Date: Sun, 07 Dec 2003 14:08:31 -0600
From: allen scult <allen.scult-AT-drake.edu>
Subject: Re: Gestell/Gewinnst - Truth as opinion


>On Saturday, December 6, 2003, at 06:41  AM, Michael Eldred wrote:
>
>>I rather liked Allen's reply to you, Malcolm, but you prance and flutter and
>>fairy around with him on a meta-level just like you do with me. Rather
>>strenuous! You surely don't think that your non-commital "that's your
>>opinion"/"that's my opinion"/"there's many possible readings"-strategy is to
>>be taken seriously in any philosophical sense, do you? I mean, engagement
>>with any philosophical issue is not possible on the meta-level you
>>cultivate. Come downstairs for a change and give your dialogue partners
>>their due.
>
>Are you incapable of thinking through your own relation to truth as 
>the representational self-certainty of the value positing will to 
>power? I can't take your response above seriously in any 
>philosophical sense because it doesn't philosophically engage with 
>anything of what I've said to you as regards your contention that 
>there is something like an 'originary' Greek meaning to Heidegger's 
>thought and that this is necessarily how we must read Heidegger in 
>order to understand him.
>
>I am not 'non-committal' in suggesting that all you have is your own 
>opinion in these matters, far from it, one forms an opinion and then 
>commits to it. In the altercation of philosophical debate all we 
>have is opinion, there are no objective empirical phenomena to back 
>our statements up, as one can only bear witness to one's own 
>existence. 'Truth as opinion' is my own effort to think through the 
>'Nietzsche/Nazism - truth' thread, and the strife of these 
>discussions about 'truth' is itself testament to the workings of the 
>will to will truth as the self-certainty of belief, in this case the 
>belief in a Greek origin that can somehow be reborn in our 
>appropriative interpretations of the Greeks. The willful 
>representation of this self-certain belief is your own stream of 
>email responses insisting that it is true. Put another way, the 
>belief is constantly re-enacted in your text that attempts to 
>surpass itself with each new email. It probably needs this constancy 
>of surpassing itself otherwise the truth of your 'origin' would 
>probably petrify. But don't worry cos I'm doing precisely the same, 
>except in my case I believe there is no actual 'originary' truth in 
>any text, only one's interpretation of it, founded in the 
>groundlessness of our non-understanding of what the term 'being' 
>actually means. So to reiterate, and represent again this selfsame 
>opinion: As far as I'm concerned there actually is a 'Greek' meaning 
>to Heidegger's appropriation of the Greeks, and that meaning is our 
>own interpretive understanding of that appropriation in relation to 
>the Greek texts themselves, but it's not actually and simply never 
>can be ancient Greek.
>
>This doesn't somehow downgrade your well informed and I think 
>genuinely interesting retrieval of what is 'Greek' in Heidegger's 
>thinking, quite the contrary, it elevates it to that level of 
>individual responsibility for thinking the truth that Heidegger 
>himself demanded. This responsibility also entails a self-conscious 
>understanding of your own relation to truth, and most especially 
>when it comes to the strife-ful truth of philosophical dialogue. 
>That Heidegger is positing one interpretation amongst a multiplicity 
>of possible interpretations cannot be denied, and neither does he 
>deny it, for "while a right elucidation never understands the text 
>better than the author understood it, it does surely understand it 
>differently" (Heidegger, 'The word of Nietzsche: God is dead' in 
>QCT, p. 58). And furthermore:
>
>"all true thought remains open to more than one interpretation - and 
>this by reason of its nature. Nor is this multiplicity of possible 
>interpretations merely the residue of a still unachieved 
>formal-logical univocity which we properly ought to strive for but 
>did not attain. Rather, multiplicity of meanings is the element in 
>which all thought must move in order to be strict thought" ('What is 
>Called Thinking?', p. 71).
>
>If anything this is a wonderful interpretation of 'pollachos legetai 
>to on', an interpretation that goes to the heart of what it means to 
>talk about these matters, and those matters themselves.
>
>Regards,
>
>Malcolm
>

Malcolm,

Far be it from me to intervene in an altercation in which I was 
merely an ancillary pretext,
but as someone once said, I look for love in all the wrong places.

There is something just a tad self-righteous about this move Malcolm. 
Aristotle was not
a believer in  attenuating the force of saying-thinking  for the sake 
of easy going,
mutually respectful philosophical  relations.  In reaction to Plato 
and in defense of rhetoric, he rightly observes that  being bespeaks 
itself in many voices (I thought I might try out a new rendering for 
the occasion.), as Heidegger speaks of thinking moving amidst a 
multitude of meanings.  But that "movement
among," the relationship among the voices,  is in the service of 
unconcealing the truth of being as we have
it in language.   And of course that unconcealing is by necessity an 
event of appropriation.  The saying
worth listening and responding to is the saying (legein) that is 
itself appropriated by gathering (again, legein) "of mortals into the 
appropriateness of their nature and [holding] them there." ("Way to 
language," 128-29)

Of course, as the precious Henry points out, there is joyful romance 
in the simple meshing of our
sayings, but there is also, sometimes, a hardness of thought that is there in
the saying, and  which desires a more direct response.

Regards,

Allen


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