Wednesday, December 22, 1999

To emphasize: THE FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS OF METAPHYSICS is at least as important as BEING IN TIME, and since you are interested in both animals and Heidegger, it morally should be important to you. One thing extremely important I forgot to emphasize in the last letter was how Heidegger means the term "dasein" which seems to escape almost all Heidegger scholars including Germans like Tugendhat. In his book SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND SELF-DETERMINATION, Tugendhat says Heidegger justifies the term "dasein" (p. 151-152) because man is 'his there' in disclosedness because Heidegger "wanted to get away from Husserl's concept of an intentional consciousness directed toward objects and he needed a wider concept for which even the word 'understanding' was not sufficient. Understanding is a mode of disclosure for him, but moods are also modes of disclosure . . . If he had written in English, perhaps he might have chosen the word 'awareness'; there is no equivalent for this in German, and its meaning seems to me to come closest to what Heidegger means by 'disclosure'. If you recall the difficulties that arose in trying to define the word 'consciousness', you will not want to take Heidegger too severely to task on this pointhow f****** generous of him. He completely missed the point that 'awareness' is a possitive and aggressive term, exactly what Husserl was doing, whereas 'disclosure' is not only passive but lays out the point it's not under our fucking control. WE DON'T CREATE REALITY BUT WE DO ACCURATELY PERCEIVE IT! a point Heidegger constantly makes). The situation is considerably worse in the case of the expression 'dasein'. The problem with this term is not so much that the expression 'da' (I first spelled 'dad': Freudian slip?) (Eng. "there") is unclear, but that the word 'dasein', just like the word 'consciousness', is a 'singulare tantum': In contrast to the substantive predicates "human being" and "person" it has no pluaral, and therefore it seems absurd when Heidegger says that he wants to designate this entity, man, as 'dasein'. One cannot adopt a different expression for a word when it has a different grammar (Heidegger's a bad boy, needs a steel ruler taken to the back of his hand). In so doing Heidegger remains entrapped in precisely the tradition (who's trapping who here?) he wants to overcome . . . Although Heidegger subsequently also analyzes the relation of oneself to others . . . a PECULIAR! and MISGUIDED! (me) EGOCENTRISM (Tugendhat doesn't have both oars in the water here) nonetheless survives as a result of this reliance on a 'singulare tantum'. I cannot see how the introduction of the term 'dasein' has had any positive sense. It is only a stylistic device that has unfortunate consequences, and we can better appropriate Heidegger's contribution to our complex of problems if we refrain as far as possible from the use of this term." And totally miss the MAIN POINT of ALL OF HEIDEGGER'S PHILOSOPHY! But Tugendhat is far from alone in his confused but benign condescention. Others want to translate 'dasein' as "being human" (JESUS! If that's all Heidegger meant, why use such a special term?) or "being here" since 'we' are obviously 'here and now'(MORONS!

I include myself since I also made that mistake--but for a very short while!). "Being-there" is used by Heidegger precisely because there is NO "being here". Paul defines the Christian as "in the world but not of it" whereas the everyday person is in the world and completely and totally OF it. The everyday is simply not at home. Sound familiar? The subject does not exist, it is not an indisolvable atomic particle that can remain untouched by this Hell of a world as Ayn Rand would have it. You don't rise above the world because you are the world--not in an "egocentric" sense but precisely because THERE IS NO REAL ("there are no such things as abstractions") EGO. Self is a convention of language, you need it to say, "I think". You need it to make a logical proposition AND BE MORALLY RESPONSIBLE--FOR THE WHOLE F******* WORLD. (A Nietzschean perspective, or Liebnitzean, you have only one free choice to make: to justify this world as the best possible of all possible worlds ((which it is! it is! Therefore real Hell would definitely be a relief)) which to Nietzsche was part of the horror of eternal recurrence, an abstract idea he MEANT to be fictional!) I mean, how can you say,"Heidegger is a bad boy and I stand in a far superior moral perspective from which to judge him" if there is no self to judge? Simply because we don't like the idea and dread its possible consequences is NOT a logical argument that it is not as true as two plus two equals four. Jivanmukta. This is where Shankara, Abhinavagupta, and the Marquis de Sade are. They are 'released' in apathy from the social convention of the guilt loaded 'self' (By the way, during the French Revolution (("Death to the aristos!)), the 'divine' marquis received a reputation as one of the most fair and impartial of revolutionary court judges: "epekinia", equity). ("All power to the soviets of workers, soldiers, peasants--and nurses! Communism doesn't work, but the spirit of Lenin still lives! He just made the mistake of believing common, everyday people basically LOVE each other, and will work for each other's benifit.)

"Being-there" was not a mistake because Heidegger meant you exist out there not 'in here'. You live without any privacy whatsoever in a public place all and, in a Hegelian sense, absolutely alone, not because you're fundamentally egocentric, but because you are that "singulare tantum" Tugendhat completly misses his own point about! In other words, you lose the best of BOTH possible worlds in reality. In other words, there is only one world--there is only one reality. And you ARE either IT or you reject it--FOR NOTHING! Talk about a double bind! But one of Heidegger's basic points is, when you are talking about fundamental, EXPERIENCED reality you are AT the limits of language. Because abstractions are not real. Only reality, beyond the control of one's magical imagination, is real. But without that imagination, that reality is shit. Now back to THE FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS. (pg. 20) "Here (Descartes) philosophizing begins in doubt, and it seems as though everything is put into question. Yet it only seems so. Dasein, the I (the ego) is not put into question at all . . . All that is put into question--or less still, remains open and is not followed up--is knowledge. . . A fundamental Cartesian stance in philosophy cannot in principle put the dasein of man into question at all; for it would thereby destroy itself at the outset in its most proper intention." "Philosophizing stands on its own as the fundamental occurence of dasein . . . Insight into the multiple ambiguity of philosophizing acts as a deterent and ultimately betrays the entire fruitlessness of such activity . . . We must rather uphold and hold out in this terror. For in it there becomes manifest something essential about all philosophical comprehension, namely that in the philosophical concept, man, and indeed man as a whole, is in the grip of an attack--driven out of everydayness and driven back into the ground of things. Yet the attacker is not man, the dubious subject of the everyday and of the bliss of knowledge. Rather, in philosophizing the dasein in man launches the attack on man . . . The normal human being takes his or her petty pleasures as the measure of what joy should be. The normal human being takes his or her shallow fears as the measure of what terror and anxiety should be. This normal human being takes his or her smug comforts as the measure of what security and insecurity can be. It ought at least to have become questionable by now whether philosophizing as the ultimate and extreme pronouncement and interlocution may be dragged before such a judge, and whether we wish to let our attitudetoward philosophy be dictated by this judge; or whether we are resolved to try something else, i. e., whether we wish to put ourselves, our being human, on the line. Is it really so sure that the interpretation of human existence in which we move today . . . is really the highest? Who can guarantee to us that man in his present day self conception has not raised some mediocre aspect of himself to the status of a god?

Enough for now. "Things fall apart".