Heidegger

Cologne 29-Sep-2006

GEVANS613 at aol.com schrieb Thu, 28 Sep 2006 14:24:22 EDT:

> In a message dated 28/09/2006 artefact at t-online.de writes: Cologne
> 28-Sep-2006

> JUD EVANS: Please note as usual - the caps are for emphasis only.JUD
> EVANS: [earlier]It depends in what sense and in what circumstances the
> significations are employed. Sometimes the word *one* is used as an
> alternative first person pronoun in such constructions as:
> *One has to take more care of oneself as one gets older* - meaning -
> *I* have to take care of myself, and others of a similar age group to
> me need to do the same. It can also be used to indicate a causal
> object whose name is unknown: *The one with the red hair and yellow
> dress.*
> *Nothing, something and anything do not exist per se, though if your
> hostess says: Will you have *something* to drink?* she will actually
> be employing the abstraction *something* in order to avoid saying:
> *Would you like a whisky, a gin, a rum, a coke, a lemonade, a cup of
> tea, a cup of coffee, a glass of water to drink?*

> DR. ELDRED: This commonsensical empiricist account of language as an
> assemblage of convenient abstractions seems plausible enough, but,
> examined more closely, is entirely untenable.

> JUD EVANS:Your contention therefore must be that if language is NOT an
> assemblage of convenient abstractions - it must be an assemblage of
> convenient material objects?

ME: No, language is the articulation of human understanding — neither
especially convenient, nor a material object. It is sheer unfounded
dogma to assert that only tangible, material things exist.

> DR. ELDRED:Our human understanding does not and cannot work that way.
> To understand the various things in this list, “a whisky, a gin”, etc.
> as belonging together in the class of “something to drink”, they must
> already be understood as “something” and “something drinkable”. These
> latter categories are _prior_ and _constitutive_ for our
> understanding, and the concrete specifications as whisky, etc. are
> derivative.

> JUD EVANS:But what you say has nothing at all to do with the fact that
> these useful abstractions ARE abstractions - all that you are adding
> here is the fact [which I could have already told you] that we humans
> organise these useful fictions and categorise them into similar types
> of utile convenient envisionings?

ME: Here you are fallaciously equating “abstraction” with “fiction”
without any argument whatsoever. What is your argument that abstractions
do not exist?

> Jud: The word or the substance *something* is NOT drinkable.

ME: You don’t say. Has nothing to do with the ontological argument, but
with evasively clowning around to divert attention from the Sache
selbst.

> Jud: If you answered your hostesses invitation to *have *something* to
> drink* by saying: Yes, thanks - I’ll have something,* she would raise
> her eyes to heaven imploringly and say again: *And WHAT are you going
> to have - WHAT would you prefer?* IF you then said* * whisky please,*
> she would open the bottle marked: *Whisky* - a causal object which, if
> she hit you over the head with it, would cause a considerable lump on
> your head, and pour you some of the stuff inside - a golden causal
> liquid object containing alcohol, which if you drank enough of it,
> would cause you to get drunk, or, if you spilled it upon her best silk
> cushions, would cause a stain which would cause her to throw you out
> of the house. On the other hand you could drink your fill of
> *something* as much as you liked all night and not get drunk, and it
> would not stain her best silk cushions if you spilled it, nor would it
> cause her to throw you out of the house - BECAUSE *SOMETHING* SIMPLY
> DOES NOT EXIST - and *something drinkable* also includes sulphuric
> acid.

> DR. ELDRED: In other words, what exists first and foremost for human
> understanding
> (but not in the mode of singular real things) are the abstract
> universals such as “something”.

> JUD EVANS:What you say has little to do with ontology and all to do
> with ease of communication. You are confusing a human understanding of
> the convenient grammatical strategies of periphrasis and ambage with
> the ontological investigation of the realities of what exists and what
> does not exist.

ME: Language is not merely a convenient tool for “communication” (an
extremely superficial definition of language), but articulates human
understanding. What exists and what does not exist can only be decided
_within_ the identity of human understanding and being (see below) and
articulated in language.

> DR. ELDRED:Only by being able to understand something _as_ something
> can you ever see and understand that cup of tea before you on the
> table as “something to drink”.

> JUD EVANS:That of course is true - but what we are discussing is what
> exists and what does not exist and NOT our understanding of an
> object’s precise existential modality in relation to [say] the
> traditional tea-drinking society of Britain. A member of the
> Bongo-Bongo tribe from the foothills of Mount Wilhelm, the highest
> mountain in the The Bismarck Range, which is part of the central
> highlands of northeastern Papua New Guinea confronted for the first
> time with a cup and saucer of a steaming brown liquid could see and
> pick up the cup, feel it, smell it, hear the cup rattle in its saucer
> and even dip his little finger into the hot liquid. He would know
> immediately THAT THE OBJECT EXISTED, but would not know whether one
> was meant to drink the brown liquid or whether it was used as a
> constituent of a plant-dye for the colouring of penis-sheaths for the
> export market.Alternatively if you visited his village, you too might
> be presented with an object of which its use was a complete mystery -
> but YOU WOULD KNOW that the object EXISTED.

ME: You would understand that it is something, and you could only do so
because you always already understand the abstract category of something
that exists in its own right just well as, but in a different
existential mode from the sock on your left foot..

> Jud. I think to introduce the subject of the anthropocentric
> consideration of the USES and even UNDERSTANDING of the things in
> themselves that surround us in such a basic, primary ontological
> investigation [the enquiry into NOT the *problem of *Being* but
> whether there IS *Being* - the interrogation that Heidegger never
> carried out] as to whether they exist or not is to invite someone
> interjecting: *I don’t give a damn WHAT the object is USED for - for
> hammering or as a doorstop - in this ontological examination I am only
> interested in if it exists or not.*

ME: I’m not talking about the uses of a thing especially, but about
understanding it in the first place as something, which is the
precondition for understanding it at all as anything specific.

> DR. ELDRED:Human understanding moves from the most abstract universals
> through to more concrete particularizations (or specifications) to
> grasp the singular in its singularity, and never in the other
> direction, from the singular thing up to merely nominal, conventional
> abstractions. (Our understanding would simply not know where to head
> upward.)

> JUD EVANS:I interpret this as an acceptance on your behalf that
> abstractions do NOT exist and that it is only the concrete objects
> exist.

ME: Your conclusion here is only a tautological consequence of
dogmatically positing that only tangible, material things exist. Of
course abstract universals exist. If you look closely (instead of
constantly overlooking), you will see that we are intimately familiar
with, say, the category of something and literally could not live as a
human being without it.

> Jud: I am overjoyed to see this turn - for it may be the harbinger of
> a new you - unfettered from the constraints manufactured in mountain
> monasteries long ago. Welcome to the club. BTW my own feeling is that
> it matters not a jot whatever way or direction *human understnding*
> decides to float or move in order to grasp something substantial from
> the billowing, gossamer webs of ontological obnubilation that drift
> over human discourse like a gentle, blanketing fog - the causal things
> in themselves exist in the cosmos in the way that they exist
> notwithstanding humankind and its categorising, ticketing,
> syntactico-semanticising and constant organising of sets of
> interrelated ideas or principles.

> DR. ELDRED:Furthermore, your pugnacious eliminativism would seem to
> have put its nitty-gritty mits on things in themselves by naming
> concretely “a whisky, a gin”, etc., but these specifications or
> particularularizations of the more abstract universals, “something”
> and “something to drink”, do not and cannot ever reach the singular
> thing in its singularity. Why not? Because our human understanding
> works in no other way than to identify the singular with the universal
> (or the particularized universal). E. g. we do not merely understand
> that “whisky is something to drink” (an identity of a particular with
> a universal), but also that “this here is something to drink” (the
> identity of a singularity with a particular), and even the expression
> “this here” is a universalization of the intended singular thing. Even
> doing without the “convention” of language with its “convenient
> abstractions”, and pointing and grunting instead of speaking,
> eliminativism would not attain its postulated rock-bottom reality of
> tangible things in themselves.

> JUD EVANS:Again you consistently introduce human understanding which
> concerns opinion AS TO THE WAY IN WHICH OBJECTS EXIST into the
> question of WHAT EXISTS AND WHAT DOES NOT EXIST. Objects exist whether
> or not humans understand or not - or whether they are right or wrong
> in their opinions of HOW they exist [in what manner in accordance with
> human language etc.]

ME: Human understanding is not “opinion”. Outside the identity of human
understanding and being there is nothing at all to say about whether
anything exists or not, for to say anything would be already to
articulate a human understanding of the state of affairs, thus bringing
it within the identity of human understanding and being. That’s why your
materialist eliminativism is a contradictio in adjecto. The only
consistent conduct for a materialist eliminativist would be to fall
forever mute — and not self-indulge in long-winded pugilism directed at
anything genuinely philosophical.

> Jud: The objects of the cosmos existed eons BEFORE the human race
> developed and will continue to exist long AFTER the human race has
> disappeared from the universe.

ME: You can only assert this from WITHIN the identity of understanding
and being. WITHIN this identity, of course, something can be said about
what has been and what will be — we are not restricted to the present
in articulating our understanding, but can develop, say, a theoretical
understanding of the so-called Big Bang billions of years ago when there
were no humans around. OUTSIDE the identity of human understanding and
being, however, there are no human beings and nothing at all to be said.

> Jud: OK, humankind can argue as much as they like about their
> perception of the manner, mode or way in which that which exists is
> perceived to exist through the imperfect sensorial medium of their
> sensors - but there is no argument AT ALL about the actuality that
> ONLY objects exist, and that they exist IN the way that they exist. If
> you have hard evidence that objects DO NOT exist in the way that they
> exist then now is your opportunity to present it to the public.

> Dr. ELDRED:As it is, your materialist eliminativism operates with a
> postulated, unfounded basic unit called “causal object” which is no
> less an abstraction than the category of “something to drink”. So
> denying the existence of the latter (as a conventional abstraction)
> implies also the non-existence of the former.

> JUD EVANS:It seems you have forgotten that when a nominalist or an
> eliminativist uses the term *causal object* he only ever employs it in
> the sense of addressing a singleton

ME: Yes, indeed. The eliminativist intends to address solely a
singleton, but immediately contradicts himself by actually saying a
universal, namely “singleton”. You keep on evading this point, but it
keeps coming back.

> Jud: - so if you are truly convinced that my postulated basic unit
> called “causal object is no less an abstraction than the category of
> “something to drink* then I invite you to participate in a public
> demonstration. A modern version of Dr Johnson’s invitation to Bishop
> Berkeley to kick a stone. We could arrange a screening of our little
> test on Deutsche TV. You could sit in a chair and a studio carpenter
> could hit you over the head with a causal object - let us say a
> hammer. If my postulation is incorrect and the hammer does not exist
> then I will concede to you that objects do not exist.What say you?

ME: This ontic clownery carries no weight in any ontological
argumentation. The appropriate experiment to prove the existence of your
causal objects independently of any human understanding would be to set
up an experimental arrangement in which a non-hammer (a hammer as a
practical human-made thing is a product of human understanding and
therefore necessarily excluded from this experiment) is not-hit over the
non-head of no one (because this experiment has to take place outside
the identity of human understanding and being) on non-TV (since TV is a
human invention, the product of human understanding, which has to be
excluded from this experiment). The non-observers of this experiment
outside any possible experience would have to (non-)observe the
non-effect of the non-hitting with a non-hammer of no-one — and report
the results neatly on a non-data sheet (because nothing is given to the
non-present, non-experiencing non-observer to report). Then you’d have
water-tight proof of the existence of your causal objects independently
of any human understanding. As it is, your repeated assertion of the
existence of things in themselves, independently of any human
understanding whatsoever, can only be the articulation of non-human
sounds outside any possible or conceivable human experience.

> Jud: [earlier]The useful fictional abstraction *anything* is another
> useful fiction that can be used in a similar way. *Are you going to
> eat anything?*

> DR. ELDRED: If something existed in the eliminativist universe, then
> it could perhaps also be one, but as it is, nothing at all can be said
> about what’s in the eliminativist universe.

> JUD EVANS:Absolutely correct. As no *nothing* - no *something* and no
> *anything* exist in the cosmos, all that can be correctly and
> veritably indicated for the eliminativist are actual causal objects -
> things in themselves - which are the true nominata of the
> significations employed, as antecedally, mutually agreed upon signs,
> as to their meaning by members of the given language family.
> Adjunctive, ancillary, appurtenant, anthropocentric descriptive
> abstractions are additionally useful fictions in describing the way
> that causal objects exist as perceived by the circumscribed and
> limited sensorial equipment of the human observer.

> JUD EVANS: [earlier]Does that make the invisible exist? I’ll you
> who/what informs us that sundry entities that are invisible to the
> naked eye actually exist - it is the scientists and their optical and
> other sensory equipment that signal the concreticity of tiny objects -
> it is as simple as that.

> DR. ELDRED:So the first, and perhaps only, theorem of eliminativism
> is: For all x, if x cannot be perceived with the unaided or
> technically aided eye, it does not exist. Does this theorem have a
> proof, or is it to be taken as axiomatic dogma?

> JUD EVANS: [earlier]No, that is not the case. No such theorem, proof,
> or axiomatic dogma operates. Firstly there are many instances of the
> detection and acceptance of existing causal objects without the
> unaided or aided eye actually seeing them. Scientists can establish
> the existence of a some white dwarfs and black holes by observing the
> perturbationary effects or secondary gravitational influences on a
> nearby binary system that causes it to deviate slightly etc.

> DR. ELDRED:There’s no problem for science to convert these measured
> perturbations into a picture and put it on a computer screen or a
> photo, just as computer tomographs can produce 3-D pictures of our
> insides and electron microscopes can generate images of the very
> small. But in all these cases, the images produced are theoretical
> constructions depending upon the postulates of physics, and precisely
> these postulates have to be subjected to phenomenological ontological
> scrutiny and cannot be admitted unquestioned as allegedly ‘hard’
> evidence for empiricist eliminativism. To do so is merely scientistic
> naivety.

> JUD EVANS:Is it *merely scientistic naivety* for doctors or dentists
> to take ex-ray photographs of your mouth or body-meat to ascertain the
> position of an abscess or a malignant tumour.

ME: No, it is not “*merely scientistic naivety* for doctors or dentists
to take ex-ray photographs,” etc, because that’s their job as
scientifically trained practitioners, but it IS scientistic naivety to
adopt, in an ontology, the tested and proven ontic procedures of science
and/or natural science’s fundamental concepts without subjecting them to
thorough ontological critique. Science itself does not do any ontology
and unknowingly works, and must work, within a certain pre-given
ontological understanding of the world that is not of its own making. It
is this fundamental understanding of the world — the historical casting
of being in a given epoch — that has to be brought to light by
ontological scrutiny — and not ontic convictions about the efficacy of
science or scientifically established ‘results’, neither of which is
here the subject of debate at all. Such clownery is only evasion of the
ontological argument.

You have to be clear about what you are doing: either ontology (in which
nothing can be presupposed, but rather everything must be thought
through in adequate concepts) or promoting some pugilistic theory of the
universe that slip-slides between unfounded ontological assertions and
natural science that is taken without question to provide the hard ontic
evidence for ontological claims (which it can never do).

> Jud: Would you have them poke around inside your flesh instead? And
> what about the *theorectical construction* of Hickman, M. D., M. R. C.
> S.(b. 1800, d. 1829) whose house I lived opposite to during WWII [he
> had lived in no.18 - I lived in no. 21 Teme Street, Tenbury Wells,
> Worcestershire]
> His should be recognised as one of the greatest names in the history
> of medicine, certainly in that of the anaesthetic relief of painful
> trauma by inhalation. Hickman was the pioneer, unrecognised in his own
> day, of the earliest steps of that great boon to suffering humanity,
> by way of scientific experiment. Some years before ether came from
> America to England (1846), and before Simpson in Edinburgh, three
> years later (1849), discovered chloroform.Would you have it that such
> dewy-eyed scientistic naivety is not allowed to strive to overcome
> ignorance and make life more bearable for mankind?In spite of your
> uncharitibility towards science, you use the internet and apparently
> invest in science-dependant financial ventures - how to you reconcile
> this jaundiced attitude to science [for ALL businesses WHATEVER they
> are science dependent in some way) and the fact that you derive profit
> from it?Anyway, what is wrong with theoretical constructions about the
> possible nature of certain causal objects [such as the red dwarf or
> black hole] existing as detected by ifs influence upon other visible
> causal objects? YOU COULDN’T SURVIVE for long if in your personal
> life you took that attitude towards causal objects seriously, for
> every time you walked out from behind a parked car there would be a
> chance that you would be killed by a [non-existent] passing car. That
> is if you refused to do as scientists do and look for circumstantial
> evidence or clues to the existence of unobserved objects, and defied
> precaution and pragmatic, experiential evidence as *scientistic
> naivety,* and walked out into the path of a speeding car just because
> you could not see it in accordance with your person modus of: *what
> you CANNOT see [like your non-existent Sumatran trees] does not
> exist - and what you CAN detect [the sound of the oncoming car] may
> not.

> DR. ELDRED:Moreover, if visibility is to be the criterion for whether
> something really, really exists, then compare the theoretically
> constructed image taken by an electron microscope (which can only be
> seen and understood through a highly theoretical interpretation) with
> the Angst we can see in a painting by Francis Bacon, which does not
> require any theoretical prerequisites to be seen and understood, but
> only that we are human beings who are familiar and experienced in
> taking in who we humanly are.

> JUD EVANS:You do not state what *theoretically constructed image* you
> are referring to here?

ME: E.g. the image produced by an electron microscope. Such images are
simply drenched in theory, and any self-evidence they may seem to have
to the unitiated eye is due only to the cleverness with which the data
gathered have been worked up by the computer into an image on the basis
of the human theoretical understanding of what an electron microscope
does and is designed to do.

> Jud: Many of the objects that I have observed through an electron
> microscope have no need to be dramatised as being * a highly
> theoretical interpretations?* Most of my personal observations have
> been pretty obvious and straightforward once one becomes aquatinted
> with *how to look.* It is rather like a specialist surgeon may look
> at an x-ray prior to an operation, or the many, many times I have
> looked at the vague foetal shapes provided live ultrasound scans of
> my wives [plural of wife] extended stomachs which, after a time, and
> with a little guidance from the diagnostic operator becomes familiar
> and eventually blindingly obvious. We both knew that our youngest son
> had a thumb-sucking habit because we had observed him doing it in the
> womb before he was born and were able to take advice on how to
> dissuade a child from such behaviour [with the concomitant risk of
> dental malformation] before his birth. Personally I believe that it is
> antiscientific naivety to accuse scientists of naive scientific
> theoretical constructions, for if such an attitude were widespread we
> would still be huddled in the back of some dark Platonic cave damp
> with disease, whilst some perfidious shaman played the beast with two
> backs with our young ones.

> DR ELDRED:I know, I know, the eliminativist will say that Angst does
> not exist but is only a neurophysiological arrangement of atoms.

> JUD EVANS:Absolutely.

ME: On the basis of unfounded (and I must say, very narrow-minded)
eliminativist dogma that fixatedly focuses the tiny cone of its
flashlight on mechanistic interactions among material particles, to the
exclusion of all other phenomena that we understand very well
preontologically.

> DR. ELDRED:…and Francis Bacon’s paintings are merely arrangements of
> certain chemically describable pigment atoms and molecules on a
> stretched piece of canvas employed as subjectile whose really real
> reality can be described in terms of atomic physics and chemistry.

> JUD EVANS:Don’t fall into the trap of imagining that eliminativists
> [THIS eliminativist anyway] do not appreciate the arts as much as any
> other sensitive, educated cultured person. Art, poesy, literature and
> its delights is no stranger to me - and I once owned my own
> successful art company which was a springboard to greater things

ME: So now the eliminativist becomes magnanimous, puts on his slippers
and indulges in his leisure hours in the quaint, non-existent fictions
of art and literature? Very 19th C.

> DR. ELDRED:Unfortunately, your nuts-and-bolts materialist
> eliminativism eliminates
> — and above all _overlooks_ — almost everything decisive and
> interesting that arises from the identity between human being and
> being, attempting to blow it out of the water with crude,
> down-to-earth, commonsensical tales of how our brain processes the
> data it takes on board through neurophysiological sensors such as
> eyes, ears and nose. I have yet to see anything remotely resembling
> even an attempt at grounding — as opposed to a dogmatic postulation
> — of your eliminativist reduction of existents to physical, tangible
> things. It’s not very persuasive to keep reading “X does not exist.”
> asserted without any argument at all.

> JUD EVANS:You make the typical mistake of muddling up my scientific,
> ontologically eliminativist dialectical persona with my personal
> every-day-life-one.We all deliberately suspend our belief whenever we
> watch a film or play, or read a novel.

ME: No, we do not suspend ontological belief when experiencing art, but
can only experience art precisely _through_ our ontological
understanding of the world within which ANY ontic understanding must be
situated. You have an extremely naive view of art — as if it were
fictitious portrayal. Art is realer than your real “causal objects”. The
point is that, say, in a painting by Francis Bacon we are able to see
and understand aspects of human being that can never be seen or
understood in the nut-and-bolts, nitty-gritty everyday reality that your
eliminativist ontology casts as the sole reality. In other words, works
of art can be the vehicle through which an other aspect of beings in
their being come to light. Your impoverished reality of causal objects
doesn’t hold a candle to the existence of art works and what they reveal
to human understanding, especially about who we human beings are.

> Jud: I am no different in that respect from anybody else.The
> difference twixt you and I is that whilst I [like you] am capable of
> such temporary suspension of belief in the realm of the arts, I am
> also capable of temporary suspension of belief when I go into a church
> [usually a Catholic one] as I do at least once a month, to drink in
> the religious ambience, admire the holy paintings and statuary, and to
> delight in the majesty and resplendence of the sung mass. So too do I
> read the King James Bible in order to soak in the glory of my English
> tongue, or read the Ramayana and Maharabatha to experience the colour,
> excitement and sheer entertainment of the Hindu epic.Just because we/I
> reject the concept that the abstraction *beauty* does not exist, and
> just because I leve my rose-tinted spectacles on the hall table before
> I enter the philosophy room does NOT MEAN that for us, what we
> consider to be beautiful objects do not, and that I am not as
> sensitively civilised in my appetites and pursuits as anybody else.

ME: All this amounts to is an admission of how impoverished
eliminativism is as an ontology, for all the phenomena you mention here
as somehow elevating for a purportedly non-existent human mind and
spirit are beyond the reach of a narrow-minded casting of mutually
impinging causal objects that are asserted, without argument, to be the
sole existent nuts and bolts of the world. The ontological task is
rather to carefully capture, in appropriate ontological concepts, the
rich phenomenality that flourishes WITHIN the identity of human
understanding and being, and not to scourge it with unfounded
eliminativist slash-and-burn tactics. What is it about the British
Insulars that philosophy never took root there, and withered and died
among them? Is it the omnicide for all things ontological known as
British common-sense?

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_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ Dr Michael Eldred -_-_-
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Posted on Friday, September 29th, 2006 at 9:50 am
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