I.D. Code Orient 00009

To: Jeffrey Masson.

Tuesday, December 28, 1999

Heidegger, animal is man, dasein is nothing.

I've finished the Santarasa (except I'm only halfway through the appendix) and have just barely started the Aesthetic Rapture. But I felt guilty I had not finished the Brahmasutrabhasya of Shankara, and so started it up. But a flood of ideas has occurred relating it and what I've been reading in Heidegger. We begin on p. 706 (Gambhirananda translation) with the monist 'manifesto' that "All the conceptions of the Immutable, that is to say the conceptions involving the negation of distinctions, are to be combined everywhere, since the process of presentation are the same and the object dealt with is the same. For the process of presenting Brahman, consisting of the negation of all distinctions, is similar everywhere; and that very same Brahmin is sought to be explained everywhere. So what is meant by saying that the conceptions obtaining at one place should not be transferred elsewhere? And this is how it has been explained under the aphorism, "Bliss and other characteristics of the principle entity (Brahmin) are to be combined" (III, iii, 11). But the positive attributes were considered there, whereas the negative ones are considered here." And (707) "Similarly here also, the attributes of the Immutable, are everywhere to be associated with the Immutable, irrespective of the place of their occurrence." And then on p. 713-714, "Doubt: In the text beginning with, "He who knows the great, the first-born, the adorable Being (i. e., Hiranyagarbha) as the Satya-Brahmin", (Br. V, iv, 1), the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad prescribes a meditation called the Satya-Vidya, together with the meditation on the letters of the name (Satya)

("This name Satya (literally truth) consists of three letters (Sa, ti, ya). The first and last letters are truth. In the middle is untruth. The untruth is enclosed on either side by truth."

(Br. V, v, 1), and there it is stated, "That which is that Satya is the sun--that Being who is in that orb and the Being who is in the right eye" etc. (Br. V, v, 2). Now the doubt arises: Are these two different meditations on Satya, or are they one?" The Opponent of course replies there are two, and the Vedantin replies, "this Satya-Vidya is but one." This is where I have stopped for now in Shankara, waiting for the supplies and infantry to catch up, setting up the 88s on perimeter, and letting the Tigers prowl. This is very similar to what Heidegger has been saying about the 'as'-structure of the propositional statement that supposedly delivers truth. The LOGOS contains the truth and the untruth in revealing-concealing, in the either/or, and the both/and. Thinking these fundamental thoughts is disastrously not a matter of mere detachment and abstraction from the real world. Fundamentals are not 'thoughts' but are decisions, constant, drastic, and irrevocable. "If there is no God, then all things are permitted" is a fundamental thought only a TRULY reborn Christian can come up with SO CONVINCINGLY! Dostoyevsky was, in some sense, on the other side, in jivanmukta, released from all common things, who may either act like an ordinary man or like a crazy man since no restrictions apply to him (he can even be a Christian), (though anti-Semitic (he says he isn't), one night in Germany he got lost in the streets and wandered into what he thought was a church. It was a synagogue (a Greek word meaning "a bringing together"). He supposedly had a profound experience there, but I cannot find out what. Do you know?). Emanuel Levinas says, in TIME AND THE OTHER, that all philosophy is simply a meditation on Shakespeare, which should be interesting to a scholar of Abhinavagupta. One of Shakespeare's lines he considers fundamental (and Tugendhat also, one of his hits instead of misses, says that the core of BEING AND TIME is implicitly a meditation on the line) is, "To be or not to be, that is the question." Is this a tease or a violation. It should get a response from you, hopefully in the best of health and completely happy in order to contend with this. This is also Hitler's favourite saying. Talk about a man of decisiveness. One thing the man never lacked, when he was in good health, was the courage of decisiveness where he pursued his ends regardless of the consequences. "TO DEINON", as Aristotle said. You do know he won the Iron Cross First Class, which was equivalent for a corporal in class-conscious Germany to the Congressional Medal of Honor? It was obtained for him by his Jewish captain. He refused to ever wear it, only his other Iron Crosses, second and third class, appropriate for a corporal. Fundamental concepts raise questions at a level not easily or even ever answered, not only 'to be or not to be', but should I love my wife, should my heart be bound to my ephemeral children, should I love the eternal and forget this world, and the constant Would it not be better to be dead? Obviously I reject these things, but "on the other hand" they are not answerable and do not go away because what is powerful enough to drive them away? They encompass the world, they surround it, they bind it. And if you do try to answer, "NO! in thunder!" as Melville said of Hawthorn, you must think through the terrible consequences of THAT decision. There is no way out. "Man is born free, but everywhere is in chains," as a metaphysical thought. There is no way out.