Heidegger

Cologne 30-Sep-2006

GEVANS613 at aol.com schrieb Fri, 29 Sep 2006 15:16:51 EDT:

> PART ONE OF TWO. In a message dated 29/09/2006 10:48:14 GMT Standard
> Time, artefact at t-online.de writes:

> 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?

> DR. ELDRED: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.

> JUD EVANS:Human understanding does not exist - prove it does exist

ME: One would hope that you are carrying on this debate with some human
understanding. Quod erat demonstrandum.

> Jud: and its *Stockholm bound!* and a specially struck Nobel Prize
> medal for *Services rendered to Metaphysics in proving the existence
> of Nothing.* and a post-ceremonial celebration dinner in the panoramic
> restaurant with spectacular views of the *Venice of the North* spread
> out below.It is sheer unfounded dogma to claim that human
> understanding or any other mentalistic abstraction DOES exist without
> a SINGLE shred of evidence to back up your preternatural claims.
> Believing in something without a shred of evidence is mere faith. I on
> the other hand can produce an understanding human for your inspection
> any time you like to provide the truth of my claims - in fact the
> planet earth is TEEMING with them, and they are growing in number at
> an alarming rate.

ME: You err in opining that only touchy-feely things exist, for one
would hope that you are immersed in the element of understanding most of
the time, and even if you weren’t and were ontically deficient in human
understanding, that would be also an ontological deficiency and you not
come up to scratch as fulfilling the essence of human being. It is a
quirky artificiality of your materialist eliminativism to eliminate
certain nouns, such as “human understanding”, replacing them with
adjectives.

> 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?

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

> JUD EVANS:I do not need one -

ME: So you don’t have one?

> Jud: …you Dr. Eldred are the person who is making these outrageous
> non-evidential claims and it is up to you to produce your evidence for
> such a curious belief. Abstraction does not exist.

ME: Repeating this silly claim endlessly does not establish its truth. I
have already shown copiously that and how abstractions exist, starting
with the abstraction ’something’ without out which we would not be
understanding human beings. Let’s consider a very simple phenomenal
example. I here something in the next room here in the flat and get up
to investigate what it was, but find nothing at all: Nevertheles, I
definitely did hear something, and it did seem to be in the next room.
Even if I am mistaken that the something was in the next room, I can be
confident that I heard something, and that that something also exists.
Because I cannot identify further what that something was,
particularizing it as a coat hanger or a book or an electrical fault or
what-have-you, it remains simply the abstraction it is: something. And
even if I did identity more particularly what that something was, that
particularity (say, the book that fell off the shelf) would STILL remain
abstract compared to the singularity of the book in all its
inexhaustible, complex, concrete singularity. So, in denying the
existence of abstractions, you deny the existence of everything that
surrounds you. You fail to see that perceiving anything around you as a
human being with human understanding enmeshes you the universal
categories within which things stand and show themselves to
understanding. And even a crude empiricist like John Locke was in a
fuzzy way aware of the proble.

> Jud: That which does not exist and (like *human understanding* or
> *pain*] is claimed to exist is a fiction - therefore abstraction is a
> fiction. Provide your proof by sending a small package to every list
> member containing a small amount of the abstraction *Human
> Understanding.* You can pop some *pain* in the same box while you are
> at it if you like - it shouldn’t take up too much space?

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

> DR. ELDRED: 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 EVANS: My writing is intentionally jokey BUT never evasive - every
> point meticulously addressed] in order to reduce the mental burden on
> you a bit, for I can see that you are whelmed and don’t really know
> which way to turn next.

ME: Is this a soliloquy directed to your shaving mirror? And do you
never go off at a tangent, changing the subject, thus evading the issue
at hand?

> Jud: It cannot be very edifying for you after a lifetime of commitment
> and dedication to an abstraction-based faith seeing your dreams torn
> to bits by an eminently more e powerful modern argument.

ME: Rather, a crude throwback, with quaint idiosyncrasies, to a position
in ancient Greek philosophy that has long since been overcome.

> Jud: And you keep claiming that universals exist so, Folk ontology
> doesn’t exactly encourage seriousness - does it?

> 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.

> DR. ELDRED: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.

> JUD EVANS: Humans exist as linguistically equipped, communicating,
> ideating creatures who employ their communicative codes for [amongst
> other things] sharing notions about what exists and what does not
> exist, and posit opinions as to the way, manner or modes in which they
> exist. A brief glance at the exchanges on this list over the past
> months will reveal that notions and opinions as to WHAT EXISTS and the
> manner in which individuals PERCEIVE objects to exist differs. In
> other words your abstractional fictions are very much generated in the
> brain of the individuate beholder

ME: Have you implanted to spyware in my brain to notice that?

> 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 Bismarck Range, which is part of the central
> highlands of north-eastern 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.

> DR. ELDRED: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 EVANS:Amongst eliminativists the notion of a special category for
> something that exists in its own right is an ontological redundancy

ME: A redundancy that we human beings cannot make do without, and which
therefore is not a redundancy at all, but exists in its own way, no less
than the singular tangible things that surround us.

> Jud: - for ALL causal objects exist in their own right and therefore
> the whole notion of *ontological categories* is ridiculous and is a
> leftover from the long dark night of folk ontology. Existential MODES
> of objects differ [though not one object in the cosmos is exactly the
> same as another.]

> JUD EVANS: 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.*

> DR. ELDRED: 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.

> JUD EVANS:Humans, cat and dogs, mice, fish and fruit flies [Drosophila
> melanogaster ] share nearly 60% of human genes and are studied by
> thousands of scientists around the world to learn how the creatures
> sensorially distinguish the causal objects which are important to
> their niche in Darwinian terms and are important to their survival.
> Drosophila melanogaster know the difference between the fruit they
> like and *nothing* - unless that is you have spotted one licking a
> non-existent plum? So what is the big deal with humans?

ME: Humans understand something _as_ something. Every singularity is
identical with a universal in human understanding — we can’t help it as
long as we are understanding human beings. That’s the difference in
essence between a human being and a fruit fly. And only because we human
beings are exposed to this apophantic As can we speak.

> Jud: Even a cat or a mouse realises the difference between the objects
> which make up a solid part of their environment and *nothing* They
> will not jump off a high object into empty space unless they can
> recognise another object [i. e., the ground, or some other object upon
> which to land safely. To the cat it matters not whether the object is
> your grandmothers Margaret’s oak wardrobe, or [in Paris] the
> newly-painted round roof of a public pissoire - the main thing for the
> cat is that THE OBJECT EXISTS - it is TOTALLY UNCONCERNED about WHAT
> IT EXISTS as. That is the approach that I am taking in this discussion
> - the methodology that Heidegger shirked and ran away from - - the
> main question in ontology is NOT about sundry humans understanding an
> object AS a certain type of *something,* but the FACT - the ACTUALITY
> that it exists. JUD EVANS:Humans are *understanding causal objects*
> who learn about the other objects [like the cat or the fruit fly] in
> the world as they develop [change the way they exist as causal
> objects] The *learning8 and the *understanding* itself does not exist.

> 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.

> DR. ELDRED:Your conclusion here is only a tautological consequence of
> dogmatically positing that only tangible, material things exist.

> JUD EVANS:The repetition of true statements concerning eliminative
> determinism is by its very nature tautologous, as too are statements
> to the effect that the claims of abstractional existence by folk
> ontology are utterly false. The only way to such avoid tautology in
> this case of denying the existence of *nothing* and other abstractions
> is to avoid truthful statements. I refuse to tell lies

> JUD EVANS:My challenge to you to PROVE the existence of the objects of
> your faith still stands. The list awaits with bated breath.

ME: The members of this list presumably know they have understanding and
are therefore able to follow or ignore this debate. Similarly, I and
they are presumably aware and self-aware, and need no other proof of
this than to direct their mind’s attention to this. Your jiggling,
interactive causal objects, by contrast, couched in a circumloquacious,
idiosyncratic jargon, must give rise to some wonderment that someone
could seriously believe in that stuff as the ultimate, rock-bottom,
no-nonsense, scientifically based truth.

> DR. ELDRED:Of course abstract universals exist.

> JUD EVANS: In that case as you are so sure, you will encounter no
> difficulty in immediately providing persuading evidence to back up
> your curious claims.

ME: You have already admitted countless times that you see or understand
something. QED.

> DR. ELDRED: 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 EVANS;
> *Categories* are no more than convenient fictions - classificational
> constructs to assist humans to sort out the objects that surround
> them. From an old fashioned folk ontology perspective everything in
> the cosmos is *something* so every *something* would be placed in the
> same fictional category presumably named *everything* - what on earth
> use is that to man or beast?

ME: Something is more indispensable to us than any electron microscope.

> 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.]

> DR. ELDRED:Human understanding is not “opinion”.

> JUD EVANS: Tell that to the Marines - the US marines in particular,
> for at the moment THEIR human understanding or opinion is that they
> are the saviours of democracy bringing freedom and deliverance from
> ignorance to a grateful Iraqi population - while large sections of the
> native Iraqis are of the opinion and have the understanding that it is
> THEM who have brought all this latest evil upon them and want them out
> of the country as soon as possible. Understanding humans when they
> make statements about their understanding are simply stating opinions.

ME: If for you there is no difference between human understanding and
opinion, all you are doing here is sprouting your eliminativist
opinions, which can be easily dismissed like any other opinions. But
surely you think that you are not merely opining in this debate?

> DR. ELDRED:Outside the identity of human understanding and being

> JUD EVANS: The IS NO *identity* of *human understanding* and *Being* -
> that is just part of folk ontology’s internalised belief-system in an
> ontological duality twixt brainbody-meat and some risible spiritual
> *product* of such an entity.

> DR. ELDRED: … 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.

> JUD EVANS:That really is not pertinent at all to do with the question
> we are addressing,

ME: That is not only “pertinent at all to do with the question”, but the
pith of the issue. Parmenides already warned us two and a half millennia
ago not to try to leave the identity of human understanding and being.
To make the attempt leads only to asserting foolish things (cf. my
proposed non-experiment below).

> Jud: and in regard to the evidential proofs with I am continually
> pressing you to reveal publicly.

ME: The public revelation here is that you have no answer to this
dilemma that we human beings could leave the identity (the
belonging-together) of human understanding and being and still say
anything at all. I challenge you to be consistent and fall silent
forever.

> Jud: The REAL fact of the matter is that HUMANS EXIST right now.

ME: Yep, we exist right now, understanding being. And existing right
now, we human beings are in timespace and understand and can think about
what is past and what is future. We can even develop theories (i.e.
contemplations) of whatever kind about times long gone, millions and
billions of years ago, before human beings existed on this planet. So
human existence in the here and now means at the same time being
stretched into both the past and the future.

> Jud: We are not addressing what counterfactuality would possibly
> appertain if no humans existed.

ME: You keep on dogmatically asseverating that causal objects exist in
themselves, independently of whether human beings exist or not — so you
yourself keep on attempting to leave the identity of human understanding
and being. To no avail, and with only comical effect (see below).

> Jud: Let us if we may stick to the ontological facts concerning WHAT
> EXISTS AND WHAT DOES NOT EXIST and consider the ways in which you
> intend to prove to the world that these extraordinary claims of yours
> can be verified and proved. So I ask you again - please prove that
> what you claim exists exists and where and when I may inspect these
> fictional [or if your prefer] *abstractional * objects of which you
> are a self-appointed custodian.

ME: The onus is rather on you to prove that the phenomena before our
eyes, especially before our mind’s eye, of each and every one of us –
such as the phenomenon of something –, with which we are all thoroughly
intimate and familiar, does not exist. Your touchy-feely criterion of
really real existence is simply a peculiar idee fixe of yours. What
exists first and foremost for us human beings understanding the world
are the ideas within which all that is shapes up and becomes
understandable.

You claim that I am deluded to assert that abstractions such as the
category of something exists. When someone is suffering from delusions,
however, and sees things that do not exist, some explanation is provided
of the delusion, either that what is seen is in truth something else
(e.g. what the deluded one sees as his general’s hat is in truth a tea
cosy), or that what is said to exist is merely imagined and refers to
nothing that is truly present and apparent to anyone present on the
basis of its own phenomenal evidence. But you do not claim either. All
you do is keep repeating that abstractions, such as the category of
something that is thoroughly manifest to each of us, does not exist,
without showing that what we see in truth is not something but some
other thing, nor even claiming that we merely imagine something.

> DR. ELDRED: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 EVANS:There IS NO contradiction between the adjective causal and
> the noun object it qualifies -

ME: A “contradictio in adjecto” has nothing to do with adjectives. It
means, “abject contradiction”.

> Jud: …because EVERY OBJECT IN THE COSMOS exists that way as a
> changing entity. You claim that folk philosophy is *genuinly
> philosophical*

ME: It would be real nice if the folk, or some folk, could really do
this folk ontology.

> Jud: and yet you consistently refuse to provide any evidence
> whatsoever to back up the claims of your philosophy which is grounded
> and constructed upon the very abstraction which you fail to prove
> exists. You yourself have just employed a contradictio in adjecto in
> your description of folk philosophy as *genuinly philosophical* when
> it fact it is just out of date speculation based upon absolute
> fiction.

ME: The evidence I have constantly provided is to call on you to open
your eyes, especially your mind’s eye. Just relax, stop denying and take
a look around.

> JUD EVANS: 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.

> DR. ELDRED:You can only assert this from WITHIN the identity of
> understanding and being.

> JUD EVANS: If by that you mean if I Jud Evans did not exist I would
> not be able to type these words - you are quite correct - and what
> point are you trying to make in saying that - I would have thought it
> was pretty obvious to anybody?

ME: I am not just talking about empirical individuals, but ontologically
about human understanding and being in their identity with one another.
The British empiricist in you cannot get beyond individualism.

> DR. ELDRED: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 EVANS:The above is very true, but it is diverging from the main
> focus of the discussion, which concerns the fact that we ARE here now
> and that you believe that certain fictions actually exist and I do not
> and I am trying to get you to start coming up with some evidence and
> proofs for the claims you keep making.

ME: Yes, “we ARE here now”, and can think and say ONLY from WITHIN our
human understanding of the world, so we have to pay attention to how a
world shapes up within and for human understanding. We cannot possibly
do any better than that. It’s mere twaddle to attempt to say anything at
all about things in themselves, outside at possible human experience and
understanding of them.

You persist in shining your tiny flashlight on that rusty toolbox of
mechanistically mutually impinging causal objects under your bed that
your wife keeps banging the Hoover up against, claiming that only they
exist, but everyone can see otherwise, namely, that what you keep
denigrating as “useful fictions” actually do exist. We cannot be human
beings at all outside the identity of human understanding and being, and
to be understanding human beings, we must see, first and foremost, the
ideas, especially the abstract and most abstract ideas that allow the
world to shape up as a world and be understood. Even though, for the
most part, we overlook these ideas (such as ’something’) upon which we
vitally and essentially depend, and take them for granted, ontological
thinking’s task is to bring these ideas to light — and philosophy from
Plato through to Heidegger is this endeavour to make us aware of what we
already implicitly know.

> JUD EVANS: 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.

ME: I have not for a moment denied the existence of the tangible things
around us. Why should I? But you’re stuck in onticity, and do not see
the ontological task of grasping both the causality and the objectivity
of your “causal objects” in well-founded, thought-through concepts.
Debating whether or not certain beings exist is beside the ontological
point and a task for the explorers of onticity of whatever kind. If you
hadn’t written off all philosophy from Plato through to Heidegger as
“folk ontology”, you could have learned something. You seem to be
deluded that your rumbunctiously aggressive polemic can wipe these
greats off the slate as mere idiots. Philosophy does not work that way.
Philosophy moves and changes only through fine minds thinking carefully
and deeply. Since your eliminativism eliminates minds as non-existent,
perhaps that does not matter to you.

> 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

> DR. ELDRED: 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 EVANS:We eliminativists [and I had this out with MichaelP years
> ago) employ such terms for convenience - in order to avoid long-winded
> circumlocution. For the eliminativist the use of such words does not
> imply that he or she accepts for one moment that universals exist. I
> have no intention of embarking upon a long section to explain the
> various ways in which the eliminativist concept of the individual can
> be extrapolated, for I have done so endlessly on this list for years.
> The bottom line is this. Whilst the folk ontologist uses universals in
> language and actually [consciously or unconsciously] believes that
> they exist - the eliminativist uses such useful fictions but
> recognises then as verbal conveniences and DENIES THAT THEY EXIST.

ME: Be that as it may. The denial of existence is no solution, for your
situation is much more dire. It is not at all that you are merely a
conformist that goes along with convention, but that, with every
sentence you say and every thought you think, you are in
self-contradiction. E.g. walking past an elm, you think to yourself,
that elm over there looks sick, and you mean that singular elm over
there in its singularity and no other. You intend to think solely the
elm in its singularity, but cannot avoid thinking “elm”, a kind of tree.
So, in thinking that that elm looks sick, you think and understand a
universal, namely “elm” as a kind of tree, and you cannot do otherwise.
And so you are left in the dilemma of saying and thinking affirmatively
universals whilst at the very same time denying that they exist. No
deeper self-contradiction is possible.

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_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ Dr Michael Eldred -_-_-
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Posted on Saturday, September 30th, 2006 at 4:10 pm
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