Heidegger

> Jud:

> Be-ing is not remotely like that (the gods or *Being*) and shows no tracks -
no effects
>
> michaelP:
>
> It does: imprecisely, beings.
>
> Jud:
>
> So you are claiming that *beings * are *the tracks* of *Being*

Nope, just that (imprecisely, note) the relation of electrons to their
supposed tracks is similar to the relation of be-ing to the being that (as
it were) ‘evidences’ it, simply through being (rather than not being).
Be-ing, if you like, is displayed through the very fact that some being is
(rather than not). If you like, the electron’s existence is made visible
through the effects it makes within (and to) the confines and apparatuses of
its conditions for being observed (e.g., tracks in a cloud chamber);
similarly (in a way — I know this is hazy but I’m doing my best) be-ing (of
a being) is made ‘visible’ (is brought to presence, albeit hiddenly) in the
very existence of that being.

> How then
> does *Being* of John or Mary instantiate such beings of which it is itself the
*Being*

“Instantiate”? Your term not mine. Beings are not instances or species of
be-ing.

> Are you claiming that the *Being* of John or Mary exists without the
> *beings* John or Mary of which it is the *Being* antecedally in order to be
> able to create them as beings?

“Exists”? Your term not mine. Be-ing does not “exist” (especially not in the
materialistic or mattergistic manner that you employ the word; if anything,
be-ing is rather the existence of what exists and thus does not exist
itself; as you say, only existents exist).

“Create”? Your term not mine. Be-ing does not “create” beings. Be-ing is the
being {verbal} of beings.

> This would make sense as I believe that for
> Heidegger *Being* is merely a God substitute.

Believe what you like, but gods are beings and not (the) be-ing (of gods).
If you like, be-ing in this instance (given you brought up “god” not I)
might be best expressed as the ‘goding’ of (a) god (an unfortunate
expression, I agree).

> Jud: [earlier]
>
> and zilch circumstantial evidence for it being there or not being there
> other than {like the fantasy as a fantasy in the unhinged minds of those
> that imagine such ontological indifferences.

> michaelP:
>
> As has been said a billion times: be-ing is not (a being, and thus not
> evidenced by another being); and, the ontological difference is infinitely
> singular (not differences or indifferences: rather, difference). However
> “unhinged” you might imagine others to be, you, clearly after 12 years or
> so evidencing on the list, can/do not read.

> Jud:
>
> I am well aware that Heidegger and the cult view is that *being* is not an
> entity - it doesn’t even take 12 minutes never mind twelve years to latch
> on to such babyish stories as that. The fact remains that if *Being* is
> representative of the *ontological difference*

[Kindly please leave out the insulting stuff about “cults” and “babyish
stories” (these are your own projections) and stick to the philosophy.
Otherwise I shall decline to respond to your stuff, OK?]

“Representative”? Your term not mine. I fail to catch the meaning of your
point that be-ing might be “representative” of the ontological difference
and thus cannot yet comment on the next part of your statement…

> and you employ the copula
> *is* in connection with *Being, * and in speaking of *Being* the
> *ontological difference construct predicative attributes such as: ( be-ing
> is not (a being, and thus not evidenced by another being); you are in fact
> attributing predicational information to a non-existent nothing.

You are absolutely correct here. This is exactly what I have meant by the
*analytic* impossibility of predicating be-ing: it’s not that it cannot be
done concretely, it’s that it leads to embarrassments if positively
attempted and to strange constructions if some kind of non-predicative
structures are attempted in the wake of the predicative embarrassments. But
even such embarrassments and strangeness are not (necessarily) due to an
erroneous (or thick-witted) employment of predication or logic: rather they
point to the absolute difference that the ontological difference challenges
thinking with, especially a thinking that is historically saturated with the
long and noble tradition of predicative language. We should also bend an ear
to Nietzsche’s observation that it is the very (predicative) language that
gives rise to the conception that the way the world works is in accordance
with the subject-predicate structure (e.g.,
actor/agency:act(ion):acted-upon) of predicative language: how to think
otherwise, huh?

I have already stated somewhere recently that attempting to speak of be-ing
lands one in a difficult and tense site whereupon one is almost ‘forced’ to
utter predicative statements (that, as you say, appear to land one in a
state of contradiction) or attempt to utter non-predicative utterances (that
sound weird or childish or 6th form ‘poetic’) or make a turn or twist (as
you point out below) to avoid predication directly. But, I notice that your
kind of thinking lands you in a similar place if carried through
uncompromisingly: I refer to the vexed problem of ‘abstraction’ in
philosophical language (of whatever creed); you cannot even begin to speak
if you avoid the employment of abstractions; but all abstractions for you
refer to nothing that exists; but your philosophy must speak seriously only
of that which exists for you (individuate mattergistic entities, etc); thus
your philosophy must continuously and without ease-up speak of that which
does not exist for your thinking. Voila. Thus your speech largely consists
(instead) in correcting the speech of others who also speak of that which
for you does not exist. This is your turning of philosophy into either a
house of correction or an anthropologistic laboratory. You (as your
philosophy) cannot escape the “prison house of language” (a phrase of
Nietzsche’s and a jolly good book title of Frederick Jameson’s) anymore than
Heidegger (as his philosophy) can; the difference is that Heidegger
continuously recognises this and incorporates it into his thinking. In that
Heidegger’s thinking explicitly embraces the problems of a predicative and
abstract language and winds his difficult and sometimes awkward paths and
threads (_verwindung_) bringing the language and its silences along with his
statements and suggestions and indications acknowledging the difficulties
all along the long ways, his thinking is far more interesting and inspiring
than yours (even though it could be said that both of you terminate in
analytic silence; nonetheless his silence is far better than yours, more
musical) because you do not seem to recognise in that very thinking (of
yours) such problems, instead having to repetitively correct the speech of
others (concerning what does and doesn’t exist in your sense) — and here I
leave out the non-philosophical nonsense of such as the barrages of hurling
insult and mockery, etc — leaving you with nothing whatsoever to say
positively about anything (I have yet to hear a single serious statement of
your philosophy that doesn’t end up correcting or mocking others), which
nicely reflects your silent analytic status.

> Heidegger being a cunning peasant is far more careful and always takes
> pains to refer to *Being* as: *the problem of *Being* or the question of
> *Being* - perhaps you should take a leaf out of the Meister’s * Bumper
> Fun-Book of Metaphysical Mischief* and do the same?

I’ve dealt with this above… Another strategem for the thinker of be-ing is
to show the relation of be-ing to beings without explicit mention or
subjection of be-ing (the word). This Heidegger has also done extensively by
‘allowing’ be-ing to show itself, even in just a glimpse, the _augenblick_;
the seminars on Heracltus with Fink hardly if at all mention be-ing but one
can catch the flight and flash of the sense of be-ing very well in those
inspired texts.

> Thus your use of *is* means that the subject *Being* and *the ontological
> difference* is being characterised as:
>
> 1) Having the quality of being or not being *Being* (is/ as the copula,
> used with an adjectival phrase [infinitely singular] )
> 2) Having an existence or predicated as not having an existence, or of not
being extant.
> 3) Being different or unequivalent to something.
>
> Surely you should never couple the *term *Being* with the copula and
> certainly steer well clear of adjectival description whether positive or
negative?

You’re right in a way, but only in the same way that you (as your
philosophy) should never employ abstractions (which refer to nothing that
exists for you) in your statements concerning the things that exist, because
otherwise you are speaking (like everyone else for you) of that which for
you does not exist (the very claim you make towards others who speak of that
which for you does not exist). Given philosophy is nothing if not speaking
seriously about something, if one cannot speak seriously without speaking
(for you, not me, note) of that which for you does not exist, one should
refrain from (philosophical) speech altogether (then my claim that your
philosophy begins and terminates in analytic silence would also be
concretely displayed in concrete silence).

> If as you have just confessed to Joe it is inappropriate to attempt to
> predicate be-ing and claim that *Being* (*… is, if you like,
> no-thing-ness, non-being, nothing in that sense* why in God’s name have you
> done EXACTLY that in writing:
>
> /be-ing/ {Subject] /is not/ [neg. copula] /a being, and thus not evidenced
> by another being/ [predicate]
>
> If as you have often pointed out *Being* does not exist, how can you then
> predicate something of it even if such predication claims that:
> * be-ing is not (a being, and thus not evidenced by another being.* ?
>
> Do you not see such behaviour as inadmissible for a philosopher ’Äî to deny
> something in one breath and institute such a thing in the next?

Again you are correct in a way. And I think I have begun to show how this
difficulty is built into the difficulty of thinking be-ing (philosophy is
surely an interminable and hard struggle to wrest what is not obvious or
clear from what is obvious and clear). But this difficulty should not be
denied or shunned or simply put down, rather faced with all the
embarrassments and tortuousness of expression that necessarily results from
attempting to think be-ing within a tradition of predicative language and
logico-technics. One inspiration that comes of trying is that behind all
such predicative-logico-technics is that _logos_ that is not itself logical.
Be-ing pervades all predication and this is why the difficulty obtains. I am
re-minded of Gödel in his valiant attempt to codify the axioms and theorems
of arithmetic in arithmetical terms…

> michaelP:
>
> The analogy, like all analogies, was *merely* an analogy, and so (as I
> said) only appropriate within limits. The point was that all tools
> (including microscopes and predicative language styles and analogies) have
> limits, that’s all. Remember also that tracks of entities (or whatever you
> choose to call them) are not the entities themselves, thus showing that one
> can see the tracks of things is only (meaning: conventionally) highly
theoretically
> (essentially, speculatively) related to the “existence” of such entities
> themselves; or rather, the existence of such entities is *precisely and
> nothing else other than their effects* (tracks, traces, signs, symptoms,
> etc), and that such effects are nothing but observable and observed changes
> in the experimental environs set up to observe exactly such effects or
> their absence… In scientific experiments and observations, the situations
> to observe and discover whatever are always a set-up (of environmental
> apparatuses designed to precisely only ’see’ what they are designed to ’see’).
>
> Show me an electron itself, *not* the representation (picture, photo) of a
> trace or track of a (supposed) electron! If electrons exist in your sense
> (through their effects in/on their environs in some determinate manner, e.
> g., visibly photographical tracks in a cloud chamber photograph) then so
> does society (in the thinking of sociology) and gods (in the thinking of some
theologies).

> Jud:
>
> When the apparatus is available to see DNA and electrons and other tiny
> entities you would still not see the actual entity eyeball to object and
> never be able to bare eye-ball them. You would be seeing an enhanced
> magnified version of the entity. They are too small to be seen with the
> naked eye, and like some greatly larger mites that can only be seen by most
> older people looking through the lenses of spectacles, you would have to
> wear your specs even to peer through the microscope. As a matter of
> interest my own position as an inference-to-the-best-explanation realist,
> is that all theories (scientific or otherwise) should only ever be held pro
> tempore. Therefore It is necessary and desirable to only provisionally
> accept that visually unobservable theoretical entities such as electrons,
> exist - but that is NOT to say that in time when the entity we now refer to
> as an electron is finally observed and is characterised as something quite
> different to the modern theory about it based upon deduction and inductive
> observation of its effects, that I currently deny that there is no entity
> at all making the tracks.
> Would you agree or not agree that the photographic observation of the cloud
> chamber tracks of particles [electrons] does at least show that there is
> *something* whizzing around at high speed? Would you agree or not agree
> that if in winter you saw footprints in the snow in your garden, that
> logically you would deduce or conclude by logical reasoning that something
> had made those impressions, even if they were not actually made by a human
> wearing shoes but by some other entity? The greatest advances of humankind
> have been made precisely by employing inductive and deductive forms of
> reasoning. Why have you stubbornly set your face against such human
> abilities? Is it part of the cult’s teachings or were you drawn to the cult
> because it appears to encourage such anti-scientific attitudes.

I don’t think this subject (which has been broached several times before)
should occupy me here/now, but I must mention this: it is true that the
existence of the electron *can* be (from and within a particular theoretical
space of concepts), as you say, deduced from such tracks, but (1) one needs
to be seriously trained in order to ’see’ those electron tracks *as*
electron tracks, as the trace of something invisible as such; there is
absolutely nothing intuitively obvious in deducing this, and (2) the
observation of electrons as leaving/making those tracks is precisely the
result of *human* deduction, a highly creative act of will; the tracks are
the sign of the electron’s existence in two humanly devised ways — the
apparatuses and conditions and set-ups necessary for the observation; and
the very act of human deduction that deduces that the lines on the
photographic plate are indeed those produced by the interaction of the
electron with the environment in which the observation/experiment takes
place. I am not saying that the statements of such deductions are not true
within the conditions of their being made (the experimental/observational
setups, the logical apparatuses of deduction and reasonings, the theoretical
conceptual frameworks in which such supposed entities come to life and
language, etc) but that’s my point.

> Have you observed the tracks of gods in the clouds above - those little
> wisps as they skip around doing the Gay Gordons? They are said to use the
> clouds them as fluffyspace-scooters for picking up their shopping from
> Plato’s great emporium of cut-price forms in the sky.

That’s just silly and I’m glad of the smiley at the end. You would serve
your anti-religiosity far more if you declined to speak of religion and
religiosity altogether (as being the almighty silliness you mock it for; why
indulge?).

enough already

regards

michaelP

Posted on Sunday, June 8th, 2008 at 6:05 am
comment | rss 2.0 | trackback