Heidegger

Says Jud:

> To reify is to ‘thingify’: to treat an abstraction as a material thing. I
> find such behaviour most unscholarly and unprofessional ’Äì the equivalent
> of skinhead-culture spilling over into the domain of serious philosophy.

Jud, reification and thingification are surely synonyms, but neither
necesarily means to treat abstractions as material things: why the
restriction to *material* things? To reify is perhaps rather to treat
something as some thing. Not all things are material things (which
necessarily anyway imply the abstraction of matter {’material’ being a
qualification, meaning made of matter, like matter, from matter, etc}).
Also, abstractions are the result of a previously or ongoing collective
mounting of an abstraction or extraction process, which (at least for
MichaelE) is the very foundation of philosophical concept formation (or any
kind of concept formation for that matter). If the employment of such
(abstract) concepts is equivalent to the behaviour of (as you say)
“skinhead-culture spilling over into the domain of serious philosophy”, then
please show us some serious philosophy that does not employ (abstract)
concepts, show us what serious philosophy is like, write a single seriously
philosophical sentence that fails to employ (abstract) concepts. Show that
and how it is possible. Demonstrate your “serious philosophy”.

How difficult such an attempt (to write a sentence of “serious philosophy”
without employing concepts or abstractions) can be seen in your own
pronouncements above, e.g., the use of the terms “material thing” or
“abstraction”: surely for you (in your “serious philosophical” guise)
neither a “material thing” nor an “abstraction” “exist” (they are both
“abstractions”), thus such terms are employed in your speech to designate
non-existent entities (neither of them designate “material things” in their
utter concrete specificity and ever-changing uniqueness, etc), thus consist
in the employment of abstractions as if they existed (as “material things”),
thus precisely demonstrating “the equivalent of skinhead-culture spilling
over into the domain of serious philosophy”. Either that, or that sentence
above of yours is not itself a sentence of “serious philosophy”, in which
case we can ignore it (as a serious attempt to speak in a “seriously
philosophical” manner {because it is either a non-serious philosophical
sentence or a serious non-philosophical sentence}).

Jud, this is not simply word-play. I think your (perhaps laudably radical
purificational, eliminative) attempt to do away with “abstractions”
(basically, words and concepts) by denying their ‘adhesion/correspondence
to/with individuate, ever-changing, material, etc, things) in what you call
“serious philosophy” (note: not from common or uncommon language, but only
from serious philosophical speeches qua serious philosophical speeches)
necessarily employs just such “abstractions” (and I think, must do so!) and
so your version of “serious philosophy” (even if it were desirable — I’m
not commenting here on that) is analytically impossible (i.e., it
necessarily contradicts/self-denies itself in its very utterances and thus
is analytically {although not concretely} equivalent to silence, to noise.
Your very seriuosly philosophical principles engage in exactly the
non-seriously philosophical (abstractions) it recommends one drop and thus
disengage (and for me, it must do so, simply because you must employ
conceptual language and thus {what you call} abstractions).

regards

michael

Posted on Wednesday, June 27th, 2007 at 7:50 pm
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