 You will remember perhaps that I am generally anti-Aristotelian? In addition to that I hold that there is only matter/energy in the cosmos - matter in the form of energy and particles and energy in the form of matter and that even things like thought is matter/energy produced by synapsal activity which is stored in the mind/brain as energy matter.
In my universe there is nothing metaphysical - nothing above or beyond the physical. For me even the word 'metaphysics' is a misnomer. Discussing problems of morality and ethics as I see it is not a metaphysical discourse but rather a dialogue concerning the ins and outs of consensual or inadmissable social behaviour within or without the framework of rules if they are or are not recognised or considered necessary.
Even a discussion on the origins of the universe is to me not a metaphysical discussion. Having read and studied comparative religion, noticed the developmental similarities and borrowings - the constant updating of doctrine and abandonment of shibboleths and the adaptation of new ones to keep up with science etc, I have arrived at a satisfactory conclusion. In my universe there is nothing supra-natural about existence, and furthermore nominalistically 'existence' doesn't even exist.
The purely physical unfolding of events involved in objects and organisms changes gradually from a simple to a more complex level and this ontogenesis is not the work of an omnipotent *Being*. Now I know I haven't been asked to explain my position about these things - I'm just voluntarily stripping away my own surrounding tanglewood and setting out my stall before saying a few things about Heidegger and Sartre and the way they attempted to interpret the world in which they found themselves and the way they set about describing it to others like you and me.
Before stating my position about the non-predicational nature of *Being* and the way that Heidegger confused sequential existence with a gerundial grammatical construct, [Dasein] I would like to say a few things about existentialism in general. To my mind, (and I don't want to sound offensive to anybody,) most of what is propounded by existentialists can be found in the plethora of mass-market cheap paperbacks on the shelves of everybody's local bookstore. Of course I'm not suggesting that the whole body of Heidegger's philosophy is encapsulated in one particular volume, but rather that a dredging and trawling of the various meretricious 'Do-it-Yourself Psychology,' and 'Know Your Own Mind,' and 'The Way to a Better You,' books cover all of the subjects addressed by Heidegger and Sartre and company.
Because these books are written for a generally non-academic market, they are usually a lot more easily understood, and are not chivvied by a mass of obfusticatory verbiage and extraneous classical references and needless Germanisms. There is one subject that they don't usually cover, and that is an investigation of the nature of existence itself. There are however lots of books on *How Your Brain Works* - *The Nature of Conciousness, * etc which do touch on this subject.
For me all the terminology and neologisms of the existentialists are jejune - I use the word jejune deliberately not through a wish to offend, but because it was my experience that the questions posed in the existentialist genre are those that usually occur to teenagers as they first begin to examine their surroundings and the interrelationships with the people that share this adolescent milieu.
For me and my scruffy mates in the streets of Liverpool in our teenage years - although we had never heard of existentialism - the ideas of existentialism - the hesitant fumblings and gropings for understanding of the world as it was unfolding were part of our 'rites of passage,' a process that we all had to go through to reach an understanding of who we were, and what the world was, and the ways in which other people thought the way we did - or did not.
Our thinking wasn't structured in any academic way - there was no body of study that we referred to or quoted from - we were basically experientialist street Arabs - poor children in donated rags running around way after our bedtime finding out about life. In our own rough English regional dialect we discussed our own isolation - we shared the wonder of discovering new objects - objects we had never seen before - the only time in one's life when one experiences the true phenomenological occurrence - when there is no need to imagine oneself into a situation where the object has no provenance or developmental history - because for you at that age - it simply hasn't one.
Heidegger was dreadfully wrong as usual - for we discussed the inescapability of death even at that age. We gazed at the faces of our dead relatives in open coffins and tried to come to terms with mortality. We found it difficult to put into words - like most working-class people we were to a large extent inarticulate. It is only now in old age that I realise that one of the greatest mistakes of the educated, particularly the academic establishment, is to interpret the inarticulacy of the uneducated as evidence of a lesser intelligence. Because it is such an important truth - I will repeat that again -
"One of the greatest mistakes of the educated, particularly the academic establishment, is to interpret the inarticulacy of the uneducated as evidence of a lesser intelligence."
Heidegger tells us that the question of the inevitability of death and the subject of *Being* is not addressed in the minds of ordinary people - this is utter rubbish. Heidegger goes on to say that the philosophical tradition has ignored the question of *Being* since the Greeks, and that there is a huge historical gap in ontological enquiry since those times. This also is utter rubbish, for Aquinas and other scholastics dealt with the subject extensively from a Christian perspective. As children we were fearful of Catholics. They had these strange beliefs and if you went to St Francis de Sales church with them, you would see these horrible statues and pictures of a man with a beard with all his chest opened so his bleeding heart was exposed. It was all very frightening and the whole atmosphere was spooky. It's a bit like you think about vampires nowadays. It was all mystical, dimly lit and frightening.
Due to the viciousness of the Medievalist church, a sensible discussion of the nature of *Being* was too dangerous a subject for most, and a freethinker could end up tied to a post surrounded by piles of kindling wood. One would have hoped that in view of Heidegger's Jesuitical training he would have been aware of these ignorant and igneous obstacles to philosophical enquiry - but then again, perhaps his black robed tutors failed to mention the leading part played in the barbaric Auto de Fe spectacles by their gothic fraternal forerunners - soon to be reenacted by Heidegger's Nazi goons.
I'd have thought that humanity has been considering the question of **Being** and **being*s* pretty seriously for the last two thousand years, at least as far as Christianity is concerned, and for longer if we take into consideration the older religions that predate the birth of Christ - plus the religions that have emerged since Jesus. If as Christians we accept that God is responsible for **Being** and **Being*s, * why do we need to question the nature of **Being*? * As a Christian, why did Heidegger need to pursue the enquiry? Why did Heidegger create 'Dasein' instead of pursuing his colloquy with God through prayer and contemplation like his Jesuit teachers and ask his questions directly to the creator of **being*s* and **Being*ness? *
Gary was quite right when he said that: "You are not only thrown into the world ready made, you are the perception of just a only that world, just the perception of it spread out on the wide screen with nothing discernibly yours, that's all, except MAYBE a teasing little inkling of desiring an identity." And you were quite right to say: "Yikes!" Gary goes on to say that:
Being-in-the-world* is in one sense '*being* the world,' while in an even more real sense *being* absolutely no body in that world. You have no identity, ergo no essence. You are 'essentially' just a thing alongside all the other totally useless things in the world whose importance derives only from what the 'They' selves says about them. And that is called "common sense."
Yes, that's how it was for me and probably for you if you think back to your early childhood. We kids soon found out about things like loneliness, depression, exultation, ennui, and most of all political reality and power. Yes, the really irritating thing about Heidegger is that when in an effort to understand what he's getting at, one rummages around in the slippery, wriggling mass of epistemological entrails and gallimaufrien giblets of his writings, one realises that he is addressing concepts and concerns that exercised one's mind during the most basic developmental stage of ones existence. He just puts things in an extraordinary complicated way - things that my old teenage pals and I would discuss and dispense with using our limited scouse, (Liverpool,) vernacular - that is if you removed the Greek and Latin quotations and rather pathetic German neologisms.
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