A problem I have been dealing with in Heidegger is that In BEING AND TIME, Heidegger takes a very radical view of dasein's authentic appropriation of tradition which, by necessity, completely takes it apart and puts it back together again as dasein actually knows it instead of the 'everyday' passive acceptance of a vague theme of what tradition is that never examines it rationally in detail or judge even if it fits together coherently.

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 point how 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 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".

Later...

Sat, 6 Jan 2001:

A gift should be given expecting no return. It is the fact that you can be bored that reveals the wholeness of world wherein abstract thought can occur. This Heidegger does say distinguishes man from animal. But that is to put it in very simpleminded terms that he constantly belittles and laughs at. He definitely says it with tongue in cheek, and explicitly says he is playing a game. One could state crudely what he dances around and at least establish a point which is to be bypassed as unsophisticated and too blunt to make the real point, but for me it works for a start of comprehension. Heidegger literally means what he says in the "Letter on Humanism" about the "scarcely fathomable, abyssal bodily kinship with the animal". The abyss is quite literal and central to his point ("You look into the abyss and the abyss looks back into you", Nietzsche). At the beginning of his course he asks, "What is man? The crown of creation or some wayward path, some great misunderstanding and an abyss?" an unanswered question he has taken from Kant. Krell seems to believe Heidegger tends toward a superhumanism, but I think the word "abyss" is the key. And philosophy is the only key to that key. "Philosophy is philosophizing", "something to do with the whole, something extreme", "an ultimate pronouncement . . . that constantly permeates him
(man? dasein?) in his entirety." He quotes Novalis, "Philosophy is really homesickness, an urge to be at home everywhere."

Heidegger then says, "To be at home everywhere means to be at once and at all times within the whole. We name this 'within the whole' and its character of wholeness 'the world'. We are always waiting for something. We are always called upon by something as a whole. This 'as a whole' is the world. We are asking: What is that--world?" "We have somehow always already departed toward this whole, or better, we are always already on the way to it." "We ourselves are this underway, this transition, this 'neither the one nor the other'. What is this oscillating to and fro between this neither / nor? . . . What is the unrest of this not? We name it finitude." To jump to conclusion, finitude is not simply 'limit of ability', it is mortality and the consciousness that man is just a kind of animal that does not want to know it is an animal, a specific fleshy animal that is as mortal as any cow or dog. And worse, is absolutely individual, alone, me, "mineness", the vanishing mathematical point of Kant's logical cogito, a nothing that knows it is nothing. Finitude is also the deliberate ignorance that a man does not control his thoughts or language except by severe limitation, by NOT saying what pulls at him. Aristotle says, "to logon zoon" which means either the speaking or reasoning animal, but the logos is not something owned but is on loan, borrowed, even cohabited with.

In other words, Aristotle's definition refers to two different beings. Man is the animal that is possessed by speech. "What is world, finitude, individuation? Each of these questions inquires into the whole. It is not sufficient for us to know such questions. What is decisive is whether we really ask such questions, whether we have the strength to sustain them right through our whole existence." "The fundamental concern of philosophizing pertains to being gripped, to awakening and planting it. All such being gripped, however, comes from and remains in an attunement." In BEING AND TIME this was dread or anxiety, but here it is through boredom. They are "fundamental attunements of Dasein. They are of the kind that constantly, essentially, and thoroughly attune human beings, without human beings necessarily always recognizing them as such. Philosophy in each case (you) happens in a fundamental attunement." "What Novalis names 'homesickness' is the fundamental attunement of philosophizing . . . Metaphysics is a fundamental occurrence within human Dasein . . . The questioners are thereby also included in the question, placed into question. Accordingly, fundamental concepts are not universals . . . They are concepts of a properly peculiar kind. In each case (you) they comprehend the whole within themselves, they are comprehensive concepts . . . They comprehend within themselves the comprehending human being and his or her Dasein--not as an addition, but in such a way that these concepts are not comprehensive without there being a comprehending in this second sense, and vice versa. No concept of the whole without the comprehending of philosophizing existence." "The ambiguity of the critical stance in Descartes . . . begins with 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 ever put into question . . . is knowledge, consciousness of things . . . yet Dasein itself is never put into question. 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." Neither Descartes nor Kant ever question the existence of the subject, just the objective world. But they can only approach, IMAGINE, such a logical, infinitesimal point on COMING BACK FROM THE OBJECTIVE WORLD WHICH THE UNDERSTANDING 'FROM BEFORE THE BEGINNING' HAS POSITED AS REAL. IT IS THE OBJECTIVE WORLD THAT IS REAL AND WHOLLY ABSORBS ALL CONSCIOUSNESS. THERE IS NO PLACE OR ROOM FOR A SELF, A SUBJECT, EXCEPT AS THE "I" OF AN OBJECTIVE SENTENCE. Have you ever touched your 'self'? smelled your 'self'? weighed your 'self'? taken a picture of your 'self'? have you ever taken your 'self' for a walk? It is an abstraction as unreal as dialectical materialism or the theory of relativity. IT IS SOMETHING OTHERS EXPECT YOU TO HAVE SO YOU CAN BE 'MORALLY' ACCOUNTABLE, i. e., held in guilt. The world is real, you are not, plain and simple common sense. Yet just as with abstractions and universals you feel the "I" must be real or everything is nonsense.

YET IT IS STILL TRUE BY ANY RATIONAL DESCRIPTION OF REALITY, ABSTRACTIONS AND THE SELF DO NOT--LITERALLY--EXIST! "We must rather uphold and hold out in this terror. For it 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 (the abyss!). 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 upon man." Enough for now.