Heidegger

Cologne 09-Apr-2007

Bernx at aol.com schrieb Sun, 8 Apr 2007 21:05:28 EDT:

> In a message dated 4/8/2007 4:53:03 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
> artefact at t-online.de writes:
>
> ME: In sliding from the noumenon to the “numinous idea” you
> confuse noumenon
> (that which has been thought) with numen, which is simply a
> Latin word
> for ‘deity’.
>
> As for Aristotelean _entelecheia_, it has nothing to do with
> numinous
> ideas, but is the perfected presence of that which has
> attained its end
> or _telos_: en-tel-echeia, literally, in-end-having-ness.
> This concept
> is Aristotle’s own coining, and is only understandable in
> conjunction
> with Aristotle’s two other fundamental ontological concepts,
> _dynamis_
> (power, potency, potential) and _energeia_. (the
> at-work-ness of a
> power). Such being-at-work or energy of a power culminates
> finally in
> entelecheia or perfected presence.
>
> Dear Michael:As I fancied, thinking in German is very much different
> than thinking in either English or the Latin and Greek. “Numinous” qua
> “noumenon” for example are meters apart for you. This I have been
> trying to fathom in terms of contextural and conceptual intention.
> Thus it appears:” noumenon, plural nou·me·na,
> Etymology: German, from Greek noumenon that which is apprehended by
> thought, from neuter of present passive participle of noein to think,
> conceive, from nous mind
> : a posited object or event as it appears in itself independent of
> perception by the senses.”Notaby, this dictionary definition is
> German from the Greek and which fits your definition.

ME: If one wants to take the etymology of words seriously, as you do,
then one has to savour the words as they are in their respective
language-worlds: Greek, German, Latin.

> On the other hand, “Noumena, in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, the
> thing-in-itself (das Ding an sich) as opposed to what Kant called the
> phenomenon—the thing as it appears to an observer. Though the
> noumenal holds the contents of the intelligible world, Kant claimed
> that man’s speculative reason can only know phenomena and can never
> penetrate to the noumenon.” For myself that is close to Numen ….

ME: But that is only one side of noumenon, even in Kant’s idiosyncratic
use of the term, namely its use as a limiting concept to demarcate the
boundaries beyond which thinking should not dare to tread at the risk of
becoming fanciful. It is ironical that Kant’s injunction on the domain
the noumenon is able to cover entices people to waffle on about the
numinous, the transcendent and the sublime which, for Kant, are
precisely unknowable!

The other side for Kant himself is the noumenon as that which is thought
by the mind and constitutes the formal (i.e ontological) conditions of
possibility of being able to see the object _as such_, i.e. the mind
constitutes “purely” as noumenon the objectivity of the object,
independently of any sense data, which for Kant are the phenomena,
literally, that which has been shown (to the senses).

> ….and Numinous from the standpoint of wider usage and derived from
> Rudolf Otto we find: “It is more difficult to say who, in theology and
> philosophy of religion in the first half of the 20th century, was not
> influenced by Otto than who was German-American theologian Paul
> Tillich acknowledged Otto’s influence on him, as did Romanian-American
> anthropologist Mircea Eliade and Otto`s most famous German pupil
> Gustav Mensching (1901-1978) from Bonn University. Eliade used the
> concepts from The Idea of the Holy as the starting point for his own
> 1957 book, The Sacred and the Profane. It is also noted that Otto was
> one of the very few modern theologians to whom C.S. Lewis indicates a
> debt, particularly the idea of the numinous in The Problem of Pain.
> Others to acknowledge Otto were, for instance, Martin Heidegger, Leo
> Strauss, Hans-Georg Gadamer (critical in his youth, respectful in his
> old age), Max Scheler, Ernst Jünger, Joseph Needham and Hans Jonas.”
> By the way, Hans Jonas was my philosophy instructor (of the
> pre-Socratic kind) and a close colleague of Heidegger and their
> teacher, Rudolf Bultmann (of demythologizing Christianity fame). The
> war interrupted their friendship because Prof. Jonas was a German Jew
> and his mother was a victim of the holocaust. Although both men shared
> views about phenomenology and existentialsim, Prof Jonas went on to
> take them from the Judaeo Christian standpoint rather than the pagan.”

ME: Yes, Otto’s influence has been enormous and seductive. To
counterpose the “Judaeo Christian standpoint” to “pagan”, however, is
off beam because the pagan is only the opposite of the Judaeo-Christian.
If thinking leaves the “Judaeo Christian standpoint”, it leaves also the
pagan.

> Thus, we come from two different traditions and which makes discourse
> difficult. When you note, for example, that entelechia has little to
> do with noumena or the numinous mostly because you cannot see past
> Aristotle’s(meta) physical references (potentia, dynamis, energia qua
> morphe) you neverthelss identify entelecheia with leading to
> “perfected presence” What could be more numinous qua noumenon than a
> perfected presence or what may be referred to *bilde* in its most
> transcendent sense and quite invisible to *Vorstellungen.*

ME: You say I “cannot see past Aristotle’s (meta) physical
references”??! But _entelecheia_ is Aristotle’s very own neologism
coined precisely as a fundamental concept of his metaphysics. So if you
don’t understand _entelecheia_ in Aristotle at least, you cannot claim
to have any understanding whatever of the term. Ditto mutatis mutandis
for the Platonic term _idea_ and _eidos_. Both _entelecheia_ and _eidos_
are very down-to-earth concepts once you learn to see the phenomena they
point to, not names for something in a transcendent beyond.

> And then you would question me, quite in accordance with the book,
> that *an sich* is not “as such” but “in itself.” But they mean the
> same thing insofar as both intend the “given” as apodictic.

ME: By no means, and not merely in accordance with the authoritative
book, but in accordance with good thinking that “saves the phenomena”.
“An sich” has nothing at all to do with “as such”. The subject of
metaphysics, as formulated by Aristotle, is _to on haei on_, i.e.
“beings as such”, i.e. “beings insofar as they are beings”. Even in
English one can make sense of this. For example (from Aristotle): a
doctor may treat himself for an illness, i.e. be his own patient. So
this person is both a doctor and a patient. One could be inclined to say
that the patient is then treating himself, but this is not strictly
true, because the patient _as such_ can never treat himself, but only
_as_ a doctor can someone treat himself, but then _as_ a patient. So you
see that the apophantic _as_, and the _as such_ are crucial for thinking
well.

The Kantian “an sich” or “in itself”, by contrast, is a term denoting a
withdrawal into hiddenness, so that the Ding an sich, according to Kant,
is precisely not “given”, as you claim. What something is “in itself” we
would normally say is its essence, its whatness, and this is knowable in
metaphysics outside Kant. In Hegel’s thinking, “an sich” pairs up with
“für sich” and “an und für sich” as well as “gesetzt” (posited): It is
hard to tie down these terms, but it is crucial to do so if one is to
understand Hegel at all (and not merely apodictically pronounce him to
be talking “mumbo jumbo” — the easy and cheap way out). One
signification of a being in itself is how it is only implicitly, i.e.
folded into itself, and therefore potentially, as opposed to it being
posited explicitly in the open as manifest. This being-manifest can be
understood, at least in one sense, as the unity of subject and object
when the object in itself becomes posited manifestly and also knows
itself as such. To know itself, the object must be bent back on itself,
i.e. re-flected, thus becoming self-reflexive subject. This for Hegel is
the realm of Geist or thinking spirit, as distinct from nature, which is
only “an sich”, i.e. implicit, still folded within itself, not knowing
itself as such in a self-reflection. Nature is “in itself” or “for us”,
i.e. we can know it in its necessity through uncovering its Wesen, its
essence. We, however, as self-reflective, i.e. bent back upon ourselves
_as_ selves are free and “für sich”, “for ourselves”, remaining
ourselves _as_ selves through the negativity of movement in becoming
other. Hence another contradiction: we remain our selves in becoming
other — the mystery of selfhood. Other beings simply change, become
other, and are not “for themselves”..

> But I am beginning to further fathom our differences (and barring
> identity) when you note that your Jungian analyst was E. Field Horine.
> Would he have been in League with Henderson & co, all of whom were
> analysed by Jung, but who complained that he was not “spiritual”
> enough for them because he understood the *imago dei* as the
> psychological rather than the metaphysical image of God. Henderson
> was, of course, an American and he eventually retreated to California
> and I believe he is still alive at 100 years old. My interest here is
> because of a paper I am preparing at the moment concerning Henderson’s
> analysis of the American painter Jackson Pollack who on the way
> committed suicide. Apparently Horine was part of this spiritualist
> group to whom Jung threw up his hands in disgust because they
> believed he was not metaphysical enough for them. In their
> transference relation to Jung they tried to deify him but he would
> have no part of it.

ME: You are rather jumping to conclusions. Horine did his training in
Zurich in the late 1950s (or 1960s). I never heard him mention anyone
called Henderson, and he was certainly not embedded in an American
context. For some time, Horine worked at the famous Binswanger Bellevue
Clinic (no longer exists — the Bellevue park today is occupied by
residential blocks) in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland, just across the border
from Constance in Germany (where I lived for over a decade). C.G. Jung
was born just a little bit further along the banks of Lake Constance
toward Austria, in the village of Kreuznach.

> But here I must break off our dialogue becaue we are too much at odd
> ends, e.g., our different approaches to the *eidos* and *xwpa.* You
> see, I take ontology from its mythogenic and psychological standpoints
> in what i have coined as *Process Ontology” and which is my
> incorporated approach.Sincerely;Bernard

Psychology is not ontology, and it is dangerous to confuse the two.
Psychology genuinely transposed into the realm of questioning being,
i.e. ontology, becomes an ontology of whoness, hitherto unknown in
metaphysics.

Regards,
Michael
_-_-_-_-_-_-_- artefact text and translation _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_- made by art _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ http://www.webcom.com/artefact/ _-_-_-_- artefact at t-online.de _-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ Dr Michael Eldred -_-_-
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_

Posted on Monday, April 9th, 2007 at 4:00 pm
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