Heidegger

Cologne 15-Apr-2007

ME: Your opinions have become apparent, and doubtless you think you have
put a splendid critique of Hegelian speculative-dialectical thinking on
the record here. Philosophical critique would be much less strenuous
than it is if one could unleash one’s antipathies (Gefuehl) against
Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger to dispose of them as
(blinkered) ‘abstract’ thinkers.

Driven by the antipathy toward ‘unfeeling abstractions’, it is nice to
believe that truth is the “sensuous certainty” (PhdG) that the sugo di
pomodori has stained your shirt.

It is also interesting to note that, when you formulate below with
regard to your very own practice of painting, “The energia of the act
unloosens the potentia of the unknown and whose
dynamis is resolved as morphe. It is one lifetime lived at once, brush
stroke
for brush stroke,” this is supposed NOT to be a thought.

Purtroppo questo é il pensiero cattivo.

_geroon de oxutata horai_ — but there are plenty of exceptions.

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_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_- made by art _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ http://www.webcom.com/artefact/ _-_-_-_- artefact at t-online.de _-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ Dr Michael Eldred -_-_-
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Bernx at aol.com schrieb Fri, 13 Apr 2007 22:50:30 EDT:

> Continued from Mystery without mysticism III > ME: Why is negation
> foolish? We cannot do without it, and ALL our
> > understanding relies on it.
> BXB: Only the abstraktionist cannot do without it simply because the
> dialectic is a form Of closed logic, the logic of alienation and then
> the violent necessity
> To escape from such closed mindedness.
> > BXB: At first this (your) attitude baffled me until I realized that
> > dialectics was qua Hegel the German man-of-mind religion but
> dressed in >the analytic logic. And now it suddenly becomes clear to
> me that Hegel
> >derived his worship in dialectics under the influence of the
> apophantic
> >mystical tradition by which the substancial or ontological nature
> of
> >God is arrived at by a littany of negations according to what He is
> not.
> >But all poor old Hegel was trying to do was lift the introverted and
> mystical
> >’Gefuehl’ from “in here” to out there in the extraverted world qua
> dasein.>And since the rational feeling is the contrary to rational
> thinking, the
> > latter is called up to do this. ‘Gefuehl’ as such would be too
> close
> > the unconscious side of the philosopher, as it were, his inferior
> > (undeveloped) side. But that unconscious and repressed side is the
> > soul of the ancient German and its archai language. And now I
> realize
> > that Heidegger represents the climax to this breaking out of the
> > archaic German unconscious with dasein as the vehicle. Hence for you
>
> > cannot do without negation and the simplistic notion that the
> > anhilation of thesis (what IS) through antithesis somehow results in
>
> > what is hardly a tertiium quid but a substanceless negation called
> > synthesis. But syn–thesis as new thesis is empty and why it was
> later
> > resorted to use the negation of the negation with the hope that
> > something postive qua substantial as thesis would magically appear.
> > But this is a purely nuthouse use and corruption of apophantic
> > mysticism more so that it results in a kataphantic ideology. ME: To
> describe Hegel as a “nuthouse” case…
> BXB: No, if you read closely with some more directed thinking you will
>
> note that I did not say Hegel was a nut house case but the
> nationalistic
> ideologies that followed him, i.e., the age of totalitarian socialism
> qua Russia, Italy and Germany.
> ME:…. and to patronize him as “poor old Hegel” is hardly up to
> scratch
> and assumes a standpoint of superiority that first needs to be
> demonstrated,
> not arrogated to oneself. You don’t seem to realize that everything
> you
> understand and say depends upon negation. Every single word, in having
>
> a definition demarcating its meaning, is a negation. And every
> determinate
> thing can only be what it is through negation, i.e. through being
> delimited. In
> speaking of the “UN-conscious” you are even explicitly employing
> negation.
> BXB: Yes, and it is because of spurious nature of negation that I
> oftime reject the Term “un-conscious” in my work, more so when Jung
> used the term “collective unconscious, and then was later
> epistemologically prudent enough to refer to it by substantiation
> rather than negation as “objective psyche.”
> ME: It was not Hegel who first said, “Omnis determinatio est
> negatio”, but Spinoza. This negatio is nothing other than the _peras_
> through which every being comes to stand as what it _is_. Thus, this
> something (e.g. a table) is NOT something else (e.g. a window). No
> being
> can be without negation.
> BXB: Only in the thinking identity may a table be even considered the
>
> Negation of a window or a chair. Better to say no being can be without
>
> differentiation for it to BE being at all. The dialectic mode too
> easily
> is slipped in as a mode of natural process and “every being,” and of
> which we are behooved to fathom. Thus, through the process of identity
> the mentalism of man made dialectics is understood as “in identity
> with” beings in nature.
> ME:As to Hegel having “resorted to use the negation of the negation”,
> this
> opinion shows only a lack of understanding of what negation of the
> negation means. Something only _is_ in its delimitation against what
> it
> is _not_, i.e. its other. The other is the negation of a definite
> something.
> BXB: What nonsense when the other is never thesis as a substantiation
> but an empty something predicated in negation. It confuses through
> identity the
> “something” with a dictum
> ME: In becoming other, in changing, something is negated; it
> changes to what it is not.
> BXB: What kind of logoid magic is that! Eh, what! You mean if
> “nothing” is
> negated it takes on flesh as something? What kind of macaroni is that,
>
> All sauce and no pasta. Che bruta!
> ME: But something is itself already the other of
> its other (e.g. the window is the negation of the table in being
> other,
> but equally well, the table is also the window’s other).
> BXB:Better to say the opposite rather than what the negative of window
> is
> because it is certainly not your table but the outside world to which
> the window opens. Accordingly, it is not fit to say the outside world
> is the negation of the window or, in heidegger’s case, dasein is the
> negation of being. The man was far too astute to play with this
> Hegelian toy, something fit only for the Marxoid mentality.
> ME:So, when the something as other changes into something else
> (another), it stays with itself, i.e. remains itself _as_ other, and
> insofar overcomes its
> finiteness, and this is the first (banal) appearance of infinity.
> BXB: It is also the banal long way around to defining difference.
> Hence the
> finiteness of the object is anhilated or ceases to exist in the mode
> of the
> extremism of abstraction.
> ME:Therefore, this dialectic of the negation of the negation is by no
> means
> “empty” as you claim, but brings forth a determinate (abstract)
> concept.
> Just stick with the simple, abstract concepts, and don’t fly off at a
> tangent.
> BXB: Whoa, buddy boy, a determinate (abstract) concept has no reality
> in the Ontological sense and merely compensates itself by the
> necessity for dasein, the all that is denied behind the locked doors
> of dialectics and the concept gained by negation. In other words the
> absence of einfuhlung is the pathologism of abstraktion.
> > BXB: Thus it seems you rejoice when you say…
> > ME:Pagan is definitely a negative term, and there were no pagans
> > before Christianity, nor is there anything as a pagan outside the
> > ambit of a Christian defining of world. The ‘pagans’ were simply
> > called such by the Christians as ‘miles’ or soldiers of Christ, to
> > denote their other.
> > BXB: Yes, and the other now demoted as God and violating as such the
>
> > mystic’s ‘Gefuehl’ is turned to clumsy usage of understanding the
> pagan as >the negation of God. Hence the tautological circulus in
> probando when >dialectical negation is used for anything but an
> attempt to regain God as >thesis and something of (ontological)
> substance.That would be a form of >logical self delusion ME: To cut
> the crap here:– the simple, dry point is that the pagan _is_
> only the negation of ‘miles’ as soldiers of Christ,
> BXB: Sorry, I am not good at cutting crap especially an other’s. The
> Pagan is neither the negation or the opposite of onward march
> Christian soldier but its form in identity. Aye Lad, give unto
> Caesar….
> > > 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.
> BXB: No, I am not ready to gain the transcendent beyond by way of the
> negation of the negation. I will just have to wait my turn like the
> rest of us inferior beings.
> ———

> ME: The transcendent (not “transcendental”, which is the Kantian
> term)….
> BXB: Excuse me but i am a neo-Kantian qua Ernest Cassirer and his
> Philosophy of Symbolic forms…ME:….career of Plato’s idea took off
> with Neo-Platonism and its Christian
> appropriation. The Christian, Hegel, deconstructs the transcendent
> interpretation of the Platonic idea, and Heidegger certainly does,
> too.
> The problem is that the little parables that Plato tells to facilitate
>
> understanding have invariably been taken for the genuine thing, thus
> misleading understanding instead of helping it. Ditto for some of the
> analogies Aristotle employs. Hegel points out that to think the
> Infinite
> as a transcendent beyond is self-contradictory, because it sets up a
> demarcating limit between the infinite and the finite, thus making the
>
> infinite precisely finite, i.e. defined.
> BXB:The unknown as precisely finite? What the hell are you talking
> about. I thought such a magic was possible only by negation and
> negation of
> the negation ad infinitum.
> ME:But you can only ‘get’ this if you think ‘drily’ enough, with
> hyperborean dry ice (a special kind of Gefuehl!). The infinite thus
> comes down-to-earth without having to be imagined (vorgestellt) as
> Christ Incarnate in Capital Letters.
> BXB: Then forget about it. I’ll not trouble you to stew in gefuehl.
> Just stay out
> of the kitchen of vorgestellt and remain indulged in your
> iconoclastic pastime> BXB: Heisenberg pondered his uncertainty
> principle but also studied

> ME: To claim that “for Hegel negation of a fact of being could only
> ‘fold back’ on Being an sich, to realize the spirit” is not exactly
> good
> interpretation of Hegel, but a wilderness of words gone to seed. And
> are
> you wanting to say that Hegel’s “motive in the Spirit” is an obsession
>
> “with facticity”?
> BXB: Of course not. It is a retreat via the spirit to the transcendent
> beyond
> and on the quick way of negation to know what is. The problem was,
> Hegel was not an apohantic mystic but one who used dialectical
> negation to achieve the heaven of abstrakstion and by which he had no
> inclination to realize that heaven was here on earth in the garden of
> einfuhlung.> > > BXB: You mean too “down to earth” where ‘Gefuehl’
> dwells? Peccato!

> ME: No, all-too-ontic, and not at all ontological, but psychological.
> This latter seems to be your main confusion.
> BXB: Ah for the sin of all-too-ontic and the carnal realm. Forgive me,
> oh
> almighty one of ineffable ontologized judgement.
> > ME:The _phaos_ in the phenomena, of course, has
> > not escaped Heidegger, nor the etymology of the middle voiced past
> > participle, _to phainomenon_, “das Sichzeigende”, “that which shows
> >itself”. I have attempted a translation of the _phallos_
> >from the psychological to the ontological realm…
> BXB: Over here (in Brooklyn) we would call that a “dry fuck.”
> > BXB: But why try to save the phenomenon except to get at what
> indwells
> > it? What is so “good thinking” about that but that it must fall
> back on
> > intution to fathom the immanent essence? ME: To save the phenomena
> requires more than intuition, or Anschauung,
> which in German means literally a ‘looking-at’.
> BXB: You mean intuition qua the eidos? Not by a long shot if intuition
> is
> a form of unconscious perception for which the eidos allows itelf.
> Such looking at the phenomena is immediate and still has to be
> mediated by the
> interpretation of the phenomena in the _logos_ that explicates or
> unfolds them. Thus, e.g. there is an immediate intuition of phenomena
> of
> power (such as human ability), but it takes the unpatient unfolding by
>
> the _logos_ to articulate the abstract ontological structure of this
> set
> of phenomena.
> > ME: Don’t go off the deep end. Good thinking requires sober
> discipline
> > and a readiness to learn and to stick to the issue.
> BXB: Yes, I know. I was once court martialed in a German court.

> ME: So I am unfeeling?
> BXB: I could never say that. But you are surely empathic in spite of
> what you think.
> ME: But unfeeling is a negation; and “denial of
> ‘Gefuehl’” is certainly a negation, which I thought you wanted to do
> without.
> BXB: Sorry, but I cannot trip along with you in your minefield of
> negations.
> Please stick to the substantial and not the negative point.
> > > BXB: I prefer the poet’s *mania* as reccommended by Plato.
> ME: See above on Plato’s _mania_.
> ——-> BXB: Do you mean as cheap as “Schwaermerei”?

> ME: So you reject Kant’s prohibition to indulge in Schwaermerei in
> trying to speak of the Ding an sich, since you have already dismissed
> Hegelian dialectics, curiously, both as “mumbo jumbo” and as “analytic
>
> logic”..

> ME: A simple, banal example gleaned from the current French
> presidential
> election campaign:– today’s Frenchman/woman identifies herself as a
> lover of fine foods (identification with the other, because a
> Frenchwoman is presumably not fine food) and as non-American
> (negation).

> ME: So you being a painter is merely your persona? Moreover, to say
> that
> Self is “essence” is to employ the category of metaphysics for
> “whatness”, and that is precisely a violation of the phenomenon of
> human
> self perpetrated by metaphysics. Hence I have developed an ontological
>
> concept of whoness which you will not find at all in the long
> tradition
> of metaphysics.
> BXB: Please use some directed thinking and read carefully. My activity
> as
> a painter is a role and I do not identify my-Self with a persona role.
> I leave
> that to Macaroni’s of la bella persona. Otherwise one is a book
> defined by it’s
> cover.
> > BXB: But then you are isolated in the socially extraverted realm of
> persona,
> > the concealing agency of Self and being. I certainly do not want to
> > identify my-self as a painter, or poet, doctor or indian chief the
> > better to satisfy the world of others. I am what I am beyond such
> > schoolboy superficialties of judging a book by its cover. Indeed, I
> am
> > what I am for my-self and I stand in difference rather than
> identity.
> > I leave the collective hunger for identity qua identity to those
> > who worship a collectivist u-topos where all are one and the same
> but
> >for the diffeent feather in each cap.So I will sing for you an
> American
> >jingle: Yankee Doodle came to town, riding on a pony, He stuck a
> feather
> >in his hat and called it macaroni.” A “macaroni” refers to an Italian
> dandy
> >which hip English gentlemen prefered to imitate in style, dress and
> manner.
> And so for Yankee Doodle they were no more than fops. He was simply
> mocking such
> foppery by way of infering that he was fighting for his liberty.
> ME: Presumably, when you say, “I am what I am for my-self”, this does
> not mean that you repeat endlessly the tautology “I am I am I…” to
> yourself. When you say, “I stand in difference rather than identity”,
> you prove my point, for I am saying that identity as self is
> identification with difference — but you are still trying to keep
> identity and difference cleanly quarantined from one another,
> uninfected
> by negation. The “extraverted realm of persona” translates in
> Heidegger’s thinking to being-in-the-world for which Dasein is thought
>
> as Existenz or standing-out-into-the-world. Therefore Heidegger can
> say
> that self is world, which breaks with the subjectivist Vorstellung of
> a
> self as an enclosed, inner ego-point. The abstract ego that abstracts
> from all determinate content is certainly something that can be
> thought,
> but it is not the self as a human being leading his or her existence
> in
> the world. Jungian depth psychology (with its notion of persona and
> its
> crude schematism) is still tangled in the subject/object split of
> modern
> metaphysics.
> BXB: Then, unfortunately, he was not cut out to be a Yankee Doodle or
> the
> top-hated guy with a musket following Liberte with her tricolor over
> the street
> ramparts (In the painting by Delacroix celebrating the revolution of
> 1848.)These
> are not figures identifying self as the world but self as the
> potential of their
> own freedom and liberty. They were not quite yet dialecticated as that
> time
> when the Hegel’s Spirit was subject to “negation” as materia by Mr.
> Marx.

> ME: There are many kinds of mirrors, many kinds of reflections, not
> just
> two-dimensional, and the physical mirror in your bathroom is not the
> original, but only possible at all because human being is reflective
> in
> the double sense I have elaborated. The mirroring of self in other is
> ontological and therefore prior to seeing yourself in the shaving
> mirror.
> BXB:No, the ontological is what it is in the depth of refraction.
> ME: It’s not a metaphor, which is only resorted to by those
> incapable of thinking concepts. And even seeing yourself in the
> shaving
> mirror is not seeing “like qua like” but self qua other, since
> presumably you are not an image in a shaving mirror — any yet you
> recognize yourself in the reflected image. That’s a perplexing aspect
> of
> self-identity — it is always identification with an other.
> ——–

> ME: The problem with these notions (Vorstellungen) from Jung’s
> psychological theory such as “mask world of persona”, “anima”, “soul
> image” etc. is that they are never grounded ontologically. Jung
> doesn’t
> know what ontology is. The dichotomy in Jung’s schema between thinking
>
> and feeling is also phenomenologically untenable. Heidegger’s _Sein
> und
> Zeit_ proceeds much more carefully and closer to the phenomena
> themselves in showing that understanding and moodedness, as the two
> primary ways in which world opens up, are a unified phenomenon: — all
>
> understanding is mooded, and all moodedness, as a mode of finding
> oneself in the world, is accompanied by understanding, even if in only
> a
> privative mode of lack of understanding, confusion, bewilderment
> (which
> as negative are nevertheless phenomena in their own right).
> BXB:Are you confusing what you are calling a unification with what in
> fact
> is a fusion of opposites and their subsequent dissociation and loss of
> identity?
> > ME: In comparison to that which does not change and has no other
> > against which it is delimited.
> > BXB: Ah, so you have found God using the apophantic method.
> ME: Or, more thinkerly, Parmenidean being, that succumbed to Plato’s
> critique in Sophist.
> > > BXB: Well, I suppose this “other” is what Martin Buber calls God.
> ME: No, it is much more down-to-earth and closer to home than that. We
>
> human beings _as_ selves remain ourselves in constantly becoming
> other. E.g. in becoming a painter, you became other, but you also
> remained
> yourself. As selves we are stretched out in time and gather what has
> been, what is present and what is still to arrive.
> > BXB: You are still speaking of a divine mandate. Or don’t you not
> > understand that the down to earth divinity is Christ Incarnate?
> ME: To be yourself, you gotta phantasize about divine mandate? I
> thought
> you approved of Kant’s negative concept of Ding an sich as an
> exhortation to let the unknown to be unknown.
> > ME: I don’t know what ice you are trying to cut with this polemic.
> > BXB: The dry ice of pure thinking or thinking an sich, i.e., psyche
> >become psychros (frozen).
> ME: More like a demonstration of the impotence of ranting for want of
> an
> incisive, coherent critique that could be taken seriously.
> BXB:Perhaps you are right. But no amount of either rant or clear
> thinking
> is up to unloosening the straight jacket of dialectical thinking. You
> might
> just as well try to covert a Muslim to atheism.
> > ME: To proclaim that ‘thinking’ (as practised by Hegel or Heidegger)
>
> > is a mere ideology is itself a way of thinking, and the issue is
> whether
> > this is good thinking or poor thinking. And don’t forget that
> > painting, too, is a way of thinking!
> BXB: Thinking!!? If I would think a painting there would be no need
> to paint
> it. The energia of the act unloosens the potentia of the unknown and
> whose
> dynamis is resolved as morphe. It is one lifetime lived at once, brush
> stroke
> for brush stroke. But of course a clutz kunstschmeer would have to
> paint out
> by negation every other stroke and would thus miss the al fresco
> ekstasis prosus of the act. So much for the alchemical feeling into
> the object.
> Sincerely;
> Bernard

Posted on Sunday, April 15th, 2007 at 8:15 am
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