Heidegger

In a message dated 28/10/2007 _artefact at t-online.de_
(mailto:artefact@t-online.de) writes:
Cologne 28-Oct-2007

Michael Eldred wrote:

Dr. Fallacia:
If the “physical being” does not show itself AS such-and-such, the “I”
cannot discover it.

the question is: did the inkblot show itself to be the bat or did you
discover the bat in the inkblot?

Dr. Fallacia:
Here there are at least three steps that lead successively deeper into the
ontological structure:

i) The viewer sees the ink-blot as (the representation of) a bat.
(Presumably your example refers to the Rorschach-test situation.) Insofar,
the viewer also sees the ink-blot AS ink-blot and understands the difference
between the ink-blot and (representation of) a bat.

ii) The viewer sees the ink-blot itself, ontologically prior to seeing it as
(the representation of) a bat.

iii) More originarily, the viewer sees the ink-blot (and presumably also the
piece of paper bearing the ink-blot) AS SOMETHING.

Yes, the viewer sees a bat in the inkblot; and, may or may not also see the
inkblot as an inkblot or, more abstractly, as a something; and, the viewer may
or may not have an opinion as to whether seeing the inkblot is ontologically
or chronologically prior to seeing the bat in the inkblot; but, how does any
of this prove that the inkblot has the power of self-disclosure or explain
where such a power comes from?

Dr. Fallacia:
It’s not a matter of the viewer’s opinion, but of what we, presumably
thinking through this simple phenomenon, see and understand.

Jud:
We are ALL viewers! And it is us as viewers and OUR opinions that we are
addressing. And thinking through the ontological order of the phenomena, it is
apparent that seeing something is ontologically prior both to seeing an
ink-blot and seeing a bat in the ink-blot. Jud: Utter childish rubbish! Looking at
an object and seeing it is a new experience every time. Whenever see an
object for a second time we never see it in EXACTLY the same way that we saw it
the first time. We and the object and the environment are in continual change.
That we have seen the same object in the past (or similar objects) influences
the way we categorise the object under visual examination. There IS NO
ONTOLOGICAL ORDER - there are objects and their is the human object. We have seen
objects in the past and we see objects now - Our brain contrasts and compares
what we see and we store a compendium of analogous and heterologous
representational correspondences or templates. You are trying to waffle your way out
of you stupid ontological fantasies and it is not working.

Dr. Fallacia:
Why? Because both ink-blot and bat are instances of SOMETHING, and not the
other way round.

Jud:
Ink blots and bats ARE NOT *instances of *SOMETHING* - they are things in
themselves or instances OF THEMSELVES.
That which we call *something* is simply an THE instance of AN object which
has yet to be verbally categorised, either out of ignorance or design. The
universalisation *something* or *anything* does not exist, being merely
reifications of unreferenced objects.

Dr. Fallacia:
Without already understanding (apriori) the category of SOMETHING, it would
be impossible for the viewer to see the ink-blot AS such at all, let alone the
ink-blot AS SOMETHING ELSE, namely, a bat.

Jud:
There can NEVER BE an a priori understanding of the category of a
SOMETHING. The categorisation of objects can only take place when the type of object
is already known. Only KNOWN objects can be categorised objects a *something*
and an *anything* [oxymoronically] is not capable of categorisation.

Dr. Fallacia:
(But modern ‘thinkers’ ‘think’, in their topsy-turvy non-thinking,

Jud:
More logical mistakes. A *thinker* cannot be a *non-thinker.* There exists
no holeronic version of a thinker as per Mr Punchinello.

Dr. Fallacia:
that they already have grasped the concrete thing ontologically merely in
its sensuous givenness before their eyes, and that everything else is ‘merely’
an abstraction…)

Jud:
Prove otherwise - the floor is your - *Bring out your dead * [*ideas*] as
the philosophical plague victims that they actually are. Let then be carted off
to their metaphysical mass grave.

Dr. Fallacia:
Moreover, who’s talking about the ink-blot having “the power of
self-disclosure”?

Jud:
YOU ARE! By implication - your crudities of expression - your abysmal use of
the English language. You need to re-structure your sentences or continue to
be taken for a blithering idiot. *To show* is an action verb which requires
a cognitive or sensitive volition only to be found in sensate creatures.
Your ontology is RIFE with personification. You would fail an English exam set
for 10-year olds on the basis of profligate and inexcusable
anthropomorphisation. You should hand back your doctorate and abase and atone yourself before
the taxpayers whose money has been wasted on your education. What is WORSE is
the effect that your ontological misrepresentations and blatant misuse of
English may have on the young or those new to philosophy. Your methods could be
said by some to resemble ontological child abuse.

Dr. Fallacia:
By introducing “power”, you are employing, without further examination, the
name for one of the crucial phenomena that must be at issue in any ontology,
viz. power (_dynamis_).

Jud:
You are childishly confusing a powerful entity with the volition to exercise
such power. All living entities are powerful in some way or degree, but
constitutionally incapable of exercising that power in certain ways. An elephant
is a powerful creature that can raise enormous weights with its trunk, yet it
could not fly like the hummingbird which has less power than I can exert with
my little finger. Nor do all animals have the volitional neurological
discrimination to initiate action or bring about certain intended eventualities.

Inanimate material objects have inherent powerful constituents and the
energy of such objects can be released of *realised* by a number of physical
processes which involve chemical changes, combustion, the moving of the mass from
location A to location B and atomic reaction.

The ink blot, which in these modern times is made up of dried carbon black,
a heavy varnish, and a drier to reduce the drying time. Most pen inks
incorporate those three main ingredients in different ratios. Intaglio) inks are
composed of petroleum naphthas, resins, and coal-tar. Such elements may indeed
have residual powers which could be released under the appropriate scientific
conditions but the power to *reveal* themselves or to
*disclose* their nature, or even to *presence* themselves [another nursery
idea of the philosopher of Nazism] is lacking. Ink blots - of dried carbon
black simply exist in the location where they are - what is made of them by the
examining brain of the human viewer is an existential mode of the observer -
NOT THE OBSERVED ink blot.

Dr. Fallacia:
And, as I pointed out in my last post, the ink-blot’s showing of itself AS
such is enabled by the category of SOMETHING, a phenomenon the Greek
philosophers could still see, but we smarties today, blinded by Cartesian and British
empiricist prejudice, no longer can see.

Jud:
OH MY GOD! Now you are simply shunting [transferring] your personification
from the ink blot onto the *shoulders* of the conceptualisation of the notion
of *the SOMETHING category.* I cannot BELIEVE you are so stupid! Are you so
far gone in your mania that you cannot see that you are now
anthropomorphising *categorisation* into a volitional agent which *organises* the personified
intentional *showing* of the inanimate ink - blot?

Joe:
how would an inkblot get the power to detect a viewer’s personality traits
so that it would ‘know’ to show itself as a bat to those with one personality
quirk and as a tomato to those with some other personality quirk?

Dr. Fallacia:
The ink-blot is simply itself, showing itself AS something with certain
qualities which define it as an ink-blot.

Jud:
There you go again - like an Alzheimer’s disease victim relentless muttering
the same repetitively inane phase. Watch my lips… the ink blot has no
volition power or intention - no agenda - no reason - no power - no interest - no
awareness of it qualities [or lack of them] to decide to show itself - to come
clean - to cease hiding itself - to make itself available to the scrutiny of
human categorisation. Like you, the inanimate object has no sense.

Dr. Fallacia:
The viewer is able to see the ink-blot AS the representation of a bat, or is
even able to mistake it for a bat (it SEEMS to be a bat), and not simply as a
representation of a bat.

Jud:
But that has got absolutely NOTHING to do with the bloody ink blot!

Dr. Fallacia:
Your silly remark about the ink-blot being able to detect the viewer’s
personality, of course, depends on choosing one side of your fallacious, either-or
dichotomy between discovering VERSUS disclosure, which is a RIGGED choice.

Jud:
Joe’s send up of your lunacy is not a *silly remark* - it is the natural
response of any person faced with a loony who claims that ink blots are capable
of *showing themselves. His valid extrapolation of your fantasy is *If the ink
blot controls its own showing or not showing, and given that not all humans
can make the link of its shape with that of a bat - how does the ink blot
know whether to show itself or not waste its time on a guy who has never seen a
bat previously and is incapable of making the link. This is the total
stupidity which your stupid fantasies lead to.

Dr. Fallacia:
Furthermore, your talk of the inkblot’s “power”, etc. is enmeshed in the
modern metaphysical prejudice that all subjectivity is to be thought along the
lines of human subjectivity.

Jud:
*Subjectivity* no more exists that the *volition* of your ink-blot or the
*Being* of your instantiational fantasies. There are *subjective* human beings
who like you naively internalise the ideas of others and make them your own..
There are objective persons who think for themselves [(The ones you accuse of
*topsy turvy thinking* i. e., the ones that laugh at and reject as puerile
the crap that you push like some street-corner user cum peddler.

Dr. Fallacia:
The human being as (the sole) subject is a product of the Cartesian casting
of being that posits the ego as the sole subject. And that is precisely what
is questionable and at issue. For Greek thinking, the subject (_hypokeimenon_)
was what we today, from within the Cartesian casting, think unthinkingly and
unquestioningly from within our now (apparently) self-evident, common-sense
prejudice as the OBJECT.

Jud:
Cartesianism is a dead duck. Even the turn-back-the-clock trannies at my
university acknowledge that.

As far as the classification of objects goes, whether it is the Linnaean
classification of plants of the Darwinian ordering of animalia the human
classifier is the arbiter of the classificational methodology and structure. We talk
of the observed entity as the *object* of our examination or gaze, but this
is purely a linguistic classification, syntactic and identificatory tool.

Dr. Fallacia:
Heidegger often renders “phenomenon”, “das Phänomen” as “das Sichzeigende”,
i. e. literally “that which shows itself”.

Jud:
Then Heidegger is the originator of your particular mental sickness. The
chief personifier - the eminence grise or reificational Reichsführer of
anthropomorphisation. Being the chief rat of reification he does not deserve the
title of *philosopher* in that he imparts and attributes bilateral volitional
relationships betwixt man and inanimate objects. The more you think about
Heidegger, the more one understands what a complete and utter country bumkin and
moron the man was.

Dr. Fallacia:
Modern English is a poor language for this, because it does not have many
reflexive verbs (unlike German), and has no MIDDLE voice at all (unlike ancient
Greek). To translate German reflexive verbs, English usually (misleadingly)
resorts to PASSIVE voice.

Thus, for example, “Es zeigt sich, daß…” is rendered “It becomes apparent
that…”

Jud:
Don’t make silly excuses. This is a list of educated people not bumkins
from the Heimat like your associates. That is no fault of English, that is the
fault of a crap translator who translates *It turns out that…* as: * It
becomes apparent that…*

Dr. Fallacia:
A key word in phenomenology, namely “phenomenon”, is from Gk. _phainomenon_,
the present participle in the middle or passive voice of _phainein_ employed
as a noun. The middle voice character of _to phainomenon_ comes across in
German by rendering it as “das Sichzeigende”, literally, “that which shows
itself”, whereas modern English resorts invariably to a passive construction,
“that which is shown”.

Jud:
That is an ontological flaw of German not English. And YOU should know
better than to retail and pass on the stupidity of the German version.
*The term *that which shows itself* can ONLY refer to an object which
accidentally or deliberately reveals itself to the sensed evaluation of another
object. It matters not whether the sensorium of the other in question is visual,
tactile, auditory, olfactory or by the chemicals involved in taste or
identification. The KEY WORDS are: *volitional intentionality* to be exposed and
sensed. INANIMATE OBJECTS ARE INCAPABLE OF SUCH INTENTIONAL VOLITION.

You are starting to make me think that the stupidities of continental
philosophy can be laid at the door of the crap ontology that such semantic garbage
thrown up like metaphysical mud on the reificational road that they ride. Is
it the stupid German language which is to blame, or is it stupid Germans -
or a mixture of both in the sense that German speakers seem content to prolong
and promote this ontological chaos?

Dr. Fallacia:
The excellent standard reference Benseler says of _to phainomenon_ “der
Schein, das was sich jmdm. in der Erscheinung so zeigt”, i. e. “the
manifestation, that which shows itself to someone in the appearance”, as opposed to “_to
dokoun_, was er in seinen Gedanken dafür hält” (”what he holds to be in his
thoughts”).

Jud:
Can we continue to trust any German speaker in future? In the knowledge of
the distortion of *reality* that you identify, is any German *expert*
ontologically trustworthy? I doubt it. If Heidegger is the best that the Germany
can do God help any putative Fourth Reich!

The blatant and uncompromising personification evident in the
characterisation of a *manifestation showing itself* is breathtakingly juvenile in its
shock to the system of any philosophical intelligence. Does this sort of
imbecility explain why the Germans turned upon a race which could run intellectual
rings around them and consigned them to the gas chambers? Is this an example of
the out of control linguistic machine that engendered such stupid
arrogance that initiated two world wars?

It is not the mass graves of the murdered that they should clean up - it is
the stupid language which allows such cognitive distortion in the first place
which should be scrubbed clean of its ontological filth.

Dr. Fallacia:
_To dokoun_ is what seems to be and what is held to be such-and-such in
opinion (_doxa_). So your making fun of reflexive constructions such as “the
ink-blot shows/discloses itself as…” is merely an expression of ignorance and
not to be taken seriously.

Jud:
Do you think for ONE MOMENT that your displays of sheer ignorance can be s
wept aside by characterising your critics as being ignorant. You remind me of
the cardinals who refused to look through Galileo’s telescope. Your ideas are
DEAD - and you are dead from the neck upwards unless you modify your outlook
and continue to be the reificational renegade and ontological outlaw which you
are.

Joe:
how can a particle disclose its dynamic properties (eg its spin) when those
properties don’t even have definite values in between observations of that
property?

did the number 3 disclose itself as a prime number; or, did some ancient
mathematician discover that three was a prime number?

Dr. Fallacia:
Again you offer only an either-or choice between a subject discovering or a
being disclosing itself. Why not both or why not a third alternative?

Joe:
why not both? because that leads to an infinite regress. you are claiming
that I, this subject, can not discover what it, that object, does not
self-disclose. I then ask ‘how did I discover that this object has the power of
self-disclosure?’. you would have to reply that the object has the power to
self-disclose that it has the power of self-disclosure. etc.

Dr. Fallacia:
Where is the “infinite regress”? I have already shown in my last post where
the buck stops, namely, with the categories as Gestalt en of being. These
categories are not infinitely receding, but precisely in between, in the
ONTOLOGICAL DIFFERENCE, which, as you professed initially (Oddly Enough) you do not
understand. If you don’t understand it, why sabotage any possibility of ever
understanding it by merely restating your metaphysical prejudices?

Jud:
How can the *ontological difference ( that *vomit on the palimpsest of
philosophy* be *understood* when it does not exist to be understood? All that
people like Joe can do is to try to understand why people like you believe in
such metaphysical muck, and why your ontological compatriots are blowing
themselves and others to pieces because of their faith in your shared pornographic
so-called *ontological difference.*

Regards,

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

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

Posted on Monday, October 29th, 2007 at 12:55 am
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