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am starting an essay by Daniel M. Groos, professor of rhetoric at the University of Iowa, entitled *Introduction: Being-moved: The Pathos of Heidegger's Rhetorical Ontology* that forms the introduction to the book, HEIDEGGER AND RHETORIC, edited by Gross and Ansgar Kemman, State University of New York Press, copyright
2005 but I think just published in June 2006.

The thesis of the essay - I think, at least in part - is that Heidegger's move toward Nazism was a move from Aristotle's RHETORIC and its *sensus communis*, Richard's  Sansom's *social norms* possibly, and hermeneutics which, as I have so far pieced it together and very possibly incorrectly, relegates science to being a *special case* of knowledge - something Aristotle would certainly have rejected - and operative according to Heidegger's - I think non-Kantian, actually I am pretty sure that is so - sense of  *understanding* which is formed and guided by passion, AKA pathos, and prejudice.

     Gross continually contrasts Hans Georg Gadamer's notion of hermeneutics with Heidegger's. Gadamer also believes *prejudice* guides our understanding, but as I understand him . . . one now hesitates to use the word . . . *prejudice* is used in the sense of *unfounded presuppositions* and is a *productive understanding*, as Gross describes it, that is, going by what I know of Gadamer, you have to start from where your understanding is at the moment you start, but as you proceed, logic and experience tell you where your presuppositions have gone wrong and you correct them to correspond to objective reality. This is reflected, I think, is Gadamer's respect for Karl Popper. The point is, Gadamer's *hermeneutics* is not primarily guided by pathos or  *passion*. It is a search for a neutral point of rational judgment of facts starting from a flawed and incomplete understanding.

RICHARD SANSOM:
I have a small book, On the Way to Language, by Heidegger, you might find interesting. The first section is a conversation between Herr H. and a Japanese scholar. In it H. makes the following remarks about hermenetics:

*…The expression hermeneutic derives from the Greek verb hermeneuein. That verb is related to the noun hermeneus, which is referable to the name of the god Hermes by a playful thinking that is more compelling than the rigor of science. Hermes is the divine messenger. He brings the message of destiny; hermeneuein is that exposition which brings tidings because it can listen to a message. Such exposition becomes an interpretation of what has been said earlier by the poets who, according to Socrates in Platos, Ion hermenes esin tontheon – ‘are interpreters of the gods’*

He goes on to say:

*All this makes it clear that hermeneutics means not just the interpretation but, even before it, the bearing of message and tidings.*

GARY. C. MOORE:
Gross makes the point that Heidegger's hermeneutics kept the passion, *pathos*, of rhetorical methodology taken out of context from Aristotle's public speaking and turned it on its head, as Marx supposedly did Hegel, and made it a passionate internal methodology of investigative knowledge where *prejudice* is no longer something to overcome, as in Gadamer, but becomes the primary motivator for knowing.

     My point of interest in Aristotle's theory of rhetoric started when Heidegger connected it with *everyday understanding* in BEING AND TIME, the average way human beings understand and judge the usual world they live in where a number of things like *social norms* are just *understood* to be around in the air we breathe. This is in fact the point from which we all start. I would think for a dispassionate and objective philosopher this would be a place from which one desires to depart from, to leave behind, so as to obtain true knowledge of how things really are, not, instead as Heidegger seems to do, going even deeper into the miasma of popular mores and swamp of emotional mass hysteria that always seems to be trembling at the bare edge of the subconscious.

MOORE: My real initial point in pursuing this was to show that rhetoric in the ancient world was a holistic way of life and knowledge inclusive of all society.

RICHARD SANSOM:
That is a very interesting opinion: stepping off or out of the mundane, the day-to-day experiences of people to *obtain true knowledge of how things really are.* Is there a different brain involved between the two approaches? If it is the same brain, how is it possible to avoid the ordinary, the common place? Does the thinker, the philosopher, the psychologist have a privileged perspective on life, while the baker and the race car driver are stuck with baking cakes and enjoying thrills – and only those kinds of things? I really do not know – these are not facetious questions. But I see the problems in life containing a common thread – the thread of finding solutions, and I have the feeling that all solutions, at their base, require the same kind of thinking.


      One can elevate the whole picture of the world to what they believe is a rarefied, *objective* view, and tackle what they see are problems in understanding it, but in doing so they cannot help but skew it towards their objective view. I have several books dealing with the so-called *clash of civilizations* called by different names, inspired by the recent conflicts between the East and the West – or more particularly, the Middle East and the West. Some see this as a religious conflict; some see it as economic; some see it as some kind of struggle of wills; some see it as only hegemonic ambitions, etc.

       Those are all supposedly dispassionate, disinterested perspectives that are objective. Of course they are not that at all. We cannot help but focus on either what interests us most, or what most has the appearance in our view of the world of being most dominant and significant. Does the capable and experienced journalist, such as Robert Fisk, have a privileged perspective? Yes, he does, simply due to his vast experience in the area. But even he, if one reads his recent opus, The Great War for Civilization, allows his personal take on things to intrude, just as B. Russell did in his History of Western Civilization, and Churchill in his History of the English. History, even recent history, can never be objectively told, thus the interpretations of what is said should never be free of the skeptics suspicions. Is not hermeneutics just the wrestling with this issue? I am not all that familiar with all the writings on the subject.

Without defending Heidegger in any way, I will say this: * the miasma of popular mores and swamp of emotional mass hysteria, * is probably 99% of what goes on in the world in reaction to the other one percent. It cannot be ignored – can it?

Forgive the long speech. Sometimes my button get punched….

GARY. C. MOORE:
The focus of this book of essays is Heidegger's lecture series in 1924 soon to be released by Indiana University Press as BASIC CONCEPTS OF ARISTOTLEAN PHILOSOPHY. Now, the Heidegger of the early lecture series before BEING AND TIME I have always found to be the most appealing and informative Heidegger. In these lecture series his popular fame as a lecturer, which Hannah Arendt styled *Rumours of the hidden king*, soared. Almost all of his lecture series read immensely better than his deliberately hermeneutically written texts like the infamous and hidden until recently BEITRAGE: CONTRIBUTIONS TO PHILOSOPHY. ( Heidegger’s Beiträge zur Philosophie.)  I have quoted extensively several years ago when I followed Heidegger more fanatically his essay written around 1922 for the possibility of obtaining a secure academic position on his methodology of understanding Aristotle. I still think it is informative and valuable, but, if I remember right, you can see something - now that Gross has brought it to my attention - of his turning Aristotle on his head from being the public lecturer to his students to being a philosopher as if writing in private for a truly esoteric audience of readers. That does seem to be the core of Gross' point, that the sensus communis of public speaking whether to students in a classroom as Heidegger did so well and public speaking on the political forum or the courtroom where people would openly debate either as an audience of qualified voters or as a jury sitting in judgment has been wrecked by Heidegger with his non-Gadamerian style of private hermeneutics in a written text written purely for insiders and culminating in the most private text of all, the CONTRIBUTIONS TO PHILOSOPHY.

     My real initial point in pursuing this was to show that rhetoric in the ancient world was a holistic way of life and knowledge inclusive of all society, politics, and philosophy which, in those times, was truly a POPULAR movement just like Christianity and Mithraism and competitive with them.

      And Heidegger makes this point. But obviously something about him in the actual writing down of BEING AND TIME changed, though it changed him in ways he was probably already tending towards, accelerated them and emphasized them, so that one can read about *understanding* in BEING AND TIME and only have a vague understanding of what he means whereas in his more universally and directly understandable lectures on Nietzsche in the mid 1930s he bluntly speaks of a *river of hate* flowing underground within the understanding AS IF EVERYONE HAD ONE!. This also, of course, relates to a fundamental concept of *mood* which supposedly Gross will get to.

      If you still belong to any Heidegger groups and want to send this onto them or just talk about it, you can, but leave my name out of it. If you, want, though, you can post it to your website and there attribute it to me if you so desire. Just check the spelling, especially *Beiträge*. And you may want to put all that on semi-permanent hold until when and if I do some more reading. Restyle it, if you desire, however you want for your purposes. My neck is starting to hurt and I still have not got rid of my bad tooth yet.

BERNARD BOVASSO:
Thanks for your illuminating comments about Heidegger. It gives a much needed understanding of his presence and influence

     I would like, however for the moment focus on what your note:

GARY. C. MOORE:
"... But obviously something about him in the actual writing down of BEING AND TIME changed, though it changed him in ways he was probably already tending towards, accelerated them and emphasized them, so that one can read about *understanding* in BEING AND TIME and only have a vague understanding of what he means whereas in his more universally and directly understandable lectures on Nietzsche in the mid 1930s he bluntly speaks of a *river of hate* flowing underground within the understanding AS IF EVERYONE HAD ONE!. This also, of course, relates to a fundamental concept of *mood* which supposedly Gross will get to."

BOVASSO: Jung noticed this in his German patients during the late 'twenties and thus anticipated the Nazi catastrophe.

In this sense, in falling back to his pre BEING AND TIME work he in fact cuts his own throat by reverting to a Nietzschean view that in fact anticipates modern Depth Psychology but insofar as he maintains a philosophical rather than psychological vernacular. The AS IF EVERYONE HAD ONE (an unconscious) is, of course, the liet motif of Depth Psychology. In this manner "mood" as the euphemism for unconscious feeling (in the sense of gehfhul) goes begging and regresses from a feeling sensibility to raw and unmediated emotion. Feeling, after all is modulated emotion which is barred in Heidegger's apparently split personality when it came to his volkish Hitlerian socialism and his compulsive intimacies with his Jewish student, Hannah Arendt: and all of which C. G. Jung would refer to as the expressed elements of an unconscious collective shadow, in this case of the German nation. Jung noticed this in his German patients during the late 'twenties and thus anticipated the Nazi catastrophe. What in fact Heidegger fell back to was Nietzsche's climax of German speculative philosophy, as it were, its end euphemistically expressed as the "Death of God." He was thus subscribed to the pre-psychological mode of (self) understanding, and the limited view of THE PHILOSOPHER at the climax of a tradition. Thus remaindered in the Nietzschean view he, along with Nietzsche botch an understanding of aesthetics by ignoring the work of both Edmund Burke and Kant in his Critique of Judgement regarding the sublime in art. But the Sublime in art as compared to The Beautiful was the early on password to the shadow zone of the psychological unconscious! Thus, permanently falling back to the vernacular of the already fallen philosopher (qua Nietzsche) Heidegger's relation to THE PSYCHOLOGICAL was aborted and leaving him wide open for the Hitler mania. He thus parted with my own teacher, Hans Jonas, who was the Jew in the party of Bultmann, Heidegger, and Jonas when Heidegger remained behind in Germany after the Nazi came to power. But Prof. Jonas remained pre-psychological himself in his adherence to Existentialism and the last breathe of European philosophy. But as I expand on this I will keep in mind if not further pursue what you have in this post already noted.