From: GEVANS613-AT-aol.com
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 18:06:40 EST
Subject: Re: Gestell/Gewinnst - Truth as opinion


In a message dated 15/12/2003 20:07:42 GMT Standard Time, 
m.riddoch-AT-ecu.edu.au writes:


> > As Tom Sheehan pointed out in the
> > translation seminar at the 22nd Heidegger Symposium in Denton, Texas, 
> > a year
> > ago, when we translate Heidegger into English, we are translating not 
> > from
> > the German but from the Greek.




> Jud: No, no, no, no NO!.
> 
> Sheenhan is wrong on three points.


> ) When we translate German to English we are translating from German into 
> English,
 [even if the German is the German of a speaker whose  first language is 
Greek.]
> 
> 2) When we translate HEIDEGGER'S German to English we are translating from  
> a particular type of idiosyncratic German into English.
> The peculiar nature of the idiosyncrasy is driven by the need to obfuscate 
> and speak indeterminately. Heidegger's convoluted constructions are the 
> philosophical equivalent of bindweed.

3). Heidegger's Greek is the laughing stock of academia as is well known - he 
capriciously and wantonly changed the meanings of the original Greek as 
recorded and  extant in the many available texts and capable of a correct analysis 
by  the methods of comparative linguistics.
A professional analysis of  semantic values is accomplished by a meticulous 
comparison of the various forms of  words as they appear in a wide variety of 
contemporary texts, as well as a diachronic study of the verb from its early 
uses in the pre-Socratics onwards, together with a comparison with the uses of 
its equivalent forms in other Indo-European languages in their contemporaneous 
examples and in its earliest extant forms which can be studied in Sanskrit.  
This sort of rigorous scholarly method seems to have been ignored by 
Heidegger and as a result his 'let's pretend'  translations have become something of a 
joke.   
As one of my favourite poets the great English critic A. E. Housman, said, 
'the subject matter of textual criticism is the play of human thought and 
emotion in creating literature, and the subsequent play of human agency, or of 
chance, in defacing it'.  Heidegger was a defacer - a vandal concerning language.


Using a wilful and specious rectification he changed the meanings of the 
words to suit his own warped take on things, in the very same crime of which 
others have been have been accused -  of altering the raw data ['moulding it nearer 
to the heart's desire' as FitzGerald said]  in order that their theories are 
proved. From a professional  point of  view, bearing in mind a teacher's 
responsibility to his students, one could almost say that his behaviour was 
criminal. The notion that a guy from the Catholic boondocks like Heidegger could 
travel to the big city, learn a truncated form of bastard Greek, and suddenly  
become magically privy to some primal truth or arcanum encoded in the lexicon of 
an ancient language is more redolent of Harry Potter than Potty Heidegger.  It 
is even more demeaning to the search for truth when modern thinkers pick up 
these tatty second-hand rags from philosophy's Charity Shop and flaunt them in 
public as a la mode.



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</A>

Heidegger Cartoons:
<A HREF="http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/cartooncontents.htm">http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/cartooncontents.htm




</A>


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