File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_2003/heidegger.0309, message 65


From: GEVANS613-AT-aol.com
Date: Mon, 8 Sep 2003 10:12:52 EDT
Subject: Hume, Hegel & Heidegger



Hi Gary!
Yes, I've been giving a lot of thought to the ways various philosophers have 
had [and still persist in having] of arriving at a classificational 
methodology of the ontological nature of the  objects that surround us.
Leaving aside the Platonic kindergarten notions of 'form' and and 'essences' 
other discredited inanities, I suppose the Aristotelian approach provided the 
first articulate suggestions which resulted in the various later modifications 
or re-jigged versions of this basic principle of 'ontological stocktaking'  
which have plopped out of the other end of the teleological cloaca-pipe and 
ended up in Freiburg of all places?

As with the classical Hegelian/Marxian hypothesis of, thesis - antithesis and 
sythesis as applied to human social progress, which apparently satisfied the 
social, political and personal needs of the hirsute-chinned classifiers, the 
classificatory objects, [that which is so classified]  remain exactly the way 
they existed before such busybody 'quality-surveyors' and 'property assessors'  
licked their ontic pencil-stubs and started ticking-off  the 'qualities' that 
an entity is supposed to 'have' and 'have not.' 
Rocks and fruit flies still exist as inert rocks or short-lived entities, [by 
our standards] and people still exist as the greedy, self-centered 
opportunists that they were before, during and after  the Communist or Fascist 
experiment.  It doesn't need much thought to realise that if indeed the 
phenomenological fairyland 'qualities' or 'essenses' of the fantasists did exist, [rather 
than being merely modalities of the existential actuality of the given entity] 
that even if  they  sat down for the next umteen trillion billion years they 
would never be able to exclude from the object in view even a tiny fraction of 
the 'qualities' or 'properties' which it didn't have. In a similar way they 
would need to sit down for another umteen trillion billion years in any attempt  
to include as part of the suit of properties inherent in the object in view, 
even a tiny fraction of the 'qualities' or 'properties' which it did have. 

In other words objects neither have or have not anything whatsoever and these 
metaphysicalities of 'property'  or ' basic or essential attributes' shared 
by all members of a class.  It [together with the notion of 'identity'  and 
even worse still - 'essence' is the biggest load of bollocks in the whole of 
philosophy.
As you say below all those primitive concepts are only there to enable 
coherent speech, to which I would add that whilst such classification is helpful, 
even vital as a feature of the  coherent speech of quotidian generality in the 
workaday world of words in the bar room or the bus queue, it has no place in 
serious philosophy where a more rigorous ontological standard should be applied.

As to the morals or ethics of 'promises' and who 'deserves' this or that, or 
if 'human rights' are God given or creations of society in order to protect 
itself etc., I normally steer well away from such discussions, because I find 
them ultimately frustrating.  I don't mean to say that ethical questions bore 
me, but rather that I find other areas of philosophy more interesting, and now, 
due to the ever increasing pressures upon my available 'thinking time' [three 
young boys] I tend to concentrate more on ontological questions.

I loved  Dr. Ulrich Voigt’s recent remark that: 



'I myself cannot accept the Kierkegaard – Heidegger postulate on the 
fundamental importance of Angst - It is an anarchistic theory.’

There is one line of thought which I have been pursuing lately about which I 
would welcome your opinion, [and Richard's and Jon's if they have time] and 
that is the question of  my growing uncertainty about Heisenberg's uncertainty 
principle. This theory of chaos, which is always trotted out by 'the 
Heideggerian and Kierkegaardian foot-soldiers in the dispiriting  'Armies of  Angst' as 
a way of refuting analytically or materialistically minded thinkers' notions 
of a physically ordered universe - that is an unchaotic one, where certain 
physical laws are held to be universal.

It came to me recently, that without the possibility of change and a certain 
degree of chaos in the behaviour of subatomic particles there would be no 
universe at all, for the whole of the material of the universe is undergoing 
constant change as a vital part of its nature [or the nature of nature]  and in the 
absence of behavioural aberration, [for example in the genetical material of  
biological entiies] there would never be any change, and in keeping with the 
Darwinian analysis without mutation, which is part and parcel of the mechanism 
of survival and specialisation and niche-finding, life [if it had managed to 
emerge at all] would still have remained as tiny mono-cellular organisms 
living on the detritus of others of their kind.
In this way, or following from this theory that fortuitousness, 
indefiniteness, and randomness at the quantum level  is merely a reflection of what goes on 
at the macro-level, even in our own lives with the neverending progression of 
chance meetings, with other humans, or speeding trucks, or religious maniacs 
piloting aircraft into buildings.

sincerely,

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</A>


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