Heidegger

Tympan,

I think that these are very nice statements. Not only are they nice, but
they are rewarding and practical. However I am led in another direction at
the same time. I think Vicktor Frankl may have clarified the real issue
when he stated that the real challenge in life is to find meaning.
Alienation is more broader than interpersonal relationships, whether
spiritual or material. Alienation from meaning, and it’s consequences imply
that even if there were no issues or challenges at the interpersonal level,
or even with respect to our, or one’s, relationship with the Creator, there
are still persistent, antagonism within. I have known and read about
persons who have it all: great family, great wealth, great talent and a
great future, but they still are finding that life is lacking….in
something ‘deeper’ and more meaningful. I think that this is because it is
not possible to be happy or content with what one has. Rather it is
sometimes the case where having it all is a challenge because then there is
no challenge, at least on the ‘day to day’ level. During the internet boom
there were well over 1 million millionaires…and many more would have
stated that they were supremely happy or content.

Each individual dasein, therefore, is different. There are no objective
ways of philosophically determining what it is that makes life meaningful.
Sure, philosophy can be practical in that respect, it can result in an
appreciation, and a ‘thanking’ or as Heidegger has stated: Thancking.

An escape from Alienation really is much more than practicing a spiritual
paradigm based on conviviality, mutal aid, and other aspects of cooperation.
An escape from alienation is not about a personal release from
meaninglessness, but rather a release from the self and what that entails.

Tympan: Yes and this is what gives meaning and purpose to life but this
involves going through a major change in one’s life. What is entailed in a
release from the ego is change in values, interests, desires such that we go
from relative goods to *the* good which is what you are refering to somewhat
under the influence of Platonic terms no? The way I read Frankl is that we
are alienated because we don’t have a significant interest in life and that
comes from the change that we go through when we move from being involved in
relative values to the follows the good because that is what is really
attractive and beautiful or the beloved. But this is a major change in a
person’s life like leaving home was, or like moving from a rural area to the
big city which is what many on this list have gone through, or think of the
dramatic change of getting married, loosing a job or changing jobs, getting
divorced and so on. How this pursuit of the good is incarnated in a
particular life I think is unique to each person and his or her
circumstances. For me its cultivating a felt sense of my surrounding world
where I am more involved or aware of conscious living which means
attentiveness to the here and now. The absolute good surrounds me
immediately at least as long as I am awake to its calling as it were and as
long as keep on developing the habit of an ethos or conscious living. Frankl
dealt with an extreme situation that was traumatic but he addresses any
significant change and the suffering that one has to go through to become
someone else, someone less egotistic for example. At issue then is any major
transition like that of conversion to a faith, changing political views,
moving to China, getting divorced, etc. In all cases we are loosing our
current identity and it is changing into another one which is more mature,
better able to adapt, more flexible and porous, more resilient and a better
witness or observer of change in others, a better companion in suffering.

John: I recall that there is a series of findings or forms of awareness
beginning with exterioception, then proprioception, and then perhaps
enteroception.

The last is everything! Since to find meaning in interoception involves a
process first of which is finding or founding of an abyss, which we might
substitute as a term, the term ‘lack’ or ‘emptiness’ or even ‘anquish’….In
Anxiety there is the fear of nothing, and perhaps the fear of the Nothing.

A true seeker would realize eventually that the lack is a value. It is a
form of emptiness which is similar to a windless day upon a lake, with
nothing apparent as an external object. The clouds are dispersed, high
cirrus clouds, there is no motion, and a great sense of stillness.

JOhn: Now your talking! and with a little jazz. This as I hear it is the
stillness that Heidegger thinks of as the stance or dwelling of those who
are reserved and therefore are a bridge elsewhere, are a trasformative
formal sign and pathmaking, a seed or potential, another possibility, a hope
and a transition, and envelope and surge… A begining is always first a
contracting concentration like the practice of pruning a tree, or stressing
a seedling by uprooting it and letting it get used to the harshness of being
outdoors. This is what many animals do when they hibernate like the bear.
Goethe observed that when you water a plant too much its has difficulty
flowering but when you deprive it of nourishment it flowers. Same thing when
we are careful about filling our minds with objects of thought or filling
our sense too much with pleasing stimuation. The cycle that goes from the
seed (contraction) to the fruit (highest expansion) is the cycle that
Kazantzakis refers to when he mentions that God has two major pillars, one
is the pillar of mercy and the other is the pillar of anger or death. The
Bible tells us that God is both love and death, expansion and contraction,
summer and winter, day and night, consciousness and unsconsciousness like
the Tao.

John: The true phenomenological antipodes corresponding to existence are
thus ’stillness’ and ‘movement’..with stillness the phenomenological
correlate of anxiety or even death of consciousness, of sleep without
dreams, without memory.

Motion is of course truely antithesis, but it is also a source of anxiety
because the images or motions move so fast that it is impossible to hold on
to them for long, and they can cease leaving a even greater sense of
stillness.

Tympan: God is a paradox,– an unmoved mover.

John: When I refer to a Being known as God, I like to refer to a God which
is Unknown except for one attribute and that is beauty. I refer to God as
the Ultimate Reality, but not as efficient cause, or to some other attribute
such as value.

Why would the Ultimate Reality be referred to myself by a sole attribute
known as Beautiy of the Beautiful?

It is not in the recognition of anything finite such as Order, Infinity,
or Lawful or as Moral that I would call the Beautiful, because each of these
attributes is ‘contingent’ upon the One, which is solely known by the
Beautiful.

Tympan: It seems to me that strictly speaking ‘NBHG’ has no name that we can
recognize so we are left with something unamable like haghjga or (&*&NBBJ
but I know what you mean a just proportion like that of God’s justice is
beautiful like any symmetrical dynamic pattern such as a maple leaf, or a
fern, or cirrus clouds, or a human face like mine… lol… it makes people
want to reproduce it in their lives which is what gives people a deep sense
of significance and meaning.

John: As I mentioned, the fact that primitive knowledge arises or is
aroused by the immediate and that which presents immediately requires an
admission, and that admission is one of a fact regarding what is universally
real. It is only how value arises because of interoception, and possibly
proprioception that obscures that truth about truth, which for me is solely
accounted for by the
knowledge of the Beautiful.

That is why even the most unhappy person can say withoug qualification
that it is a good day, or a beautiful day, and that it is good to be alive
just to know that.

Tympan: But then you are abstracting the beautiful from nature rather than
seeing it in natural processes like I do with Goethe. Maybe you mean to
refer to the way the sublime completely overflows any possibility of
conceptualization since it is immesurable like the infinite? This is another
train of thought that is valid but not so Platonic.

John: The problem with interpersonal relationships is that we have
culturally engrained habits, and practices that in some cases make it
essentially and practically impossible to be happy, to be good.

I guess I jumped ahead a bit. It is through knowing the Good, that the
Ultimate Reality is know as Beautiful.

I know this may sound simplified and perhaps naive, but when one assesses
what is common to experience, it is likely that without the attribution of
Goodness or the Beautiful, there is no meaning in life and in the Universe.

The fear of the Nothing, or anxiety, is a beginning, but not a false
beginning because there must be a recognition or awareness leading to the
Beautiful which is wanting at least, a wanting to have a conscience and to
be authentic, or to know what is authentic.

Tympan: If it is a knowledge then it is knowledge that comes from undergoing
an experience that involves anguish, spiritual melancholy, and
reorganization of a whole life and sense of identity. I am saying that these
transformations happen all the time and are a normal part of life and
involve the ability to keep *changing* and letting yourself be surprised by
who you are becoming because we don’t know what it is like to be whatever
until we get there. The process of pursuing ultimate reality or the beloved
is what is interesting. Attaining it is an illusion and boring.

John: Heidegger seems to suggest that proprioception is now encompassed by
artificial means: that being modern technology, of having things organized
in a very orderly and efficient way so as to stave off tedium and lacking.

Tympan: Also he says that one way that tedium or boredom is avoided is
through the machinations of lived-experience by which means the traditional
vice of curiosity. It is entertainment so to speak that covers up the
possibility of a rich experience of distress or depression and therefore
recognition of a loss and emptiness,– or recognition of the search for the
departed beloved whose witness and companions we can become.

John: But at a more deeper level a wanting or a lack can be the instigator
or initiator to true art and remembrance, even if it is nothing in the end
but defeat, or humiliation. So many are humiliated and defeated, but at
least in the recognition of it, there is hope, a wanting to have a
conscience, even it that is only a ‘conscience for change’.

Tympan: Yes, interesting, there is a question here of experiences like
humilation but also emberassment which are a kind of modesty and ability to
be open and tender and be bruised rather than something ugly and demeaning.
It’s a victory not a defeat. It is a sense of service.

John: Projection and inflation result in something which may not be good or
beautiful…at the very least projection and inflation are not momentary
recognitions, but rather due to ‘internalization’ of a lack, of something
missing or an emptiness….that is why it is difficult to treat that as real
issue in philosophy, but commercialization of a lack does fufill a transient
lack, and what really is binding is the longer term or underlying lack or
emptiness.

Tympan: What you refer to as the “commercialization of a lack” is an
interesting and valuable topic because struggling against that is part of a
serious spiritual life. We all are under the vice of curiosity trying to
avoid change by escaping into entertainment or trivial academic exercises
that go on for years filling your head with interesting objects to think
about and make you feel good because you have a mastery over the jargon of a
particular field and you think that amounts to being intelligent and having
control and security over the future. But as Heidegger understood very well
the point is to undergo the experience of distress that is there when you
face up to an empty life that is lived in need of something of great value,
in need of an idol, of a God. Idolatry obscures the image in our hearts that
is always and already there and is good enough.

John: If they are doing it to be seen as popular or daring, then it is
curio, often momentary and transient…when it is done inspite of what is
popular or trendy, then it done for something else, something permanent. If
we were to plan, then we might as well do it for a longer form of
satisfaction, but this would be risky….

Tympan: If you think long term you can let go of the cheap satisfaction of
relative goods and cut away the focusing on objects of thought most of which
are garbage. If we really observe them come and go like we do during
practice we see that they are for the most part garbage. Permanence is the
stability of a clear mind that is lucid. A mandala helps to center and focus
the mind so that it is in closer contact with the body and so a felt sense
of the surrounding world which is what makes one a good naturalist and a
good observer, awake with an animal’s soul. When you start seeing natural
processes like the cycles of winter-summer, day-night, seed-fruit as a
mandala that also shows you who you are and how you live your life and give
it meaning, well, that is something you know. It’s like you are living on
the edge, on the boundary between inside and outside, in transition…. in
process….

John: The greatest enemy is tedium. The moment of vision during sustained
period of tedium is shock, like seeing a great white shark whilst being left
abandoned in the sea with nothing more than an inner tube.

Tympan: Did you ever see a movie called Open Water? It was very disturbing.
It’s worth watching just because it gives you a sense of what dying could be
like but getting a new job could do it also, or going through a divorce, or
becoming a Muslim, or voting republican does it also.

John: At least there are the returns of summer and spring…the winter is
soon passed, my mother makes plans to garden again at her new home.

Tympan: The winter is starting to break here too. No rain yet but the
temperatures are getting close to zero. I remember when I used to have
garden back west and I had that fever to plant a garden now all I have this
empty dust bowl and my dancing lessons for so far it’s all sunshine and a
clear azure sky. Fires have made everything so dry everywhere. I see nothing
but deserts. It’s all one smooth texture. I guess if I lived in the hope of
an oasis I wouldn’t be able to see the desert.

John: The only objective fact is that most of what we know is
incomprehensible, even a climate scientists cannot appreciate any more the
warmth and long day light of coming spring.

I miss being in the forest and the mountain when spring slowly arrives.
Today it rained…and the streets were cleaner, and small blades of grass
occur on the steep south facing slopes of the railroad. Yet the railroad is
busier and dirtier than ever,

Tympan: This is the dirtiest time of year. The cars here are totally filthy.
There is no point in washing them. Are you having negative thoughts about
the place your living in? That’s homesickness. I hear it all the time here
in Ottawa where I come across people going through various levels of culture
shock. One time I lived with a person with a severe desire to be elsewhere.
Her fundamentalism didn’t help much and I couldn’t do much because I became
too emotional having to hear somebody so full of a lack of thankfullness for
being here away from the violence of home. I am upset that I couldn’t
understand her as I would now given what I know. I didn’t say anything that
could have helped her. I just got angry which probably made things worse. I
have heard and seen this response to uprooting a lot and only now do I
understand it better.

If your depressed it’s normal. Soon you will be a regular urbanite and trust
me your going to miss it when you are out there preaching to the little
critters in the bark of the trees again.

Tympan
chao

John

Posted on Tuesday, February 27th, 2007 at 10:05 pm
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