SEP article on Heidegger, etc.**
July 20th, 2008, search relatedRelated posts :: One particular article :: One particular article :: [fyi] Are animals naturally musical? :: If technology is the problem, this is paradise.
In a message dated 7/15/2008 5:52:39 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
tgeorgescu at home.nl writes:
> Dear Tudor;
> “Nothingness” is the state abreviated as Thanatos and which was the
> Nazi as well as the Hedeggerian telos. The Jews, unlike the modern day
> suicidal terrorists of Jihad, do not and never did seek finality in the
> final perfection of nihil in potentia. To say that the Nazi “loved
> existence and being” is true, providing “love” means exterminaton. The
> Nazi final perfection and which coresponds to their final solution had
> built into it a planned finality, an apocalypse without revelation or
> death for death’s sake. And that is where Heidegger fits in– in the
> beginning– and which amounts to dasein for its own sake sans human
> Beings.
> Bernard
Well, in respect to the Nazis, it is said “… for sinners also love those
that love them.” Luke 6:32. I.e. in the old Thrasymachian conception of
justice (from Plato’s Republic), just is to do good to your friends and harm
your enemies.
It’s evolutionary psychology 101 to assume that when food is really scarce,
exterminating the other group means the survival of your own group. This is
hard coded in our genes by thousands and thousands of years of evolution.
The Bible simply reflects this reality: for the Bible authors, it was
perfectly normal to exterminate the opponent group, instead of tolerating
them. This is why Jesus’ idea of loving one’s enemies came as such a shock.
Jesus for this mere reason was taken to be the worst of traitors (John
11:48). Considered the social realities of His own time, He was preaching an
abnormal message.
Norbert Elias has a theory of civilization, saying that due to increased
interdependence of people inside and among societies, violence had to be
repressed, transforming thus barbarians into civilized persons. In such a
context, Jesus’ message of love came to take precedence over the nasty
bloody parts of the Bible. His message is suited for our time because we are
civilized (or: effeminate?).
We may consider that Lucifer’s purpose is to turn all beings into nothing,
this way Lucifer becoming the governor of the Nothing, which in the end
would include everything, i.e. nothing would be in dynamics, everything
would be in potential. But, it is a saying that even the most abject and
corrupt society did something for the common good. Human societies cannot be
100% Luciferian, because then they would cease to exist, and the world would
become prey for their enemies. (I assume from a certain metaphysical
perspective that no human group could terminate the existence of humanity on
Earth.)
This is why the Nazis loved those who loved them. In fact, they were not
abnormal (seen the many millennia of bloody human evolution), but they were
an anachronism. They were neo-barbarians in a civilized world. They were
vanquished because at that moment civilization was stronger than barbarism.
The Jews were defined by the Nazis as their enemies, so the Nazis applied
political operative methods which were not uncommon in the last five
thousand years. For most of the human history, genocide was normal, and
civilization (in Elias’ meaning) was the exception. Even Greeks and Romans,
who had huge pretences of being civilized rather than barbarian, preferred
doing genocides to Norbert Elias’ civilized society. (There is a book in the
Netherlands called “Greeks come from Venus, Romans come from Mars”. Its
authors say that there is little difference between what Roman legions did
and what the Nazis, SA and SS did. Both considered that at war their enemy
had to be exterminated, or something as close to that as possible.)
Even, an argument could be made that Hitler was the perfect Darwinist: he
applied Social Darwinism to the max, he was a 100% purist of evolutionary
selection of the people by the people. So, from an evolutionary standpoint,
Hitler was simply pushing the logic of nature to its final conclusions.
Happily, our societies have emancipated from natural selection, although the
destruction of the welfare states in Europe could point that people have
become tired of being civilized and they long for being barbarians again.
Greetings,
Tudor
Dear Tudor;
You mean they wish to grow beards? A society of bearded ones (barbarians)
would of course have to exclude all those without penises and hair on their face.
This would go along with your cold turkey justification of genocide which has
no compare in the ancient world where there was no such thing as
technological mass slaughter. All slaughter was done by hand. Better to re-evaluate your
view when it is techno that depersonalizes murder as more civilized.
Bernard