Heidegger

In a message dated 03/10/2007 _artefact at t-online.de_
(mailto:artefact@t-online.de) writes:
Cologne 03-Oct-2007

Dr. Strangelove:

“Entities cannot exist without existing AS SOMETHING.” This is what our
Elmatist tells us below — an ontological statement about what and how entities
are. But our Elmatist has told us just as often that the category of
“something” is an abstraction, a mere conceptual figment and that abstractions do NOT
exist (never mind the self-contradiction in claiming that the non-existent
Something IS an abstraction — we are moving on to the next self-refutation).

Jud:
*Oh! Dearie, dearie, dearie me!* Alice said to the Fieldmouse, *our
scatterbrained Mad Hatter is at it again,* she exclaimed.

Another grasping at the riverside straws of misrepresentation as you sink
below the surface of seriousness. So anxious is our locum tenens lout to
recoup some of his rapidly evaporating kudos and respect that his Platonic
platitudes are gasifying into such a bewrayed bouleversement, he ignores my long
term [year in and year out] statements, that the employment of useful
fictions makes for brevity, and allows one to avoid needless circumlocution, ambage
or periphrasis.

In civilized language it is quite permissible to use a certain word for
communicative convenience, as long as it is made quite clear in advance [as I
have been doing for years] that such use does not confer existential status. It
is a subject that has cropped up many times over the years with MichaelP.

The operative factor is NOT the use of such abstractives, which for the most
part are useful tools of human discourse, but the belief, or the suggestion
that such terms actually have a nominatum somewhere out in the world to which
the word refers. Therefore to claim that entities cannot exist without
existing AS SOMETHING, is simply to state that an entity, to be an entity, must
exist in such combination of fashions, states, and manners of material modes
which admit and permit, allow and endow it with the necessary extension, size,
shape and corporeal nature to exist and be present in the cosmos.

The Daseinic Doctor Dee* [see below]
Our Elmatist is a comfortable, conventional sort of chap for whom language
is an eminently useful tool, and he avuncularly intimates to us: “I do not
agree that such reificational practices invalidate abstraction if employed with
care, as a useful element of human discourse. In my view it is enough to
inform people as to the dangers of reifying such abstractions and advise them that
to think about a non-existent is not to existentialise it — but merely to
instantiate the concept of it.”

Jud:
And to INSTANTIATE the *concept* rather than to attempt the EXISTIALISATION
of [something] some unspecified object is exactly what I have done and no
more. I deliberately spelt that out in advance, and indeed you have quoted it,
but so fevered is your desire to find a chink in the eliminativist
ontological armour that there is no end that you will go to in your desperation. To say
that *something* does not exist is, by the way, NOT to say of course that
there are no objects in the cosmos which exist which have not been individually
specified [named] by earth-bound humans, but I would guess that by your
track record to date, such a subtle ontological distinction is far beyond the
intellectual limits of or resident Dr. Unsubtilis.

Doctor Dee:
Concepts, for our smug Elmatist, are merely figmental projections onto the
screen of consciousness generated by the internal whirrings of neurological
activity.

Jud:
You are an academic anachronism who lacks assiduousness and REALLY does not
pay attention. How often have I told you that *consciousness* does not exist?
Watch my lips [if your attention span permits.] Only conscious beings exist
- the IS NO wibbly-wobbly witchery woo within - no *mind* or *consciousness*
or *soul.* No Elixir of Life exists within the bubbling retort. The
sacrificial oak contains wood fibre, sap, and is heterogeneous, hygroscopic, cellular
and anisotropic material. There are no *spirits’ or *souls* ensconced within
the *Temple of the Mind.* No greedy spirituous ghoul abides within* the *Holy
Oak* waiting to act as agents of the god as the blood of the sighing
sacrificial child soaks into the loam of the forest clearing.

Dr. Dee:*[see below]
Accordingly, an abstraction like something is merely a “non-existent”,
“useful element of human discourse”. Whence it follows that: Entities cannot exist
without existing AS a non-existent. Hence all entities are non-existent;
they cannot exist at all.

Jud:
The above is obviously travesty and gross misrepresentation of my known and
public position. But NOW the floor is yours to bring proof to the list that in
your opinion this is NOT true. Your evidence that indeed abstractions and
reifications DO EXIST will be read with great interest I am sure.

For my part I can show you the oak and the human head - you show me the
*mind* and the *spirit* within.

Dr. Merlin:
The experience of our Eliminative Materialist in his efforts to get at the
nitty-gritty of what really, really, truly exists therefore comes to nought,
and he ends up as the inverted sophist that he is, dangling upside down from a
gibbet of his own self-contradictory making. (The upright sophist, a more
slippery fellow than our simple-minded Elmatist, argues conversely that that
which is not (_to mae on_) cannot be said, so that everything he says, of
necessity, truly exists.) So much for the experience of an imbecile intellect.

Jud:
Your reasoning is that of a convolvulus plant that wraps itself the wrong
way around the plant upon which it is parasitical. I have made it quite clear
that I am not a Parmenidean and that I am quite happy that the concept of *to
mae on* be employed as a useful fiction. I have been saying to the Sage of
Sandwich for years that I have no wish to ban abstraction, and I have driven
home the point time and again that the eliminativist agenda is not to eliminate
but to educate. You are a particularly lazy student, the concentration that
you must have had at one time in order to achieve your hard earned doctoral
distinction seems to have deserted you. Arguing with an eliminativist is not
the same as the intellectual easy pickings of Parmenidean to mae onic
proscription, or the effortless intellectual domination of lesser inter-trannie
discourse.
More concentration is required, for you will be more stretched - your
thoughtless platitudes challenged as is happening here.
Now, please let us have more effort please, for from my point of view this
debate is like me taking dialectical cookies from a cognitive kindergartener.

Regards,

Jud Personal Website:
_http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/index.htm_
 http://evans-experientialism.freewebspac…)

*John Dee (July 13, 1527–1609) was a noted English mathematician,
astronomer, astrologer, geographer, occultist, and consultant to Queen Elizabeth I. He
also devoted much of his life to alchemy, divination, and Hermetic
philosophy. Dee straddled the worlds of science and magic just as they were becoming
distinguishable. One of the most learned men of his time, he had lectured to
crowded halls at the University of Paris when still in his early twenties. John
was an ardent promoter of mathematics, a respected astronomer and a leading
expert in navigation, having trained many of those who would conduct
England’s voyage of discovery (he coined the term “British Empire”). At the same
time, he immersed himself deeply in magic and Hermetic philosophy, devoting the
last third of his life almost exclusively to these pursuits. For Dee, as with
many of his contemporaries, these activities were not contradictory, but
particular aspects of a consistent world-view.

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

Posted on Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007 at 9:40 pm
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