Heidegger

In a message dated 30/09/2007 13:34:11 GMT Standard Time,
_michael at sandwich-de-sign.co.uk_ (mailto:michael@sandwich-de-sign.co.uk) writes: Jud broke his
fast with this snippet:

[snip]

I think of Heidegger’s notorious “Das Nichts nichtet” “nothingness nothings”
a gnomic remark somewhat similar to saying: “being beeze”.

[snip]

Such obvious idiocy risked him being stuck away back in the mental home
again.

[snip]

MichaelP:
Jud, I think again you miss at least something of the point of such “obvious
idiocies”: like “rain rains” (what else can it do!),

Jud:
(CAPS FOR EMPHASIS ONLY) It would seem that way on first examination I
agree, but (bracketing out intensionality for a moment] burrow a little deeper,
and you will realise that *rain does not rain* no more than *fire fires* or
water waters.* or *breath breathes . * It is the CLOUDS that rains down its
condensed moisture ‘pon our thirsty earth.’ It is the river or the stream or the
man with the hose-pipe or watering-can [or the clouds again] which water our
growing crops and provides heaven’s purest of drinks to our wild flowers and
greenswards. It is the combusting oxygen that creates the fire, and the
living animal that breathes in and out.

MichaelP:
“nothingness nothings”, and both are cast that way to suggest that what is
normally cast as a name/noun (nothing, rain) is to be seen rather verbally, as
an activity or a process(ing) or a happening, as something taking place,
emerging and submerging from nothing, etc.

Jud:
First, we must (Husserl-like,) bracket out the obviousness that the human
conceptual instantiation of *to mae on* does not exist to DO anything other
than to flit around the human neuronal network like a frenzied electro-chemical
cloud of syntactic fire-flies. Nothingness is no more that the
instantiational activity of the lump of meat ensconced between our ears.

The fact that an object is NAMED with a denotational label which is redolent
or evocative of how it is perceived by the human namer does NOT mean that
the given named object actually deliberately carries out or is responsible for
that activity.

When I say *responsible,* I do not of course mean personificationally in the
sense that a rain-cloud can be *blamed* for you getting your new suit wet
just when you are on your way to meet your date. I am just driving home the
fact that the trigger-mechanism for precipitation is NOT the water droplets that
we call *rain* that actually drop out of the sky, but the disproportionately
large quantities of large and small water droplets which are effected by
areas of air turbulence that form very small spiral patterns and that this then
causes clouds to produce rain. During this process small tubular-shaped
vortices are formed and that these force droplets outwards by centrifugal force,
so that they congregate at the edge. For rain to happen one in every million
droplets needs grow to a diameter greater them 20 micrometers and this happens
as droplets collide - this then sets off a chain reaction within the cloud.

So is it the rain that causes it to rain? No, plainly there are other causes
- the drops that fall are the EFFECT of the causal forces active within the
rain clouds. So it is the rain-clouds that rain down the rain - not the rain.

As for *nothing nothings* one [you and I) after donning a suitable
children’s paper party hat, could if we wanted to enter into Heidegger’s little game
of ontological silly buggers and IMAGINE the nothing actually exists. Could we
really state that nothing nothings any more that we could say that rain
rains? No, we could not. In the contorted mind set that we would need to adopt
only the absence of some object could rob a spatial position of it
somethingness. Therefore only something could nothing in the same way that only Michael’s
walking out from a room could deprive that room of his presence. Only the
termination of an objectival presence can instantiate the notion of absence or
nothing [were a short while ago there was something.

In my honest opinion [minus any rhetoric] I do not believe that Heidegger
was capable of such a profound analycity which is required for this level of
explanation. Like our member in Neues Athen, his mind was simply not up to it.

MichaelP: For me it’s a sort of literary tactic to bring one to think
differently of those things and beings that are named that they be heard as, as it
were, thinging, in short: be-ing; to engender the coming to be of those
things that are present (that the apparently static state [sic] covers a dynamic).

Jud: Although I love your way with words and I myself love to lift of in a
verbal freedom flight of metaphorical merriment, executing lazy linguistic
aerobatics with line loops, Immermann Rolls, Red Baron Spins, Bader Hammerheads,
Cuban eights, Stall Turns and ending with a defiant deft flip, roll, flip
roll flick, as far as serious ontology is concerned I prefer a steady horizon
flight with only the merest slight adjustment of the jabberwocky joystick. In
other words playful language is OK for the communicational padding - but the
ontological nitty-gritty must be spot on, serious and professional. MichaelP

This only works so far because even thinking of things as processes (the
processing of thinging)

Jud: But it is NOT the *processing of *thinging* it is the processing of
real hard objects many of which if you dropped one on you toe you would hop up
and down like Heidegger at Hitler’s Annual Ball.

MichaelP

…. is easily unwittingly transformed into further static things (processes
‘are’ beings), Jud: Correction Michael. *processes are the changing of BEINGS
[objects] by other objects - humans, animals, (squirrels eating nuts and
defecting fertilizer on the forest floor etc. Human slaughter men killing cows,
stripping off their skins and processing the chemically pumped up diseased
meat for human consumption.

so that a tantalising glimpse of (the) be-ing (of a being) is immediately
cast as yet another being; in the end we spy the ontological difference however
fleetingly.

Jud: No need to strain yourself to see the *ontological difference* read a
chapter of Being and Time then raise your head and look around at the real
[rather than the irreal] objects that populate your world - that old tree you
love so much, the piano keys which respond to your loving fingers as you caress
them into interpreting and making actual the desires and frustrations of
your creative soul.

But wait! Der Sour Kraut dislikes any hint of warmth or friendliness on the
list, preferring the humourless, tight-lipped comic-seriousness of his
Platonic Pantomime. He will accuse me of ass-crawling in his next Ad Hominatum you
can be sure.

MichaelP
Of course, you’ll rubbish this with humour and ridicule, but I cannot stop
that, and this is just my take on this Heideggerian sleight of hand.

Jud:
Long association here has taught me that humour and ridicule is the best
attitude towards Heidegger’s sleight of hand - to cat-call the fumbling conjurer
with the Platonic rabbit peeping over the brim of the top-hat for all to
see has two beneficial outcomes.

(a) he either improves his act to the benefit and erudition of all concerned
(b) He retires and makes way for professionals with better material and
defter stagecraft.

Thankings,

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

“In nuclear war all men are cremated equal.”
Dexter Gordon

Posted on Sunday, September 30th, 2007 at 6:20 pm
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