Heidegger

> [B] In the East the other “discussion partner” is a transpersonal
> figure, such as the oracle in the I Ching. This was also true in
> ancient Greece at Delphi.
> Your “monistic worldview” applies only to social discourse where “the
> masses” are polarized by the device of “dialectics” and its spurious
> limitation to negation. In Western monism there is also no discussion
> partner where Freedom of Speech is banned as in the later Christian
> Church

Reading Umberto Eco’s historical fiction Name of the Rose, we notice that
those monks enjoyed freedom to discuss almost everything, as long as they
did not challenge the authority of the Pope and the basic dogmas of the
Catholic Church.

> all the way to the political socialist dictatorships of the 20th
> Century in Italy, Russia, Germany and the de facto socialism of
> Roosevelt who ruled for 12 years as a virtual dictator. In such
> monistic systems the inner dialogue is banned as it is still is today
> where there is pretense to freedom of political opinion but no freedom
> of Self and the right to individuation.

According to Leo Strauss’ Persecution and the Art of Writing, the dialogue
in totalitarian regimes is much more intense and interesting than in
present-day liberal democracies.

Consider astrology: deterministic astrology denied the dogma of free choice
and it was considered and punished as heresy; however, non-deterministic
astrology was a respected profession in those days, and many Popes consulted
astrologers for political advice.

> [B]> The Muslim mood, accordingly, more literally indulges the
> ontology of Thanatos and the bliss of pure being more so than it is
> appreciated in the West ( although Heidegger tries hard but fails to
> bring Thanatos up to date simply because he remained fixated on the
> extraversion of Being as dasein and which is endemically a
> problem of Germanic introversion).
>
> [T] Germans are introverted, but only relatively, in respect to
> Americans, who are most extravert. In respect to Asians and Middle-
> Easterners, Germans are altogether extraverted.
>
> [B] Since Rome the Teutonic people were alienated by the tradition of
> Roman projecting of dasein which is in fact an intent towards
> extraversion or “object seeking.” Since Rome Germnay was bottled up and
> denied acess to the Romanoid extraverted social ideal. Both
> historically and prehistorically the Teutonic people had great affinity
> to the Neat East because of the introverted collective ambiance. This
> changed only by 1933 when the archaic expression of dasein by Hitler &
> co. was curiuously if not acausally parallel to its philosophical
> articulation by Heiddeger. Indeed, dasien *ist lose* by compensation to
> the collective introversion as is precisely the case with today’s
> Muslim necessity to extravert and seek the object “out there” in the
> ralm of daseinic extraversion.

I think that Muslim extremism is mainly reactive. After all, someone said
that if you look around from Iran, you see American troops in whatever
direction you look. So, when one sees his enemy all around him, he may get a
little paranoid.

Besides, Ralf Bodelier said that in European Union, in a period of five
years after 9/11, the following statistic holds:

Deaths due to terrorism…………….less than 500
Deaths due to car crashes…………..about 160 000

Or, in 2001 in US:

Deaths due to terrorism x 10 = (approximately) deaths due to car crashes

So, I don’t think that Muslim extremism is the big problem. The big problem
is the tragic-comedy built around Muslim extremism, as if it were a big
problem.

> [T] C.G. Jung noticed that in the West, the best fit (most desirable
> human type) is the extravert, while in the East that is the introvert.
> In the East, it is a big shame to promote your ego. In the West, you
> have to promote your ego in order to get a job. Empirical psychological
> research confirms this.
> [B]That’s right. In either case the introversion or extraversion was
> culturally enforced and not achieved by either the will or the ego. In
> all cases, however, the Roman ideal has perdured and with it the
> daseinic extraversion. Historically, however, Germany and The East were
> not embraced by this ideal until Hitler tried to implement it as an
> instrument for world conquiest and as has been the case with the Muslim
> East for the last 300 years and in climax today.

Now, I think you’re talking about extraversion as “military conquest of
surroundings”. That’s not the same as the extraversion of the individual
psyche.

> > Thus the historic and prehistoric affinity of the Teutonic
> > Hyperboreans evolved as “Sea Peoples”, Philistines, Aachaens, Dorians
> > and lastly as Viking Norsemen, and all of whom were expeditionary and
> > in the compulsion of dasein.
>
> [T]Americans are very extraverted and they have been already fighting
> “from the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli”. And Russians,
> very introverted people, have a somewhat similar record. So, the
> extraversion-introversion dimension does not matter in such respect.
> [B]That is nonsense. “Mother” Russia always cleaved to its vast borders
> and with little expeditionary intent.

Peter the Great’s Testament says otherwise. And, since Russia became
“communist”, it had an universal ideology which it sought to spread all over
the world, e.g. by occupying the East Block, and stimulating/supporting
revolutionary movements elsewhere.

> When its fleet was sent east it
> was utterly defeated by the fledgling Japanese Navy (Russo-Japanese
> War, 1908). By contrast, the USA from its very start embraced the
> Gaeco/Latin extraverted ideal and where the expeditionary dasein was
> always in place as essentially invasive. Even during its “Revolutionary
> War,” or secession from the Crown, it attempted to invade Canada. By
> 1800 it sent a Naval squadron to defeat the Muslim pirates of the
> Mediterranean. The American “Civil War” to “save the Union” was in fact
> the prelude to the dasein of the USA as a future “super-power.” Dasein
> was thus built into the American “manifest destiny” and which today is
> at climax and closure.

Well, I think it is the Enlightenment which is coming at a closure. US seems
to have abandoned under George W. Bush its concern for the promotion of
human rights and for the preservation of world peace. It is back to a
militaristic policy pursued by an authoritarian leader.

E.g., considering catching a crime suspect, who was not even judged in a
court of law for his supposed crime, as casus belli, this is the greatest
insanity I have ever heard of. By this, Bush showed his utmost contempt for
the rule of law; all international law became useless at that moment. All
the lip service paid by diplomats to fragile international law treaties was
in vain, since Bush said: it is my game, it is played by my rules, I can
change the rules every time I want, and I may cheat at my own rules as much
as I like. So, force of the law turned into the law of force.

> > In all cases the attermpt to break out of the “Kubla Khan” monad of
> > thanatic bliss was sucessful although continuosuly aborted in
> similiar
> > attempts by the Persian and now Islamic people. They were,
> > accordingly, less “individual” (extraverted qua dasein) as in the
> > Western Hyperborean tradition but no less evolved in personality and
> > power of intellect.
> [T]I think that in the East their personality is always in the service
> of the group. The person itself does not matter much. Marx was very
> afraid of the “Asiatic mode of production”, wherein community are the
> property of the ruling classes, and what grows higher than the “maize
> field” has to be cut down. The West in the only place where “higher
> than the maize field” has been allowed to grow (i.e. tolerated).
> [B]Well, I guess Marx was wrong, seeing how national communism settled
> in the East, rather than for the Romanoid Western Allies: from Russia
> to china, N.Korea, N. Vietnam. Although finally settled in the “New
> World” after the Kennedy blunder in Cuba and now Venezeula and
> Nicarauga. Marxian comunnism was designed for highly industrialized
> nations but found its mark exclusively in agricultural “maize field”
> countries.

Now, I think you have misunderstood Marx on these issues:

(i) communist revolution was not a primary concern for Marx; rather he
thought that it is “inevitable” and “inherent in the nature of the system”
that capitalism turns into communism (i.e. that the means of production
become socialized, instead of capitalized); he considered that the
bourgeoisie will see that it is in its best interest to go along with the
inevitable trend;

(ii) in so far as he spoke of himself as the inspirer or even the brain
behind the Commune in Paris, he was attributing to himself the merits and
the actions of others; he was half-decided between what would have been
better in such a case: dissolution of the state as repressive entity or
recovering the old repressive state under the control of the Proletariat; at
that time, repression was the rule rather than the exception;

(iii) aside from his vitriolic comments on the bourgeois, which perhaps he
did not meant literally, Marx did not plan to exterminate the bourgeoisie,
and, as presented by George Ritzer in his Classical Sociological Theory, he
was an admirable humanist, concerned with the improvement of the human
beings rather than in spilling any drop of blood;

(iv) Marxism, just as Straussianism, was incorrectly understood and
incorrectly applied; many of today’s Marxists see Lenin as kind of a traitor
of the communist cause, because he betrayed all the decent ideals the
communists stood for, e.g. by inventing labor camps and by making possible a
monster like Stalin;

(v) true socialism means that society has to govern itself, without
interference from the state, i.e. consider all those clubs, associations,
corporations and charities in the US while making abstraction of the federal
and states administration, and presume that the tasks of the later were
taken over by the previous; as such, Marxism is inimical to totalitarian
regimes, for it rejects state despotism.

Greetings,

Tudor

Posted on Monday, June 4th, 2007 at 10:25 pm
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