Very good writing. I'm reminded of the television interview with Heidegger, as reported in "Erinnerung an M. H." In a discussion before the interview the interviewer proposes his questions and H. makes some changes. The last question is: Can H., as the eighty-year-old philosopher he is, tell the people something about his understanding of death and loneliness? Heidegger, very sharply: With this question you hit yourself in the face! Long silence. Interviewer feels offended, it reminds him of Zen-tactics. Then Heidegger begins: Mein lieber Herr .... You cannot know about my loneliness, which is what your question suggests.

28-8-00.,
Gary C. Moore wrote:

Dear Calypso
,
One of the absolute necessities for a voice like Catweasle's (Jud Evans) is to bring one's own position into an objective perspective. This cannot be done when everyone is basically in agreement with each other because then key problematic concepts never get analyzed. It is not simply telling somebody they are wrong, but the necessity of explaining why they are wrong logical point by logical point, or all this list becomes is a mutual admiration society going around in meaningless circles discussing concepts that 'feel' good but have absolutely no rational content. In other words, one must be able IN REALITY to stand back from what one writes and truly THINK, "Is what I have stated ridiculous?" In other words, are you ABLE to really tear into your own thinking that you have work very hard at to achieve? Because whatever your credentials, whatever effort you have put into a project mean nothing to anyone else, and, as a philosopher, SHOULD MEAN NOTHING TO YOU. All that counts is if you are right or if you are wrong. This is exactly the way the early Heidegger worked. He was passionately filled with self-questioning and also took on in agonistic contest everyone else's thought. He never hesitated to attack people who had helped him to develop like Bergson, Dilthey, Jaspers, and especially Hegel because, as he said himself, "He came so close!" Heidegger has always defined his thought antagonistically to Hegel because, even though dead and his work 'finished', Hegel was still his most severe and unrelenting critic. You must be able to see if what you say fits rightfully or not into the framework of the word "ridiculous" for the sake of your own 'salvation'. For instance, Heidegger MUST be a kind of materialist. Otherwise his concern in the early years with "throwness" and "facticity" and "fate" would be meaningless. Hegel's so-called "Idealism" incorporates, and never excludes, and certainly does not refute, materialism. This is why, in his own self-debate, since he considered no one else his equal as was the truth, that he evolved what he called an "atheistic methodology" as stated in his
1922 Aristotle thesis. He started as a firm, conservative Catholic absorbed in Scholastism, then having, like Hegel, absorbed that into his personal experience, became a fervent but liberal Protestant, absorbed in Luther and Schleiermacher. In other words he became totally absorbed in his subject from the inside out like a 'true believer' but in the inner core of his self could stand back eventually, see what was good with that kind of thinking and what was disposable, absorb it and go on to the next stage. This is due to the fundamentally detached, totally uncommitted st methodology". And having learned a new way to approach Aristotle specifically from Luther who only appreciated the NICOMACHIAN ETHICS and hated the rest of Aristotle, Heidegger became certainly the most innovative Aristotle scholar of all time. Yet having made a tremendous investment in that, he absorbs Aristotle like he did everyone else, utterly careless of his status and investment in that field, and goes on to Kant. All this time he is also deeply absorbed in contemporary scientific methodology, never questioning its fundamental materialistic basis but discarding naive concepts of cause and effect determinism because there are fundamentally two things wrong with such an approach. One, you can never fully or even adequately know the cause or the effect of anything since they can only occur within a total context of world one cannot grasp in detail nor fully experience. Two, whether there is a materialistic determination or not is a matter of complete indifference since such a position requires, to comprehend it and know whether it is true, the viewpoint of God. And even the later Heidegger still holds to a materialistic base since, one, though there is freedom in some sense, it is never a matter of one's arbitrary control. He totally denies any rational understanding of any immortality. He constantly says "Being" is not in any way "God" (In fact, in "What is Metaphysics?" he makes it clear that not only is "Being" finite, it is dependent on Dasein for its 'existence). He might call himself a "Christian theologian" (I would like to know exactly where that came from), but that must be taken from a point of view of one who has digested Scholasticism and Martin Luther and Kierkegaard WITHIN an atheist methodology.

H. didn't like it when Husserl, around 1920, referred to him as a theologian. Heidegger later said, that, without theology, he wouldn't have been the philosopher he had become. (I guess that theology here must be taken as broad as possible, incl. the faith of his youth.)

Maybe it is interesting to compare with a statement of "Kant's thesis on being", where he says, that the sentence "God is" (absolute position) is the hidden prickle, the "geheime Stachel", that was driving Kant on his critical ways.

And, though the latter Heidegger SEEMS less self-critical and open to religious manipulation, he has essentially climbed Wittgenstein's ladder out of that turmoil, and has achieved a personal viewpoint that he has not really shared with anyone else. Heidegger is not a public philosopher. He has absolutely no interest or pretension that he has a public 'message'. This leaves him open to other people to find one, but what is public in his work he essentially left behind. And what he 'truly believed' no one will ever know. This is where biography becomes relevant because the material, personal acts of a person shows IN A NEGATIVE WAY, like the blind men trying to define what an 'elephant' is, what he is intent upon. He obviously wanted to be much more than just a professor, or even for that matter a philosopher. But he DID NOT want to become a religious prophet or a mystic in the popular sense of the word. What he did think of himself is unknown much more so of him because he deliberately and systematically hid it, unlike, for instance, Sartre. But like Sartre you can at times see the purely personal existence that really grounds his philosophical endeavor peep through--MAKING THE WHOLE THING BECOME RIDICULOUS AS A PUBLIC SPECTACLE. And if the philosopher himself can do that, then someone like Catweasle is merely criticizing a public facade left behind by the philosopher to be torn apart--or not with equal indifference. In other words, it is a thing to be examined initially just like a used car. And if it cannot stand up to that level of examination, of what possible use is it? In other words, "To thine own self be true/And thou shalt be false to no man." An over obviously appropriated saying to the one of triteness--until one realizes an old fool like me is saying it. One must always assume one might be the fool.

Heidegger said once that philosophy was anyhow a crazy business. In it one is always "ueber sich hinaus", or: ver-rueckt, which can be seen as a translation of "transcendent", but verrueckt means also plainly: crazy.


Gary C. Moore