Letters to Nowhere

Abhinavagupta, Jeffrey Mousaieff Masson, & Heidegger.

THIRD LETTER

(Thursday, December 9, 1999.

This is interesting, writing into the void. It is like prayer. And therefore I should look upon the situation with humility and patience.

This letter is in specific regarding to Heidegger’s book The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. I am in the process of reading it and it is becoming harder and harder to grasp. In the beginning he talks about general concepts like phusis, which might be called the fundamental temporal process of being, and "world", which is an ‘all’ comprehending concept primarily distinguished by its inability to completely enclose the experience of ‘reality’. It then goes into the main material of the first part which talks about the three kinds of boredom: 1) the boredom of having missed your train and having to ‘pass the time’ while you are waiting for the next one; 2) the ‘relaxing’ boredom of going to a party and having nothing important to do which means you have to get drunk in order to stand not having anything to do (my interpretation, but I think it hits the nail on the head); 3) the boredom of "the moment of vision", a joy and terror all in one, where everything in the universe is seen in its proper context as it actually exists: utterly useless. How this relates to the second part is unclear to me at the moment. I would like to know your thoughts. The second part goes much more deeply into the concept of "world" which you should be familiar with from Being and Time. But he relates the concept to stone, animal, and man. The stone has no world about which he writes very little but which is fascinating. Man is "rich" in world compared to the "impoverished" world of the animal. At first glance this seems to be demeaning to animals, but I think, all he is saying is that animals do not have language. They can obviously communicate, as with your experience with the elephant flapping its ears, but do not have the ability to construct sentences from words that necessitates that underground connection of Abhinavagupta of undistinguished consciousness whereby to make the wholeness of the sentence.

Two things are occurring here. One, you know the fundamental importance to Heidegger in the unanswered question he repetitively quotes from Kant, "What is man?" He takes Aristotle’s definition of man as to logon zoon very literally. He gives it great importance, yet discovers limits by it, a Platonic khoura if you will that points in a receptive way towards being (there is a very important reason why "being" should NOT be capitalized) but leaves aside man as man, not as dasein, incomplete.

The other thing that is occurring is that, if I understand it right, though the animal is poor in world because it does not have language, IT STILL POSSESSES COMPLETE AND PERFECT AWARENESS OTHERWISE according to the specific animal’s context (6). I think you need to read this text starting around page 176, either to learn more about the ontology of the animal (am I using the word right?) or about Heidegger. His philosophy is rich and important and should not be trashed because of his activities as an ordinary person which I in absolutely no way wish to be excused: but as the acts of an ordinary person. I just want to make clear that there is a rational, important difference. I love Walter Kaufmanns’s books but his hatred of Heidegger’s philosophy because of his hatred of Heidegger the man was a great disappointment to me.