Heidegger

> 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.

Now, I would say it would leave feeling as essential to emotion. I still do
not completely understand the thing with “Gefuehl ist alles”. My two cents
about it that it is like in Jonathand Haidt’s Emotional Dog and Its Rational
Tail, wherein most people are unable to reflect rationally on ethical and
religious issues.

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

Well, at the time Heidegger was maturing in his philosophical views,
psychology was kind of alternative occupation (read: sinecure) for
philosophers who could not find a proper job. This could be one reason for
it. Another one would be that we was writing about what the analysis of
human existence is able to reveal in kind of bird’s eye view on human
existence. For him was essential to build an analytical method of human
existence which does not rely on the fact findings from empirical sciences.
Since his uncovering of the existential structures of the human being was
not a by-product of positive science, but a philosophical enterprise,
wherein philosophy is conceived as bereft of a positum (since Being is not
an object).

> If self did not include collective consciousness, or what I better call
> the “culture body” it would languish solipsistically.

Agreed. And Heidegger would agree, too.

> On the other
> hand, the insistence that “they” is nemesis

Now, that is Sartre. Heidegger said that one can lose his Self in the they
(aka fallenness). But, therein the expression “the they” is not “they”
(pointing to a real human group), but it is an abstract phantom, which
Tocqueville was already conscious that it haunts democracies. I.e., as Leo
Strauss analyzed Tocqueville’s stance, the lostness in the they is a slavish
addiction of the moral conscience to the verdicts and the ways of doing
specific to the public opinion. Wherein “public opinion” means “all and
nobody, at the same time”, i.e. all people in an abstract and impersonal way
and no one in particular (as personal as care would require). This could be
hinted at that by a quote from Petre Tutea, saying that “It is easy to love
the humanity (the human specie), but it is very difficult to love the human
being.”

What Heidegger did is to liberate ethical theory from this collective
phantasm, and curiously enough for people who think that Rudolf Steiner was
a wacko guru, Heidegger’s existential view of ethics is quite similar to
Rudolf Steiner’s ethical individualism from the Philosophy of Freedom. I.e.
moral decisions are personal and one chooses for himself how to act, without
paying lip service to that very collective phantasm, which got expressed so
well in Kant’s ethical imperative.

This of course does not mean that one acts immorally. It means rather that
true moral action can only arise from liberating moral conscience from the
chains of that collective phantasm. And here liberty does not mean “a
privilege to act ad libitum”, but precisely “the freedom to act morally” and
the freedom to follow the insights of one’s moral conscience.

> and the ground to guilt
> short changes the I Am and leaves the self as merely a self-
> predicating windowless monad.

Heidegger’s monad was never windowless.

> Compensating this tautology, it must
> suppose that dasein is grounded in an apriori potential much like in
> Aristotle’s Entelecheia.

This is where you become cryptic again. What I can make sense of what you
wrote is that it is a mixture of psychoanalysis and philosophy, which is
neither true psychoanalysis nor true philosophy. The depth psychological
interpretation of Entelecheia gets mixed with ontological considerations.
And, until you tell me the way wherein you symbolically interpret such
philosophical ideas, I cannot be sure that it is something else than
psychologism, i.e. taking psychoanalytical evidence for ontological
evidence.

Of course, I have nothing against a symbolic reading of philosophical
theories. What I point out is that you mix this symbolic reading which is
supposed unmask psychological traits of their authors with the theories
themselves.

> 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?

Well, if you ask “who is to judge”, then I have to answer: nobody. If you
ask “what is to judge” my answer is: the reality itself, the social life.
Because art is not art without an audience. And this audience, even
posthumous (as in van Gogh’s case), is what makes the artist be an artist.

So, I was not positing another judgment than that of posterity. Since in
respect to art a human life is short, this means that the only one who
judges over the art of the artist is the artist himself. If he/she considers
that it is worth the sacrifice of a life in poverty, then this is ok, as far
as the artist is concerned.

But in so far as an audience (be it posterity) is concerned, the statistical
evidence remains that not all artists are produce true art. Some simply
remain wannabees without even knowing it. So, we could judge this only from
a statistical standpoint external to artists, and in the individual case,
artist’s own sense of reality is the judge.

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

Well, the problem with the scientists is that they considered such
perspectives very abstractly: it is an abstract group “us” vs. an abstract
group “them”; us-good, they-bad. It is something wholly different to see the
corpses, the wounds and the sufferance of civilians on a movie screen. The
very graphic nature of such films wake up the scientist from the game of
“Who is the smartest guy in the world? Let’s get our articles published and
decide!” to a reality which few can face without trembling in horror.

When Sakharov heard that civilians were killed in a Soviet atomic
experiment, we cried like a baby. Because the atom bomb for him was a toy, a
proof of human theoretical intelligence materialized in a technological
device. The game of materializing such knowledge was fun and challenging.
When people died, he learnt that this game is for real.

> 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.

As a citizen of one of the countries which got enslaved then, I am not
terribly fond of the Soviet deeds in this matter. But common sense prompted
politicians to consider that two world wars were enough, and they don’t need
the third world war beginning just after the Second World War was finished.

> 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.

Modernity has many points which can be admired, but archetypal adequacy for
building a well balanced (thus: classical) Self is not one of them.

> 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.

Well, he knew he was not getting away with that without fighting a war.

> 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?

Well, you made here a nice point. But then you have to admit that in the
past five thousand years suicidal behavior was the rule rather than the
exception.

> You are a bit cryptical in what you say, can you elaborate more on
> giving such answers?
> Give me a hint about what I was cryptic about and I will oblige.

Well, it was an intuition, since your comments were very short, and they
kind of required from the reader to share the same depth psychology
background as yours. Now, I did read a lot of C.G. Jung, but I think that in
most cases psycho-analyzing philosophical theories is futile. It is like
answering the claim “The electron is at the same time wave and particle.”
with “Since this guy does not know anything about logics, he must be
intellectually impaired.” Now, it is kind of obvious that quantum mechanics
is valid, but it was a time when such ideas were heresy, and people who were
proposing such heresies were considered as mentally challenged (since the
“normality” in thinking is to think like most of the people think most of
the time).

Greetings,

Tudor

Posted on Sunday, July 27th, 2008 at 6:00 am
comment | rss 2.0 | trackback