Heidegger

> Cologne 28-Oct-2006
>
> michaelP schrieb Sat, 28 Oct 2006 05:40:44 +0100:
>
>> Ken’th:
>> > A duck went into a bar and asked for some crackers. The waiter said no. The
>> > next day he came into the bar and asked for crackers again. The waiter said
>> > no, again. The next day he came in again and asked for crackers. The waiter
>> > said no. The next day the waiter said if you ask for crackers one more time
>> > I will nail your beak to the counter. The next day the duck asked if the
>> > waiter had any nails, “No,” said the waiter. The duck then asked “Do you
>> > have any crackers”

mP:
>> Lovely, nearly fell off my seat…
>>
>> But [and nowhere near as good a tale] did you hear about the Heideggerian
>> who entered the Eliminatist Lounge bar and went up to the Eliminatist In
>> Waiting and asked him:
>>
>> What is a thing?
>>
>> The Waiter replied:
>>
>> There is no such thing as “a thing”.
>>
>> The Heideggerian thought a while and then asked:
>>
>> What is “a thing”?
>>
>> The Waiter, exacerbated, waited not and replied:
>>
>> There is no such thing as “”a thing”".
>>
>> The Heideggerian smiled, thought a while and then asked:
>>
>> What is “”"a thing”"”?
>>
>> The Waiter didn’t even wait for the Heideggerian’s sentence to end before
>> exclaiming:
>>
>> If you don’t stop asking me “what is a thing” I’ll give you something
>> painful to think about!
>>
>> The Heideggerian remained silent for a few minutes and asked:
>>
>> Does “something” exist?
>>
>> The Waiter exploded:
>>
>> No, there is no such thing as “”something”"!
>>
>> The Heideggerian smiled and asked:
>>
>> What is a thing?
>>
>> ‘gards
>>
>> michaelP

ME:
> Nice!
> For “eliminativist” one could substitute also “analytical philosopher”,
> “positivist”, “logical empiricist”, inter alia.
>
> If one looks back to the heyday of speculative philosophy in German
> Idealism, and the sequence of -isms thereafter through positivism to
> so-called ‘analytical philosophy’ (analyticism?), it becomes apparent that
> Heidegger’s diagnosis of Seinsvergessenheit, even in the metaphysical sense
> of forgetting the ontological difference, has its justification.
> “Seinsvergessenheit” can be rendered as ‘forgetting of being’, ‘oblivion to
> being’, ‘ontological amnesia’. It’s as if the Weltgeist had got Alzheimer’s
> since the early nineteenth century. Fortunately, it can always recover in some
future time.

Michael, this sets me off somewhat tangentially thinking of some thing I
tried to begin with Jud: the nature of abstraction (especially as it
flourishes in philosophy and science). I need to do some further re-reading,
especially of Althusser’s impressive and focussed take on the empiricist
(and religious, almost in the same breath) take on (the object of) knowledge
(a mode of theoretical production), in his ‘Reading Capital’, before I write
another post in this direction. I think it will touch on the nature of
philia {love of, striving for, lust for, attachment to, harmony with…}
sophos {skill, cleverness, artistry…} aa well as this vexed business of
the abstract(ion). Does this twang your fibres?

Perhaps the Seinsvergessenheit is not so much a forgetting more a crypt:
beings are that be-ing is not (or, be-ing is not that beings may be); be-ing
as the crypt of a being. Be-ing is necessarily a for-getting: one has gotten
be-ing before a being can even present its self as a being. All the
prefigured configurations of philosophy (from Plato onwards to the bomb) –
in which the history of be-ing is embedded) — perhaps are always already
harmonised together synchronically (although spun out diachronically as a
series of epochs), be-ing being always re-coverable, de-crypted, the very
epochality of the epochs…

More later

regards

michaelP

Posted on Sunday, October 29th, 2006 at 3:00 pm
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