Subject: Desire ARIOSTO to Mr. Gary. C. Moore, April 20, 2000

May I ask you a question?

You wrote:

1)"Ontologically you are figuratively 'cut off' from everybody else, except you are alone with your death. And that true partner provides you with your highest desire."

2)"... art is never at the "foremost of reality"

3) and desire is fundamentally magical not real."

4) You were saying that ultimately each one of us is responsible for ourselves and not others, correct me if I am wrong please, this seems to imply that since there is no external standard of value by which to make a decision on a future course of action; that attentiveness to the solid reality of everydayness is a sort of idleness and not-doing where we are cut off from external obligations, consensus, recognized directions and admitted truth is it not?

5) And this seems to me would be a release from the "burden of the universe" where desire suffices to itself and would you not describe it as intensity of life where there is "propensity to and not to" that is also a perpetual opening that aspires to no particular satisfaction and is sobriety that is lucid yet not knowing an ultimate joy?

A profound sense of simplicity, no?

GARY C MOORE:

Hi Ariosto! Glad to hear from you again! You are always appreciated. I am at my stupidest right at the moment and will be stumbling over my own feet and shouldn't be writing. But in my heart this is what I live for. So I can't resist. I am NOT a practical man. 'Phronesis' only serves the purpose of 'theoria'. That sounds stupid but I think it says something. But now I have a triple perked cup of coffee.

1) I use the word "cut-off" badly because that implies a time of original unity like Aristophanes' hermaphrodite. What Heidegger describes in BEING AND TIME as dasein has both, on the one hand, an inheritance of tradition in pre-ontological understanding and a sense of cozy togetherness in the everyday 'They' self it shares in being-with, while, on the other hand, it also has what I call the solipsistic aporia that is "always already" in place, i.e., the obvious, you cannot know in any possible fashion not only what is going on in other people intellectually, emotionally, or any other way, but that being 'another person', even if you, for purely practical reasons, assume similar workings goes on within them as goes on within you, is a whole different realm of reality, i.e., "ontological". Different items may translate with some similarity from person to person, but the context of the Whole that makes sense of each and every item, emotion, sense, ability, etc. in your life is not translatable, not communicable in any way because it is a whole and because it is the experience of your 'self', its multifarious history, its mismatch of self-indulgent emotions that disregard everything else and need a rational mind to guide them (emotions just want: they have no 'how' or 'why': they are 'single-minded' and obsessed in and by themselves: which puts even my love of philosophy in suspicion doesn't it?), the irrevocable context of everyday reality you cannot get away from except by changing one 'everyday' for another kind of 'everyday' but which is still just yours, alone, and the future that also irrevocably pulls everything together of its own accord whether you like it or not of death which Heidegger makes a very explicit point that you cannot share in any way with any one. In fact, death is a primary aspect of the solipsistic aporia because your future denies you everything literally yet motivates you in the present to act in haste for the sake of a future that denies you everything.

2) If solid reality is the 'everyday' and the real self the 'They' self and these are the only things that endure reliably in your existence from moment to practical moment, then, literally, a place must be created for art and authenticity. In fact, "authentic art" and "artful authenticity" are clumsy redundancies.

3) On this one point, I fully and unequivocally support Sartre. Emotions are not the result of honest, logical decisions ever. They have a simple-minded, one-track life of their own and suffering the consequences of blindly giving in to them has no part in them. They are the quintessential "bad faith" in dasein because they demand that you've already made their decision for you when you haven't. But then you cannot even imagine life without emotions, or even being in any real sense detached from them. You at every moment THROWN into the turmoil, whether you realize it or not (after all 'to realize' is an intellectual function THAT IS ALWAYS MOMENTARY WHEREAS EMOTIONS ARE 'FOREVER'), and it would take an immensely powerful passion to fundamentally control them which would be a horrible contradiction would it not? It would be like Kirilov's becoming God by committing suicide.

4) 'Responsibility' is also, like emotion, a double-edged reality. Nietzsche says somewhere, and I wish I could remember where because he would say it so much better but that is impossible in this mental fog, that, I think, in the realization of the meaning of eternal recurrence you assume the responsibility of all existence. He does not say explicitly that is because it can only live through you, but I think it is clearly implicit in the understanding of eternal recurrence, i.e., only an 'I' can realize, and, although everyone calls themselves an 'I', the only 'I' I can ever know is me. That there is no memory of all history and science, etc., preserved in the race or libraries or computers but only in the absolutely single living 'I' with all its known deficiencies and faults and duplicities to self and others. In other words, when you, Ariosto die, the universe then has never existed -- doesn't go out, doesn't stop -- just: Thereby it all rests on your shoulders, all history, all memory, all science, philosophy, literature, etc. All. You. The death of you is the death of everything, and you are responsible for it. Is that not a burden you would like to be relieved off? But you can't. It stays regardless because it is the simple fact of 'everyday' solid reality. Like the emotions, reality says you belong to it and, like emotion, enforces its demand drastically. So the only way out is the devious imagination, the trickster Loki.

4a) There are plenty of external value systems, but that just the point: a value system, an ethics per se, is ontologically external to dasein. They are easy to choose. All your emotions are screaming for one -- or another -- or that one over there -- or the one you learned at your mother's knee -- or the one you learned from the back of your father's hand. So your emotions are soundly and thoroughly backed up by all sorts of memories. In fact, they are saying you have "always already" chosen them, and hesitation now is cowardice and disloyalty, and you don't want to be a coward and a traitor do you? In other words, your whole life backs you into a corner and only with utter ruthlessness can you make the ultimate decision, as Nietzsche said, that "Honesty is the only virtue". And then, left only with that pitiful tatter, does it then seem worthwhile when all these others offered you such riches, affluence, influence, power -- comfort and coziness, sex, love, pleasure? "Honesty" is utterly worthless. Agreed. But it is the only place the imagination can function.

4b) And in 'everydayness' you are not cut off from obligations at all, just the opposite. You have a thousand forces within your own soul telling you about your obligations to the real world. And it is real in every sense of the word. And, none the less, it is still, "You do this for the sake of that for the sake of this other thing for the sake of something else" ad infinitum (I'm in a daze, I hope I spelled that right) so yes, it is idle, just like a motor in park racing as fast as possible, and that's all there is to it.

5) That desire suffices unto itself, aye, there's the rub. Even the desire for authenticity is a desire, and desire is inherently "bad faith". But desire doesn't want to be 'bad', or rather, you and desire which are still irrevocably one, do not want to be dishonest, bad, fallen, just thrown like a piece of trash into the universal dustbin of history. The 'everyday'' and the 'They' self know they are incomplete, are not sufficient unto themselves. Maybe even the emotions 'know' that. That is what dasein fundamentally is: ontological incompleteness. Nothing is finished, yet no one has the foggiest idea what 'complete' would mean here. Because reality IS the everyday, because the self IS the 'They' self, because the fallen and thrown is the here and now and there is no other place for a "from" to come from. Yes, it is very simple. In the authentic state, dasein is perfectly free to choose from its infinite possibilities. But there is no one to tell it what to choose, not even itself.

Signed: FEVER (Gary, C. Moore.)