Heidegger

Cologne 10-Aug-2006

GEVANS613 at aol.com schrieb Wed, 9 Aug 2006 09:30:46 EDT:

> In a message dated 09/08/2006 11:01:56 GMT Standard Time,
> artefact at t-online.de writes: Cologne 09-Aug-2006

> Jud: [previously]I am reminded of the mother watching her soldier-son
> march past, who, turned and remarked to her neighbour: *Look,
> Everybody is out of step but our Charlie!* In your case it is: *Look
> you guys. Everybody is ontologically out of step except me - SEE! *

> ME:Very good example. To be what it is, an army depends on suppressing
> individuality, on making each individual uniform. There is no place
> for the singular individual.

> Jud: Firstly - thank you for the gentlemanly restraint in the tone of
> your reply. What you say is true of the lower ranks who are expected
> to carry out orders unthinkingly and unswervingly. The higher one
> climbs up the hierarchical ladder of command however one is expected
> to be able to exercise personal initiative. The outstanding military
> leaders of the past were blessed with the ability to combine lateral
> thinking with a profound knowledge of basic strategy and traditional
> episteme allied to an open-mindedness in relation to new game plans
> and novel weaponry etc.

> Doc Eldred:Charlie is marching incorrectly, unaligned with the others,
> but he is the only one with a true step.

> Jud:
> *Truth* is an abstraction. One *truth* is that Charlie is a disgrace
> to his regiment and is letting his comrades, his officers down by his
> inability to perform even the most basic military conventions. If it
> were an international parade, with contingents of troops from other
> countries, many would say that he was letting his country down.

ME: Yes, truth is an abstraction, or, more precisely, it is a universal,
and universals are, by their nature, abstract. Your objection to
abstractions, however, comes too late, for you are already moving in
language which, of its nature, articulates abstract universals.
Thus, you invoke and combine two universals “one” and “truth” to refer
to “Charlie”, who is a singularity. A combination of universals is a
concretion, a growing-together of abstractions to point to a
particularity or a singularity. As long as you think or speak, you are
invoking abstractions, and presuppositing them for what you think or
intend to say.

Even pointing to Charlie and saying, “That’s Charlie.” you are invoking
an abstract universal, viz. “that”, and also articulating a
contradiction, namely, that a universal (”that”) _is_ a singularity
(”Charlie”). Thus, even the simplest statement is the identity of
identity and difference. Furthermore, without seeing abstract universals
(’that’ in the present case), we could never see Charlie.

Moreover, philosophically speaking, it is not “one truth” that “Charlie
is a disgrace to his regiment etc.”, even though it is a fact that the
incorrectly marching Charlie is a disgrace to his regiment, etc. Facts
as such are not truths. Facts are either correct or incorrect. There can
be correct non-truths and incorrect truths.
A correct non-truth is e.g. ‘This rose is red.’ This statement may be
correct, but can never be true, for a rose may be pink or yellow or
whatever. The statement says nothing at all about the rose as such.

An incorrect truth is e.g. “This criminal, a thief, wills that he [i.e.
wants to] be punished for his crime.” — for the thief is a free human
being, and wrong (in this case, crime) does not correspond to human
freedom.

> What is a true step? Is it a step that is indistinguishable from one
> that he would use when walking in a shopping mall or strolling through
> the park? Is it *unnatural* to march in such a way that one’s
> leg-movements are synchronised with that of one’s companions? After a
> short time in the army becomes *second-nature* to walk this way and it
> becomes a gait that one automatically assumes in a military parade or
> even if one is part of a small group of men walking from the barracks
> to the cookhouse dressed in fatigues to peel potatoes. It then is
> UNNATURAL to walk out of step.

ME: Such marching out of step may be incorrect, but it may become the
correct way of marching, just as music played on the beats may be
correct in one age, and beome incorrect in another (bad, boring music
that no one want to listen to), when syncopated music becomes the rule.
Such conventions, customs, although they have become second nature,
however, are of themselves only ever correct, not true.

On the other hand, the move to syncopated music could be seen as moving
toward the essence of music as the art of sound, thus freeing music to
its truer essence from an untrue corset of harmonically arranged,
on-the-beat notes. Thus art works may be true while being incorrect.

> Doc Eldred: It takes a mother’s love, i. e. an Eros-gaze, to see the
> truth in the incorrect strides.

> Jud:She sees not *truth,* but the son she loves, who in her eyes can
> do no wrong.

> Doc Eldred:The possibility of seeing that truth is there, but it is
> not predictable, not foresayable when or if it will be seen. It
> slumbers in latency. Suddenly you catch sight of it. What showed
> itself as incorrect, now shows itself as incorrect but true.A gift.
> That makes the individual gifted, albeit out of step with the
> correctness of the times.

> Jud:What you say as a general principle is correct - but the
> correctness of the generalisation does not mean that the
> particularisation of *your truth*is guaranteed or covered because of
> it, (in spite of the artful use of the second person pronoun; *you* in
> the phrase: *Suddenly you catch sight of it.*)

ME: There is no guarantee at all that when someone (ME or another
thinker) starts thinking out of step that a truth will come about. That
depends upon whether a face of being is brought to its concept, so that
the world shapes up and shows itself in another way.

> In spite of that, much of what you say in your writings
> makes sense to me, and if you could only rid yourself of the
> inauspicious Heidy-speak that mars your prose and clouds
> your meaning, what you write would be even more pleasurable
> and informatively important to read, and produce not wry
> smiles of amusement or frustration, but frowns of
> gratifying concentration.
>
ME: Any philosophy worth its salt, at least initially, is very
frustrating and its meaning seems clouded. I’m not married to
Heidy-speak, but I use many of his (and other thinkers’) terms, albeit
in non-standard translations. Philosophical thoughts often demand new
language, neologisms that seem very strange and unnatural. Thus e.g.
Plato spoke of the _ontoos on_, where _on_ is the neutral present
participle of _einai_, ‘to be’, and _ontoos_ is the adverbial form,
‘beingly’. So Plato was speaking of “beingly being” with a straight
face. But he had an important point to make.

Similarly, Aristotle coined the strange neologism of _energeia_ from
_en_ ‘in’, _ergon_ ‘work’ and the suffix _-eia_ ‘-ness’. Thus literally:
‘in-work-ness’ (better: at-work-ness), which is about as strange as you
can get. But we got used to it, and today speak unthinkingly of ‘energy’
as if we knew to what we were thus referring.

Then there’s Aristotle’s famous neologisms _entelecheia_, which
translates literally as ‘in-end-having-ness’, and _to ti aen einai_,
‘the what-it-was-being’.

Such neologisms justify their strangeness and awkwardness through
bringing to light what was hitherto unseen and unthought.

_-_-_-_-_-_-_- artefact text and translation _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_- made by art _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ http://www.webcom.com/artefact/ _-_-_-_- artefact at t-online.de _-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ Dr Michael Eldred -_-_-
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_

Posted on Thursday, August 10th, 2006 at 9:30 am
comment | rss 2.0 | trackback