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My attitude towards Bohr somewhat shocks
people. My intolerance towards Martin Heidegger
is even more strident. Why is this? I will
try to explain. But first a quotation from
Roland Barthes:
"In his story Sarrasine, Balzac, describing
a castrato disguised as a woman, writes the
following sentence:
"This was woman herself, with her sudden
fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive
worries, her impetuous boldness, her fussings,
and her delicious sensibility."
Who is speaking thus? Is it the hero
of the
story bent on remaining ignorant of
the castrato
hidden beneath the woman? Is it Balzac
the
individual, furnished by his personal
experience
with a philosophy of Woman? Is it Balzac
the author professing ‘literary’ ideas
on
femininity? Is it universal wisdom?
Romantic
psychology? We shall never know, for
the
good reason that writing is the destruction
of every voice, of every point of origin.
Writing is that neutral, composite,
oblique
space where our subject slips away,
the negative
where all identity is lost, starting
with
the very identity of the body writing."[1] (Barthes.1977)
On the contrary, for me, writing is
not that
neutral, composite, oblique space where
our
authorial subject slips away, because
such
a duality conflicts with my ontological
commitment
in which ideas (or *memes* to give
them their
modern label) do not exist and such
an author-and-his-output
disconnect never takes place. There
is no
death of the author, I do not allow
the writing
to lose its origin which is the neuro-existential
modality of the writer. The enemies
of reason
are Hitler and Hitlerites, Heidegger
and
Heideggerians - not Hitlerism or Heideggerianism
which is just a non-existent abstraction.
For me there is the ideating Heidegger,
the
conceptualising Bohr, the compositorial
Wagner
- there is no such thing as the abstractions
of evil and virtuousness inhabiting
some
memetic ether, much as unheard wandering
radio-waves await communicative redemption
and release via some receiver/listener.
Only
evil or righteous men exist, or men
like
most of us, who are to be found in
subtle
kaleidoscopic combinations of good
and bad
existing in various gradients of benignity
and immorality as seen relativistically
against
the moral touchstones of their societal
opinion.
The meme is characterised as a cultural
unit
(an idea or value or pattern of behavior)
that is passed from one person to another
by non-genetic means (as by imitation);
via
personal contact, education, books,
the media.
If such retailed memes are the cultural
counterpart
of genes, does this mean that it is
possible
for the *ideas* of Heidegger, or Bohr
or
even Wagner to become post-modernistically
detached from the brainmeat of the
original
thinkers, to unhook themselves in some
viral-like
process of metaphysical metastasis
and disperse
like semantically imprinted dandelion
seeds
to be blown to the brains of others,
where
they put down neurological roots of
their
own wherever the wind listeth?
No, for me ideas and memes (musical memes
included) are incorporeal abstractions, their
is no death of the author or the composer
in the sense of a forgetfulness of the originator,
for ideas and memes are encoded descriptions
of the neurological-existential modes of
the human originator at the time the neurally
active author converted it to alphabetic
or musical symbols. Such symbols are not
material entities like germs or viruses which
spread by inhalation and gain entrance to
other hosts via bodily fluids, they are mimicked
neurological behaviours based upon the decoded
and copied existential modes of their antecedent
human causal objects accessed by symbolic
codes (language) . Thus it is not the *ideas*
or *memes* of people like Hitler, Mother
Teresa or Einstein that *live on,* for such
things have no worldly substance, it is the indoctrinated-human-replacements - the human behavioural mimickers or fellow-travelling ideators (good or bad) that exist.
In the sense that *ideas* are the existential
modes of the original abstracting human abstractionists
and their mirror-like mimickers, ad hominem
ceases to be seen in the traditional sense
of being an appeal to personal properties rather than
to fact or reason, but rather that it becomes logical and
reasonable to attack the factual flesh and blood
ideating man rather than dissipate one's
time and waste one's argumentative ammunition
on the nebulous targets of non-existent ideas. As people have often said:
*Why attack religion - when it does
not exist?*
It is not the holocaust that existed - it
was the holocausters and the ones that looked
the other way.
So for me a consideration of the Ring Cycle, Being and Time or The Born-Einstein Letters is an experiential interplay of opposing
emotional and analytic elements. In the case
of Wagner, it is both an enjoyment of the
undoubted grandeur and creative complexity
of the music, juxtaposed with picking the
nationalistic hairs from my teeth which are
to be found in much of the presciently sinister
symbolism of his harmonic alphabet soup,
which often sounds like the overture to the
Grand Opera of Nazism (which is precisely the reason that Hitler
and his followers worshipped Wagner’s music.)
Maybe, if I had never attended or seen his
operas, maybe if I had never read his life-story
and his relationship with Nietzsche, perhaps
if the brass dominated portentousness and
religio-mystic leit-motivs and other re-occurring
dissonant phrases of primitive occultism
had gone over my head, if I was unaware of
his anti-Semitism and the significance and
relation of the Germanic myths to the obscenity
of notions of Arisch ubermenschaft, the forest symbolism, the emotive feelings
aroused and obtruded by the post-Versailles
Götterdämmerung, etc. Maybe I would just
sit back and enjoy the show?
In a similar way the textual unravelling
of the Heideggerian tangle of teutonic
tripe
reveals anti-Semitic toxins concealed
in
his conceptual Chinese cookies. And
so it
is that I watch in wonderment at Bohr's
sudden,
jaw-dropping change of gear in his
vehicle
of verisimilitude as he crashes from
the
synchromesh of commonsense and scientifically-toothed
engagement to the intermeshed cogwheels
of
thaumaturgic asynchronic-overdrive,
just
as he is negotiating the most dangerous
gaps
of conceptual credibility and crashes
over
the cliff to land on the rocks of reification
below.
References.
[1] Barthes. Roland. Image, Music, Text, 1977.
/barthes06.htm
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