I.D. Code 00005

Letters to Nowhere,

Abhinavagupta Date: Sat, 6 Jan 2001

To Jeffrey Masson.Thursday, December 23, 1999

Heidegger, animal is man dasein is nothing III

As I proceed with these letters, I try also to finish the book. Starting at the beginning again illuminates the passages I'm reading now because when I first started reading the book I thought it was old hat but as I try to finish it Heidegger is taking these concepts I thought I was comfortable with, breaks them down into very simple concepts THAT DO NOT GO TOGETHER AT ALL WITH ANY EASE WHATSOEVER such as the prepositional "as", pointing as APOPHANTIKOS (revealing, disclosing), "either . . . or", "both . . . and", truth and falsity and then says they exist as a necessary and fundamental unity, that unity being the very nature of language and what makes man man as opposed to an animal which only makes sounds which express something like a statement of request but cannot state a proposition like, "All cows are black at midnight"

(Hegel). Though the words are simple, and the concepts familiar, putting them together is entering a whole new world. That is one of the reasons why this particular book is so important. He makes abstractions literal. Or as literal as they can possibly be. As to the difficulty of another very simple idea, monism, one reality, I touched on in the last letter, if you consistently try to explain the philosophy of one reality you run into problems that seem absurd like Ayn Rand (If you cannot explain the experience of reality, why should you assume there is a reality?) or Marx (If everything is purely and simply matter, how can you talk--about matter or anything at all?). If you accept one reality, you can no longer constantly dodge back and forth from abstraction to experience and vice versa. And then you get Derrida's "aporias" like "abstractions do not exist" or "there is no such thing as experience, only thoughts".

Materialism or idealism which the experience of language and the language of experience both say is false. What then is true? This is what Heidegger is dealing with in TRYING to distinguish man from animal, and slowly disintegrating the whole concept of man, like Slothrop at the end of GRAVITY'S RAINBOW, leaving only beasts and gods and an indeterminate point in between that might or might not be called man. Now back to the book. "Philosophizing is a fundamental way of dasein (p. 22)." "All men by nature desire to know." "Philosophy is born in wonder" when every ordinary person at some time realizes that the obvious is for some reason not obvious (Why is there anything, anything at all, rather than nothing?"), or stands on the edge of the abyss when they realize that absolutely nothing can help them either to protect them ultimately from death or, even more, nothing is really of any use in achieving what is really most important, and the very idea of what is important itself becomes extremely vague and recedes into infinite distances. "If there is no God, then everything is permitted." But you would have no desire to do anything whatsoever if there was not a goal of 'ultimate importance' "somewhere, somehow". "Yet the dasein concerned never knows what the dasein of man can be in individual epochs. Rather its possibilities are first formed precisely and only in dasein. Such possibilities are those, however, of factical dasein, i.e., of the confrontation it must have with beings as a whole." Remember the SINGULARE TANTUM and the aporias of monism. "Plato says that the difference between the philosophizing human being and the one who is not philosophizing is the difference between being awake and sleeping . . . Only philosophizing is wakeful dasein, is something totally other, something that stands incomparably on its own with respect to everything else. Hegel designates philosophy as the inverted world. He means that compared to what is normal for the normal human being, philosophy looks like something upside down, yet is fundamentally that orientation which is proper to dasein itself . . . Philosophy . . . as something extreme and primary, is already comprehensive of everything, (like a teenager, everyone always already knows everything ((sound familiar from Shankara?)), one must simply REAL-ize what it is one COMPREHENDS.) so that any application of it comes too late and is a (GOODAMN COMPUTER! SUDDENLY EVERYTHING GOES BLANK AND IM SCARRED SHITLESS IVE LOST EVERYTHING AND ONLY BY CHANCE GET IT BACK!) misunderstanding (p. 23). At issue is nothing less than regaining this originary demension of occurrence (!) in our philosophizing dasein, in order once again to 'see' all things more simply, more vividly, and in a more sustained manner." "Fundamental concepts of metaphysics (are) comprehensive concepts in which the whole is always questioned, which in their questioning ALWAYS INCLUDE AND COMPREHEND WHOEVER IS COMPREHENDING AS WELL (p. 24) . . . We are not at all in danger of arbitrarily giving one discipline of philosophy--metaphysics--precedence over the others, because we are not now dealing with disciplines at all. The intention of our preliminary appraisal is precisely to destroy this idea of metaphysics as a fixed discipline. Metaphysics is comprehensive questioning. The questions: What is world, finitude, individuation (remember the "solitude" of the title)? constitute such comprehensive questioning." Must stop. I've got to get ready to go to work.