Heidegger

Richard:
I enjoy the trip through our human history as to the beauty and wonder of
the mind as it grappled with the same kinds of tragedy and misfortune as I do.

Jud:
ME TOO RICHARD! ME TOO! Please do not think that I am merely an iconoclast,
sourly criticising the figures of the past just because they do not comply
with my 21st century sensitivities. Yes, you are right to link and empathise
those folk of yore with the same kinds of tragedy and misfortune that you and
we all experience in our own short lives.

Richard:
I enjoy the dialectic of Plato.

Jud:
Here we must agree to disagree I am afraid – I find the Socratic elenchtic
method as orchestrated, attributed and scored by Plato, the amanuensis turned
ghostwriter for the executed, safely dead puppet Socrates most irritating. It
is too combative and leads inevitably to aporia.

Due to the nature of abstractions being impossible to define without
mentioning at least some of the human intellectual and physical activities which
populate the amorphous reificational blancmanges that gives rise to such useful
fictions, Socrates’ irritating insistence and ill natured cutting into the
speech of his interlocutor becomes utterly boring for me. It in only in the
The Theaetetus, which lacks the cross-examinational extremes of the elenchtic
method, by good-naturedly getting his conversational partner to re-examine
the entailments of his uncritically held beliefs that he gives the jaded Jud a
break from a conversational rat-at-tat-tat which puts me in mind of an
educated fishwife in Billingsgate market. Socrates’ discussion with the brilliant
geometrician and mathematician Theaetetus’ whom he likes [and probably fancies
sexually] and respects, is a sensible joint examination of the subject
matter of ‘knowledge,’ which except for the occasional mandatory …

‘But the question you were asked Theaetetus, was not what are the objects of
knowledge…but to find out what the thing itself - knowledge - is? [Ibid.
146e.]

…lacks the cross-examinational extremes of the elenchtic method by
good-naturedly getting his conversational partner to re-examine the entailments of his
uncritically held beliefs. Predictably, as with all of Socrates’ dialogs it
leads nowhere – at least one can enjoy the pleasant dialectical drive around
the Athenian la route circulaire de reification. [The ring-road of
reification.]

I am beginning to see reification as a tool for drafting ontological
isograms that enable us to model and map an acceptable and coherent representational
conceptual-map of our world. Putting it into another form of words
reification is not ONLY to be found in the entification of single word abstractions,
but in the rigidification of whole word structures, sentential expressions and
completely developed ideas which become ossified in such a way that they
maintain their influence long after their appropriateness as a socially viable
interface with the rest of humanity has vanished.

And some are so bizarre, so inconsistent within themselves, and so in the
face of common sense, that it is difficult to understand how they could have
been continued to be maintained within the group itself or how such idiocies
have survived contact with more enlightened groups.

It seems that a part of the explanation of world-wide cultural diversity is
to be explained as being through temporal uniformity, or conservative
persistence.

That is, to determine the initial origins of difference in divergent world
regions, one must take into consideration the biological factors, the nature
of the religious indoctrination, the differential concentration of the culture
process, and the political, topographical, adventitious or historical
factors. The perpetuation, and in some measure the accentuation, of that divergence
is a problem of social rigidity, and becomes explicable in reificational
terms.

Reificational reinforcement is effected by participating in the most
elaborate and absurd rituals enacted with exaggerated solemnity on innumerable
picayune occasions. In other reification-enforcing ceremonies the reifiers
themselves are subjected to the most grievous privations and submit to the severest
impositions and account it a privilege.

Voluntary torture was part of the climax of the sun dance in certain tribes
such as the Sioux and Cheyenne. In those cases, the dancers were pierced
through the breast or shoulder muscles by skewers which were tied to the
centre-pole, and they danced by pulling back until their flesh tore away. Sometimes
the thongs inserted in the sufferers bodies were attached to a varying number
of buffalo skulls rather than to the centre pole. [Wikipedia.]

Among the Greeks and Cretans homosexuality was institutionalised and
idealised in literature and art; and among the early Hebrews it was a religious
appurtenance. Here extra-marital relations are sinful, criminal, and wicked and
the wife who offends is put to death. In a vast number of instances
reifications arrive ready-made and packaged ready for immediate consumption which is
the case with the Christian *creed,* wherein the reifications of Christianity
were cast in a easily remembered definite form, which, under the leadership of
the priest was repeated by the entire congregation who respond like tiny
children in unison. The philosophical given called *Being,* as upchucked by the
human-emetic Heidegger is almost chanted out on every page in the manner of a
Jesuitical response midst guttering candles.
Consider the Quran on fasting which reminds me a lot of the old Catholic
instruction not to eat meat on a Friday and other reified taboos connected with
food or sex:

“DO ye who believe! Fasting is prescribed for you, as it was prescribed for
those before you, so that you may become righteous.’

Thematically, the Bible and the Qur’an contain thematic injunctions for all
mankind, allegories, stories of past events with neatly reify a complicated
neurological instantiation in a form easily grasped by the uneducated.

Single-word entification is normally accomplished using verbal nouns, and
the gerundialised forms of infinitives and participles. A less obvious and
little understood reification of the cerebral activity generative of whole
grammatical constructions via the neurological enginery of appropriate speech-forms
which we have developed. Such linguistic forms allow us to transform whole
sets of facts or circumstances, or whole belief-systems squeezed down into
concretised or semi-philosophical sentential objects and facilitate their
emplacement into an ontological narrative or propositional construction or logical
argument.

One’s ‘credo,’ better known as ’one’s beliefs,’ which are often
revealingly referred to as ‘articles’ of faith, to which we ‘hold’ (notice the
implied tactility of the language of reification’) comprise of radically
compressed versions of whole belief systems. The credo ( or ‘creed’) as applied to
religious belief embodies and economically signifies the entire body of beliefs
held by the adherents of a given religion, which are presented in a short
and pithy, easy to remember distilled version – often designed semi-poetically
and capable a rhythmic expression suitable for reificational chanting by a
crowd.

I dwell upon and deliberately emphasise this point here to drive home the
fact that reification is concerned not only single words, where a suitable
abstract noun is reified into an easily grasped but fuzzy insubstantiality, but
with complete ideas. Various versions of the mores and ethics of conformity,
consummate philosophical, scientific and religious systems abound, perfect and
complete in every respect; having a ‘thought through’ ontology of their own
complete with ready-made strategies of defence.
Thus when a philosopher, scientist or cleric admits to ‘holding’ a certain ‘
position’ he is stating that he believes in whatever is identified and
signified by the one-word identificatory reificational label he displays. This
allows the addressee rapid access to the nature of the particular conceptual
domain and time to decide on intellectual integration or differentiation via
reificational trigger-words such as: ‘Idealism, Darwinism, Calvinism, Realism,
Electro-Magnetism, Constructivism, Communism, Hinduism, Nominalism,’ etc.

Such formulaic reificational conveniences appear in philosophical,
scientific and religious text books as chapterised ‘reificational packages’ awaiting
to be chosen by the more curious sojourners of this world arrayed like shiny
chokecherries appealingly polished in some provincial marketplace of ideas.

What do we reify? Much more than most people realise. As Landor said:

‘Absurdities are great or small in proportion to custom or insuetude.’

The concretistic-seeming representations of actions, beliefs or credos,
situations, ideas, states of affairs, (Sachverhalte) plus the proliferation of
gerundialised versions of ephemeral activity disguised as verbal infinitives
abstracted into nouns. An insight to what we reify is the giveaway concretistic
term: *article of faith.* The choice of the word ‘article,’ which is an
entity or an object. I offer the view that humankind has a natural, biological
predisposition for the emblematic, and fuzzy-logical deflective reification of
action. Ontological variables are often assigned quite arbitrary degrees of
entiatic reality or abstraction, as compared with the ontic or material order
of entities, which Berkleyans apart, most people acknowledge as being
ontologically unproblematic. There can be a high price to be paid for peeling away
the self-deceiving layers of reification, and as T. S. Eliot wrote in ‘Burnt
Norton:’

‘Go, Go, Go, said the bird: Mankind cannot stand very much reality.’

Richard:
…and the amazing wonder of Aristotle’s mind, considering his times.

Jud:
Apart from the Pre-Socratics whom I love and admire Aristotle [for all his
reificational warts] is the only post Socratic I can stomach.

Richard:
I do not believe we have had a philosopher of his range of thought and
talent since then.

Jud:
He was indeed incredibly wide-ranging in his examination of the ways of man
and the world in which he found himself.

Richard
I enjoy the dramas of the ancients who saw into the complexities of the
human spirit and wrote them out, gave them to the people to ponder. I enjoy the
inventions of Homer who laid out so much of the spirit of those times – the
brutality, the consequences of poor judgment, the tragedy of mistaken love and
homage. Where else in our human history do we find the roots of our inner
conflicts and even our so often misguided national priorities. We are the
natural heirs of those ancient Greeks, far more than of the Hindus, the Hebrews or
the Buddhists. We are the aggressive, self centered, inquisitive, inventive,
introspective, creative creatures who began this long tortuous road, from
their axial age, to where we are in spite of all that has happened since the
birth of Christ and what great madness and folly ensued thereafter as a result
of the force that mythical figure inspired.

Jud:
I share your joy in such things Richard and consider myself very fortunate
that at my time of life I can derive so much pleasure which these great minds
from history have bequeathed to us. To be able to click a few buttons on my
PC and have access to such treasure is a constant [family and friends such as
you apart] consolation to me as I near the end of my life

Richard:
This does not mean they are holy or without fault. It merely means they are
to be respected and understood for the foundations they have provided –
nothing more.. While Nietzsche, Hitler and Heidegger may have been misguided as to
the true value of the ancient Greeks, surely theirs is not the only
interpretation that can be chosen. We can take from the Greeks what we choose and
should disparage those who chose wrongly. Do you agree?

Jud:
ABSOLUTELY!!!

Warm Regards,

Jud
Personal Website: http://evans-experientialism.freewebspac…

“In nuclear war all men are cremated equal.”
Dexter Gordon

Posted on Saturday, September 15th, 2007 at 10:00 pm
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