Heidegger

In a message dated 07/08/2006 14:24:11 GMT Standard Time,
_R.B.M.deBakker at uva.nl_ (mailto:R.B.M.deBakker@uva.nl) writes:

Rene:
you ask wrongly. There have been questions as to the Ister and the Rhine.
There have been not such questions concerning the rivers you mention.

Jud:
There have been many questions as to the Thames and the Mersey. Every people
weaves the waterways of their world into their poetry and literature.
Americans write about their mighty Mississippi, Indians about their Mother Ganges,
Russians eulogise their beloved Volga, and the Chinese go into deliriums
about their yellow River or Yangtze. I am sure that if the Guahibo Indians who
live in the Amazon Basin of South America could write they would write about
the mighty Amazon - but if they cannot, then they think, sing and dream about
it.

*Heidegger’s brand of existentialism as revealed in Being and Time has a
peculiarly grammatological twist to it. Reality is a kind of language for him,
and it’s as if he thinks of human beings as verbs (never nouns) embedded in a
variety of sentences. That we are under a “sentence of death” is an idea he
takes quite literally. These Grammar-Beings have tenses, moods, aspects
depending on their relations and contexts. Sometimes they take Death as their
object, at other times other parts of speech, objects, or sometimes they become
the gerundial object of other human verbs. One’s life is a book compounded of
such sentences.* Draggin’ The River: The Ister by Carloss James Chamberlin
_http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/04/33/the_ister.html_
 http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/0…)

Renekins:
There also was no thought about the Veluwe, until i asked myself, and found
a GEschick there, because otherwise i would not have been born in Den Haag. It
is, however, not primarily important to re-erect nations, but: EUROPE, via
its backbone.

So because you had had no Hölderlin, you had to throw phosphor on Germany?
On a wandering i came up to a cemetery of German boys, near the Totenwald; the
Eifel has been completely destroyed, eh… freed.

Jud:
We had Shakespeare - a towering titan compared to the madman Hölderlin..
Every country - every village - every factory worker and every peasant in the
world has heard of Shakespeare. Who outside of a small coterie of intellectuals
and dasein-dabblers has heard of Hölderlin?

Rene:
“Not just like that the rivers go through the dry. But how? They namely
have to be (put) to language. A sign is needed, nothing less”, etc etc. (Der
Ister)

Jud:
The Ister for Hölderlin was NOT the noblest of rivers - it was the *freeborn
Rhine* that took the transcendentalistic-Biskuit.

*Die stimme wars des edelsten der Ströme,
Des freigeborenen Rheins.*

Love of the Ister? Love of the freeborn Rhein?

*Denn es kennet der mensch
Sein Haus und dem Tier ward,
wo Es bauen solle,
doch jenen ist Der Fehl,
das sie nicht wissen wohin,
In die unerfahrne Seele gegeben.*

Love of the Ister? Love Des freigeborenen Rheins? At the pre-total-madness
period when Hölderlin was writing his *Rhein poem* and Ister bit, and in spite
of the German’s supposed love of the two rivers, and in spite of the
knowledge of the German of his own house, and in the animal’s soul being aware of
where it must build and abide, Germans were abandoning and scurrying away from
their homeland in millions. Immigration from the riverine German paradise at
the beginning of the 19th century was at a rate exceeding that of any other
country in Europe - so much for their love of the Heimat - their fleeing legs
couldn’t carry them away quick enough. In the middle of the 19-th century in
a short span of 10-years years over a million people deserted the idyllic
riparian banks of the Danube and Rhine and settled… where?

Why in the ample and welcoming bosom of Heidegger’s hated bête noire of
course - in the United States.

keep singing Rene - your voice is definitely improving.

regards,

Jud Evans.
Personal Website: http://evans-experientialism.freewebspac…

Posted on Monday, August 7th, 2006 at 3:35 pm
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