Sat, 6 Jan 2001:

I.D. Code H0006

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.