David Hume 1711 - 1776

Srinivasan Karpagam:

I think its rather sad that none of Baeumler's works in English can be found; hopefully in time, this situation too will improve. His outlook interests me.

Are you aware of this work? -

http://www.vedamsbooks.com/34694.htm

GCM:

Vedams said there were no entries for Baeumler. Amazon. com gave numerous German titles under many different first names.

Srinivasan Karpagam:

How do you stand on the theory of the Eternal Recurrence?

GCM:

In Nietzsche, it operates as accepting what cannot be accepted. I get the idea from ECCE HOMO this specifically means coming to terms with what he considers betrayal by the closest person to him. This is a specific application that, however, throughout Nietzsche if quite broad and Heidegger's tack that it basically applies to accepting the reality of nihilism is to be found in THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA, just not as clearly. Accepting the theory, which is really more like a pycho-therupeutic technique, a plan of action as going through with what you must do in order to 'survive,' -- in nihilism why survive? -- which means therefore the technique involves the moral imperative, "You are going to triumph no matter what!" Some concentration camp survivors thought that way. The real results were equivocal. The strictest and most seeming necessary moral imperatives always find a straining point where they break down in extreme cases. Nietzsche's attempt to resolve his feelings about his sister

(who replaced his indifferent, unemotional mother when his father died) could not resolve because the only person he deeply loved he also deeply hated. I discuss this more in the NECESSITY FOR DEBATE. (This sounds pompous and self-important). As to torture and the camps, I discuss these in HEIDEGGER AND THE BODY. Terrance de Pres' THE SURVIVOR is a MOST important text. Cynthia Ozick's analysis of Primo Levi's suicide also (the anger that 'everyone' was indifferent to the holocaust, that so many Nazi criminals were getting away with it, finally overwhelmed him after many years of trying to maintain a psychological balance to survive, and he threw himself from the top floor of his appartment house. The concentration camp is the same as random, meaningless torture. Two more notes on Levi, in his book of collected poems, there is a very strange elegy about Pliny the Elder going straight to Pompeii to observe the eruption which he thinks is beautiful. Historically, he dies. The poem in its context with the poem before it, and maybe one after also, makes it seem pretty explicite somehow the "ASHES" [title of poem I think] of Pompeii and Auschwitz are - somehow - similar. Two, there was a Jewish Belgian resistance fighter by the name of Jean Amery who was caught and tortured by the Nazi's but survived the camps. He committed suicide in the 1990s. He somewhere made the comment that the survivors lived the rest of their lives with horrible nightmares every night (I have been assured that this is not true) whereas people like Adolf Eichmann and the camp guards always had "safe and restfull sleep." The victims were punished till death whereas the guilty, unless they were caught ["Why are you doing this to me? I was just following orders!"], got off 'scot free'. [Jud Evans, where did that expression come from?]) There is also a book by a Elizabeth . . . . ? published by Oxford that goes into the precise effects of structured torture (sometimes structured deliberately by the torturer to discover the "end point" of the process) that result in the dissolve of personality, language, sensory connection (a ideational process that identifies the definition of a specific sense impression), world, and with the last the identification by the tortured of the torturer as God. There is also a very good book on eternal recurrence by one of Heidegger's students, Karl Lowith. You might join and check out the files of two yahoo groups, David Hume Implications and Neoplatonism Damascius. I will also send you a letter which relates eternal recurrence to the nihilistic experience everyday is essentially the same day since importance no longer exists.

****For the ART OF MEMORY GROUP**** This is a model of the deconstruction of mind/memory quite literal and real. It, in reverse, seems to follow the overall shape of the fiction of David Hume's 'moderate skepticism.' Pyrronistic Skeptism by itself would lead to the same "end point" as structured torture. If "sense knowledge" was the ONLY real knowledge (and, in a sense, it is), then it would by necessary definition be wordless knowledge since the fictional 'knowledge' conveyed by words would, if knowledge at all, be non-experiential knowledge. Language is firmly grounded in and purely created by the "vulgar understanding" of tradition, custom, and common sense. The only point of connection between words and experience is the experience of the word purely as sound where, once you supply context to understand the word, it is no longer experience but "idea." The essential problem is, how are words and experience really connected? ESSENTIALLY AS SOON AS EXPERIENCE BECOMES< AS THE INSTANT OF EXPERIENCE PASSES INTO MEMORY A MEMORY, IT BECOMES AN IDEA DEFINED BY WHAT YOU HAVE REVIOUSLY DEFINED AS "COMPARABLE EXPERIENCES. But on what grounds do you "COMPARE" the non-existent substance of memory with the existence of the experience that has immediately PASSED? You are comparing two wholly unlike 'things.' We get into great difficulties with language here because it is grounded upon the absolutely non-linguistic. Not only does a stone not speak or think (but are you sure?) but all you say about a specific rock right in your hand right now is "words, words, words . . ." including its identity as A rock, THIS rock, instead of a momentary hard pile of dust or (endless examples . . . ). The more I examine the issue the more absolutely identical are the concepts "mind," "memory," and "imagination." None of the three can work an instant without the full participation of the other two and therefore can never be meaningfully separated. So that the ART OF MEMORY is simply the "ART OF THINKING CREATIVELY."

Srinivasan Karpagam:

P. S. Just finished Charles Bambach's Heidegger's Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism and the Greeks - most interesting.

GCM:

Tell me about the Greeks. Have you read Heidegger's RECTOR'S SPEECH and its quote from Plato?

'Sincerely'

Gary. C. Moore