Heidegger

Joe asks:

> Michael, do you sincerely expect anyone to believe you when you say
> “words don’t matter at all with be-ing”?
>
> if you are sincere, why is there such opposition to my claim that the
> act of choosing a root predicate is logically prior to the condition of
> having a root predicate — whether that root predicate is ‘being’ (or
> ‘be-ing’) or ‘reality’ or ‘existent’ or whatever?

Joe, I don’t care whether anyone believes me or not when I say that words
don’t matter at all with be-ing; what concerns me is that the very word
“be-ing” (in its meaning, in its articulation, in its presence, in *its*
be-ing) covers/eclipses precisely be-ing (say, of the word “be-ing”) in its
being the word it is (because be-ing {of some being or beings} is itself not
a being, and thus not name-able without making be-ing over to a being {this
word “be-ing”, some thing to speak of as a subject, as a thing of interest
or investigation, as a matter of some importance to chat about, etc}). And,
in that sense, it matters not an inkling what one chooses as a so-called
root predicate.

A very bad analogy might appeal to your mathematical bent: we can speak and
play with something as-it-were ‘quantitative’ in the infinitesimal dx (in
the infinitesimal calculus) that is neither nothing nor some definite
quantity (like say, the delta-x that consists in a small-as-you-like change
in the variable x) and thus not zero either (a perfectly good quantity);
this dx of the calculus is nonetheless the very pinnacle and epitome of the
notion of continuity essential to the calculus. We just accept this strange
state of afairs without which we could not continue [sic] the calculus and
all the benefits it gifts us through the acceptance of the infinitesimal dx
that is not a quantity but not nothing either, rather the very possibility
of the (continuously) quantitative (the very essence of the real, as opposed
to the rational/fractional, numbers). The notion of the limit (as delta-x
tends to zero) that is represented by the non-quantitative dx is badly
equivalent to the difference (bounds and limits obtain that are not part of
that which is limited and bounded) that [is] the ontological difference
between be-ing and beings. It is the *acceptance* of such a difference/limit
for the (mathematical, ontological) speech to make sense that I am referring
to and not the employed bad analogy itself…

I apologise for any mathematical inaccuracies above.

regards

michaelP

Posted on Monday, February 4th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
comment | rss 2.0 | trackback