Heidegger

In a message dated 7/20/2008 7:21:42 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
tgeorgescu at home.nl writes:

[BXB]> Heidegger thus fails to notice that feeling is the modulation of
> emotion and hence the active antidote to “moods.”

My guru says that the energies of sensations, feelings and desires produce
the emotions. As such, I consider feelings as one of the ingredients of
emotions.
That would leave “feeling” as epiphenomenal to emotion and, worst of all, to
physical sensation. That is understandable in the Goethean tradition where
Gefühl ist alles and by which religion is reduced to its worst common denominator
and hence a cop out answer. In that case, gefuhl would be the shadow side of
the thinking man’s understanding of consciousness.

Heidegger analyzed emotionality in general, and he was not zooming
in on the specific components of the emotions, because he was not doing
psychology, but philosophy. And, he was not trying to produce a very
comprehensive (all-including) philosophical anthropology.

He need not have avoided “psychology” in so cavalier a manner. Why is
psychology so didactically excluded as an aspect of phenomenon?

> That is because there is no distinction drawn between the “real world”
> and the personal individual.
> Hence, “moral conscience” is thus reduced to a super-ego predicated in
> social collectivity.

I think that Heidegger is more individualistic than you think. He says that
moral conscience is the call of the Dasein for living up to its own
potential, i.e. a call to actualize its Self. As such, Heidegger’s concept
of conscience is structured around the Self. Guilt is produced through
absorption in the they, failing thus to be true to one’s Self. There is
still the question if the Self is merely individual, or it is pre-wired for
social existence (the existence of peers). E.g., as my computer could be
considered something existing by itself, yet it is wired to the internet,
being thus a participant to the internet.
If self did not include collective consciousness, or what I better call the
“culture body” it would languish solipsistically. On the other hand, the insist
ence that “they” is nemesis and the ground to guilt short changes the I Am and
leaves the self as merely a self-predicating windowless monad.
Compensating this tautology, it must suppose that dasein is grounded in an apriori
potential much like in Aristotle’s Entelecheia.

> Van Gogh was certainly such a finacial failure but hardly an artistic
> failure.

Agreed.

> Again, no distinction is drawn here between the collective
> rule book of conscience and the indivudal conscience predicated as the
> will to artistic authenticity.

Well, the idea behind being a “true” individual is that individuals are
rare, while the mass is large. Good artists are an exception to this rule,
but again… very few are able to become good artists, the rest remain
just… wannabees. And it is very sad to see somebody wasting his/her life
with delusions of being a huge artist, when he/she has no chance of being
so. It is like the seeds of a plant I saw in a nature documentary: if all
its seeds would produce viable plants, the whole Earth would be covered only
with such plants. So, for each seed that attains such purpose, there are
many many others fail to attain it. This is a statistical evidence, and we
know that statistics applies to large groups, it means little in isolated
cases.

That is precisely the case but which has little to do with good (”authentic”)
artists and an army of wannabees of whom a van Gogh was a member
before the fact of his acclaim. Who or what is to judge whether one is
wasting their life and as if dasein were a fact accompli?

> No! It was because he was a hypocrit

Well, if that were true, it would have been a lot easier for him to just
produce the hydrogen bomb, instead of letting Teller do that. I am inclined
to believe that he was genuinely scared and shocked by what he saw in the
films documenting the effects of the atom bomb.

Good heavens, you are counting Einstein and his colleagues as dumb clucks in
the matter of outcome in the deployment of a nuclear device.

> Then “true warriors” are somehow deficient when in comes to conscience?

Not necessarily. But one’s conscience is different from another’s
conscience, since they have to actualize different Selves. A true warrior’s
conscience could be defined by a honorable victory, and depends on the
warrior himself to what extent is he prone to compromise honor in the
pursuit of victory.

> What kind of a little boy’s view do you have of what you generalize as
> a true warrior? Would this mean that Gen’l Eisenhower had no moral
> conscience?

Well, there’s a saying “Shit happens”. And when shit does happen, one needs
the warriors to intervene.

Why then was Gen’l Patton restrained when the shit that was happening of the
USSR about to enslave Eastern Europe? Shit happens only when the so-called
warrior is privy to its conclusion and the non-warriors, i.e., the politicians,
who have another agenda, prefer to turn the other cheek.

So, I guess that Eisenhower’s conscience was
tweaked for such kind of interventions. In the traditional view of the male
role, it was considered ok that a man is a warrior. So, the upbringing that
Eisenhower received produced his Self in a manner that one could honorably
lead armies and still be true to one’s Self.

Then you are concluding that the “traditional view”
is the decisive intrument to amplifying the Self? That would put the “they”
as the defining factor to one’s self and by which the Self is not it’s self but
the other.

But, my grandfather said that Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon were just a
murderous as Hitler. Soldiers’ main job is to kill people and when one draws
the balance, what does it matter that the victims were wrong or right,
friends or foes? The idea is that people get killed, and the whole idea of
killing them the proper way could be just a rationalization for killing. It
is a good thing that Hitler was defeated, but the price for it was huge
(millions of people killed by either side). It was like the human species
was in zugzwang, and that the only alternative to bloodshed was bloodshed.

In whose view was it that the “only alternative” to bloodshed was bloodshed?
Indeed, an “only alternative” implies that an other alternative was neglected.
Hitler was aware of this and thus felt free to move into the Sudetenland
without interference. He backed off the invasion of Britain when it became clear
that the other alternative would come into effect and then made the suicidal
blunder of invading Russia.
Was it so “psychologically” unknown that the destiny of the “warrior” was
suicide as was the case with berserker warriors as it was for G.I. Joe in the
field of combat or, today, the suicidal martyr?
sincerely;
Bernard

> Therefore, authenticity is more complicated (and more painful)
> than Osho
> implies.
>
> And quite incomplete by how you rationalize as much.

You are a bit cryptical in what you say, can you elaborate more on giving
such answers?

Greetings,

Tudor

Give me a hint about what I was cryptic about and I will oblige.
Bernard

Posted on Sunday, July 27th, 2008 at 6:00 am
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