HE WAS BEING HEIDEGGER

HE IS   HEIDEGGER

HE WILL BE  BEING HEIDEGGER

Since the very first shell was placed over a pebble, man has been performing one rendition or another of a Cups and Balls routine. A drawing of the trick can be seen on a mural in the tomb of Baqt III at Beni Hassan - circa 2500 B. C., and it is a representation of what is commonly regarded as the first depiction of a conjuring feat.

In Egypt and India the cup-and-ball performers knelt on the ground; in Turkey they conjured on a carpet in the open air; in Greece and Rome they preferred to work standing behind a table. Heidegger flim-flammed an ontological version of the trick sitting at his writing desk and standing behind a lecturer's podium. He renamed his version of the trick as: "the Problem of Being."

Seneca the Younger, who was born in Spain in 3 B. C., said the bewildering sleights were similar to the tricks of speech used by orators. For Heidegger's illusions it was the other way around - his bewildering oratorial grammatical tricks were similar to the sleights of hand used by the illusionists. The trouble was that whilst the magician's tricks were harmless entertainment - the Nazi philosopher's distortions of ontological reality seriously damaged philosophy and the minds of the poor dupes whose brain's were too slow to spot the sleight of gerundial hand.

The set up of the scam is simple. There is normally a small folding table (see Heidegger's table in the above image taken when he showed the 'Dasein Trick' to the philosophy students he marched to his hideaway Hutte for weekend Nazi indocrination sessions 1933.  At the university a crowd collects and shuffles into the lecture hall with its low stage upon which a table is placed with three upturned cups and three small balls.

Watched intently by the little crowd, the hustler places the ball under one of the cups then switches them around with such speed and bewildering dexterity that the onlookers soon become confused and uncertain about which cup conceals the ball.

The wily ontological operator then invites students from the audience to point to the correct conjugation of the BE-word on the understanding that if he guesses correctly he be invited to the Hutte for another session of imprinting with Hitlerite hate-speech. At this stage one of the more confident students usually points to one of the cups. Alas, he will inevitably be wrong in his assumption, for when the cup is lifted the space beneath is always empty (for Nothing nothings)   The skill of the manipulator always exceeds the concentration of the observer.  "No Hitlerian high jinks for you this weekend!"  comes the sterm adomonition.

That is precisely method of metaphysical manipulation Heidegger employs. He switches the German intransitive, separable verb Dasein ("to exist.")  A separable verb is a verb that is composed of a lexical verb root and a separable second root (particle). In some verb forms, the verb and the particle appear in one word, whilst in others the verb stem and the particle are separated.

Note that the particle cannot be accurately referred to as a prefix because it can be separated from the "main lexical" root of the verb. German, Dutch, and Hungarian are notable for having many separable verbs. Thus Heidegger insinuates Da-sein ( "da" meaning "there" and "sein" meaning "being")  into his writings as a method of personifying a so-called entity which is "ontologically different."  He names his metaphysical protagonist  with  its gerundial form:(Being there) which is an existential modality and not an corporeal entity.  In short he personates a verbal noun and then anthropomorphises it with human qualities and attributes human characteristics to his abstraction as a reification of "universal man." (compare the name "Christian" in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress)

The word Dasein has been used by several philosophers before Heidegger, most notably Ludwig Feuerbach, with the meaning of human "existence" or "presence".

Though Heidegger insists that Dasein must not be mistaken for a subject, that is something definable in terms of consciousness or a self that is exactly how he does treat his metaphysical manikin and chose to refer to the term as a synonym for "human entity." 

Such is the apposite analogy that can be used to describe the thinker Martin Heidegger's philosophical trick of Dasein and his three cups of Heideggerian prosopopoeian hemlock -  Dasein, Being and being There.

Like the fairground entertainment the clues for the more discerning lie thickly scattered around but go unnoticed or ignored, while a whole philosophy of falsehood is enacted on the doctrinal mesa.

The fact that Being and Time are merely convenient fictions has not occurred to the seekers after enlightenment who frequent the pages of Heidegger's 1927 work, 'Being and Time.' Nor do they know that the verb 'be' is simply a device to indicate that what follows in a sentence always refers to existential modality on objects in the cosmos and NOT that fact that they exist.

The ontological rules of grammar are harsh and unremitting ones, and when Heidegger in his search for the meaning of Being is confronted with the inexorable inflexibility of its unassailable logicality and rationality he is forced into the academic equivalent of the fairground mountebank and cheap chicanery.

Let us look at some examples that occur as Heidegger tries to grapple with the entailment of a reified 'Being' and is unable to and circumvent the logical barrier of the 'is' and the 'be' word.

Consider the following verbs:

He played - he plays, or he is playing.

It flew - it flies, or it is flying.

She was - she is, (or she is being.)

Note that we can only enter into a discussion of the nature and meaning of 'playing' if we utilise the concept of a player or players. So too, we may only talk about the concept of flying on the basis of a flyer - a bird, a kite or a snowflake.

Heidegger to his chagrin rapidly realises that he cannot proceed with an investigation of  Being unless he has a 'be-er,' or an 'is-er,' so he is forced to make one up - to create an ersatz exemplar of Dasein.  "Being there in the form of what - and  doing what?" We ask. Being a doctor? Being a dentist? Being a Nazi?

Why is this, and how does Heidegger reconcile this most unprofessional and illogical philosophical device with his standing as a respected member of the German academic establishment?

It is simple - he ruthlessly rejects the logicality of the scientific method. He ignores the diachronic bounty of human developmental and historical experience and understanding of the nature of being someone or something as expressed in the linguistic mechanisms of the consciousness.

"The first philosophical step in an understanding of the problem of being," he says, "consists in avoiding the mython tina diegeisthai - in not telling a story - i. e., in not detailing beings as beings by tracing them back to their origins - to another being as if Being had a character of a possible being."

In other words says Heidegger, forget about your mother and father - how you got here - your genetic history and the known science of your genesis - forget that the small stone in your hand was hacked from a larger rock in that quarry in the woods - Being is to be found in the "there is," [es gibt.]

So how does Heidegger get around this linguistic impasse - it is easy - this is the point when Heidegger makes his historic decision to invent a 'quasi-existential be-er and an 'is-er' all of his own - he calls his mythic gerundial construct 'Dasein' - a manufactured circuitous linguistic tautology based on the fact that in German the term 'Dasein' can mean both 'being there' and 'existence' depending upon the context.

He simply uses the three cup trick of Dasein, for Dasein with its contrived pleonastic illegality can help thwart the impenetrable verbal logic of the consciousness in its dealing with actuality.

In answer to critics who accuse him of circuitry, he arrogantly dismisses them as sterile because they hinder penetration into the field of 'ontological investigation.'

Just like the fairground trick, It is a fait accompli unnoticed by the bemused observers - the three cups of rhetoric, sophistry and illogicality whiz around so fast that the readers mind is in a whirl. A moment later the forged Daseinic key of philosophical falsity lies on the table before their very eyes accepted by all as a genuine fairground prize.

It is upon this false ground and the passive acceptance of this fantastical world of Dasein that the false logos bifurcates into what becomes the complicated tautological fantasy-universe of existentialism with its plenitude of phantasmagorial and risible verbiage that it drags in its preposterous train.

This, FALSEIN (Falsely Attributed Linguistic Simile Inserted Non-legally,) perhaps forms the same function as faith does in religious dogma - for the believer it provides a passkey or actuator to gain entry, to construct and explore exciting antonymous dimensions of the human consciousness.

We who remain on the outside of these fantasy worlds can at least take some gratification in our understanding of how the trick is accomplished - most of us cannot point to the right cup, but we understand roughly how the trick works in its amazing simplicity.

It is human experiential and existential modality that is the hidden secret of the is-word and the being-word, and the interval between any two chronological nodes that you care to select circumscribes your experience of being or actuality for that historical period. For me, I can select a slice of my life between 2pm and 4pm this afternoon, you on the other hand are free to contemplate the interval between January the 14th 1963 and September the 4th 2042, which may be the total span of your portion of being human - the complete duration of your BEING and your TIME.

Did the cavemen perform his manipulation? Probably not, but think about this for a moment. How advanced did man have to be to put a shell of some kind on top of a pebble and then, to the amazement of his or her child, make that pebble disappear? How long did it take a fairly dexterous member of a Pharaoh's court to "master" a routine using multiple cups and balls (and perhaps a large piece of fruit for the finale), and therefore gather additional favour and trust from his king? Probably not at all... and for good reasons. No fancy gimmicks or gadgetry are needed. All the magician needs is a good imagination, the ability to "weave" a routine into a story and the skills that come from practice, and as for Heidegger - he was probably the biggest practiser of ontological trickery in the history of philosophy.