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*Being*

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The
Ontological Difference.
Or
An Existentialist  Play on Words




A Comedy of The Third Reich 
  by
Martin (Heil der Fuhrer) Heidegger

(Nazi Party Membership Card Number: 312589)



Starring
Sebastiania Snide
as


(Hannah (Candle in-the-Window) Arendt


and featuring

The Captivating



Frau Elfride (Elefantarsch) Heidegger

As the Lovely 'Daseina'
*Being There*  as a Nazi  (in a big way)

'Dear Patron of the Existentialist Theater of the Absurd:

The title of this piece does not refer to, or insinuate that anyone who reads this is a 'dummy,' but is meant as an allusion to those ubiquitous introductory yellow books to be found on the shelves of most bookshops – 'Windows for Dummies' or 'Excel for Dummies' etc. Whereas those worthy yellow books are targeted to further an understanding of the computer and other matters, this piece addresses the equally fascinating area of linguistic semiotics and how Heidegger's misunderstanding of a certain vital component of this coding led him in such a disastrous direction.

We must however face up to the sad fact that there exist in western society at large, and in academia in particular, many people in positions of some influence and  power, who, in  the word's of Lewis Carroll's Red Queen, could believe: "as many as six impossible things before breakfast time , " and in order to be able to combat this cognitive cancer in our society we must make an effort to understand this transcendentalist drivel in order to oppose it. The publishers of the: 'For Dummies...' books are in no way connected with this posting, for [as yet] there is no book with the title 'Dasein for Dummies. '

*Existence* or *Being* can never be a predicate – never a property or the existential mode of an entity's presence. *Existence* or *Being* is the Gesamtsumme (sum total) or aggregate or unitisation of the multiplicity of uncountable trillions of miscellaneous infinite existential modalities of entities. The clavis universalis to an understanding of existence is an understanding of the *attributive of modality*  word *BE* in its many conjugational guises. (Was, were, is, am, are, being, etc.)

The Dasein mechanism is a grammatical and semantic trick to allow existence or BEING to become a predicate.

Annabelle is the sum of her total existential agglomerate, and the total of the existential modalities of that agglomerate inevitably points to the fact that: "Annabelle is Annabelle, " and that Annabelle is the total sum of Annabelle's' existence, and Annabelle's existence is Annabelle. Put another way: Annabelle = the sum of her total existential modalities, and the sum of her total existential modalities = Annabelle. (Total existential modalities = Gesamtsumme.)

Heidegger attempts to drive in a wedge and distinguish a dichotomy or dualism between the named 'ontic' entity, (which he characterises wrongly as: "anything that is") and the sum of its existential modalities that is referenced by its name. The name 'Annabelle' is merely a referential identifier for that bundle of infinite existential modalities that could never be communicated by way of modalic enumeration, and it is this undisclosed raft of modalic information mass, or modalic Gesamtsumme - this infinite dimension of concealed existential essivity that the name Annabelle represents.

Like most other things regarding aspects of 'BE' Heidegger failed to detect that the words 'IS' and 'BE' and 'BEING' are ontological individuation or ontological secenators which allow us to separate and tease out individual or multiple existential modalities prized from the matrix of the Gesamtsumme.

In theory a sentence containing a variety of existential modalities of an entity could be strung out until the fingers of the typist or typists were bloodied, and even if the ribbonlike sentence length was taken up and expanded in a sort of typographical chronological relay-race with replaceable teams of typists typing their lives away into the distant future, even to the end of time, it would never record a fraction of the existential modalities that comprises the Gesamtsumme of Annabelle. Hence" Annabelle is Annabelle, " for the Gesamtsumme.

But "Annabelle is beautiful" presents an individual characterisation of a particular existential modality of hers. This ontological individuation is carried out in most European languages in the form of the well known paradigm of: Subject Verb Predicate or some other such combination, and although certain languages [German for example] display variant systematic word-order arrangements and inflected forms of the key words, these variants are easily explained by any trained linguist or grammarian.

There are defined living creatures that have a certain awareness of the various existential modalities that befall them. Even the most primitive organism will react immediately to the existential modality of pain or hunger or the desire to mate, and within the animal kingdom there is a whole hierarchy of existential modalities of awareness or elementary or undifferentiated consciousness. Not being a biologist I will not hazard a guess as to which of the organisms lie at the bottom end of this hierarchy of individuated modalic experience, but I have no such doubts as to which species inhabits the top rung on this scaling ladder of perception – it is human beings themselves.

The Instauration of Dasein.
It is very important for students of Heidegger to enquire: "Why did he choose this name? " Our first reaction is that Heidegger, being a German speaker was perhaps forced to use this construction because of some hidden grammatical obligation imposed upon him by the contingencies of German grammar? Next we wonder why if he was anxious to universalise the human condition with a neutral name for his interlocution with being, that he did not create a name along the lines of the one created by John Bunyan in his masterpiece: "The Pilgrim's Progress. ' After all he could, had he so chosen have employed the German word for 'Everyman' [Jedermann] or, failing that, he might well have chosen 'somebody' [Jemand] or 'anybody'' [Irgendjemand?]

Why on earth did he reject all these pronouns and insist on naming his protagonist not with a form of noun or pronoun but a gerundial construction 'Das-sein' (being there) which is the continuous present form of the word which was his nemesis – 'BE – IS – Being? What grammatical skullduggery is afoot? Why when he was dealing with words which he had already admitted in writing that he didn't understand, (he never discovered what IS meant and admitted getting the meanings of being confused) did he go ahead and play around with the 3rd-person continuous tense version of the BE word (being,) even going to the extent of wrapping it up with the locative 'there' word to form a fake 'noun' which he called Dasein?

The answer is simple, Heidegger gambolled [correctly] that after a while the real underlying meaning of the 3rd-person continuous present fragment – 'being there' or 'being in the world' as he later lengthened it to, would be forgotten by the readers of 'Being and Time, ' and it would be accepted into his philosophical lexicon as a fully fledged noun, which is the way he boldly treats it in his writings. Thus he smuggled 'IS' and 'Being' into his physical vocabulary in the form of a noun in order to avoid the existential duality that the word 'Being' imposes' if it is bereft of existential modality or modification. Dasein poses as a noun – as an entity which as a noun might be expected to have an existence – but it is an illusion, for it is no more than a BE word in drag – a 3rd-person conjugation continuous *being* word in sheep's clothing. It must be remembered therefore that when he uses the word Dasein, he is using it to substantiate or instantiate the verb being and thus when he talks of the *being of Dasein* he is really saying the 'being of being. ' {Compare the 'dancing of dancing.*]

The 'being in the world' (*dasein* or the 3rd-person continuous present manoeuvre) may assist Heidegger to escape from the ambuscade of his own somewhat bizarrely named 'Ontological Difference, ' but of course he remains as dependent as he ever was on the BE mechanism. Heidegger's employment of the Daseinic device as a disclosive mechanism with which to reveal 'being' is a turkey, for it is only those aspects of the Gesamtsumme which are observed visually, [either actually or representationally] or singled out by a speaker or writer for exposure by the semiotic communication of language through the factorisation of the modal processant [is, are or being etc] which are available to initiate disclosure.

It is only with our own physical senses and with the help of BE that we can lift the ontological curtain and glimpse a selected, occasional, ephemeral coup d'oeil of the existential singleton that lies beneath. The Daseinic 3rd-person continuous completely ignores this multitudinous seething molecular mass of existential modalities that wriggle and writhe upon and beneath the surfaces of the entities it purports to address. What few existential modalities it does manage to strip away and expose with the help of BE, it packages and labels as exhibiting the 'Being' of the entity in question. The answer of course is that the existence of the existing entity IS the entity in the first place, and its existing cannot be separated out from its material presence. Thus the farcicality of Heidegger's 'Ontological difference.

For some strange reason Heidegger never understood the critical momentousness of the inclusion and operation in language of the semantic mechanism (BE) which provides a clear syntactical dichotomy between the existence of the singular conglomerate subject entity itself, (from which it can be said that the whole infinite ever-changing throng of existential modalities is constructed,) as opposed to the communication of individuate instances of modalic or stative activity as attributed by the BE mechanism.

Heidegger's casuistical 'ontic and ontological' therefore is one and the same thing – two sides of the same dud coin. Cast in Heideggerian terms: The being of the entity is the entity, and the entity is the sum its own being. To illustrate this consider the following: An apple = the in-toto sum of its existential modalities.

This can be verified in the sentence: "An apple exists as an apple. " Who would argue that there is a difference between the communicative meaning of the the word-sign we use for the denotatum of the word 'apple' - the object towards which the sign points? But the entity and the in-toto modalities that comprise the entity are not separate of different things - they are the same thing, the only difference involved is the human descriptive methodologies.

In the same way, nobody would contend that there is a difference between what it exists as, and an apple - would they? When we decide to single out a specific existential modality of an apple however, we are forced to employ a mechanism, which makes it perfectly clear that it is not the simple presence of the apple that is being addressed, but one of its existential modalities. That mechanism is the BE mechanism. Hence: The apple is red. " So we can see that whilst a specific existential characteristic of the apple has been disclosed, the infinite multitudinous modalic makeup of the apple, which is the apple, remains undisclosed.

Heidegger was so confused that he believed that the being of an apple was in someway separate or different from the apple itself - and for him whilst the apple itself was an 'ontic' entity, the phenomenological fact of its cosmic presence was a separate 'ontological' physicality he called by the mysterious name 'Being. ' There is no difference at all between Heidegger's ontic and ontological, the name of an entity is no more than a convenient specified epithet for the purpose of both individuating it from other entities, and substituting a simple name for the plethora of infinite and undisclosed and un-disclosive existential modalities which form the entity itself.

Aristotle in his 'Categories' classifies all existential modalities into ten ultimate types, and in the 'Topics' introduces the as different kinds of predication that can be predicated of subjects. AITism claims that there is only ONE category to which all existential modality 'belongs' and that category is named with the name of the entity itself. Thus the Gesamtsumme of Annabelle's existential modalities is Annabelle, and Annabelle is the Gesamtsumme of Annabelle's existential modalities

"Existence is the link of a being as one with itself as a multiplication. " Schelling. Naturphilosophie 1801.

Jud Evans.