Heidegger

Cologne 30-Sep-2006

GEVANS613 at aol.com schrieb Fri, 29 Sep 2006 15:30:13 EDT:

> PART TWO OF TWO. JUD EVANS: - 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?

> DR. ELDRED:This ontic clownery carries no weight in any ontological
> argumentation.

> JUD EVANS: It is only my good-natured way of shielding you from the
> embarrassing reality of the claims you make, softening the blow if you
> like, for I am beginning to get the feeling that you will NEVER come
> up with the proofs for your curious claims and you are truly boxed in
> a corner from which there is no argument that you can escape. The
> classical response at this juncture, according to my experience on
> this list is that an element of personal attack starts creeping in,
> usually out of frustration that they have run out of ideas in order to
> counteract the relentless logic of my arguments and the final
> realisation that they haven’t got a snowball’s chance of ever
> providing any proof. This sort of thing comes as no surprise to me of
> course for I recognised long ago that folk philosophy is a faith - it
> is not philosophy or ontology at all.

> DR. ELDRED: 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).

> JUD EVANS:But every object in the cosmos is a causal changing object
> whether it is spewed out of the mouth of a volcano and fashioned by an
> artisan in a tool-making workshop. You talk about the *non-hammer* and
> the *non-hit* over the non-head* only demeans your curious onto-faith
> even further in the eyes of an amused public.

ME: I am merely showing you the consequences of your position which
asserts that one can say something about whether anything exists or does
not exist OUTSIDE the identity of human understanding and being.

> Jud: Even the ontofolk are not silly enough to be taken in by that
> sort of comedy.

ME: Yes, I do think your position is comical, and yet you constantly
repeat that causal objects exist in themselves, independently of the
existence of human beings at all. And yet you make this claim, and can
only make this claim, from WITHIN the identity of human understanding
and being.

> Jud: Now come on - let’s be serious about this. You cannot wriggle out
> of your responsibility to provide some REAL proof for your claims. The
> viewers will understand PERFECTLY that sitting on the chair is a folk
> ontologist whose claim is that objects cannot cause anything.

ME: But I am not saying that at all. I am saying that causal objects
exist only WITHIN the identity of human understanding and being, and
that the ontological task is to think through the mode of existence
called “causal object”, thus explicating conceptually what causality and
objectivity are. Get it?

> THey will see the hammer - they will see your head - they will see the
> arm of the studio-assiatant raise the hammer in his hand and bring it
> down with great force upon your head. The will see you slump to the
> ground.The announcer will then turn to the audience and ask who in
> there opinion was right concerning causal objects. Your bloodstained
> figure on the studio floor will bear mute testimony to the utter
> foolishness of your claims.

ME: Don’t run away with your aggressions about what you’d like to do
with me.

> DR. ELDRED: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 EVANS: The evidence is staring you and the millions of viewers in
> the face - your recumbent figure being stretchered away by the
> ambulance men.

ME: _That_ experiment in aggression can only be carried out WITHIN the
identity of human understanding and being. The (non-)experiment I
proposed is the one required for your claim of being able to step
outside said identity, and it is comical because it is humanly
impossible to leave the identity of understanding and being.

> 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.

> DR. ELDRED: 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,

> JUD EVANS:So in your view during the stages when scientists are
> theorising and experimenting with new means of unburdening suffering
> humanity they are vilified by you, but when their *naive theories*
> prove to be efficient and workable methods of relieving human trauma
> you are fist in the chair for treatment. Do you not detect a little
> hypocrisy in such behaviour?

ME: Who’s vilifying anyone? I’m only saying that scientists and doctors
_as such_ are not ontologists, and an ontology cannot simply ‘borrow’
the well-established results of science as evidence for ontological
claims.

> DR ELDRED: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.

> JUD EVANS:And what specifically are you referring to here?

ME: I am referring to your constant use of ‘hard’ scientific
explanations and results and procedures as purported evidence to shore
up your eliminativist assertions. It does nothing at all to refute the
existence of all that you would like to eliminate as existent (from a
‘modern’, ’scientific’ standpoint that has purportedly supserseded and
done away with philosophy). Instead of eliminating the phenomena, they
have to thought through carefully and brought to their adequate
ontological concepts.

> Jud: Even the doctor varies his questions to the patient as if already
> not sure whether pain exists or not for example. Sometimes he says
> *Which is the painful shoulder?* and sometimes he says: *In which
> shoulder is the pain? As the Philip was quick to point out the obvious
> - it matters not to the patient whether *pain* exists* or not when he
> or she is contorted in agony, and ait matter not to the lovelorn
> whether *love* exists when he or she is consumed with passion for the
> beloved. As an ontologist I am NOT interested in the patient or the
> lover [that is NOT to say that I am devoid of the normal feelings of
> empathy for my fellow creatures - I am ONLY interested in the question
> which underpins the wide, unrequitable gap between modern ontology and
> folk ontology - the most important question in philosophy - *WHAT
> EXISTS AND WHAT DOES NOT EXIST? It is impossible to subject ANY of the
> tested and proven ontic procedures of science and/or natural science’s
> fundamental concepts to thorough *ontological critique* without FIRST
> OF ALL subjecting the fundamental foundations which underpins that
> *ontological critique.*

ME: Your fundamental critique of the “fundamental foundations” consists
of asserting incessantly that “abstractions do not exist”, only
nitty-gritty arrangements of atoms and molecules do exist. Some
critique!

One corollary I’ve already pointed out in previous e-mails that your
eliminativism has to deny the existence of life, because its basic unit,
“causal object”, cannot cope with the phenomenon of animate beings, but
is reduced to mechanistic explanations that have been refuted countless
times throughout the history of philosophy. Life and living beings for
your eliminativism are among those “useful fictions” whose existence you
deny — instead of offering well-thought concepts to grasp the
difference in the mode of being between the animate and the inanimate.
That’s why I say that all the entities in your eliminativism are neither
alive nor dead.

In other words, the question is not “*WHAT EXISTS AND WHAT DOES NOT
EXIST?” but how to think through attentively and conceptualize the modes
of existence that the phenomena in their diversity present to us. What
your materialist eliminativism is to flatten ontological diversity into
a mechanistic materialism.

The ‘hard’ scientists today, enmeshed in a materialist ontology (a
contradiction in terms, because all ontology is idealist), or rather
left desolate without any ontology, believe confusedly that the
phenomenon of consciousness is in principle only a matter of complexity.
That is, if you build a supercomputer powerful enough, it’s gonna wake
up. That’s the desolation in thinking with which we are faced today.

> Jud: If one approached the scientists in Cape Kennedy who had just
> successfully landed a space vehicle on Pluto and explained that some
> Doctor fellow in Germany who didn’t believe that objects change and
> that they are incapable of causing anything wanted to *ontologically
> criticise them* what do you think their response would be? Oh yes,
> they would say *Well how does he think we got the damn thing off the
> ground if the thruster rocket where incapable of causing any
> pressure?* But they wouldn’t just say that would they - they would
> have a lot more to say which isn’t fit for public publication on this
> discussion group.

ME: You want to know something _ontologically_ about causal objects and
change? Read Aristotle’s Metaphysics for a few years.

I’m not sure whether you are really befuddled by British common-sense or
are intentionally writing twaddle to misrepresent what I say. I have no
quarrel with the natural sciences insofar as the validity of their ontic
truths is concerned (yes, theories of cause and effect), but one still
has to ontologically investigate their fundamental concepts in order to
be clear about the RESTRICTED RANGE OF PHENOMENA to which natural
scientific concepts apply. Otherwise, natural science (dressed, say, as
social science) runs havoc and does immense violence to the phenomena
with the result that we human beings cannot understand them adequately.

> DR. ELDRED: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.

> JUD EVANS:There are some scientists who are aware of the ontological
> factors underlying their experiments and theories. But generally
> speaking - yes - you are right.

> DR. ELDRED:
> — 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.

> JUD EVANS:The *historical casting of being in a given epoch* or to
> de-Heideggerianise the term as *Opinions as to the political,
> religious, economic and sociological conditions in a given historical
> period* need to be examined and explained NOT BY PHILOSOPHERS but by
> specialist political commentators, theologians, sociologists and
> economists. This is PRECISELY what Husserl was getting at when he
> accused Heidegger of being no more that a glorified sociologist and
> anthropologist. All that is left as a *rump* for philosophy nowadays
> is to finally sort out the existential mess which folk philosophy has
> presented us with and to discuss ethical problems concerning human
> interaction with other humans, questions of medical, legal, animal,
> and environmental ethics concerning the flora and fauna of the world
> we share with other entities. Significantly my own philosophy
> department is not called *The Philosophy Department* any more it is
> called *The Department of Professional Ethics.* The writing is on the
> wall for philosophy - *Be relevant* or Sorry - try elsewhere.*

ME: Yes, philosophy has indeed come to this — ethics, without the
ontological underpinnings it still had in previous ages. Nothing against
ethics, but it has had the guts ripped out it in having its heartland,
ontology, removed. You’re right that all that is left today of
philosophy is a “rump”, and there is a good reason for that. Seventeenth
century philosophy set the natural sciences up pretty by providing the
ontological casting of being within which the natural sciences can think
mathematico-physically. The natural sciences could then dispense with
philosophy, and have long since taken their foundations unknowingly for
granted.

The task of genuine philosophy today is to turn the attention of
thinking to those manifold phenomena that have not been adequately
thought through to the present day, such as the phenomenon of social
power or of whoness. The very success of the productionist paradigm in
metaphysics from Plato and Aristotle on, culminating in the
technological power of the mathematico-natural sciences today has
occluded thought on other issues that have been shunted off to other
areas such as art and literature.

One has to be patient in philosophy, and the times are not auspicious.
Nevertheless there is something to be done TODAY. Genuine philosophical
thinking today achieves precious little, but the little it does achieve
is precious, i.e. indispensable, for the identity of human understanding
and being is always open to historical recasting in the crucible of
questioning thinking.

Today’s universities are important places to get a grounding in learning
how to think philosophically, and they are the same time, as
institutions with their own conventions and set power games, also the
places that keep a lid on thinking, forcing it into conformity with the
status quo. Just look back at the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in
Europe, a great historical period in which the world was being
historically recast in a new thinking, and you will find scores of
philosophers, including the big names, having to flee for their lives –
from universities. The present times are hardly receptive to any new or
different thinking. Nevertheless there are those precious few today
working away on the precious little that philosophy is.

> DR. ELDRED: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 EVANS: I thank you for your advice, but for me *ontology* means
> something entirely different from old folk ontology. The *adequate
> concepts* of yesteryear are inadequate arguments concerning historical
> philosophy, which though as a separate subject is interesting enough
> in its own right is completely irrelevant to modern life. The reason
> for my *pugilism* is because I identify *old folk ontology* as a
> dangerous component of the transcendentalist apocalypse towards which
> we are all heading as if hypnotised - and of course *hypnotised* is
> EXACTLY what has happened to us - brainwashed from birth into the old
> lies of folk ontology - with its enervating dualisms and divisive
> dialectics. Folk ontology is as important to religion now as it was in
> the early days of Christianity when the church fathers injected the
> church with large dollops of Greekish ontological stiffening in order
> to render it more intellectually attractive and credible. Folk
> ontology performs the same service to Bush, Blair and any other leader
> driven by the fictions of religion, and similar philosophical
> underpinning can be found in Islam.

> 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?

> DR. ELDRED: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 EVANS:But EXACTLY the same thing applies to your optician when he
> makes up a prescription for your spectacle lens, or when you have your
> house rewired and the electrician works out a ring-main and and a
> voltage demand estimate. Are you saying that these results should be
> ignored

ME: No, I have nothing against theoretically constructed images or
scientific theories per se. What I want to make plain is that such
theory-ladenness means that there are no innocent facts that can be
pointed to to provide evidence of the existence of certain kinds of
entities (such as your “causal objects”). Rather, one has to learn to
see that the very existence of causal objects AS SUCH depends upon
ONTOLOGICAL concepts of causality and objectivity, and these are tacitly
and unknowingly presupposed by natural science when it goes about its
work.

> Jud: - I am still unclear whether you are just unusually suspicious of
> workmen and technicians, or whether you are a completely ant-science
> *back to the hills* anti-scientist? You obviously view science as a
> threat but you identify it as undermining and exponentially exploding
> some of the myths on which you have founded your very life work - is
> this so?

> 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.

> DR. ELDRED: 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.

> JUD EVANS: If as you seem to imply here you are staking a claim on
> *ANGST* as yet another abstract existent in your L’Armadietto di
> Travestimenti Burleschi ( Cabinet of Seriously-Minded Travesties) then
> go ahead and ticket it to be included in your forthcoming Große
> Ausstellung Metaphysischer Proben to which the world and his wife will
> flock to see the abstractions in the flesh at last.

> 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

> DR. ELDRED: 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.

> JUD EVANS:Correction: *Puts on his slippers and indulges in his
> leisure hours in the ELIMINATION OF quaint, non-existent fictions.

> 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.

> DR. ELDRED: 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.

> JUD EVANS:Same thing - different words.

> DR. ELDRED:You have an extremely naive view of art — as if it were
> fictitious portrayal.

> JUD EVANS:You have no idea of my taste in art - which as it happens is
> extremely eclectic. For you the oil image of The Mona Lisa IS the Mona
> Lisa eh?

ME: Not interested in your taste in art; it’s your conception of art
that is naive in the extreme.

> DR. ELDRED:Art is realer than your real “causal objects”.

> JUD EVANS:A work of art - IS A CAUSAL OBJECT which causes one to react
> in certain ways - we change the way we exist as we direct our gaze
> upon it.

ME: You mean our sensors gather the data radiating measurelessly from
the art work and processes them in our multi-core processor AKA the
brain, and the brain’s software, written by an unknown hand, churns out
the message Angst in response to the data impinging on the cortex
through the mediation of the neurophysiological sensing equipment, and
suddenly we feel Angst?

> DR. ELDRED: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.

> JUD EVANS:I have never ever suggested that eliminativist ontology
> *casts itself as the sole reality* - for me only that which exists
> exists and *reality* is just another folk ontology fantasy. The human
> exists in existential modalities of understanding and being enraptured
> and relating to any piece of art in a similar way to anybody else. The
> difference is that for the eliminativist it is the understanding,
> enraptured human appreciator that exists and not some ethereal
> *understanding or enraptured realm.

> DR. ELDRED: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 EVANS:Meaningless palavers about the *impoverished reality of
> causal objects* does not mean a thing - hits no intellectual button -

ME: At least not in the mind of a nuts-and-bolts eliminativist, nor
probably in the minds of most auto mechanics. The impoverishment
consists, for instance, in being unable to say anything ontologically
about the phenomena of human understanding or human attunement AS SUCH,
i.e. to conceive what they are, and instead, to constantly resort to
ontic assertions such as only “the understanding, enraptured human
appreciator … exists”. Such claims of existence or non-existence are
entirely uninteresting. The task of the thinker is to think through the
phenomena as they show themselves, not to wipe them off the board as
allegedly non-existent.

> Jud: exerts no ideational leverage with someone for whom *reality*
> [whether *impoverished* or enriched*] is a meaningless term from
> history - as irrelevant as *phlogiston* or *the vapours* or
> *properties, essences, astrology, cartomancy, channeling, chiromancy,
> dowsing, fortune telling, geomancy, ley lines / dragon lines,
> numerology, ornithomancy, pyramid power, remote viewing, scrying,
> telepathy, levitation and other of dusty heirlooms from the museum of
> metaphysics which were hailed as the great *triumps* of folk ontology.

> JUD EVANS: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 leave 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.

> DR. ELDRED: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…

> JUD EVANS:Where did I mention *mind?*

ME: You don’t have one? It matters little to me to choose words of which
you do not approve and which you have tried, unsuccessfully, to
eliminate from your own vocabulary.

> DR. ELDRED:…and spirit…

> JUD EVANS:Where did I mention *spirit?*

ME: You don’t have one?

> Jud: You are indulging in your favourite fallacy again the erection of
> straw men. Do you HONESTLY think you can get away with such tricks
> with me of all people? You seem to believe that you folk ontologists
> have a god given right to our very culture. My culture - my history is
> as much mine as anybody else’s.

ME: Your protestations here miss the mark. When I use your words I
usually put them in quotation marks. When I use my own, I do not first
ask for your approval.

> DR ELDRED:…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.

> JUD EVANS:Then your way is clear isn’t it - provide the proofs to your
> increasingly bizarre existential claims and you can settle down with
> your abstractions, snuggle into your slippers summon and your real
> Mona Lisa to step out of her frame, rest your head upon her ample
> bosom and go peacefully asleep with a contented smile o your face and
> live happily ever after untroubled by the strident voices of the
> unbelievers to disturb your transcendentalist tranquility.

> DR. ELDRED: 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?

> JUD EVANS: They all emigrated to Australia - hence the reputation of
> Australia as the ontological and philosophical centre of the earth.
> ;-0regards,Jud Evans.

ME: So we see that the philosophical spirit must take detours to escape
the clammy isles with their oppressive common-sense. Oz, thankfully, is
a little less afflicted with the blight of British Insular common-sense,
but is still a stifling culture for philosophical thinking.

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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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