking a pop at him. I am an emotional Celt you see - not the cold-blooded bourgeois Englishman you imagine. For me being anti-Heidegger is being authentic. Very well (or bad), the least i try is to convert you. I have to get rid of him, too. But he is like Grimm's hedgehog, it doesn't matter where you turn, he's already there. He is the most generous of all, has the most to give, but turns his face away. You call that inhuman. But he cannot give what is one's own. And we call human those that pretend to give us that. While they can only take it away, thus. ("we want your best") regards rene --- from list heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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