Heidegger

In a message dated 27/06/2007 _michael at sandwich-de-sign.co.uk_
(mailto:michael@sandwich-de-sign.co.uk) writes:

CONTINUATION.

Of skinhead-culture spilling over into the domain of serious philosophy.

MichaelP writes:
Jud, 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).

Jud:
The thing that goes wrong is when the cognitive product [the experiential
concordance/memories] of those antecedally collected mountings of abstraction
via the processantal extraction sequences are reformulated and cast in a
semiotic-type *abstract noun* which reifies those abstractions gleaned from
experience into a pseud-concretisation. You have no doubt had many lovers, and
you have remembered and internalised the host of abstract influences which
those events have meant for you. To gather those abstract memories up into a
nosegay of rememrances and label it *Love* is an ontological error.

Concepts and their formations do not exist in the real world - you could
spend the rest of your days searching for *Love* or a *concept. * or a
formation, or a flight, or a bevvy, or a collection of concepts and never find them -
for they do not exist. What exists is Michael, the believer in the existence
of *Concepts,* the believer in the existence *Being* - the believer in the
existence of *Love.* None of those things exist - not even the existence of
Michael Pennamacoor exists. What exist are human conceptualisors, human
beings and of course Michael himself

Michael:
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”.

Jud:
The point is not THE USE of abstract concepts, for abstractve
conceptualising is extremely effective. Eliminativists abstract all the time - I am
abstracting as I write this letter, but I do not reify these disposable
abstractional tools I use into real things. THAT is the uneducated, crude, primitive,
yobbish part of *continental philosophy* which they inherited from the
Greeks. The main offender being Plato of course whose crude ontology allied to
Christianity wreaked more damage on Europe than Ghenkis Khan, Tambourlaine,
Attila the Hun and Hitler put together. If there is such a person as a highly
intelligent, educated, observant, wise in some ways, highly educated but
ontological yob it was him.

Michael:
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:
We have been over and over this one before thousands of times Michael. It is
not about the USE of abstract nouns, gerunds, adverbial nouns etc., it is
about the naivety, misunderstanding, basic semantic ignorance yobbishness - call
it what you may of distorting language into an attenuated form where
abstraction is awarded the state of concreticity in the mind of the abstractor,
rather than recognising the abstractive process as the working of the brain as
it marshals its memory banks, organises its networks, collates, contrasts and
compared the old data with the new and makes certain judgements. The
abstracting brain exists but what it abstract doesn’t. The mistake of
transcendentalism is to confuse intellectual process with intellectual product.
And what is the *intellectual product?* you ask …it is the neurological
changes in relation to yourself and others that have taken place in your own
ideating soma - the fact that existential changes have transformed the
previous existential version of the thinking you - into the new up-to-date present
version.
It was not only the Ship of Theseus that changed during its voyage - the
crew also changed.

Michael:
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.

Jud:
You persistently return to your confusion between the USE of abstraction, a
use which I and the rest of the analytical community wear like a badge of
honour, for without the abstracting brain, man would still be a primitive
animal crouching in some dank cave - it is the appropriation and promotion of that
abstraction
into philosophical discourse and the treatment of those abstract nouns and
gerunds as if they were actual objects - i.e., employed as the subjects and
objects of sentences. You want examples? *Lionel’s dancing became a thing to
covet by the learners at the Blair School of Dancing.*
*Plato’s wisdom became the subject of study for millions thanks to its
incorporation into the Christian compendium.* These forms of speech are insidious
in that they help promote the concept of a weird, spirituous duality betwixt
the soma of Lionel and Plato in that *dancing* and wisdom* are portrayed as
being somehow separate from the dancing Lionel and the wise Plato.

Michael:
(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 seriously 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).

Jud:
See above about the use and abuse of abstraction. The name of the game or
bottom line really is that the continentalists always, the analytics
partially, the nominalists occasionally, and the eliminativists never abuse
abstraction by objectifying, reifying, personifying ideas, judgements, states of
affairs or any other activity human or non-human into actual THINGS.

I will end on an observation about the ontological nature of *things.* for
the meaning of things has been corrupted by indescriminate use by the
tradition over the centuries and has become a bastard word which can mean virtually
anything you like.

Even the coarsest and most commonsensical things cause problems of
referentiality because of the unspecificity that the term *things* denotes.
Ponge’s le parti pris des choses came down on the side of the specific
referentiality of objects for *things* whilst for a poet like you MichealP
Michael Riffaterre has argued that poems, growing solely out of a word-kernel
(mot-noyau) defy referentiality. I respond immediately to MichaelR that the
referentiality of a poem is to the poet, just like the referentiality of a dance
is to the dancer, or wisdom to the wise man etc. I would say the same thing
to Derrida who claimed that throughout the poet’s effort to *make the thing
sign* the thing is not an object and cannot become one. For me the thing that
signs is the signifying poet who signs and signals how he feels through the
medium of the poem.

Regards,

Jud Evans.

Personal Website. _http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/index.htm_
 http://evans-experientialism.freewebspac…)

Posted on Saturday, June 30th, 2007 at 7:50 pm
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