File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_2004/heidegger.0406, message 142


From: GEVANS613-AT-aol.com
Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2004 15:35:11 EDT
Subject: Re: Will de Power and the Burning Bush


In a message dated 23/06/2004 15:18:25 GMT Standard Time,  
R.B.M.deBakker-AT-uva.nl writes:

Jud, I  know there's not much likeness between you and Anthony, so
the same thought  mechanisms i think i detect in you both, and in a
lot others, incl. myself,  too, are only more surprising.
 
Jud:
Anthony lives on the blue-cheese side of the moon and I abide on  the rocky 
other and never the twain shall meet.
One thing we DO have in common [I think] is that we both think logically  and 
reason in an 'organised' sort of way.
However his reasoning is Jesuitical, which means he is free to drag in that  
which is illogical as a redoubt of last resort [a fallback position] when his  
logical mode proves ineffective.  No such retreat into illogicality is  
available to me — and there is no need of one — for my position is grounded in  
touchy-feely OBJECTS.


RENE  NEW:
Because [speech] is like glossa or lingua bound to a speaker  and his tongue,
i prefer in case of words to speak of their power of  saying, or of telling. 
Jud:
Words - language have no power of saying anything whatsoever.  Only  the 
speaker
can communicate the way his brain is  thinking about certain subjects  to 
others
[using the sound-symbols of words] can say or tell anything.
The baseball bat doesn't play with the ball — the baseball player does —  
using the bat as
a tool or instrument for the purpose. The keyboard and the words I  choose 
are not composing my e-mail  I AM.
 

Rene:
Evidently it is on words and their ability to mean or  denote sting, that
any speaker relies. Or do you think it is the  tongue and its phonem-forming
activity that creates meaning? 
 
Jud:
Not for one moment. Words have no ABILITY - Only humans have the ability to  
distinguish the meaning of signs — oral and written.
Words, traffic lights, airport terminal arrival boards — the books on the  
shelves of your library have no 'abilities' at all.  They have no idea  of the 
meaning of the significations and messages that they contain and  convey.
 
 

Rene:
 

The  bizarre of that has been shown by Abaelard
to Roscelinus and his  'universale est vox', the universal is mere voice.
 
Jud:
Abelard was correct — to universalise is to produce meaningless  chatter.
'America' didn't bomb Iraq certain Americans [a minority of the population]  
who clean their teeth,
eat food every day and go to the John and strain did the bombing. To say  
that 'America bombed Iraq' is ontologically ridiculous.

Jud:

If  you want to reduce meaning to physics, you've not done enough. You  also
have to show the other way: how from physics you go to  semantics. It is not
enough to ridicule Heidegger's 'solution'  (Bedeutsamkeit as belonging to the
world of being-in-the-world, the  only world we know of)   
 
Jud:
There is no ME 'Being in the world' — there is only ME - the physical,  
tangible ME which can be touched, heard, smelt, seen.
Being in the world is a philosophical nonsense — a leftover from olden  times 
when mankind was no so well educated.
There is nothing strange that a physical thinking human entity should wish  
to analyse and try to define the meanings of the communicative signs with which 
 he communicates to other human holisms, whether those signs are 
finger-signs,  gesticulations, words, pictures, coloured flags, or by flashing the study 
lights  on and off like Heidegger did. Heidegger was incapable of grasping the 
simple  things of life that most people take for granted, and therefore was 
FORCED to  retreat into the ontological fantasy of the so-called 'ontological 
difference'  in order to stop going completely mad. As Eliot said — "some people 
cannot stand  much reality" — and Heidegger was one of them. I know it annoys 
you to hear me  say it — but Heidegger was just an ignorant peasant — 
brilliant at the seeding  and planting of the endosperms of an already rotting 
philosophical  crop, and coaxing and convincing the naive with a mixture a 
demagoguery and  rhetoric. But at ground [Grundbegriffe] level he lacked the basic  
common-sense and understanding of the world and the words with which we describe 
 that world. Woe to the man who lacks the intelligence to understand the word 
 'IS.'



Jud: [earlier]
and that lies are engaged in some quest to  find a  
suitable mouthpiece to be used to broadcast them.  
I  fail to see how 


Rene:
It just becomes inevitable to speak of this 'speaking of language,' as  soon 
as 
the subject that claims language, turns out to be a  lie. 
 
Jud:
In the bar room yes, [ordinary talk]  but not on a philosophy list  whilst 
talking [or being interpreted] ontologically]


Jud: [earlier]
A person DOES NOT claim language — a person  SPEAKS words, the compendium of 
which, 
if a person is  speaking Dutch,  we call the Dutch Language, and if he is 
speaking English we  call the  
English Language. It is not the WORDS that lie or the LANGUAGE that   lies — 
it is the LIAR who speaks those words of the Dutch or English  language  who 
is 
lying. When you say: "... as long as the subjects keep  on believing in  
themselves," I presume you mean by the collective noun  "subjects" — the  
speakers of 
the lies [or the truths?] What do you  mean by 'believing in  themselves' do 
you mean:

(1) Believing  that they speak the truth?
(2) Believing in themselves as  worthwhile  and decent people?
(3) Believing that they exist?
(4} By "subject" you  refer to the subject of the sentence?


RENE NEW:
a  combination of (1) and (4): a subject has to believe in what
he says,  whether truth or lie. (if not, he won't live long)
 
Jud:
You have just put your finger on the importance of semantics for  mankind.
Because the Islamists believe: "America bombed Iraq/Afghanistan'  they want 
to kill every American they catch —
yet the American they catch might have been violently AGAINST  the Bushite 
madness.

Rene:
 When truth and lie become indiscernable, it has to believe 
harder. 
 
Jud:
Truth and lies do NOT EXIST - only truth tellers or liars exist.
One man's truth is another man's lie.
 
Rene:
he objects of its beliefs appear as subjects in its 
propositions. Of these objects he is informed via the media. 
Iraq is  sthing it has heard of through television. 
He hears his leader say:  Iraq is ready to throw a bomb
on you, my subjects. Now the subject is  threatened by the subject
of the sentence (Iraq), spoken by the  subject-leader. And it can 
only maintain itself amidst the fear of  itself and of all the other 
subjects, by accepting the proposition of  the leader.
 
Jud:
PITS [people in the street] may reason this way — but responsible  
philosophers should not.
We should [in our small way] point out to people that no such thing as  
'Iraq' or 'USA'
exists — that they have been terribly conned. It's not "Iraq' that is ready  
or not ready to throw a bomb — it is the 
transcendentalist loony Saddam Hussein and his goons — the one that  kneels 
on a mat looking south west three times a day
is the ENTITY [who shits and farts] will order or not order the bombs to be  
dropped or not dropped
Iraq - USA are just IDEAS which don't exist. It is the land, desert,  cities, 
skyscrapers and Bush and Saddam that exist.
Religion doesn't exist — just the religious. Patriotism doesn't exist —  
only the patriotic.
Torture doesn't exist — only the torturers and their  superiors.

Rene|: 
Would you now say: the subject does the lying? I'd say he is  merely
an instrument used in the lying process. And that really there  are 
no subjects anymore, for the same reason as that there are no  more objects
for real subjects, but only subjectivity, to stamp those  former subjects.
 
Jud:
It is awfully easy to get confused about these things, and although you are  
very intelligent and I respect you
and you are 'well-meaning,' you are nevertheless mistaken.
If I [knowingly] tell a lie - I am a liar. If I go to the pub and if my  wife 
asks me where I have been and I say
to the library I am a liar. It is not the words that are lying — it is I  [me]
If somebody says: 'Jud went to the pub and told Clare he had been to the  
library," the subject [Jud] is a liar.
If what you say is correct and the subject [Jud] is only an "instrument'  for 
the lie — on whose or what's behalf is he instrumentally lying?
Human lies are not based on the model of a lingual ectoplasm that issues  
forth from the innocent mouth of the medium,
nor are the owners of the brewery telling lies through my lips in order to  
maintain their sales of beer.
If on the other hand I am taken in by Tony Blair's lies, and repeat them  
believing them to be true — am I also a liar?
YES, but MORE - I am BOTH a LIAR and a FOOL.
 

Rene:

If you don't accept this subjectivity for being abstract and  non-existent,
and analyze it away, you take away the last ground under  the feet of the
subjects, from whence on they're nothing anymore, and  that means totally
made mobile: ants. On the other hand that would  even be more than 
Heideggerians
refusing to go into subjectivity, and  turning them into ghosts.
I'm afraid that your being-existent merely  means dissolving. This dissolving
is very real.
 
Jud:
I don't dissolve abstractions and nonexistencies - I CANNOT - because what  
does not exist cannot be dissolved or resolved.
I analyse all the meaningless cognitive vegetation away — cut the tangled  
bushes and at the same time cut the crap.
Nominalists could NEVER be ants like Heidegger's helmeted hordes — because  
nominalists just laugh at the childish notions of Fatherland and
the Chosen Volk.  It has just struck me that for the Jews to claim  that they 
are the Chosen People is just as arrogant and stupid a claim as Hitler  and 
Heidegger's believe in the special role of the German people as chosen by  
'destiny' as the major players on the world stage.
There ARE NO Chosen German People - there are just breathing living German  
men and women, there ARE NO Chosen Jewish People - there are just  breathing 
living Jewish men and women.
I want to dissolve MYTHS - particularly RELIGIOUS and political myths -  
German and Jewish "specialness"  are both dangerous and stupid  myths.
Germans and Jews are on the whole hardworking intelligent people — but that  
does NOT make them special or different to the rest of us.



Jud:  
I completely agree with you here Rene, but there is a form of political  and  
social criticism called satire, irony, parody, pasquinade,  ridicule, etc., 
which I personally favour? In the great tradition of English  satire one can 
often be  more effective as a critic of some hypocrisy  or political outrage 
than 
one can  achieve in a measured logical but  ultimately boring piece about the 
torture and killing and ... 
Every  nation has a satirical magazine — even the dour Russians with their   
Crocodile - it is a well known European method of political and social  
criticism.

Rene:
 Thanks yes, i had almost forgotten. Satire and irony seem to have had  their
best times too. Because, like all questionworthy, all  satire-worthy has 
disappeared too?
True  satire seems to presuppose the same lightness as the true and serious  
self-questioning, that belongs to Dasein. A sort of  floating.
 
Jud:
Satire, irony, parody, pasquinade, ridicule, etc., represents a true  and 
serious 
self-questioning — a self-questioning of one's  preconceptions and one's 
belief and trust in the lies of others.
It is FAR MORE powerful and effective as a weapon than the fruitless  
discussions that go one here concerning
 what is ontic and what is ontological. That is the reason they have  
cartoonists in the newspapers every day and not 
Heideggerians talking about the Rhine Dam. ;-)


Die ros' ist ohn Warum; Sie bluhet, weil sie bluhet, Sie acht nicht  ihrer  
selbst, Fragt nicht, ob man sie siehet. 
The Rose is without  "why"; She blows because she bloweth. She asks no  
passer-by to heed  her as he goeth.

RENE NEW:
Jud, quoting Silesius and the  Feldweg, is more miraculous to me than all
bikers together.  Being-in-the-world-but-more-like-a-groundless-grounded-rose-
than-like-an-eradicated-worried-old-wo..human is a possibility. It just  
depends:
does it appeal? are there still ears to hear the possible,  and not merely 
exclusively physical ears to registrate (the  lies)?
 
Jud:
I am attracted by the poetic — by the sweet nectarine [slightly  mouldering] 
bouquet of lost causes.
For me I enjoy Feldweg as a prose-poem — a fine bit of writing by  Heidegger.
I enjoy Heidegger like I enjoy the old, yellow, jerky, scratched films  taken 
before the First World War.
Queen Victoria in her horsedrawn landau, the family of the Czar dancing  
around oblivious of their fate to come,
Hitler with his dog in the last days, Heidegger dreaming his way down  the 
Feldweg his head full of the snows of yesteryear
and the fresh young limbs of his lover. The cranked handle of times camera  
spasmodically turns and the old strutting images haunt us 
with the sadness of what once was, and what we will one day be a part of —  
the past.
 
AND THEN I WAKE UP and see Victoria, the Czar, Hitler, Heidegger for what  
they REALLY were.
 
Nevertheless a stroll down the Fantasy Feldweg is OK now and again — we  
suspend the faculties and the critical judgement for a Feldwegian  frolic.
We all need and enjoy a poetical break now and again — as long as we  don't 
DARE pass it off as 'Philosophy.'




Cheers,
 
You missed out on the 1787 Chateau Lafite  too!

Jud




Nullius in Verba

_http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/index.htm_ 
(http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/index.htm) 
JUD  EVANS - XVANS XPERIENTIALISM



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