File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_2003/heidegger.0312, message 96


Date: Sat, 6 Dec 2003 06:12:10 +0800
Subject: Re: Liberal vs. social democracy - Gestell/Gewinnst
From: Malcolm Riddoch <m.riddoch-AT-ecu.edu.au>



On Saturday, December 6, 2003, at 05:15  AM, Anthony Crifasi wrote:

> We are free to think about its origin and do as we please, but are we 
> free to have ALREADY understood "as we please"?

I was just trying to put together a response to your previous email 
Anthony but the way you frame your questions confuses me. I'd say we 
are free to constantly understand this world any way we choose, but the 
choices are not something rationally presented to us, they are based on 
the familiarity of how we already pre-understand our everyday world. If 
you can understand how this pre-understanding functions then perhaps 
you can widen the horizons of your philosophical freedom to think its 
origin.

> If not, then in what real sense can anyone or anything ever be 
> criticized on that basis, since Gestell is how we already understand 
> the world today as a whole, and therefore everything in it? It seems 
> that we are just going on about freedom and gestell, criticizing this 
> or that entity on the basis of an equivocation between factical 
> orderings and how those factical orderings have already been 
> understood in terms of ordering (i.e., gestell). This seems an 
> enormous philosophical problem here, and it seems to be the basis for 
> so many "Heideggerian" critiques of factical entities in terms of 
> technology and gestell. What exactly is going on here?

It's called the hermeneutic circle, and it's the groundless basis on 
which Heidegger posits his inaugural question of being. It's 
necessarily groundless though, as all we have is the way we have 
already come to understand everything. It's on the basis of this 
ontical pre-understanding of factical things that Heidegger posits the 
possibility of ontologically understanding how this everyday 
familiarity with things is temporally constituted.

By the time the Third Reich collapsed Heidegger saw this 
pre-understanding as the historically constituted globally dominant 
sway of the objectifying will to will in the culmination of the 
metaphysics of subjectness. This is his critique of the metaphysical 
understanding of being, it's a form of criticism so I don't understand 
what your problem is in this regard. You are free to think and question 
as you will but only from the basis of how you have already come to 
understand the world, a basis that is not at all something that is 
rationally understood as such but which is nonetheless open to critical 
questioning. Isn't this what we've been doing all along in our 
different ways?

Cheers,

Malcolm



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