drifting. . .
December 31st, 2006, search relatedRelated posts :: my doctor tells me :: my doctor tells me :: my doctor tells me :: my doctor tells me
Jud, in your usual haste to rapidly demonstrate your enormous sophistic wit,
and without here commenting on the vitriolic mash-up you evidence below in
your ‘response’, you have not noticed that your respondent is one Marie
Mainil and *not Allen* (and not at all in the style of the Allen I know…
and different email address to boot); equally, another of your recent
respondents is one Les Smith and *not Lee Smith*.
A little less speed and a little more respect perhaps in the new year…
regards
michaelP
In a message dated 31/12/2006 02:18:44 GMT Standard Time,
morethanchinese at hotmail.com writes:
Jud,
Amongst your many services to this list is the opportunities you present for
the diagnosis of philosophical pathologies, that is systemic errors you make
that seriously infect any semblance of philosophical sensibility you might
have once had,
the possibility of which you might even have been born with–who am I to
say.
Jud:
You live in an *Alice in Wonderland Through the Looking Glass World* old
Nunc.
It is I who am deconstructing you - not the other way around.
Allen:
The most tiresomely repetitious of these pathologies goes all the way back
to the sophists, most notably Gorgias. It manifests itself most generally
as the
fear-of-being-affected, more specifically, as the unwillingness to confront
the proximity of rhetoric to philosophy. Now please listen carefully.
Jud:
Fear of being INFECTED you mean. 
No. YOU listen carefully. I deny
the existence of rhetoric just as [with Gorgias] I deny the existence of
existence. [or the *Being* of persons and objects] But that is NOT to say I
deny the existence of rhetoricians and that which exists and rhetoricalises
- nor does it mean that I have no understanding of the power of speakers or
rhetoricians or the persuasive existential modalities of humans employing
language to influence, cozen and lie. Quite simply I deny the existence of
abstraction and lies but accept that human abstractors and liars exist.
The most tiresomely repetitious of the pathologic variant with which you
personally have been infected goes all the way back
to the time when Greek philosophy turned sour, most notably with Plato -
though the slippery slide was greased with pig-fat in advance by the
grotesque Socrates - a loon obsessed with reification [see: http://evans-experientialism.freewebspac… ] who
believed that we carry forward memories from previous lives and thus can
uneducated slaves master geometry.
For Plato the firmament was a warehouse of forms.
Allen
The fear-of-being-affected correlates with an obsessive need to be in
control, most specifically through the power of reason.
Jud:
If *being in control* means not allowing myself to be dominated by
supercilious no-marks like you
then you are perfectly right - I may be a simple goy but I am no gentile
walkover if that is what you mean/
Allen:
As is true of most obsessions, reason itself is used to fend off any
possibility of overcoming itself.
Jud:
Who could be more obsessive than a Jew writing an ass-licking book
eulogising a man who called for the extermination of his own race?
Come on Allen - you are no more than a male version of Arendt - a traitor to
your own people - beware you are not marked out as a scapegoat and pushed
over a cliff. YOU are obsessed with Heidegger and the baby-language you use
when you speak of him would make a nursery-maid wince.
Allen:
The very idea of such self-overcoming, itself overcomes the sufferer with a
potentially lethal
deficient form of rhetoric, which has come to be known in our time as
“critique.” This
deficient rhetorical form can be self justifying to a fault, making it
impossible for
the sufferer even to hear, let alone comprehend any ideas which might expose
him to the
dreaded open-ness which he associates with a complete abnegation of the
independence
and integrity of the self. This integrity and independence he feels an
overwhelming
obligation to protect , using the iron-clad capacity of reason to turn
away anything that stands in its path back to itself, often with an
ingratiating wit and
charm which endears the sufferer to himself to a degree which sometimes
results in
anti-social behaivior, fortunately of a rather benign variety.
Jud:
I sincerely hope that the beginner’s philosophy/come *Meg’s Problem Page*
level psychoanalysis above never comes to the attention of any of your
students or you will be lecturing to empty classrooms. The lack of
understanding in confronting an eliminativist with garbled idiotimus like
*self* and *reason* and other transcendentalist meconium is a wonder to
behold. I deny your reificational rubbish and cast it back into your
pearly-white teeth.
Allen:
Now as to the unwillingness to confront the proximity of rhetoric to
philosophy.
Jud:
What are you tattling on about now you silly old sausage? I have never been
unwilling to deal with or to
trade back philosophical dialogue in terms of rhetorical stratagems - I just
deny that rhetoric itself exists Äî is that a concept which lies outside
the pale of that which your brainwashed transcendental thought-processes can
access? Watch my lips - the rhetorical *watch my lips* does not exist - *I*
exist in the mode of typing *watch my lips* and YOU exist in the existential
mode of reading it - GED IT?
Allen:
The problem here is an inability (congenital or not, I cannot say) to
recognize,
let alone appreciate the constitutive power of language, a power often
associated with
the Greek “Poiesis,” whose relationship to truth as the Greeks conceived of
it, we can
discuss at a later session, should you choose to engage what I have to say
with a good
faith effort (words deliberately and carefully chosen) to keep the more
extreme
expressions of your obsession in check.
Jud:
As a determinist I believe that we are born with *tendencies* or
*inclinations* or *characteristics,* which, in the likelihood of
encountering certain stimuli, manifest certain outcomes which allow one’s
natural disposition toward a certain way of experiencing the world to
blossom or wither on the vine. An inability (congenital or not, I cannot
say) to recognise and appreciate the constitutive power of language is NOT
one of my inherited characteristics which is evidenced by my poiesistical
employment of language on this and other lists I AM willing to enter into a
*Good Faith* discussion, though my past experience with you on this list [in
one particular and outstanding incident] has taught me to be cautious in
accepting many things that you say. Perhaps you have turned over a new leaf?
If so you may proceed with pleasure.
Allen: It might be encouraging to recollect the sophistic heights of
Gorgias’s expression of the obsession:
*Being does not exist, If it did exist, it could not be cognized,
And even if it could be cognized, it could not be communmicated*
Jud:
I am willing to march through Gorgia at any time. But what you quote above
is no obsession - it is simply a calm, controlled statement of TWTWI [the
way the world is] one of the last bits of Greek brilliance and commonsense
before the dark night of Socrates and Plato decended on Athens like a
suffocating blanket of ignorance.
*Being* [that is the existence of things] does not exist - it is the objects
which exist. It is as blindingly obvious as the nose on your face.
If it COULD be cognised [as the fantasists claim it can be] - it cannot be
communicated - to which the archives of this list provide mute but
convincing testimony.
Allen:
I have known some talented obsessives in my life, but few if any could come
up with such an apparently thought-tight “conundrum”
Jud:
There is nothing of the brain-teaser about Georgias. It takes an obsessive
to imagine they recognise an obsessive - but I think you are wrong. The fact
that another person strongly believes that [say] Heidsegger was a murderous
half-crazed Nazi liar, whilst you see him as a sensitive, angelic,
world-class intelligent thinker of great stature and you STICK unwaveringly
to that unhealthy position and suffer from a compulsive preoccupation
with a recognised monster, does not AUTOMATICALLY mean that he who holds the
opposite view is an obsessive. It IS obsessive to think in that manner.
Allen:
Further realizing how hearing about fellow sufferers, especially well-known
ones, can give one so afflicted some hope, I give you the best and the worst
of so called “analytical” philosophers.
Jud:
I am only *analytic* in the sense that I analyse things. I have much in
common with the analytics but would no longer classify or characterise
myself as being firmly in their camp. In many ways they are as much affected
by the Asperger disease of abstraction as your common or garden
transcendentalist.
Allen:
Best wishes for this new year and all those that might come, though at this
point, one has reason to doubt.
Jud:
Same to you old boy and many of them.
(Sent late and and unspell-checked)
regards,
Jud Evans
