Gary Moore
Date: Sun, 17 Dec 2000

PART 1
First, an apology of sorts to those who may expect a reply to their letters and do not receive any: This is NOT done out of any animosity and most of the time not even out of disagreement. My primary problem is that I have approximately three hours to work on philosophy in the morning, no more, AND THAT IS ONLY IF EVERYTHING GOES WELL. Second, the next major problem is what to say. On some items I may even know generally what I want to reply. However, within that time limit I specified, my mind works only on a single narrow track which is usually single mindedly working on the NECESSITY FOR DEBATE. There is a long list of people I have inadvertently offended. Andrea Susan Wheeler, Jud, and Randy Zeitman top the list because they have given so much and I have returned so little. Sometimes I start writing a reply as I did to Andrea and realize that what I am saying is incredibly stupid, and that I have not seriously thought through several of the problems she has presented me with. With Jud, once I start writing I cannot stop and the morning has gone. With Randy Zeitman, my mind almost clicks into work but not quite. And I have certainly not forgotten Stuart Elden, no, not at all. TOPOS is becoming very important to me right now, also in relation to Aristotle. However, I have forgotten others. So be patient, and if you feel the need, simply repeat your request. I refuse to write unless I at least 'feel' I know what I am talking about, whether that is in fact true or not. Sometimes though, I simply do not understand at all from the bottom up what the writer is literally doing. To be frank, I neither comprehend nor sympathize with the postmodernist style of 'philosophy'. Though I know I miss many interesting points because of this, I feel their path is FUNDAMENTALLY A COMITTMENT TO EVASION, and that the political and aesthetic stance many postmodernists take can only be maintained by that evasion. Yet I learned long ago when something SEEMS to be garble and contradictory, that somewhere down the line I have not grasped what their basic premises are - OR - I have not fully understood my own. Which is what this letter is essentially about.

In THE NECESSITY FOR DEBATE, I severely criticize Hubert L. Dreyfus in his paper "Could anything be more Intelligible than Everyday Intelligibility: Reinterpreting Division I of BEING AND TIME in the light of Division II" that is available at his web site. I feel extremely uneasy with this because, though I still feel my remarks, in my context, are correct, Dreyfus not only has with brilliant clarity defined exactly what the problem was BUT ALSO SEEMS ALL TOO OBVIOUSLY TO FALL INTO A VERY SIMPLE 'BLUNDER'. If one perfectly understands the background of a situation and generally how all the parts fit together, then proceeds to ignore what seems to be an all too obvious objection to their conclusion, either 1) they have a tremendous blind spot or 2) I HAVE THE BLIND SPOT as to what they are ultimately getting at. Dreyfus' points would seem to be trivial in some respects except he also has a clear and profound understanding of certain points in Heidegger. This is something I need to resolve now before proceeding on with THE NECESSITY FOR DEBATE because it involves what I consider a premise that seems obviously true to me.

This involves the nature of the "subject" and the nature of "humanism". In Dreyfus's paper mentioned above, he is discussing the expertise of the PHRONEMOS, essentially the 'prudent' guide to other peoples' affairs as planer or leader who sees more clearly than they in what direction they should go. As the PHRONEMOS accumulates experience and wisdom, his conclusions become more and more detached from a thought process of cause and effect relation guided by conscious intent to be come in one sense 'automatically' right without explanatory justification as in the perfect flow of thought and experience without objectivization that comes up with an answer the PHRONEMOS 'knows' or rather feels is right though unable to explain it to others, and that others must take on faith is the correct way to do things until later they find out from their own experience that it makes practical and logical sense AFTER they have worked it all out in practice. The PHRONEMOS can only do this out of his own resolve, out of what he knows and FEELS is correct, disregarding all rules and authorities. What the PHRONEMOS concludes itself is not authoritative, but is only one out of possibly many correct solutions. This is an important point because the solution to the problem considered did not come about by a conscious chain of reasoning. One main point his that the PHRONEMOS is free to depart from the main line of cultural heritage and consider what Dreyfus calls "marginal practices". It would seem logical to me at this point to consider the PHRONEMOS is totally detached in his decision making from all norms elsewise he is not free to consider all options, i. e., "marginal practices". Dreyfus reinforces my conclusion with, "In anticipatory resoluteness, anxiety in the face of death has freed Dasein from taking for granted the agreed-upon current cultural issues" (pg. 18). Here Dreyfus actually has gone beyond in part from the sphere of the practical, 'prudent' PHRONEMOS, and concludes: "Dasein can then act in such a way as to take over or repeat the marginal practices in a new way and thus show a form of life in which that marginal practice has become central and the central practices have become marginal. Such an innovator has become so radical that he transforms his generation's understanding of the issue facing the culture and produces a new authentic 'we'. He thus goes beyond not only the banal general understanding of his peers, but even beyond the Situational understanding of the PHRONEMOS. We could call such a fully authentic history-making Dasein a cultural master"
(Ibid.).

Unless I missed it, the word detachment never occurs in his paper, yet on the other hand he is describing an extreme form of it that is still somehow attached to "history-making" formation of culture and 'producing' "a new authentic 'we'." But how can there be "a new authentic 'we'" when the very basis of 'we' has just been destroyed* He sees death as liberating 'Dasein' only in the sense of NOT "taking for granted the agreed-upon current cultural issues." But this leaves 'Dasein' open before an infinite number of possibilities with the basis for judging between them discarded. In other words, on the one hand, 'Dasein' is freed from all and every compulsion, yet on the other hand is so enthralled with its throwness that, for some unknown reason, it can only see its purpose in "history-making" culture formation and 'producing' "a new authentic 'we'." One point I want to make is, Why is this the only model for behavior even considered when other models not only exist but are historically familiar to everyone as well as familiar from their life experiences* When I read the above passage, the model of the anti-social Ch'an Buddhist hermit was already in my mind, but on reading this there was added the models of the Marquis de Sade, Adolf Hitler, and Joseph Stalin as well as any number of others including most people in prison. In other words, "marginal practice" WITH THE CONTEXT AS DREYFUS HIMSELF HAS DESCRIBED IT is completely detached from any restraint whatsoever, and is not BY ANY MEANS a benign thing. But then one has just put into question the meaning of 'benign'.

If "marginal practice" is considered as an idea never used before, that has been shelved, and now we take it out and say, "We've never tried this before. Let us see what it does," we are not talking about mechanisms completely neutral, indifferent in their purpose, but "marginal practices" like extermination camps, or slave-labor gulags, or massive aggressive war to cut down on overpopulation and get rid of 'useless' elements in society. These are necessarily among "marginal practices" and many times throughout history were considered in their turn as mainline traditional culture. There is a problem here with the unmentioned detachment, the unconscious and automatic freedom of the PHRONEMOS to take in all possibilities and by experience alone formulate a new "practice" because the drastic possibilities mentioned above DO solve the problems they are intended to solve, and have been successfully used in the past, usually with the approval, before or after, of the dominant and surviving culture. After all, we owe the existence of the United states to Europeans being able to change their cultural practices to adapt to the new world where the indigenous inhabitants failed almost completely to do so even after the initial massive impact of new diseases and new weapons with the effective military organization behind them when they could see what was happening to others yet failed to change or give up their cultural heritage which doomed them to destruction. The mythical balance with nature they supposedly attained was of no use to the Hohokam when persistent drought destroyed their civilization or to the Sioux when the superior might of neighboring tribes drove them out of the eastern forests. They eventually became the great warriors they became known as BECAUSE they were weak and had to flee to a land far less rich and learn all over again a new way to live, or die. Unfortunately this in turn became a fixed cultural tradition. And this is true of most indigenous societies to a more or less degree. Rarely did the indigenous inhabitants understand what was happening when the Greeks had their period of massive colonial expansion. Who knows anything about the Siculi of Sicily now* However, the Lydians, Lycians, Bithynians, Pisidians, Phrygians, and Pamphylians learned to adapt to a greater or lesser degree after seeing the initial impact of the Greeks on the shores of Anatolia. That "Might makes right" has been a successful cultural practice all over the world for 10, 000 years. Is this in fact part of the point that Dreyfus is trying to make*

The philosopher, as Heidegger says Aristotle describes him in PLATO'S SOPHIST, is ABSOLUTELY "autonomous" in their engagement with THEOREIN, "autonomous sheer onlooking upon the world" (pg. 86) where, "Thereby we procure the ultimate determination of SOPHIA and see at the same time that THEOREIN is a completely autonomous comportment of Dasein, not related to anything whatsoever" (pg. 88). This seems perfectly clear to me that this is the highest form of 'Dasein' known to Heidegger and Aristotle - "When Aristotle speaks of SOPHIA as PHRONESIS, he is indicating thereby that he sees in SOPHIA (as Plato did in PHRONESIS) the highest mode of ALETHEUEIN and in general man's highest comportment, the highest possibility of human existence" (pg. 86) - which in its absolute selfishness is perfectly harmless to others if not useful - or as Aristotle says, "All the sciences, indeed, are more necessary that this, but none is better" (Meta. I. 2.983a10). Aristotle is saying that a philosopher cannot be concerned with practical and contingent matters and yet contemplate THEOREIN because the motivation to do that has left behind practical concerns. As a matter of interfering inconvenience disturbing the main project of THEOREIN, such matters therefore should be arraigned so they do not interfere, that they support the endeavor, and then be put aside. This is the whole purpose, in the end, of establishing an ethical society and an equitous state and a sound economy - so that individuals can proceed to do what is most proper to their nature. But Dreyfus seems explicitly and only concerned with 'practical' action while having undermined any restraints for being 'practical' in the first place. Yet at the same time he is using arguments to clarify his position from the same set of lectures on the SOPHIST that I have just quoted from. He lifts any restraints on action enabling "marginal practices" with no reason to exclude Genghis Khan's making pyramids of heads from the inhabitants of Samarkand.

Where the absolute detachment of the philosopher would only be properly employed in THEOREIN, Dreyfus has him recreating society. The skull pyramid was only a "marginal practice" to the people of Samarkand, but to Genghis Khan it was the moral and proper thing to do according to his "cultural heritage." Dreyfus treats these things as morally and emotionally neutral. But this is a contradiction on the practical everyday 'They' self level, and can only be consistent with the philosopher contemplating THEOREIN as a whole that is one, which is however only its own end in itself and has no direct practical effect, except, maybe, as in China with the Ch'an or even Japan with the Zen monks, seeing people at peace with themselves whereas practical people are not. And the combination of Zen and practical action as it happened in Japan produced, because what one did in the practical world was supposedly without meaning, Japanese militarism, racism, imperialism, and all the atrocities they thought either justified by those motives or a matter of complete indifference in following orders and obeying their proper superiors just as a novice would obey the master of a monastery. But the sole purpose of a monastery is to divorce oneself from the practical world, and obeying the master absolutely solely part of that purpose and only that purpose. If we are as enmeshed in "throwness" and "cultural heritage" as Dreyfus says 'Dasein' is in its very essence, and as 'inauthentic' being-there he is perfectly correct, then, on the everyday practical level, they cannot be neutral ever, at all, in any way. BUT THIS IS TOO OBVIOUS! It leaves one listening to the upstairs bedroom for the other boot to drop. This can't be all he has to say, but as far as I can tell, this is exactly the situation. Is he really talking about computers rather than human beings* In some ways that would seem more appropriate. But that would also be grossly illogical, considering the context and premises as stated.

Now I need to consider another paper of his available at the same web site
(OR just look up the title in a search machine): "Heidegger and Foucault on the Subject, Agency and Practices
(http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/html/paper_heidandfoucault.html: there is suppose to be a _ between "paper" and "heideandfoucault"). Its main thesis is, "One thing that Heidegger and Foucault clearly have in common is that both are critical of the Cartesian idea of a self-transparent subject and the related Kantian idea of autonomous agency" (pg. 1). Dreyfus then proceeds to say, "Yet neither denies the importance of human freedom." That this can go along with the first statement, without extreme qualifications and re-definition, I find highly problematic and certainly not obvious. For the obvious question comes up, "If 'freedom' is an act, even the negative act of detachment, what is it that acts* And if 'freedom' necessarily implies intent to gain or maintain a state of freedom, then who's intent is it*" Either the word describes a contradictory concept, or it is meaningless because it refers to nothing, or those questions need to be answered. And Dreyfus is quite clear that he thinks "freedom" is a value, is effective, and is real. One problem is the definitions of "self-transparent subject" and "autonomous agency". Dreyfus seems to talk of these concepts as if they shared the same nature with modems and keyboards, objects which one can take apart and put back together again, as if they were simple and obvious. But what exactly is "self-transparency"* I can understand what a piece of transparent glass is as I can hold it before me and see through it. But to describe a self like that, as an object, as something solid yet letting light through, even metaphorically is nonsense. How does it function* What is it composed of* Who sees through what* Though these questions may seem to reduce "self-transparency" to the ridiculous, the simple key to it is in the word "subject". Only an object can be "transparent", so that "subject" has become a privileged object of some sort. For Descartes, it was a point of certainty from which the philosopher could proceed to matters of much greater importance. It was merely the Archimedean fulcrum by which he could move around the rest of the universe - and that was all! It was certainly no area of great mystery to him or of any epistemological or ontological concern in itself.

For Kant, however, who could appreciate the necessity of the Cartesian approach of establishing a point of certainty and unquestionability AS FAR AS A LOGICAL/MATHEMATICAL POINT OF ORIGINATION WAS CONCERNED, was also very aware that that very point of 'certainty' was, in its ground, put into question by his critique of pure reason because he had established there that both faculties of understanding AND intuition were derived from the fundamental faculty of the imagination. So when he discussed the "I think" from its Cartesian basis, he did so using it as a tiny area, literally 'infinitely' tiny which really means imaginary, of logical clarity within a surrounding manifold of obscurity. Kant's "I think" was tiny, a mere mathematical, abstract point of no substance whatsoever, because its only purpose was just like Descartes', to justify the philosophical enterprise toward bigger and better things. It was something Kant was COMPELLED to tie perception back to as an originating point which was the only thing that gave the nature of perception itself a logical ground. That was its purpose in the CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. But in the CRITIQUE OF PRACTICAL REASON its significance expands completely beyond the ability of Cartesianism to contain it. It is there the self establishes the discipline of itself which is also the discipline and expectation of the whole world which is inclusive of the very discipline of pure reason itself. And in the CRITIQUE OF JUDGEMENT he begins to uncover the wellsprings of passion and wonder that originate both pure and practical reason in the confrontation of the logical and moral discipline of the self in the face of beautiful, wondrous, yet utterly terrifying nature which is the very analogue of God and even points with his rejection of teleology toward Heidegger's rejection of God as an object and mirror image of 'man'. In other words, Kant was well on his way to dispensing with the subject as logically privileged, mathematically atomic object just as Heidegger did.

The main point of this discussion so far then points out a large discrepancy between comparing whatever a "self-transparent subject" might be with the ambiguities of Kant's "autonomous agency" which are far from transparent. In fact, the word "autonomous" here seems to be used meaninglessly because none of the logical connotations of that term are brought into play. "Autonomous" in this context implies ABSOLUTELY "separate" and TOTALLY "self-sufficient" in its essence. Such an essence or approach to experience and perception would be absolutely private and intensely personal. One knows in general what is involved in the emptiest and most general terms from the outside, but one is also in the position of the blind men trying to describe the elephant which they have never 'experienced' before: As to the self as "autonomous agency", each person can only report their personally limited point of view. "Autonomous" means absolutely unconnected in this context which necessarily implies an equally absolute uniqueness. Ernst Tugendhat's SINGULARE TANTUM. The self-transparency here has all the clarity of Jude's "wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever" (verse 13).

Dreyfus then states, "In Heidegger's early work the subject is reinterpreted as Dasein - a non-autonomous, culturally bound (or thrown) way of being, that can yet change the field of possibilities within which it acts" (pg.
1). This would only apply to 'inauthentic' being-there both as a 'reinterpreted subject' and as 'non-autonomous'. It is precisely the LACK of autonomy and the desire, crudely put, to be one's own self , that is the nameless guilt in the call of conscience that says nothing except by the accusing pull that you are not your own but belong to everybody but yourself, where even your 'selfishness' is defined purely in terms of what other people think it is. You are totally at a loss to define what selfishness is that is truly and purely yours and not someone else's reflection. In other words, you can find everybody inside yourself except your self. This is what the "culturally bound (or thrown) way of being" is, and I do not think Dreyfus would disagree too much with my definition. But being a "subject" in any sense is left behind in 'authenticity' because one then chooses to be pure possibility as deliberately choosing to run ahead towards death, to take on your death as your unique ownmost deliberately and passionately, which would be a purely futural motion and therefore only always pure possibility and never any such 'object' as a subject. "In middle Heidegger, thinkers alone have the power to disclose a new world, while in later Heidegger, anyone is free to step back from the current world, to enter one of a plurality of worlds, and, thereby, facilitate a change in the practices of one's society." The statement "thinkers alone have the power to disclose a new world" is hard to believe as it stands about Heidegger. It is in fundamental ontological conflict with what Heidegger says about primitive 'Dasein' in his review of Cassirer's volume on myths, the second part of THE PHILOSOPHY OF SYMBOLIC FORMS, and with Heidegger's statement in PLATO'S SOPHIST, "The root of an autonomous sheer onlooking upon the world already lies in primitive and everyday Dasein" (pg.
86).

To bring up distinctions of early, middle, and late Heidegger IN REGARD TO FUNDAMENTAL ONTOLOGY is ludicrous since it is never essentially different from Aristotle's, while taking in the FULL consideration of the nature of Greek "presencing", and would entail total change in the whole method, fundamental principles, each and every aspect, and the whole motivation and project of his philosophy which, obviously, has by no means and to no degree happened. All of his historical development is variations on exactly the same theme with absolutely no change in the basic theme, although how it is thought about certainly has changed, and, as the marginal notes to SEIN UND ZEIT tell us, he does say he has made mistakes and changed his mind, although most of the time when you pin these notes down firmly they turn out to be incredibly trivial in one sense or another - most of the time. Yes, I am well aware Heidegger was a Nazi party member. BUT NO ONE, ESPECIALLY HEIDEGGER, has ever even begun to coherently explain what HEIDEGGER'S being a Nazi MEANS. Certainly no one is stupid enough to say his Nazism was like Hitler's or Alfred Rosenburg's and certainly not Ernst Rohm's or Julius Streicher's ("Mention the word culture and I reach for my gun."). And what it means, if we could truly figure it out, would be directly and tremendously relevant to Dreyfus' discussion of the PHRONEMOS. Because, whatever else it was, it certainly demonstrated the drastic intrusion of the autonomous philosopher's passionate indifference, as Camus' Mersault is 'indifferent' ["What would it feel like to kill that man** "What would it feel like to have power and let my petty, vicious emotions have free reign*"], into the normal world of everyday morality and what a mess it made of it. And he says that was a "mistake", that he changed his mind in some way which, however, did specifically refer to the massacre of Ernst Rohm and his coterie on "the night of the long knives" for which Sepp Dietrich was recently sentenced in Germany. "Mistake" a word that, used in this context, has numerous possible meanings, most of them trivial, and none of them touching on his fundamental philosophy. So I think it would be safe to say that whatever of HIS Nazism was in accord with his fundamental philosophy never changed to the day he died. However, it is a good example of initiating "marginal practices" and wanting to "facilitate a change in the practices of one's society," and a good example of why philosophers should never mess with politics. THEY ARE FUNDAMENTALLY INCOMPATIBLE IN THEIR BASIC PROJECTS. Plato's interference with the tyrants of Syracuse, Dionysios I & II and his friend Dion, if that is a true story, is also a good example. And Aristotle's model constitution for Athens, designed in co-operation with the Macedonian governor Demetrius of Phaleron, did not end very happily either. The point seems to be, whether we like it or not, running and designing practical things should be left solely to practical men THAT ARE ABLE TO EXPLAIN CLEARLY, PRECISELY, AND IMMEDIATELY WHY THEY DID WHAT THEY DID and not try to figure it out after a Zen moment of Satori. Such moments are fine for philosophers and Ch'an monks, but not for a Japanese officer with a sword in his hands and a blindfolded American flier on his knees before him.


PART TWO

". . . While both Heidegger and Foucault reject the Enlightenment idea of an autonomous subject, they have a robust notion of freedom and action. And it will turn out for both thinkers that each person can modify his or her cultural practices by openess to the embededness in them." Now this is exactly what Heidegger said in the Rector speech. I am not trying to be mean or nasty, but this is blatantly obvious and Dreyfus MUST be very aware of it. So why did he not say something about this instead of giving such a positive and fervent glow to "thereby facilitate a change in the practices of one's society." It is very disturbing, especially when we have seen so many laws that have been passed in the last fifty years for the best of emotions turn out to be, in the long run, destructive and divisive. You cannot legislate love between people, and attempting to do so perpetuates hate until the law ends. As the gentleman indicated recently integration is essentially a sham; 'equality' can be legislated but that does not mean it lives.

"I. Early Heidegger's Substitution of Dasein for the Cartesian Subject"

Dreyfus quotes, in what I assume is his translation from somewhere in SEIN UND ZEIT, "The idea of a subject which has intentional experiences . . . encapsulated within itself is an absurdity which misconstrues the basic ontological structure of the being that we ourselves are." This is related to Heidegger's desire "to get beyond the subject/object distinction" that opposes "the Husserlian claim that a person's relation to the world and the things in it must be mediated by something in the person's mind: beliefs, desires, experiences, etc. -- what philosophers call "intentional content". Now on page 48 (Stambaugh 44-45, M&R 73-74), if this is what he is referring to, Heidegger is discussing the "psychical" which is an objectification of acts which essentially makes them into something separate from the person to which Heidegger replies, "Essentially the person exists only in the performance of intentional acts, and is therefore essentially NOT an object. Any psychical Objectification of acts . . . is tantamount to depersonalization. A person is in any case given as a performer of intentional acts which are bound together by the unity of a meaning." Dreyfus' quote, then, standing by itself, could almost be seen as an attack on Heidegger's statement if we were not aware that by "intentional experiences" he is talking about "something in the person's mind", an "intentional content", a 'thing' in between the person and their act. However, substitute "person" for "subject" and "intentional acts" which in some sense must be experienced for "intentional experiences", which I do not think is that far fetched or unjust considering the totally unknown provenance and context of this quote which I can find nothing like it on page 48, and he is saying exactly the opposite of Heidegger. There is no reason not to consider "intentional acts" as not "encapsulated" in some sense in the "person" as "bound together by the unity of meaning."

As I have often said in THE NECESSITY OF DEBATE, Heidegger never literally rejects or refutes fundamental historical philosophical concepts that have for some reason endured and, to a certain extent withstood the test of time and have become an authentic part of a world-view. And such a concept "subject" certainly is. Descartes and Kant within their historical context had good reasons to use it. And that Heidegger wants to describe something 'better', more adequate and accurate to his own historical context in no way means the concept of "subject" is merely a blundering mistake. If nothing else, it does reflect a historical reality we must deal with as an inheritance that is part of what we are, the very "embeddedness" of a "culturally bound (or thrown) way of being" that he speaks of.

That there is actually more to the intent of Dreyfus' quote than a discussion of the reality of "psychical" objects is indicated in the immediate statement following the quote: "(Heidegger) seeks to undermine this view by returning to the phenomenon of everyday skillful activity. He finds that, when everyday coping is going well, one experiences something like what athletes call flow, or playing out of their heads. One does not distinguish one's experience of acting from one's ongoing activity, and therefore one has no experience of oneself as a subject causing that activity." But if a "person exists only in the performance of intentional acts", this would seem to basically contradict Heidegger at some level. Or, we are talking about Dreyfus' performer of acts as when we say, "Nobody's at home". It would seem to me obvious that in the "unity of a meaning" of "intentional acts which are bound together" that there are levels of importance to one's acts, that less important acts receive less attention, but with other acts more attention makes them more important, or, if important acts are being performed without 'anyone' in intentional control, we normally say that person is "out of control." The situation is much more complicated than that when we deal with conflicting intentions, one of which we are trying to suppress, evade, and ignore although actually we are quite well aware of it. But I do not think this is at all what Dreyfus is talking about, although, as he describes it, it very easily could change exactly into such a situation precisely because conscious intentional control is relaxed, and they would be literally "playing out of their heads."

That there are different intentional 'levels' is clearly and most dramatically made evident precisely when one is trying to suppress a thought. There is then no reason not to suppose that a certain 'amount' of attention stays with any act or thought however unimportant or unwanted so to say we are unconscious of it is completely incorrect. In fact, in a sense, there is a universal 'level' or 'amount' of consciousness always present, so that talking in terms of 'levels' and 'amounts' gives a completely false picture. Rather it is the nature of the assignment of IMPORTANCE that brings about more or less 'attention', and there is no reason to assume the intention behind these assignments is by any means unilateral. Consciousness, or rather a far better concept, the full range of sensibility of perception is by no means the same as "intent". I can clearly see the advantage of "flow" with some types of highly self-disciplined people, which Dreyfus has fully discussed elsewhere, in certain very specific situations like athletics where action and thought must be instantaneous and the same because there is only an instant in which to react to the particular point in a quickly changing situation. But such athletes in such situations have also done strange and inexplicable things. And simply saying that is due to disorientation is inadequate because there are also many different levels of orientation, in one of which that strange act may actually have an explanation and be 'oriented'. And the athlete's situation is far from appropriate to every or any situation. It is certainly no supreme ideal of action itself. However, in a culture like the Japanese such an ideal IS held on a very wide-spread basis, applying to or coloring every aspect of life.

What I have discussed here covers much of what Dreyfus goes on to say about "this non-mediated coping mode" that takes up "a huge amount of our lives." There have to be degrees of mediation never, hopefully, getting to the level of real non-mediation or one would not survive long in driving in big city traffic where if "one is actually surprised when one's action is accomplished, as when one's thoughts are interrupted by one's arrival at the office", or if you are in someone's blind spot and they suddenly cut into your lane. "Flow" can either help or hurt here but depending on sufficiently aware collateral levels of attention. Intent is always present, even inefficiently, and the person is never absent even in dreams. A football player is never going to say, "I really wasn't the 'one' who caught that pass," for he knows he is the one.

It is precisely this "one" that Dreyfus then compares the oneness of "Dasein" with the clumsy construction of "spheres" of the usual conception of the subject/object relationship. The quote he gives, "BP, p. 64", is from the English translation of BASIC PROBLEMS OF PHENOMENOLOGY. The whole quote goes, "Because the usual separation between a subject with its immanent sphere and an object with its transcendent sphere - because, in general, the distinction between an inner and outer is constructive and continually gives occasion for further constructions, we shall in the future no longer speak of a subject, of a subjective sphere, but shall understand the being to whom intentional comportments belong as DASEIN, and indeed in such a way that it is precisely with the aid of INTENTIONAL COMPORTMENT, properly understood, that we attempt to characterize suitably the being of the Dasein, ONE OF THE DASEIN"S BASIC CONSTITUTIONS. The statement that the comportments of the Dasein are intentional means that the mode of being of our own self, the Dasein, is essentially such that this being, so far as it IS, is always already dwelling with the extant. The idea of a subject which has intentional experiences merely inside its own sphere and is not yet outside it but encapsulated within itself is an absurdity which misconstrues the basic ontological structure of the being that we ourselves are."

And there is our mysterious quote from above. How foolish of me not to have looked for it here. I am sure it was obvious to you, of course, all the time. However, putting them together gives a very different idea of what is going on in Heidegger than what Dreyfus says is going on, and everything I said above still applies. The description of subject and object as actual separate spheres of being is obviously not only clumsy and inconvenient, but is, put in such a way, also experientially and logically absurd. In deciding to "understand the being to whom intentional comportments BELONG as Dasein", Heidegger has put the subjective and objective on the same level and plain of being where, "Essentially the person exists only in the performance of intentional acts," and also from page 48 of SuZ is Heidegger's approving quote from Max Scheler: ". . . It is essential to the Being of acts that they are experienced only in their performance itself . . ." The subject/object dichotomy has ceased at this point to be useful in this specific context because we are describing being there as thrown being-in-the-world. Reality is no longer accurately described as a subject inside here and an object outside there but has become ONE in the INTENTIONAL act. In other words, "Dasein", being-there, is THE WHOLE GAME. THERE IS NOTHING OUTSIDE DASEIN! When you say you are "one with the ball" this is no longer figurative but literal since the reality is the intentional act where that which is valid in the concepts of subject and object lives in AND as one motion. It is the motion that is the fundamental and indivisible reality here, "the intentional action." Heidegger even reassigns the clumsy "constructions" of subject/object spheres to being one or another of "DASEIN'S BASIC ONSTITUTIONS." Instead of dividing the whole of reality between themselves, they are now merely subordinate parts within a greater and MORE valid scheme IN WHICH THEY STILL PARTICIPATE WITH VALIDITY, but of a diminished sort. On page 65 of "BP" is the statement, "Intentionality is neither objective nor subjective in the usual sense, although it is certainly both, but in a much more original sense . . ." And in the space of the three dots of the original mysterious quote, there is the phrase, ". . . merely inside its own sphere and is not yet outside it . . ." is a world of understanding literally. That is the whole point of being-there, of being-in-the-world, of "embeddeness" in the "culturally bound (or thrown) way of being." There is no "inside" as there is no hidden "unconscious" within perception. There is only the full and total sensibility of perception. There is only the "outside". Perception is "Dasein" and is "Being" in the full understanding of what it is. But even in perception the full relation of the open and the covered over is in full force. And it is in the nature of questioning in and of itself, beyond the limitations and particularity of answers, that creates that relationship that is the whole one of perception that is "Dasein".

But what should be overwhelmingly obvious, and must be obvious to Dreyfus as well, is that intentionality is not only alive and well within being-there, but completely 'fills it up'. "It is precisely with the aid of INTENTIONAL COMPORTMENT, properly understood, that we attempt to characterize suitably the being of the Dasein, ONE OF DASEINS BASIC CONSTITUTIONS." If one wants to slip the "flow", the "non-deliberate activities", the "non-mediated coping mode" into "Dasein" as one of the basic constitutions, you still have to contend with, "Essentially the person exists only in the performance of intentional acts" AND, "The statement that the comportments of the Dasein are intentional means that the mode of being of our own self, the Dasein, is essentially such that this being, so far as it IS, is always already dwelling with the extant." Intentionality fills perception absolutely. However, that doesn't mean you always know what is going on, because intents, though indeed they are all connected to each other, are not necessarily at all connected in an single-willed efficient and orderly manner. They are fixed as you fixed them in the specific moment and emotionally special context of fixing. So that, as a whole, pictured in the imagination 'objectively', it is a chain that does not necessarily connect together what you expect it to, it is not a ladder that necessarily goes to a clearly recognized single direction, but is a crazy mixture of intents put together with little or no design, and only a highly disciplined person can make a new structure out of them that would probably not be recognizable, or maybe even considered sane viewed as a whole, to a mythical external observer. This is tradition, this is history, this is the "embeddeness" of the "culturally bound (or thrown) way of being." It can only make sense after being rearranged by the individual. Heidegger calls it "reappropriation" and "repetition".

"Heidegger now adds that such unthinking activity provides the background both for specific acts of ongoing coping, and for deliberately focusing on what is unusual or difficult" (pp. 1-2). Though this is a perfectly correct statement in itself, in the overall context that it is in, i. e., "To consolidate (Heidegger's) rejection of the primacy of the self-sufficient subject," it gives a completely fallacious picture if it is really meant to state that "unthinking activity" and "non-deliberate activities" is MORE than just "the background of specific acts" but actually does take up "a huge amount of our lives . . . in this non-mediated coping mode . . . " Heidegger said above essentially that Dasein is DEFINED by intentional comportment, and what Dreyfus clearly seems to imply flatly contradicts that.

Dreyfus goes on, on pages 2, to say, ". . . When Dasein is simply at home in its situation, there is no separation between Dasein's disclosing comportment and the world disclosed." Yet if what I said above is true, that being-there is wholly 'outside' in and as such itself to the degree that 'inside' is meaningless when applied to being-there, and it would seem clearly evident in that translation of "Dasein", i. e., being is always there and never ever 'here', then it is not just THERE "when being-there is simply at home in its situation" but it is always and in every moment and every circumstance THERE. Perception is absolutely inclusive and is in its very nature a permanent exile. It is NEVER "at home" in ANY situation. THEREFORE it is at any moment, totally unexpectedly, that existential anxiety in the face of one's own death rendering all entities whatsoever not just contingent in an everyday world that said "Things just go on forever" but useless in curing life of death and therefore fundamentally useless altogether in fundamental boredom where you can do anything but there is no reason to.

Now Dreyfus says, "It is important to realize that our general background coping, our familiarity with the world, is what BEING AND TIME is all about
(******). Indeed, Heidegger says explicitly that 'this familiarity with the world . . . goes to make up Dasein's understanding of being.' This understanding of being provides a background understanding of what matters and what it makes sense to do. Moreover, this background coping gives us a space or a CLEARING in which things and people can show up as mattering and meaningful for us." In such a beautifully benign world absolutely no one would ever have reason to go insane or commit suicide. Why, "background understanding" itself "provides" a knowledge "of what matters and what it makes sense to do." What a truly wonderful thing "background understanding" must be. I'm sorry, but I am beginning to really lose all my neutrality and sense of 'fairness' here when 'fairness' means tolerating the horrors of average, everyday, commonplace life. "This background coping" DOES "give us a clearing in which things and people can show up as mattering and meaningful to us." But "things and people can show up as mattering and meaningful to us" because on the overwhelming whole of everyday life it is forced upon us, and can be tolerated ONLY because we desperately and deliberately seize the viewpoint of the 'inauthentic' 'They" self as it is the only practical way to survive growing up and then becoming an adult. Even good parents, parents that truly love their children and in no way enjoy hurting them KNOW THEY MUST drag the child away from its childish dreams and desires and everything that is fundamentally "meaningful" AS desirable, and force it in a benign way as possible to accommodate the desires and needs of the real world to the death of most of the things it once loved. Good parents, even like this, are rare. Because parents have as their only 'authentic' model of child rearing the way they themselves were raised, and being of course loving children they try to put a good a light as possible upon that time. And then, strangely enough, when one gets to be an old person and maybe does not have to accommodate that world so much - or just can't do it anymore - Death is liberating - what do they do but go back to precisely those same dreams of a wonderful and benign world that had to be shaken out of the child so it could survive in the first place. Life within this circle is truly absurd. We try to attain again what we were made to lose and then made others lose. I fully understand the impracticality and impossibility of opposing it. But do you understand, though, the obscenity of putting it into a 'benign' light* Do you understand now why I can find a rational impulse in the deliberate desire to either become insane or take a path of such loneliness that it seems insane and few people realize what that path logically entails* Such oppressiveness changes the color of light. The "clearing" is benign only to the philosopher who has shed as much of that world as possible.

"And since individual Daseins can act only within this background that determines what can show up as making sense to do, Dasein can never be the fully lucid source of its actions postulated by the modern understanding of the subject and of autonomous agency." But I say "what BEING AND TIME is all about" is precisely trying to become as autonomous, as ownmost, as unique as possible (Why else would you desire to run after death*), to become one's own self come what may (which means being 'insanely' impractical), to become as "fully lucid" as possible which is still wondrous even in old age and the only serious, non-trivial motive to philosophize.

Now, again, I know that Hubert Dreyfus is fully aware of ALL of this. No man could be so blind, and especially one as intelligent and perceptive as he is AND THAT DEFINES THE PROBLEM SO CLEARLY AND MAKES IT SO RIDICULOUSLY EASY TO ATTACK. So why does he not say something* Is he as committed to a philosophy of optimism as Sartre was committed at one time to Stalinist communism, and Heidegger to Nazism, and knowing REFUSES to say something*

PART THREE

In reading Dreyfus, I am entranced with his clarity. He says exactly what he means and makes it very clear what he stands for, however much it may raise opposition. My surprise is, that so few people oppose him and accept him as if what he was saying was not extreme. It is as far as I am concerned a clear presentation of the choice between good and evil. Does it surprise you that I put it in terms like that* When I have said often enough, that when one has attained that very ambiguous situation of so-called *authenticity*, that one is beyond good and evil* Now, usually, this is interpreted as meaning does then does what one wants, unrestrained by morals. But, of course, this is logically ridiculous, and such a *usual* person has not at all understood the *Situation*. If one is LITERALLY beyond good and evil, then one is beyond action. One has not only renounced action, one must renounce decision. As Dreyfus quotes Heidegger to prove his own point, *Every decision . . . bases itself on something not mastered, something concealed, confusing; else it would never be a decision* (POETRY, LANGUAGE, THOUGHT, pg. 55). That is why when one makes a decision, which one MUST do, in the state of *authenticity, it is a decent into *Bad faith.* Of course, such a Situation beyond decision can exist only for a Moment, the Moment of vision or *Augenblick* where one PURELY UNDERSTANDS everything. But originary time in that very Moment, corrupting it fatally, DECIDES FOR DECISION. It does not impel any particular decision, but it does impel you to decide what you want. And being the strange and thoroughly contradictory Being that you are, you may very well not like what you want. If you are intelligent and courageous then, you investigate why you had that desire in the first place. If you are a coward, you say, *Well, that is just the way I am, and will just have to live that way.* This is nonsense. You have already established you do not like who you are, so in being that dislikable person, you have doomed yourself to unhappiness. This is also lazy, but then is not laziness the epitome of cowardice* *Become who you are!* is not a simple-minded statement releasing you of the responsibility of creating who you are. And the courageous person wants to make themselves worth-while, worthy of time itself. They want to make themselves beautiful as an artist creates an artwork. Anything else * war, death, disease, destruction, building great intellectual or physical structures, making great endeavors of mutual beneficence, creating states, nations, and peoples, and then bringing it all down crashing * compared to that effort of self creation, these things are a mere pastime.

There are two times: the time of creation which is always searching and always questioning, where mere answers are the coins of one* s pay which one merely pockets, and pastime which literally means you had your chance to live and you past it by, thinking it was too much effort, too controversial, too egotistic (which I have never understood because that is EXACTLY WHAT YOU DO NOT AND CANNOT HAVE IF YOU ARE IN THE PROCESS OF CREATING A SELF), and, what is really the point, far too painful. In other words, you have already done with living and are merely passing the time till . . . But you don* t really think of your own personal death BECAUSE THAT MAKES YOU THINK OF LIFE! Death for you is something a physiological organism eventually does and is of no real importance. So.

In reading Dreyfus, one has the opportunity of making a real decision. The decision is between light and darkness, the love of light and living things which drives to you know more and more about what they mean to you (I do not mean some scientific, manipulating bookkeeping procedure than balances accounts), or darkness where one refuses to think MORE, to push against the impossible boundaries of being and non-being, of life and death. He makes you take a stand because he clearly makes his own stand, a stand you may very well may never have taken because you let your thoughts slide down the easy way regarding the matters he considers. And, what is worse, much worse, is that since his thinking is so clear and precise, if he comes upon a point THAT YOU MUST AGREE ON, then everything you have done in opposition might just fall apart in utter worthlessness. Which the courageous person, who must enjoy their courage or why do it then, sees as the opportunity to explore whole new horizons freshly opened to them while inattentively sweeping away the trash of one* s past blunders. Because the worthless is worthless, why waste time on it*

This is why Jud is so important. He is clear about everything he stands for. You can accept it or reject it. You cannot be indifferent. For one thing, he won* t let you be indifferent. He nags the utter hell out of you if you refuse to resolve a conflict. He gets into your soul like a worm and eats it out. But, you find, what that worm eats out is just dead tissue. He is the maggot in the gangrene. To him it is food, to you it is death. And it is most interesting philosophically that this is an old nineteenth century treatment for gangrene is being brought back throughout the world, an old, simple, commonsense but disturbing procedure with little glamorous *science* about it that is replacing the disastrous so-called medical *advances* that brought more death to its patients than life. This is the difference between mastering technology and being mastered by technology. In being mastered by technology, you totally forget the whole meaningful goal in the beginning was to live life beautifully. And in the end you destroy yourself and maybe everything else as well. It is your decision. Technology decides nothing. It has no importance. It is meaningless. In itself, it is neither good nor evil. It is beyond good and evil. This is common sense. It is up to you, alone, without anybody else to help you.

Jud is absolutely right in saying *Being* is equivalent to life. Heidegger did not disagree so much as hold back, because the common, everyday understanding of life had become so much like a sociological or physiological objectification rather than any spontaneous outburst of love and chaos. So why not use the word life instead of the ambiguous *being** Because when you take *life* out of the merely physiological, and its only alternative is to become purely personal, emotional, subjective in the arbitrary and whimsical sense, sensible not in the restrictive sense of obeying every idiot around you but of feeling, and you take this total lack of responsibility, discipline, and seriousness seriously, why then you are in a very ambiguous situation indeed! The loss of respect for whimsy which David Hume loved so much he called it *imagination* that was absolutely necessary to real thinking, I think is a great disaster. Though I may disagree with Jud on many things, yet HE is the one that points out disagreement, defined its terms, and SHOWED THAT IT WAS IMPORTANT AND A MATTER THAT MUST BE TAKEN CARE OF * NOW! That *Being* is *simply* life is one good point. It makes you decide between socioplogy, psychology, economics, and really living. That *Being* is an utter nullity that gathers together predicates is another wonderful point he made. And his paen to Marxist humanism, which sounds exactly like Ayn Rand* s though this comparison may make him break a tooth while gritting his teeth (but one must remember she learned Marxism backwards and forwards in daily force feeding before she fled Saint Petersburg), made me realize that of course I was a humanist, that my being human is the center of the universe no matter what, irrationally if I have to, that if I am not the center then that center is everywhere, which is nowhere. Or worse, belongs to someelse altogether, someone that does not value my life in the slightest. All places and no place. Or your place. Your TOPOS. You must make a decision. *What do I care if the world dies, I must love . . .* Phaedra says. It all hangs on you. Even if one then risks ending all of it by saying:

J* ai voulu, devant vous exposant mes remords, Par un chemin plus lent descendre chez les morts. Et le ciel . . . que ma présence outrage; Et la mort, à mes yeux dérobant la clarté, Rend au jour qu* ils souillaient toute la pureté

I wished, before my remorse is exposed to you, To slowly descend by a road I have taken To the home of the dead . . . The sky . . . my presence outrages; And death, stealing the clarity from my eyes, Renders to day, that they soil, all her purity. PHÈDRE, ACTE V, scene VII, lines 1635-1643

*. . . à mes yeux dérobant la clarté . . .* That is the best remorse of death, not pain, not fear of an afterlife, not the collapse of all your projects, but the loss of clarity. Yet, on the other hand, your death *rend au jour qu* ils souillaient toute sa pureté,* to give back to day its purity is certainly not something to despise either. Like reading Jud and Dreyfus, it must give one pause. You must decide. All of this, the world, day, sun, and whatever tiny self I have within all this, is all included in being-there where purity can be rendered back to day. Humanism is an inevitable circle one must come back to with new understanding. And that is exactly what Heidegger did in *Letter on Humanism*. He made a new and higher humanism.

And what if excess of love Bewildered them till they died* I write it out in verse* MacDonagh and MacBride And Conally and Pearse Now and in time to be, Wherever green is worn, Are changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born. Easter 1916, lines 72-80

And, Jud, before you say this is an unjustified glamorization of Heidegger, remember what Yeats also said in the poem:

This other man I had dreamed A drunken, vainglorious lout. He had done most bitter wrong To some who are near my heart, Yet I number him in the song; He, too, has resigned his part In the casual comedy; He, too, has been changed in his turn, Transformed utterly, A terrible beauty is born. Lines 31-40

This was Major John MacBride, Maud Gonne*s husband. If Yeats could see this in him of all people, surely you might appreciate what I see in Heidegger. *Et la mort . . . rend au jour qu* ils souillaient toute sa pureté.* (Please do not think I know French, but I have gone over these lines so many times I know THEM.)

NOW: specifically in reference to Dreyfus something must be made absolutely clear. Dreyfus is a pragmatist. Dreyfus sees everything through the lenses of a pragmatist. The purpose of a philosopher to him is to create a workable society in a meaningless world. In other words, he finds the community life meaningful because this is what we have grown up with, this is the background history upon which the insignificant and random points of our individuality are pinned against in order to connect those insignificant and random points, when they are taken by themselves, into an *always already* meaningful context. He believes exactly what Aristotle expresses at the beginning of the politics: *Hence it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal (*nature* here is a process, how things necessarily *work themselves out*, not a systematic scientific object). And he who by nature and not by mere accident is without a state, is either a bad man or above humanity (which would be impossible if *man* had a fixed, objective nature); he is like the *Tribeless, lawless, hearthless one* (ILIAD, ix. 63.), whom Homer denounces * the natural outcast is forthwith a lover of war; he may be compared to an isolated piece at draughts (i. e. he doesn* t *fit* in) . . . The proof that the state is a creation of nature and prior to the individual is that the individual, when isolated, is not self-sufficing; and therefore he is like a part in relation to a whole (but this cannot be an absolute statement because he has already said there CAN BE *he who by nature . . . is without a state*; therefore either *nature* is simply synonymous with Heidegger* s Situation or man has two different natures). But he who is unable to live in society, or has no need because he is sufficient for himself (ditto), must either be a beast or a god: he is no part of the state. A social instinct is implanted in all men by nature, and yet he who first founded the state was the greatest of benefactors (*instinct* here is obviously the same as ETHOS, *habituation*, not a physiologically fixed pattern of behavior; *and yet he who first founded the state* MUST be stateless, lawless, tribeless, hearthless and as Greek mythological tradition repeatedly attests, precisely a beast or a god * or both at the same time considering Alexander the Great; as *first* he is a *primitive principle* as in, *Depending on things that are prior is depending on appropriate principles; for I call the same thing primitive and a principle. A principle of a demonstration is an immediate proposition is one to which there is no other prior* [POSTERIOR ANALYTICS, I, 2, 72a7-9]; *there is no other prior* means there is no genealogy, no tradition to follow, no law to obey, no justification from other circumstances but a declaration that this is how it is; in other words, the declaration of a *god*). For man, when perfected (but by whose standard*), is the best of animals, but, when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all . . . Wherefore, if he have not virtue, he is the most unholy and the most savage of animals, and the most full of lust and gluttony. But justice is the bond of men in states, for the administration of justice, which is the determination of what is just, is the principle or order in a political society* (POLITICS, I, 2, 1253a1-39).

And yet, and yet . . . does not Aristotle praise self-sufficiency in the METAPHYSICS after the philosopher has USED *political society* to establish the means whereby he can pursue his completely selfish THEORIA* Is this state of *man* not considered by Aristotle as *divine** *Hence when all such inventions were already established, the sciences which do not aim at pleasure or at the necessities of life were discovered, and first in the places where men first began to have leisure. This is why the mathematical arts were founded in Egypt; for there the priestly caste was allowed to be at leisure* (981b21-24). *And understanding and knowledge pursued for their own sake are found much in the knowledge of that which is most knowable; for he who chooses to know for the sake of knowing will choose most readily that which is most truly knowledge . . .* (982a30-982b1). *Therefore since they philosophized in order to escape from ignorance, evidently they were pursuing science in order to know, and not for any utilitarian end. For this is confirmed by the facts: for it was when almost all of the necessities of life and the things that make for comfort and recreation were present, that such knowledge began to be sought. Evidently we do not seek it for the sake of any other advantage,; BUT AS THE MAN IS FREE, we say, WHO EXISTS FOR HIMSELF AND NOT FOR ANOTHER, so we pursue this as the only free science, FOR IT ALONE EXISTS FOR ITSELF. Hence possession of it might be justly regarded as beyond human power; FOR IN MANY WAYS HUMAN NATURE IS IN BONDAGE (all my italics), so that according to Simonides, *God alone can have this privilege*, and it is unfitting that man should not be content to seek the knowledge that is suited to him. If, then, there is something in what the poets say, and jealousy is natural to the divine power, it would probably occur in this case above all, and all who excelled in this knowledge would be unfortunate. But the divine power cannot be jealous (indeed, according to the proverb, *bards tell many a lie*), nor should any science be thought more honorable than one of this sort. For the most divine science is also the most honorable; and this science alone is, in two ways, most divine. For the science which it would be most meet for God to have is a divine science, and so is any science that deals with divine objects; and this science alone has both these qualities; for God is thought to be among the causes of all things and to be a first principle, and such a science God alone can have, or God above all others. All the sciences, indeed, are more necessary than this, but none is better* (982b20-983a11).

There are two fundamentally opposed purposes of action here in Aristotle. One, man is a politically social animal, and cannot sanely be anything else. Two, the supreme effort of an individual person who wants to be free is first philosophy, *a divine science* that *as the man is free, we say, who exists for himself and not for another, so we pursue this as the only free science, for it alone exists for itself.* And this is certainly the same as defining a self-sufficient man, not needing society any more after it has served his purposes, as *a beast or a god* if there is a difference. But the solution to the problem is contained therein in the definitions themselves, for you must have the first before you can have the second. However, in ABSOLUTELY no way is the first, the *political animal*, the background that grounds the meaning of the second. It is essentially something one must dispense with in order not to be distracted from *understanding and knowledge pursued for their own sake.*

Now the reason why I have clarified Aristotle*s position is that exactly this same *dichotomy*, if one should call it that, is also present in Heidegger. And such a situation to a pragmatist like Dreyfus would be totally intolerable to the point that he would necessarily, AS A PRAGMATIST, be compelled to consider such statements as those by Aristotle to be garbled nonsense. The first clue to this in BEING-IN-THE-WORLD: A Commentary on Heidegger* s BEING AND TIME, Division I, MIT Press, 1991, pg. 6, is that he calls Nietzsche a pragmatist. Now I hope I have made it perfectly clear in THE NECESSITY OF DEBATE to the point of nausea that the end of both Heidegger* s and Nietzsche* s project is art, and the supreme art, the metaphysical art, is tragic. Now, there is absolutely nothing more useless than tragedy for exactly the same reasons as Aristotle said first philosophy was useless, but more so, because tragedy revolves around death and its meaning to life, that the grand project a person has, they either live past its time and it dies, or death puts an arbitrary and whimsical end to both. Yes, a person can make their death into a plot, an artwork, and a final completing end, but only - to be *pragmatic* - while they are still alive. After their death, it belongs to other people who will do with it as they will, which almost inevitably for the mass means the trash can, the file thirteen of the meanings of life. So, to make Nietzsche of all people a *pragmatist* means one has already performed one incredibly weird dance, totally obliterating any coherence to his philosophy UPON HIS TERMS.

And with Heidegger, something very similar occurs. In Section B of Chapter One, *Heidegger* s Substantive Introduction*, page 14, entitled *Dasein* s Way of Being: Existence*, Dreyfus says, *The way to do justice to the fact that Dasein is Heidegger* s name for us and yet avoid the centrality of human individuals is to see that what is to be studied in BEING AND TIME ultimately is not Dasein but DASEIN* S WAY OF BEING.* And thereby the whole discussion of the meaning of death as defining *authentic* being-there has, at least in the fundamental importance Heidegger *pretended* to give it (pretended for what purpose*), been simply dropped out of sight. What Dreyfus has done is clearly choose the, what is to him, the coherent and completely finished aspect of Heidegger in his discussion of pre-ontological understanding and the full and thorough meaning of throwness, or, as Aristotle expressed it, *in many ways human nature is in bondage.* And in this project, he has brilliant coherence, fully clarifying the fullness of the everyday *They* self, which is to him, and I agree, the only solid self of *background practices.* It can neither be subject or object BECAUSE, just as his title makes clear and Heidegger says time and time again, being-in-the-world is what being-there is. That *being* is altogether and absolutely in every respect out there. Which, of course, makes any *here* at best merely pretentious and really quite meaningless.

Now, I am operating on very insecure ground here for I am having to go back over Dreyfus* book after having read it years ago. But he seems to be enunciating quite clearly and definitely his fundamental premises at the first of the book where, of course, with a rational person they should be. And Dreyfus is nothing if not rational. In fact, he is a MOST reasonable man. He refuses to deal with Heidegger* s nonsense that is obviously going in the same direction as Aristotle* s pursuit of *divine science* which Heidegger makes absolutely crystal clear is his primary motivation in the pages of PLATO* S SOPHIST I have been discussing in THE NECESSITY FOR DEBATE. Is he saying that Heidegger changed his mind* Not at all, for in his paper, *Could anything be more Intelligible than Everyday Intelligibility: Reinterpreting Division I of BEING AND TIME in the light of Division II*, he uses almost exactly the same pages to justify his final conclusion of his paper: *We could call such a fully authentic history-making Dasein a cultural master" (pg. 18). He uses PLATO'* SOPHIST to justify and clarify his conclusions about BEING AND TIME, especially the absolute autonomy of the philosopher in PLATO* S SOPHIST that becomes the PHRONEMOS or *prudent one* in Dreyfus, who, *In anticipatory resoluteness, however, anxiety in the face of death has freed Dasein even from taking for granted the agreed-upon current cultural issues* (Ibid.). But, instead of Heidegger* s, *Thereby we procure the ultimate determination of SOPHIA and see at the same time that THEOREIN is a completely autonomous comportment of Dasein, not related to anything else whatsoever* (pg. 88), we have instead from this supposedly autonomous PHRONEMOS: *Such an innovator is so radical that he transforms his generation* s understanding of the issue facing the culture and produces a new authentic *we** (Ibid.). This is a blatant and direct contradiction of Heidegger* s primary intent in PLATO* S SOPHIST, which Dreyfus obviously intends as a valid commentary on BEING AND TIME, not only of the quote I gave above but also, *When Aristotle speaks of SOPHIA as PHRONESIS, he is indicating thereby that he sees in SOPHIA (as Plato did in PHRONESIS) the highest mode of ALETHEUEIN and in general man* s highest comportment. Thus far we know, on the basis of the GENESIS of SOPHIA, that it more and more renounces practical goals . . . But now it must be shown positively (and here Heidegger is speaking unequivocally on his own without a doubt, beyond Aristotle or Plato) that SOPHIA is predelineated in Dasein itself in accord with the very possibility of Dasein; i. e. it is the development of a primary possibility of the Being of Dasein itself. Thereby the autonomy of SOPHIA first becomes ontologically understandable and the discussion of it in relation to PHRONESIS is planted in the proper soil. The task is to demonstrate the possibility that, first, PHRONESIS no longer has as its them the ZOE as PRAKTON but that, second, as ALETHEUEIN it is precisely a mode of Being of the ZOE. The root of an autonomous sheer onlooking upon the world already lies in primitive and everyday Dasein. Aristotle shows that SOPHIA is unconcerned with POESIS and PRAXIS not just by accident and subsequently, but that it is so primordially and originally* (pp. 85-86). Heidegger here not only states his unequivocal agreement with the Aristotle I have quoted above, but, to me, seems to stretch beyond him in a fashion I admire and attribute the essential essence of SOPHIA and THEORIA to common, everyday, basic human being. But is this a practical, rationally coherent enterprise* I think Dreyfus has unequivocally indicated by his deliberate evasion and silence that it is not.


PART FOUR


Now actually one of the greatest disagreements I have with Dreyfus revolves around his statement, *The way to do justice to the fact that Dasein is Heidegger* s name for US and yet avoid the centrality of human individuals is to see that what is to be studied . . . is not Dasein but DASEIN* S WAY OF BEING.* Dreyfus deliberately here cuts off *Dasein* s way of being* from individuality and makes it pragmatist, deliberately taking up Haugeland* s interpretation which *runs up against many passages that make it clear that for Heidegger Dasein designates exclusively entities like each of us, that is, individual persons. For example, *Because Dasein has in each case mineness one must always use a PERSONAL pronoun when one addresses it: *I am*, *you are** B&T (68) [42]* (pg. 14). Dreyfus justifies this blatant and deliberate ignoring (I mean, he is essentially coming right out and telling us directly, *Yes, I know very well this is what Heidegger also wants to do, but I think it is irrational and logically incompatible with his much more practical project about *background practices!*) of Heidegger* s explicit intent with, *The whole question of whether Dasein is a general term or the name for a specific entity is undercut by Heidegger*s more basic interest in the way of being that human beings, cultures, and institutions share*
(Ibid.). BUT *DASEIN*S WAY OF BEING* IS BEING INDIVIDUAL, OWNMOST, UNIQUE IN THE FACE OF DEATH! This IS *Dasein* s* way of being first and foremost as demonstrated from my quotes from PLATO* S SOPHIST! And the way he speaks of *us* in his context is already an abstraction, a thing, an object. In other words, he has gotten rid of the subject as an object, true, but simply has replaced it with a simple, plain, ordinary, everyday, abstract, I might say TAWDRY object. I sense you, you sense me * as objects, sure, but as perception not as abstraction. No one has ever perceived an *us*. Those who see the forest but not the trees will soon receive a nasty surprise as they walk into it.

I have no disagreement with Dreyfus* bare statement, *(Heidegger) is only interested in the de facto structure of this way of being.* What we disagree about is what *this* refers to. It is true I ASSUME this structure applies to all other human beings who SEEM to be like me. But what is *me* and *I* beyond being the emptiest abstractions as Hegel calls them is my total sensibility of perception, my emotional subjectivity which is impossible to objectivize and make into an abstraction, my body as the TOPOS of this original temporality. These are indemonstrable first principles to Aristotle and Heidegger. They are the primitive premises from which both start. And these *things* are NOT abstractions to either one of them. They both approach them as simply and unobscurely as ONE is. *What necessarily is the case because of itself and necessarily seems to be the case is not a supposition or a postulate. For demonstration is not addressed to external argument * but to argument in the soul * since deduction is not either. For one can always object to external argument, but not always to internal argument* (POSTERIOR ANALYTICS, I, 10, 76b23-26).

*External argument* is words against words, abstractions against abstractions, and relates to the voluntary choice between acceptance or rejection of the conclusion. To the statement, *It is day outside and the Sun is up,* you can always obstinately object, *No, it* s not.* *A skeptic can no more be refuted than the being of truth can ever be *proved** (B&T, Stambaugh 210/M&R 271/SuZ 229). The correctness of the conclusion is absolutely and finally judged only by the unique perception of your self in its total loneliness. You will KNOW, whether you WANT to or not, whether the Sun is up because the Sun is involuntarily already within your perception. Now it is another thing altogether if you misunderstand the words or you cannot grasp abstractions, but, if you are not blind, the Sun will be within your perception even if you call it by another name or associate no name with it. BECAUSE THIS IS WHAT YOU ARE. You are perception. If the Sun is up, you are perception of the Sun, not in words at all but just in absolutely lonely perception. And while you with your perception are FORCED to perceive the Sun, the other person with his abstractions in his utter blindness could be lying to you, or offsetting the truth, by perceiving the Sun simply by its warmth whereas you perceive it by its light. In other words, you always have the ability to doubt the truth value of the other person* s words, in their saying my perception is just like yours, either by testing the logical self-consistency of those words * but that simply establishes whether or not they contradict each other * or whether the meanings of their words accurately describe what you perceive.

What you DO NOT DO is compare sensation with sensation. *The Other* s soul is therefore separated from mine by all the distance which separates first my soul from my body, then my body from the Other* s body, and finally the Other* s body from his soul . . . In short, in a philosophy based on intuition, there is provided no intuition of the soul of the Other. But if we are not to make a mere play on words, this means that realism provides no place for the intuition of the Other . . . If the Other is accessible to us only by means of the knowledge which we have of him, and if this knowledge is only conjectural, then the existence of the Other is only conjectural, and it is the role of critical reflection to determine its exact degree of probability . . . Thus since a relation between consciousnesses is by nature unthinkable, the concept of the OTHER can not CONSTITUTE our experience . . . The perception of the Other-as-object refers to a coherent system of representations, and this system IS NOT MINE. This means that in my experience the Other is not a phenomenon that refers to my experience but that on principle he refers himself to phenomena located outside of all experience which is possible for me . . . We can never apprehend the relation of that OTHER to me and he is never given, but gradually we constitute him as a concrete object . . . There remain then only two solutions for the idealist: either to get rid of the concept of the Other completely and prove that he is useless to the constitution of my experience, or to affirm the real existence of the Other * that is, to posit a real, extra-empirical communication between consciousnesses. The first solution is known by the name of solipsism. Yet if it is formulated in conformity with its demonstration of the affirmation of my ontological SOLITUDE, it is a pure metaphysical hypothesis, perfectly unjustified and gratuitous; for it amounts to saying that outside of me NOTHING exists and so it goes beyond the limits of the field of my experience. But if it is presented more modestly as a refusal to leave the solid ground of experience and as a positive attempt not to make use of the concept of the Other, then it is perfectly logical; it remains on the level of critical positivism, and although it is opposed to the deepest inclinations of our being, it derives its justification from the contradictions of the notion of OTHERS considered in the idealist perspective. A psychology that wants to be exact and objective, like the *behaviorism* of Watson, is really only solipsism as a working hypothesis . . . Thus the recourse to God, which we find in Leibnitz, is purely and simply a recourse to the negation of interiority; it is concealed in the theological notion of creation: God at the same time is and is not both myself and the Other since he creates us . . . The image of creation is the most adequate here since in the creative act I look into the very heart of what I create * for what I create is me * and yet what I create opposes itself to me by closing in on itself in an affirmation of objectivity. Thus the spatializing presupposition does not leave us any choice: it must either resort to God or fall into a probabilism which leaves the door open to solipsism* (Sartre, BEING AND NOTHINGNESS, trans. Hazel Barnes, Philosophical Library, 1956, pp. 223-232, Washington Square pp. 303-314).

Dreyfus says on page 13 of his book, chapter I, section A: *Dasein Is Not a Conscious Subject* (which more or less literally states his whole case right there), *Since, as Heidegger holds, getting the right approach is crucial, we must stop here to get the right approach to Dasein. *Dasein* in colloquial German can mean *everyday human experience*, and so Heidegger uses the term to refer to human being. But we are not to think of Dasein as a conscious subject. Many interpreters make just this mistake . . . The most famous version of this mistake is brilliant but misguided reformulation of BEING AND TIME into a theory of consciousness in BEING AND NOTHINGNESS.* Now, to put a positive point first, since Dreyfus is basing his project on what in part is validly present in BEING AND TIME, he does in fact present an aspect of Heidegger that Sartre largely ignores. However, with Sartre, in can be fitted in addition with the greatest of ease without any logical contradiction. This is certainly NOT true of the reverse. Dreyfus makes his position very clear and takes his stand come what may.

And so, here it comes. First of all, the statement, *Dasein is not a conscious subject* is utterly ridiculous because, according to Heidegger* s actual texts, that would be like saying, *A car is not four wheels and a motor.* Now, if the statements were, *Dasein is not JUST a conscious subject* or *A car is not JUST four wheels and a motor*, they would both be perfectly correct. So, unless Dreyfus is playing deceitful little verbal games, and I think it is his great and redeeming virtue that he clearly does not, when he says, *Dasein is not a conscious subject* he is saying in equivalence, *There is no conscious subject at all in Dasein*. Now, if he made it clear at this point that what he was really intending to say was, *There is no reified, objective, thingly consciousness as a reified, objective, thingly subject in Dasein,* he would again be perfectly correct. But as far as I know he does not say this, and certainly does not say this where he needs to if this is really what he means. Still, though he seems to leave little room for it, it might still be what he means. And if any of y* all have a specific, clear text from Dreyfus that directly and unequivocally says this, please inform me of it.

Now, Heidegger says, *The answer to the question of who this being actually is (Da-sein) seems to have already been given with the FORMAL INDICATION
(mine) of the basic characteristics of Da-sein. Da-sein is a being which I myself am, its being is in each case mine. This determination INDICATES an ONTOLOGICAL constitution, but no more than that. At the same time, it contains an ONTIC indication, albeit an undifferentiated one, that an I is always this being, and not others. The who is answered in terms of the I itself, the *subject*, the *self*. The who is what maintains itself in the changes throughout its modes of behavior and experiences as something identical and is, thus, related to this multiplicity. Ontologically, we understand it as what is always already and constantly objectively present in a closed region and for that region, as that which lies at its basis in an eminent sense, as the SUBJECTUM. As something self-same in manifold otherness, this subject has the character of the SELF. Even if one rejects a substantial soul, the thingliness of consciousness, and the objectivity of the person, ontologically one still posits something whose being retains the meaning of objective presence, whether explicitly or not. Substantiality is the ontological clue for the determination of beings in terms of whom the question of the who is answered. Dasein is tacitly conceived in advance as objective presence. In any case, the indeterminacy of its being always implies this meaning of being* (B&T, Stambaugh 108/M&R 150/SuZ 114-115).

So far Heidegger is setting up a concept of Dasein THAT IS ALWAYS ALREADY INHERENTLY, AND CAN BECOME OPENLY SO BY RESOLVE, AUTHENTIC. It is utterly insubstantial as a *thing* of consciousness or person, but *whose being retains the MEANING (the Situation, the context) of objective presence*. It is *conceived in advance as objective presence* which means IT IS NOT SOMETHING PRESENT-AT-HAND. Thus the *subject*, the *self*, *consciousness* is going to be defined as *pure possibility*. *Da-sein is not something objectively present which then has as an addition the ability to do something, but rather is primarily being-possible. Da-sein is always what it can be and how it is its possibility* (B&T, Stambaugh 134/M&R 183/SuZ 143). But Heidegger continues the above quote from SuZ 115, *The ontic obviousness of the statement that it is I who is in each case Da-sein must not mislead us into supposing that the way for an ontological interpretation of what is thus *given* has been unmistakably prescribed. It is even questionable whether the ontic content of the above statement reaches the phenomenal content of everyday Da-sein. It could be the case that the who of everyday Da-sein is precisely NOT I myself.* Heidegger says as to everyday Da-sein, *But is this requirement satisfied by positing an *ideal subject** Is it not a FANTASTICALLY IDEALIZED SUBJECT* Is not precisely the A PRIORI character of the merely *factual* subject, of Da-sein, missed with the concept of such a subject* . . . The ideas of a *pure ego* and a *consciousness in general* are so far from including the A PRIORI character of *real* subjectivity that they pass over the ontological character of facticity of Da-sein and its constitution of being, or do not see it at all* (B&T, Stambaugh 210/M&R
272/SuZ229). So Heidegger clearly does not reject *subject* or *consciousness* but only their reification.

Is this not exactly what Dreyfus has done, while rejecting *the substantial soul, the thingliness of consciousness and the objectivity of the person* supposedly, merely replaced it with another *thingliness*, that of the *us* and *background practices* which in the real Heidegger, *authentic* being-there molds this *throwness* of tradition to its own purpose* *The authentic retrieve of a possibility of existence that has been * the possibility that Da-sein may choose its heroes * is existentially grounded in anticipatory resoluteness; for in resoluteness the choice is first chosen that makes one free for the struggle to come, and the loyalty to what can be retrieved . . . The retrieve of what is possible neither brings back *what is past*, nor does it bind the *present* back to what is *outdated*. Arising from a resolute self-projection, retrieve is not convinced by something *something past*, in just letting it come back as what was once real. Rather, retrieve RESPONDS to the possibility of existence that has-been-there. But responding to the possibility in a resolution is at the same time, AS IN THE MOMENT, THE DISAVOWAL of what is working itself out today as the *past*. Retrieve neither abandons itself to the past, nor does it aim at progress. In the Moment, authentic existence in indifferent to both these alternatives* (B&T, Stambaugh 352-353/M&R 437-438/SuZ 385-386). *Authentic* being-there stands above the *throwness* of *background practices* and chooses what it wants to retrieve or reject and exactly how to interpret either. And these are certainly knowing, conscious actions.

In saying, *It is questionable whether the ontic content of the above statement reaches the phenomenal content of everyday Da-sein* is another way of saying, *THE BEING THAT WE OURSELVES ALWAYS ARE IS ONTOLOGICALLY FARTHEST FROM US* (287/359/311). In other words, it is not an object at-hand as is *the phenomenal content of everyday Dasein*. *The who of everyday Dasein is precisely NOT I myself.* What Heidegger has constructed is the basis of authentic Dasein that is covered over in the everyday, but is *always already* there, the ground of the *Become who you are.* *To clarify the existentiality of the self, we take as our *natural* point of departure the everyday self-interpretation of Da-sein that expresses itself in SAYING-I. Utterance is not necessary. With the *I* this being means itself (later marginal comment * *Clarify more precisely: SAYING-I and being a self*). The content of this expression is taken to be absolutely simple. It always means only me, and nothing further. As this simple thing, the *I* is not a definition of other things; it is ITSELF not a predicate, but the absolute *subject*. What is expressed and addressed in saying-I is always met with as the same persisting thing* (B&T, Stambaugh 293/M&R 366/SuZ 318). So this conclusion is not only late in B&T, i. e., part II, chapter iii, but confirmed by an even later marginal comment. And *subject* is an absolute.

But this is only possible in the face of death where, in coming near what one truly is, *one does not tend toward making something real available and taking care of it, but as one comes nearer understandingly, the possibility of the possible only becomes *greater*. THE NEAREST NEARNESS OF BEING-TOWARDS-DEATH AS POSSIBILITY IS AS FAR REMOVED AS POSSIBLE FROM ANYTHING REAL. The more clearly this possibility is understood, the more purely does understanding penetrate to it AS THE POSSIBILITY OF THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF EXISTENCE IN GENERAL. As possibility, death gives Da-sein nothing to *be actualized* and nothing which it itself could BE as something real. It is the possibility of the impossibility of every mode of behavior toward . . . , of every way of existing. In running ahead to this possibility, it becomes *greater and greater*, that is, it reveals itself as something which knows no measure at all, no more or less, but means the possibility of the measureless impossibility of existence . . . Being-towards-death is the anticipation of a potentiality-of-being of THAT being whose kind of being is anticipation itself* (B&T Stambaugh 242/M&R
306-307/SuZ 262). In other words, you become and *always already* are that *no-thing* death itself. YOU ARE the anticipation of death, and you desire to run ahead towards it precisely because that *projection* DEFINES YOUR AUTHENTIC INDIVIDUALITY. Death here is not some gloomy, dark ending that swallows you up * that act reifies it into something real, and death, like the authentic self, is not real * but something that defines the general plot of your life, shows that you inherently have meaning as trying to define something within the closing boundaries of death. It is not something you wait for, but, rather, in a sense death waits for you. DEATH IS SOMETHING YOU ACCOMPLISH! *Call not a man happy until he is dead.* Only the Greeks could turn what we consider the hopelessness of death into a tragic affirmation of life, and tragedy into a task accomplished, fulfilled.

And I have already said tragedy is useless, and that Dreyfus has no use for the useless. Worse than that, death strikes at the heart of his whole project of practical community: *Death is the OWNMOST possibility of Da-sein . . . The ownmost possibility is NONRELATIONAL. Anticipation lets Da-sein understand that it has to take over solely from itself the potentiality-of-being in which it is concerned absolutely about its ownmost being. Death does not just *belong* in an undifferentiated way to one* s own Da-sein, but it LAYS CLAIM on it as something INDIVIDUAL. The nonrelational character of death understood in anticipation individualizes Da-sein down to itself. This individualizing is a way in which the *there* is disclosed for existence. IT REVEALS THE FACT THAT ANY BEING-TOGETHER-WITH WHAT IS TAKEN CARE OF AND ANY BEING-WITH THE OTHERS FAILS WHEN ONE* S OWNMOST POTENTIALITY-OF-BEING IS AT STAKE (my italics). That then completely and totally overthrows the thesis, *the fact that Dasein is Heidegger* s name for us and yet avoid the centrality of individuals.* The whole notion of community and tradition and *background practices* comes apart in the face of death which *individualizes Da-sein Down to itself* where *being-with others fails.* *The indefiniteness of death discloses itself primordially in ANGST. But this primordial ANGST strives to expect resoluteness of itself. It clears away every covering over of the fact that Da-sein is left to itself* (B&T, Stambaugh 285/M&R 356/SuZ 308).

As one pursues death *understandingly*, it is then the epitome of *knowing*, but not as representation and correspondence, and questioning, of intelligence AS individuality. In the face of this, Dreyfus* *At the foundation of Heidegger* s new approach is a phenomenology of *mindless* everyday coping skills as the basis of all intelligibility* (pg. 3) also goes down the drain. It is true that Heidegger *claims that he is doing ONTOLOGY, that is, asking about the nature of this understanding of being that we do not KNOW * that is not a representation in the mind corresponding to the world * but that we simply ARE* (Ibid.). But as Aristotle has already said, *that we simply ARE* is the primitive primary principle of the *primitive universal in the mind* which is perception as *perception is of the universal* (POSTERIOR ANALYTICS, II, 19, 100a16-17). Dreyfus says, *If all were clear about our *presuppositions*, our actions would lack seriousness* (pg. 4). And though Heidegger does say in THE ORIGIN OF THE WORK OF ART, *Every decision . . . bases itself on something not mastered, something concealed, confusing; else it would never be a decision*, this is a matter of lack of omniscience, of NOT being God, a major thesis of the CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON, that one tries to overcome as best one can in the desire of DIAPOREIN, trying to get through no matter what, Heidegger expounds in PLATO* S SOPHIST. If it becomes a matter of, *Thus what is most important and meaningful in our lives is not and should not be accessible to critical reflection*, not only does *retrieve* and the *Moment* become useless nonsense, but even that slight little thing death. Dreyfus, in effect, has given us a whole new, and extremely strange, meaning to the word *seriousness*.

*Heidegger follows Wilhelm Dilthey in emphasizing that the meaning and organization of a culture must be taken as the basic given in the social sciences and philosophy and cannot be traced back to the activity of individual subjects* (pg. 7). This would come as an immense surprise to both Kerenyi and Pausanias, as well as the Aristotle of the POLITICS quote above, in their enumeration of numerous hero cults exalting their establishment of almost everything cultural in Hellas. And death doesn* t mean much to Dreyfus, does it, nor the THEORIA of Aristotle; and, yes, there is a connection: *In running ahead to this possibility (death), (Da-sein) becomes *greater and greater*, that is, it reveals itself as something that knows no measure at all, no more or less, but means the possibility of the measureless impossibility of existence."

Dreyfus goes on, "Thus Heidegger rejects the methodological individualism that extends from Descartes to Husserl [what about Aristotle*] to existentialists such as the pre-Marxist Sartre . . . In his emphasis on the social context as the ultimate foundation of intelligibility, Heidegger is similar to that other twentieth-century critic of the philosophical tradition, Ludwig Wittgenstein. They share the view that most philosophical problems can be (dis)solved by a description of everyday social practices*
(ibid.). Actually, what Wittgenstein did was find out how people actually used and understood language, so that, although he could himself clear up puzzles in language from within that language, in his theory of family resemblances, the relation of meaning and understanding in actual language was as haphazard as the *everyday social practices* as is described in the quote Dreyfus strangely includes almost immediately following, to actually make another point altogether about Heidegger* s *strange* language, which he precedes with the sentence, *Wittgenstein is convinced that the practices that make up the human form of life are a hopeless tangle* which the quote exactly procedes to do. But this also reduces to utter nonsense *that most philosophical problems can be (dis)solved by a description of everyday social practices*, for how can one rationally expect the solution to philosophical problems to come from *the whole hurly-burly* of *the actions of a variety of humans* that *are all mixed up together* as Wittgenstein says* Indeed, as Wittgenstein concludes, *it determines our judgement, our concepts, and our reactions*, but that is exactly what CREATES those philosophical problems in the first place.

PART FIVE

One thing I failed to mention in my haste to finish letters 3 & 4, and I hope it does not show too much, is that Wittgenstein ALSO had a similar *dichotomy* to what I said Aristotle and Heidegger had. I hope I made it clear that both situations are false dichotomies, that essentially ONE HAS TO HAVE a rational *political society* AND the *background practices* of *throwness* and the tradition that comes with it. The second is the one that is most important to Heidegger and Dreyfus, but it is also fundamental to Aristotle in his NICOMACHIAN ETHICS as ETHOS, the *habituation* one receives from one* s family, friends, and teachers of what is to be considered proper behavior. These are both NECESSITIES because 1) we need them both to accomplish anything lasting at all other than bare hand to mouth survival or to be able to comprehend the world, and 2) we are given no choice: THEY ARE FORCED ON US. So essentially both of those backgrounds come to us as an act of violence, in one sense or another, and as total suppression, even more total in some cultures (the word *culture* is questionable in its application to some societies such as Hitler* s Germany or Stalin* s Soviet Union or Pol Pot* s Cambodia because they are the artificial and immediate imposition of the will of one man, or in the case of Japan of a group of men, the SUCCESSFUL warlords!).

The totality and completeness of this suppression always comes through the family structure, either as parents doing to their children what their parents did to them, or they are forced by the changing state to teach their children how to survive in a world that is new to all of them. The rebels to the family structure rarely have any recourse than to escape into ignorant squalor and then usually into criminality. And even the exceptions to that *rule* rarely accomplish much overall other that just for themselves, for instance Jack London. However, in one way or another by many vastly different paths, this is where the *god* will come as in Heidegger* s statement, *Only a god can save us.* Of course, this is part of Nietzsche* s fundamental thought. Jack London had some of Nietzsche* s ideas in very poorly worked out primitive principles that failed when he ultimately needed the approval of society rather than the *To Hell with everything!* attitude of Hitler who, however, had none of the intellectual attainments of Jack London to any degree whatsoever. The combination of both at their most drastic would not at all be pleasant, and certainly not produce the safe but *meaningful* society Dreyfus so desperately desires, but just like having Angela Davis or Jesse Ventura for president, it sure would shake the whole damn, grey, tawdry world up wouldn* t it*

There is a very good movie whose title I do not remember and I only was able to see once that stared one of my favorite actors, Oscar Werner, in it as a German P. O. W. whom the Americans got to go back to Germany to try to arrange a whole German Army* s surrender to the Allies on the Western front and thus cause the whole collapse of Nazi Germany. In one scene, he is in a restaurant with a motorcycle courier for the Wermacht, and the soldier says, *I know we* ve lost, but we sure gave the world hell didn* t we** The whole world changed after World War Two, not for better nor for worse. No issues were resolved, just their expression changed. Even extermination of peoples was not resolved, but changed into a mode no one would notice or believe in if told. But then, didn* t exactly the same thing happen in the forties* No one could *believe* in the extermination camps until pictures came back from the American Army* s liberation of Bergen-Belsen* Even though everyone had been told about it for years* Even though it was the only logical answer to *the final solution of the Jewish question**. So essentially what we really got was old wine poured into even older bottles, and no miracle whatsoever.

Now Wittgenstein* s *dichotomy* is of a somewhat different sort than Aristotle* s or Heidegger* s. It essentially aimed in the same general direction, but he kept it ALMOST absolutely and completely private. If he had not kept his notebooks, and if various letters and reminiscences had not survived, no one would know about his passionate love of art, especially the poetry of Rilke, his quest for God, or the fundamental influence of Arthur Schopenhauer (or Otto Weinegger (sp.*), for that matter) on his whole way of thinking. His relation to God was formed through the reading of Augustine and Kierkegaard, and later he resolved he refused to believe in God until he was redeemed first which actually in a way reflects the accurate Church doctrine of faith and grace. You need grace first in order to have faith at all. And, as to Schopenhauer, once when he was in Vienna working with the Logico-Positivist philosophers associated with Carnap, in answer to a question relating to how one should between philosophical inquiry, he said one must read THE WORLD AS WILL AND IDEA, surprising the utter hell out of them because they thought very little of Schopenhauer if as a philosopher at all, and never dreamed that Wittgenstein loved him.

The only really public expression of all this, though, in his published writings (if there are others that qualify, PLEASE TELL ME!), is the ending of the TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS, or LOGISCH-PHILOSOPHISCHE ABHANGLUNG as Wittgenstein preferred:

5.6 THE LIMITS OF MY LANGUAGE mean the limits of my world.

*Wittgenstein defines language as *logical space*: *1.1 The is the totality of facts, not of things. 1.13 The facts in logical space are the world.*
(Pg. 7)Language and logic therefore are PLACED as world, as both its space and its limits, as the primitive primary universal principle of being-in-the-world, i. e., as the Greek philosophical concept of TOPOS which fundamentally has to do with the Aristotelian concept of being *familiar*
(Posterior Analytics, II, 19, 99b17-18) and the Heideggerian concept of world as *being at home* (see below).

5.61 Logic pervades the world: the limits of the world are also its limits. So we cannot say in logic, *The world has this in it, and this, but not that.* For that would appear we were excluding certain possibilities, and this cannot be the case, since it would require that logic go beyond the limits of the world; for only in that way could it view those limits from the other side as well. We cannot think what we cannot think; so what we cannot think we cannot SAY either.

*The limits of logic as the limits of language are the limits of existence as such, the limits of *Being*. Though Wittgenstein is strictly referring to logical discourse, I do not see any reason to think that Heidegger would disagree with this in any way except for possibly objecting to its stringency.

5.62 This remark provides the key to the problem, how much truth there is in solipsism. For what the solipsist MEANS is quite correct; only it cannot be SAID, but makes itself manifest. The world is MY world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of LANGUAGE (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of MY world.

*For what the solipsist MEANS is quite correct; only it cannot be SAID, but makes itself manifest* is radically in accord with Sartre* s statement above that, *If (solipsism) is presented more modestly as a refusal to leave the solid ground of experience and as a positive attempt not to make use poof the concept of the Other, then it is perfectly logical.* Solipsism then is the EXPERIENCE, the *manifestation* of, not abstract concepts describing, but EXISTENCE itself. It is not a theoretical statement of some conceptual belief, but is precisely and exactly *manifest*. *Heidegger says, *This world is always already from the outset my own* (B&T, Stambaugh 111/M&R
154/SuZ 118). But M&R has, *The Others who are thus *encountered* in a ready-to-hand, environmental context of equipment, are not somehow added on in thought to some thing which is proximally just present-at-hand; such *Things* are encountered from out of the world from which they are ready-to-hand for Others * a world which is always mine too in advance* which at first seems to imply a shared world of a plurality of *Daseins*. However, Heidegger farther on says, *But the characteristic of encountering the OTHERS is, after all, oriented toward one* s own Da-sein*, so *one* s own Dasein* is always the center and centering structure of being-with. At this point we must also realize that we are in the first part of B&T, and that Heidegger* s primary purpose here is to describe the structure of being-in-the-world THAT WE MUST NECESSARILY FIRST ENCOUNTER in any examination of the meaning of being for Heidegger goes on to clarify the meaning of *Others* as, *They are rather those from whom, for the most part, one does NOT distinguish oneself * whose among whom one is too . . . The *too* means a sameness of Being as circumspectively concernful Being-in-the-word. *With* and *too* are to be understood EXISTENTIALLY, not categorically* (M&R).

And *to be understood EXISTENTIALLY* means *REALITY IS REFERRED BACK TO THE PHENOMENON OF CARE in the order of ontological foundational contexts and possible categorical and existential demonstration. The fact that reality is ontologically grounded in the being of Da-sein cannot mean that something real can only be what IT IS IN ITSELF (my italics) when when and as long as Da-sein exists. However, only as long as Da-sein IS, that is, as long as the ontic possibility of an understanding of being, *is there* [gibt es] being. If Da-sein does not exist, then there *is* no *independence* either , nor *is* there an *in itself*. Such matters are then neither comprehensible nor incomprehensible, Innerworldly beings, too, can neither be discovered, nor can they lie in concealment. THEN it can neither be said that beings are, nor that they are not. NOW, as long as there is an understanding of being and thus an understanding of objective presence, we can say that THEN beings will continue to be. As we have noted, being, not beings, is dependent upon the understanding of being, that is, reality (not the real) is dependent upon care. This dependency protects our further analytic of Da-sein from an uncritical interpretation of Da-sein constantly obtruding itself * an interpretation that follows the guideline of reality. Only the orientation toward existentiality as interpreted in an ontologically POSITIVE way guarantees that in the factical course of the analysis of *consciousness*, of *life*, some meaning of reality is not made basic, even if it is one that has not been further differentiated. The fact that beings having the kind of being of Da-sein cannot be comprehended in terms of reality and substantiality has been expressed by the thesis that the SUBSTANCE OF HUMAN BEING IS EXISTENCE. Interpreting existentiality as care and distinguishing it from reality do not, however, signal the end of the existential analytic, but only lets the maze of problems in the question of being and its possible modes, and the meaning of such modifications, emerge more sharply. Only if an understanding of being IS, are beings accessible as beings; only if beings of the kind of being of Da-sein are, is an understanding of being possible as beings* (B&T, Stambaugh 196/M&R
255-256/SuZ 211-212).

This undeniably establishes Kant* s fundamental faculty of imagination as the basis of existentiality as well as all categoriality. Everything is dependent on the existence of individual ownmost unique being-there, and ceases to exist when being-there ceases. Existence is NOT AN OBJECT, and therefore NOT REAL in the sense of the independent Kantian thing-in-itself that is utterly beyond in its absolute, wordless indifference from us Heidegger mentions at the first of the quote. Our *substantiality* then is the completely insubstantial existence that is purely and only possibility. In other words, existence itself is nothing, and, as in the quotes from Heidegger in Parts 3 and 4, becomes very much likened to the nothingness of death itself. But this is absolutely no problem in the context of Wittgenstein.

5.621 The world and life are one.

* Heidegger says, *We shall reserve the expression world as a term for the meaning (that) world can be understood in an ontic sense . . . as that *IN WHICH* a factical Dasein lives. Here world has a pre-ontological, existentiell meaning. There are various possibilities here: world can mean the *public* world of the we or one* s *own* and nearest (in the home) surrounding world* (B&T, Stambaugh 61/M&R 93/SuZ 65).

5.63 I am my world. (The microcosm.)

5.631 There is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas. If I wrote a book called THE WORLD AS I FOUND IT, I should have to include a report on my body, and would have to say which parts were subordinate to my will, and which were not, etc., this being a method of isolating the subject, or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject; for it alone could NOT be mentioned in that book.

5.632 The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world.

5.633 Where IN the world is a metaphysical subject to be found* You will say it is exactly like the case of the eye and the visual field. But really you do NOT see the eye. And nothing IN THE VISUAL FIELD allows you to infer that it is seen by an eye.

*This is what Sartre is getting at when he talks about the existential body as opposed to the scientifically objectified physiological body we have taken out of the textbook and voluntarily imposed upon ourselves, thus making us objects to ourselves. This is what Aristotle was getting at in the POSTERIOR ANALYTICS, II, 19, 100a15-100b5: *When one of the undifferentiated items takes a stand, there is a primitive universal in the soul; for although you perceive particulars, perception is of universals, - e. g., of man, not of Callias the man. Next, a stand is made among these items, until something partless and universal makes a stand. E. g. such-and-such an animal makes a stand, until animal does; and with animal a stand is made in the same way. Thus it is plain that we must get to know the primitives by induction; for this is the way in which perception instils universals*
(trans. Jonathan Barnes, Clarendon Aristotle Series, second edition, 1993, pg. 74). As obscure as this is, what is sure is that perception is the fundamental ground for knowledge and understanding as a whole. *Depending on things that are primitive is depending on appropriate principles; for I call the same thing primitive and a principle. A principle of a demonstration is an immediate proposition, and an immediate proposition is one to which there is no other prior* (P. A., I, 2, 72a6-9). Aristotle* s demonstration is immediate experience as such, not a teacher* s demonstration of an experiment. An example of such a demonstration: *Here is still a clearer case: in the absence of any cause of terror we find ourselves experiencing the feelings of a man in terror. From all this it is obvious that the affections of the soul are enmattered accounts* (ON THE SOUL, I, 1,
403a23-25). This is experiential demonstration, this is primitive principle and immediate proposition. Also, *the affections of the soul are enmattered accounts* cannot mean in this context anything like an objectifying science of psychology precisely because it is a self-perception and therefore completely out of the range of scientific study. *What necessarily is the case because of itself and necessarily seems to be the case is not a supposition or a postulate. For demonstration is not addressed to external argument * but to argument in the soul * since deduction is not either. For one can always object to external argument, but not always to internal argument* (P. A., I, 10, 76b23-26). So *demonstration* is the *internal argument* *in the soul* that one can only sometimes object to in some situations. In fact, the only way you can possibly *object* in that way is when, for instance, you feel hatred for your mother but refuse to acknowledge it. There *demonstration* the presentation of the knowledge of the emotion IS THERE, IS REAL BECAUSE IT EXISTS, but you deny it or ignore it ALTHOUGH THE KNOWLEDGE IS STILL PRESENT IN YOUR CONSCIOUSNESS. And then something else that needs to be tied into all of this to cap it off is Aristotle* s famous statement that Heidegger quotes, *The soul is in a way all EXISTING things; for EXISTING things are either sensible or thinkable*
(ON THE SOUL, III, 8, 431b20-21). *Existing* and *living* here are synonymous, and you do not refer to a rock as living, but only to yourself as the only thing you know from direct *demonstration* as *existing*. This is in total accord with the quotations from Heidegger above.


PART SIX

5.634 This is connected with the fact that no part of our experience is at the same time A PRIORI. What ever we see could be other than it is. Whatever we could describe at all could be other than it is. There is no A PRIORI order of things.

*Experience is primitive demonstration; there is no necessary prior knowledge needed to explicate experience.

5.64 Here it can be seen that solipsism, when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides with pure realism. The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it.

*Here is *Dasein* as pure possibility, which means it has no reality at all, being reduced to a spaceless logical/mathematical point created by and for the imagination just as Heidegger described above.

5.641 Thus there really is a sense in which philosophy can talk about the self in a non-psychological way. What brings the self into philosophy is the fact that *the world is my world*. The philosophical self is not the human being, not the human body, or the human soul, with which psychology deals, but rather the metaphysical subject, the limit of the world * not a part of it.

*It is *being-in-the-world*, inclusive of *world*, inclusive of *being*, and, most of all, inclusive of *in*.

6.1 The propositions of logic are tautologies.

*Words, without the Aristotelian of pointing at *this*, only refer to words.

6.11 Therefore the propositions of logic say nothing. (They are the analytic propositions.)

6.3 The exploration of logic means the exploration of EVERYTHING THAT IS SUBJECT TO LAW. And outside logic everything is accidental. [Die Erforschung der Logik bedeutet die Erforschung aller Gesetzmäßigkeit. Und außerhalb der Logik ist alles Zufall.]

6.31 The so-called law of induction cannot possibly be a law of logic, since it is obviously a proposition with sense.- Nor, therefore, can it be an A PRIORI law. [Das sogenannte Gesetz der Induktion kann jedenfalls kein logisches Gesetz sein, denn es ist offenbar ein sinnvoller Satz.- Und darum kann es auch kein Gesetz a priori sein.

*This is true for all the reasons we evidenced for the primitive primacy of experience.

6.32 The law of causality is not a law but the form of a law. [Das Kausalitätsgesetz ist kein Gesetz, sondern die Form eines Gesetzes.]

6.3431 The laws of physics, with all their logical apparatus, still speak, however indirectly, about the objects of the world. [Durch den Ganzen logischen Apparat hindurch sprechen die physikalischen Gesetze doch von den Gegenständen der Welt.]

6.36 If there were a law of causality, it might be put in the following way: There are laws of nature. But of course that cannot be said: it makes itself manifest. [Wenn es ein Kausalitätsgesetz gäbe, so könnte es lauten:* Es gibt Naturgesetze*. Aber freilich kann man das nicht sagen: es zeigt sich.]

6.3631 This procedure (induction), however, has no logical justification, but only a psychological one. It is clear that there are no grounds for believing that the simplest eventuality will in fact be realized. Dieser Vorgang hat aber keine logische, sondern nur eine psychologische begründung. Es ist klar, daß kein Grund vorhanden ist, zu glauben, es werde nub auch wirklich der einfachste Fall eintreten.]

6.375 Just as the only necessity that exists is LOGICAL necessity, so too the only impossibility that exists is LOGICAL impossibility. [Wie es nur eine l o g i s c h e Notwendigkeit gibt, so gibt es auch eine l o g i s c h e Unmöglichkeit.]

**Necessity* and *impossibility* can ONLY be intellectual abstractions.

6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: IN it no value exists * and if it did exist, it would have no value. If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case. For all that happens and is the case is accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie WITHIN the world, since if it did it would itself be accidental. It must lie outside the world.

6.42 And so it is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics. Propositions can express nothing that is higher.

6.421 It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are the same.)

6.431 So too at death the world does not alter, but comes to an end.

6.4311 Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration, but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.

*Trying to truly speak of death is literally trying to speak AFTER ONE IS DEAD, just as Heidegger covered above.

6.4312 Not only is there no guarantee of the temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say of its eternal survival after death; but, in any case, this assumption completely fails to accomplish the purpose for which it has always been intended. Or is some riddle solved by surviving forever* Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life* The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies OUTSIDE space and time. (It is certainly not the solution of any problems of natural science that is required.)

6.432 HOW things are in the world is a matter of complete indifference for what is higher. God does not reveal himself IN the world.

6.4321 The facts all contribute only to setting the problem, not to its solution.

6.44 It is not HOW things are in the world that is mystical, but THAT it exists.

6.45 To view the world SUB SPECIE AETERNI is to view it as a whole * a limited whole. Feeling the world as a limited whole - it is this that is mystical.

**Why is there anything, anything at all, rather than Nothing**

6.5 When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words. THE RIDDLE does not exist. If a question can be framed at all, it is also POSSIBLE to answer it.

*But Heidegger says the grounding question of the guiding question of *Being* does not necessitate, does not need, does not consider an answer as in any way truly completing the fundamental, grounding question (NIETZSCHE, vol. II, "*5. The Essence of a Fundamental Metaphysical Position", pp.
194-195). However, Heidegger has also climbed up the ladder and pulled it up behind him.

6.51 Scepticism is NOT irrefutable, but obviously nonsensical, when it tries to raise doubts where no questions can be asked. For doubts can exist only where a question can exist, and an answer only where something CAN BE SAID.

6.52 We feel that even when ALL POSSIBLE scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course there are then no questions left, and this itself is the answer.

6.521 The solution to the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem. (Is not the reason why those who found after a long period of doubt that the sense of life became clear to them have then been unable to say what constituted that sense*)

6.522 There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They MAKE THEMSELVES MANIFEST. They are what is mystical.

6.53 The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i. e., propositions of natural science * i. e., something that has nothing to do with philosophy * and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions. Although it would not be satisfying to the other person * he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy * THIS method would be the only strictly correct one.

6.54 My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them * as steps * to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions and then he will see the world aright.

7 What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

(trans. Pears & McGuinness, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969, pp. 115-151)

I had forgotten how tremendously wonderful this. Even if he MIGHT disagree with Heidegger here or there, Wittgenstein marvelously clarifies Heidegger* s thinking to the point you want to slam your head against the wall for having wasted so much time on lesser writers. Heidegger almost had to have read Wittgenstein* s book, but, in the first place I can think of to look, Rudiger Safranski, there is no mention of Wittgenstein* s name in the index. After all, Heidegger had a fascination for both logic and mathematics, and Wittgenstein had just as big an impact on the German philosophical community as he did on the English.

Regardless, you can see a radical sense of individuality and more sophisticated kind of solipsism explained in such a way that it radically explains and logically confirms the thinking of both Heidegger and Sartre, showing in the lucid coherency of Wittgenstein* s thinking why the radical, sophisticated solipsism of *Da-sein* is on the one hand logically justified, yet on the other hand clearly displays a logical world the ordinariness of human beings not only could not endure even if they tried, but would refuse to in the first place since such a logical world as Wittgenstein describes in the TRACTATUS is literally insane through utter detachment both from others and from oneself. But it is also an insanity that literally says that, once it explains itself, it doesn* t apply to itself any longer, shucks itself, and climbs up the ladder back into the world of art, religion and the foolishness of other LIVING people and pulls the ladder up behind it. Which is precisely what Wittgenstein did in his life, concluding with the manuscripts that became the PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS. There he deals with language and logic as it is and can/should be used within a living context of human beings where, though some things can be clarified, shown how they are contradictory WITHIN THAT LIVING CONTEXT, and corrected, many things can only be observed and described as best they can and left to be exactly as they are as FOUND. As even Dreyfus* quote from Wittgenstein on page 7 of his book (Ludwig Wittgenstein, REMARKS ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF PSYCHOLOGY, vol. 1, ed. Anscombe & Wright, University of Chicago Press, 1980, 108, #629) shows exactly how the thinker of the TRACTATUS relates to real life in one of his very last writings: *How could human behavior be described* Surely only by showing the actions of a variety of humans, as they are all mixed up together. Not what ONE man is doing NOW, but the whole hurly-burly, is the background against which we see an action, and it determines our judgement, our concepts, and our reactions.* This is no benediction of *background practices* as in Dreyfus, but a pessimistic condemnation that is resigned to *what is the case*. Wittgenstein obviously doesn* t believe in sociology as a real science either, and this certainly would make *psychiatry* limited to a radical one on one situation of absolute equals, the psychiatrist both trying to understand the other within the same process at the same time of trying to understand themselves. It would literally be an ART OF WAR situation involving most of Sun-tzu* s prescriptions, all based on the primarily fundamental, *Know thy enemy, know thyself.* And Dreyfus comments which his usual brilliant, radically defining, but self-contradictory clarity, *To begin with, Heidegger and Wittgenstein have a very different understanding of the background activity of everyday activity. Wittgenstein is convinced that the practices that make up the human form of life is a hopeless tangle . . . Wittgenstein warns against any attempt to systematize this hurly-burly. *NOT to explain, but to ACCEPT the psychological phenomenon * that is what is difficult* (Ibid., 97, #509).

PART SEVEN

And now hopefully having established several basic points about the necessity and centrality of individual existence and experience, I will now deal with the essay that Arum-Kumar Tripathi and Rene de Bakker recommended to me. The first thing I want to make clear, and actually to show my appreciation of Doctor Dreyfus, is the immense superiority in clarity and true philosophical intent that is in this essay compared to the rest of the off-hand gaff that is in THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO HEIDEGGER. This specifically refers to the essays by Charles Guignon, Michael Zimmerman, and Charles Taylor. I especially did not appreciate this pronouncement from Guignon: *Yet when (Heidegger* s) writings became more widely known among professionals in the field, it was less through this route than through the impact of existentialism in the fifties and sixties. As a result, though Heidegger* s thought is often treated as the cornerstone of existential psychotherapy, what one usually finds is a Heidegger refracted through the lens of the far more accessible writings of Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus. In the mouth of this *existentialized* Heidegger, the idea of authenticity is pictured as the stance of the rugged individualist who, upon experiencing anxiety in the face of the ultimate absurdity of life, lives intensely in the present and creates his or her own world through leaps of radical freedom . . . The decline of existentialism can be attributed, I believe, to the growing suspicion that its image of the human condition is too limited to capture the concrete realities of actual existence. The conception of *terrible freedom* found in the French existentialists, seems to conceal the sense we have of being embedded in the world where not all things are possible. Idealizing the notion of freedom runs the risk of glorifying sheer capriciousness, the kind of *do-your-own-thing* willfulness that created such misery for the *me-generation*. Moreover, when authenticity is equated with the existentialist vision of freely creating one* s life as a work of art, it is quite natural to conclude that this idea is consistent with an amoral or immoral way of life . Existentialist psychology, allied in the sixties with *humanistic* movements, was suppose to provide a *third force* to serve as an alternative to Freudian and empirical approaches. Opposing what it perceived to be the scientific *mechanism* and *determinism* of standard theories, this movement sought to protect the dignity of humans by insisting on human freedom. But, in the end, its overblown notion of freedom came to seem as unrealistic and pernicious as the view it sought to replace* (*Authenticity, moral values, and psychotherapy*, in THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO HEIDEGGER, ed. Charles Guignon, Cambridge, 1993, pp.
215-216).

This is a great example of: If you cannot even begin to understand what your opponent is doing or comprehend what the problems even are that they are dealing with, call them names. This is obviously acceptable as an academic virtue and the epitome of philosophical acuity in the *professional* community. However, it is a deliberate and knowing turning one* s back on the whole meaning, history, and purpose of the philosophical endeavor. Guignon* s ethical campaign against such blatant amorality clearly demonstrates that he already fully knows exactly what the truth of truth, of reality, and of human existence is, and that one should acknowledge his obvious mature and well considered judgements of such jejune matters. One wonders, Why is this person supposedly in philosophy at all if he clearly doesn* t like thinking* His language is aimed only at one goal, establishing his authority without justification and the high status of his respectability.

I hope I am doing far more reasonable and explicit justice to Doctor Hubert L. Dreyfus who definitely does enjoy thinking, does present a position that is important and relevant to human existence, and, though I thoroughly disagree with the direction he is taking that thinking, presents a formidable argument based on real evidence. Dreyfus has clearly read his Thomas Hobbes and Hobbes* reasoned but very emotional lament on the ravages of the English civil war and the results of the breakdown of law and common, everyday social decency. If there were a Thomas Hobbes today from Vietnam or Korea or El Salvador or Israel/Palestine that could write and reason as well as he did, such a person could have real impact at least on the reading public that might truly help resolve such conflicts with the realization of what these people are in truth committing upon each other. Contemplating such things, along with mind sets like Guignon* s of such total inhuman indifference to *actual existence* he says existentialism somehow distances itself from, one wonders truly if the name-calling denigration of the *do-your-ownthing*, *me-generation* meaning of life has, under the guidance of such educators as Guignon, finally become under them the infliction of pointless pain and idiotic dullness on other human beings. Enough of that. Now to something with some real flesh and blood in it.

In Dreyfus essay, *Heidegger on the connection between nihilism, art, technology, and politics*, pp. 289-316, the author begins with what might be considered a paen to existentialism compared to Guignon* s exultation of pomposity and drabness. In his connection of Kierkegaard* s passion of commitment to Heidegger, Dreyfus then sets up a legitimate and believable background to his contrast of Heidegger to Kierkegaard: *But whereas Kierkegaard thought that leveling and lack of commitment had been accentuated to nihilistic proportions by the media, Heidegger in BEING AND TIME writes as if leveling had been with humankind as long as tools have, and he sees nothing special in the present age* (pg. 290). Now, I am sure everyone has read statements in Heidegger to the effect that *leveling and lack of commitment* have *been accentuated to nihilistic proportions, specifically his reference to the technological giants Russia and the United States as bastions of evil between which, at one time, he saw no difference. He did change his mind about the matter and developed a much more balanced and interesting view of technology later. But, much more importantly, Dreyfus does disclose in that statement an extremely fundamental and supremely important point throughout Heidegger, a point that if not taken into consideration reduces Heidegger to trash: THAT NOTHING HAS BASICALLY CHANGED IN HUMAN NATURE SINCE THE BEGINNING OF HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY WITH THE GREEKS, CHINESE, AND INDIANS.

In other words, as we have exactly the same kind of body, we have *always already* all begun and fundamentally endure with EXACTLY the same kind of needs, as Sartre explicitly shows in the CRITIQUE OF DIALECTICAL REASON, and that, though different cultures seem to have fundamentally different answers to the same questions, yet, if we look hard at real human experience as it truly factically IS, we find in individuals here and there in the present age, though usually in an undeveloped fashion, trying to follow through exactly the same paths of thinking as the Greeks, Chinese, and Indians went through. Culture is not something that exists as an objectified spirit high above us that descends upon us and makes us live a certain way. Rather, culture is something worked out in each individual* s factical life within their own Situation and their own pain and joy. So in reality there NEVER is *a* culture, but always as many cultures as there are individual human beings. Each person* s way of life is a kind of *solution* to the problems raised by *culture*. Which means as each person approaches those problems absolutely alone from within their private Situation, they may well be resolved as *unrealistic and pernicious*, as *overblown*, as *amoral or even immoral*, as *do-your-own-thing*, or, Guignon forbid such *amoral or immoral* behavior as *freely creating one* s life as a work of art*. When I go jogging very early in the morning, I occasionally meet gang members coming home from wherever they were, and doing what they were. I* m sure Guignon would consider them *amoral or immoral*, but as with all other COMMITTED *amoral or immoral* people I have met with in my life, they have a straightforward code of *ethics* that, though it can be dangerous to you under the right circumstances, you can actually rely upon them abiding by. It is the people who pomposly declare their moral standards like Guignon that you must beware, along with the likes of the Ayatollah Houmeini, Jerry Falwell, and Meir Kahane, all, all profoundly moral men. When a person makes it clear that they know exactly what right and wrong is, you are in deep trouble. This why I am writing here, because I am NOT certain that Dreyfus is wrong or how much he might be wrong since I hope I have made it clear he has a strong basis upon which he makes his argument, an unusual approach blatantly ignoring obvious existentialist elements in Heidegger* s philosophy but still very strong, possibly in fact a very complicated path I do not even have the slightest, vaguest comprehension of. AND it is your job to show me exactly why and where I have gone wrong with adequate evidence and not pompous moral pronouncements.

*The only way to have a meaningful life in the present age, then, is to let your involvement become definitive of reality for you, and what is definitive of reality for you is not something that is in any way provisional * although it certainly is vulnerable. That is why, once a society like ours becomes rational and reflective, such total commitments begin to look like a kind of dangerous dependency. The committed individual is identified as a workaholic or a woman who loves too much. This suggests that to be recognized and appreciated, individual commitment requires a shared understanding of what is worth pursuing. But as our culture comes more and more to celebrate critical detachment, self-sufficiency, and rational choice, there are fewer and fewer shared commitments. So commitment itself begins to look like craziness* (pg. 291). One thing is for sure, Dreyfus is radically opposed to Guignon* s denigration of existentialism* s *rugged individualist* who *creates his or her own world through leaps of radical freedom* that *is too limited to capture the concrete realities of actual existence* to the point that I wonder why Guignon even tolerated Dreyfus essay in his book that makes him look so bad. Once again, Dreyfus straightforwardly defines a clear and present danger in current reality. Commitment has indeed begun *to look like craziness.* But revolving precisely upon this point, I would radically disagree with Dreyfus estimation that this *society like ours* (let me make this PERFECTLY CLEAR: it is not mine!) is either *rational* or *reflective*. It might be called *reasonable* if the most spineless and mindless possible image of that *reason* can be put forward. This is the age of compromise so no one has to make a commitment and conclude a harsh decision about what to do about horrendous problems, for instance, that of the fast accumulating population of the utterly useless aged like me that are not now able, or soon will cease to be able, to do productive work and are a gigantic drain on any welfare state* s economy to the point that, even within my lifetime, literal bankruptcy faces their treasuries. And then add to that figure all the other kinds of fast accumulating populations, the mentally *ill*, the mentally retarded, the perpetually ill, the disabled that cannot or will not work or train for work, the old people like me whose skills are outdated and find it extremely hard to train at new technologies, the greatly expanding population of criminals in and out of prison, and the great mass of people in general who despise education and accomplishment yet have a great love of money. Am I talking about the future population of the world* No, this is the present population. But no one wants to see this, they refuse to examine the situation, they feel no concern because those who ride the wave of present success at the moment feel such a concern is ridiculous and, like Guignon, *unrealistic*. But there can only be one, and one only, result of having the vast majority of the population completely unproductive. A similar blindness occurred before the Great Depression of 1929 when the booming economy totally ignored the complete collapse OVER A PERIOD OF YEARS of the farming system. An even worse example was the inclusion of slavery in the Constitution of the United States by the founding fathers who clearly knew then, even the ones from Virginia, that such inclusion contained the very destruction of the newly created nation that so nearly came to pass during the Civil War. So this society is far from rational, and certainly in no possible fashion whatsoever *reflective*. But this aside, I would have to agree with the rest of Dreyfus* paragraph. This is because, though we are opposed in some of our basic premises, Dreyfus, unlike Guignon, is rational himself. If one discovers a problem, first of all, one tries to understand it as it actually exists, not call it a belittling name and walk away from it. I think when Dreyfus uses the words *rational* and *self-sufficiency*, he means a kind of detachment that is totally divorced from problem-solving and resolving, not the detachment of blind justice dispensing equity, but the detachment of Guignon* s *I don* t want to think about it.* In other words, they claim the word *rational*, especially its lack of commitment and emotional resolve it brings, but have no idea to its meaning or effective use outside of that. What they are skilled at is manipulation, saying something is in *decline* due to a vague *suspicion* (on whose part*) that an *image of the human condition is too limited (in what way*) to capture the concrete realities of actual existence*, which is a circular and goal-less endeavor that contains its own ultimate exhaustion and collapse because it has foresworn *commitment*.

I will even admit, to a degree, that *individual commitment requires a shared understanding of what is worth pursuing.* As much as we may or may not dislike the context, art, literature, and philosophy were encouraged and supported in a way during the medieval age. Whereas in the modern context, it is productiveness that is rewarded in these endeavors, where a scholar must *publish or perish* regardless of quality, and the artist*s and writer*s greatest boast is, *I can deliver!* i. e., mechanically produce the merely adequate. Dreyfus is perfectly right with his examples of *a workaholic or a woman who loves too much.* As disastrous as these lifestyles can be, Dreyfus shows commitment requires a bit more than opinions and moralization. I would rather be forced to commit to the passion of the Catholic Church than the dead dreariness of academic art, literature, and philosophy. Commercial success, on the other hand, is a Quixotic thing.

    You could say Michelangelo, da Vinci, Raphael, Shakespeare, Rubens, and Rembrandt were commercial successes of sorts. But then it gets to be a question of exactly WHY are these people laying out their money and who are they* Does the evaluation of giving concrete value really have any connection to the art as such it is buying* For you could say that in the Renaissance, it was an investment in vanity and self-esteem, whereas now it is merely an investment for monetary gain since no one really needs to cultivate self-esteem as that can be bought with little expenditure of time and effort. But at least money has, and maybe really IS reality. The meaning of what money really is, that, concretely, this supposedly concrete, solid, down to earth, ultimate practical value that is essentially very complex history of relations of exchange, has always puzzled me. Its power is very real. In fact one could say its power to evoke truth itself is possibly unparalleled. And the power of money displayed in how it is used and what exactly it is used to buy, in naked truth discloses our primal values * as a *society* of individuals watching what a person with the power of money does, with that person knowing full well they are being closely observed in what they do. I wish Sartre would have used his analysis of *the look* in a profound examination of the overwhelming power of money which was so important to his later thought. I remember reading about Germans at the end of World War II whose Nazi paper money was officially without any value whatsoever, still using that mere symbol of money because it was the only money they had, and especially where barter had failed or was totally confused. What do you say*

*When everything that is material and social has become completely flat and drab, people retreat into their private experiences as the only remaining place to find significance* (pg. 292). This is *nothing special in the present age* EXCEPT that it is seen as *craziness* as Dreyfus says. In almost every other age, there was a deliberate space set aside for such people. Monasteries and convents and hermitages were one such kind of space, something almost universal in all the religions of the world and even in Greek and Indian philosophy. And we no longer have anything like it, no protected space to retreat into ourselves from this overbearing world of blatantly hypocritical morality whose true name is force and fraud. True, and still going by what Dreyfus said about Heidegger, the morality of each and every age was totally and blatantly hypocritical * it is a necessary part of its essence * but this age is unique in being without a space for people who are totally nauseated by that hypocrisy. They are precisely the ones, unlike us who can always compromise a way to get along with the world, who are called "crazy."