Heidegger

In a message dated 21/08/2007 17:50:11 GMT Standard Time,
_allen.scult at DRAKE.EDU_ (mailto:allen.scult@DRAKE.EDU) writes: In a message dated 21/08/2007
_allen.scult at DRAKE.EDU_ (mailto:allen.scult@DRAKE.EDU) writes:

Allen spake this recently: It seems to me the time factor is crucial here.
Enter Heidegger. Could it be that Heidegger teaches Nietzsche? Definitely. Jud:
It’s similar to the rather radical (that is, held by radical rabbis)
rabbinic notion, that the Oral Torah preceded the written Torah. That is the
interpretation, the way of understanding, the understood precedes the Torah text
itself.

Jud: I too think that amor fati is both a beautiful and very pragmatic idea,
though for me such acceptance is a recognition of the material existential
imperative of a deterministic cosmos, rather than the teleological consequence
of the fantasies of some spirituous control-freak, whose modus operandi
includes such vandalistic conjuration as setting fire to low woody perennial
plants in sheep pastures, shooting lighting bolts and spitefully turning the
populations of whole cities to salt.

The radical rabbis are correct. It is really too much to ask us to believe,
that lacking a private secretary, a tape recorder, an amanuensis or even a
clip-board, Moses was able to remember and record the whole contents of the
Torah as revealed and dictated to him by god on a windy mountain top, or whilst
panicking about the sheep in his care, which were running off in all
directions, coughing their lungs up, wreathed in the smoke of a non-combustible
burning bush.

Far more sensible is the progressive rabbinical idea that attitudes towards
the Godhead, creation, teachings, legislation and the moral guidance therein
that constitute the foundational entablature upon which the rest of the Tanakh
rests was a oral feature of the teaching in primitive transportable
tabernacles and by itinerant rabbis long before it was written down, codified and
collected together as a historico-moralistic prompt-book. I have little doubt
that similar processes where a feature of most early religions.

Regards,

Jud

Allen:
Of course, as I hope you already know, perhaps have always already known,
you missed the entire point. You take a potentially explosive hermeneutical
reversal, capable of destructing the conventional linear direction of
interpretation imposed by the arbitrary categories of historical time (past, present
future etc.), and opening up the text to novel possibilities of understanding
moving every which way in and about the words; and turn it into the same old
predictable logic yielding no surprise, no joy, except the pseudos of
philosophical pleasure–confirmation of what you think you already know. And that’s
only what you did to the radical rabbis!

Jud:
But Nunc old chap the ARE NO *arbitrary categories of historical time.*
*Time* does not exist and therefore cannot *impose* or be *imposed upon.* What
exists is* *that which is timed by humans* - the earth around the sun, the
4.45pm bus to Gloccamora and the number of days left in the presidential career
of the biggest disaster ever to hit Washington. Personally I welcome the
contribution of the radical rabbis - more power to their elbows say I and *yippy
yi ai* to their smoking yods. There is nothing pseudo about philosophical
pleasure BTW, and as to predictability, you would have to go a long way to find
a more predictable and foreseeable outcome than that which is experienced
after a leisurely sabbatical stroll to schule on a Saturday?

For such people as you (nice warm Nunc though you are) who entify such
abstractions as: *linear direction, arbitrary categories, historical time, eternal
return * etc., and all of the other speakers of natural language and the
educated thinkers who share your tendency to hypostasis human ideation at the
drop of a hat, this acceptance of abstraction reflects the fact that for you
and for them the products of such patterned neurological entification are
acceptable as actual existents or quasi-objective objects. Hence, like Meinong,
you build your own castles in the air and seek to occupy the draughty corridors
of shame and gloomy cellars with their storerooms of dead ideas. Such
transcendentalist descriptors of material objects are often inclined towards many
different practices, and may ascribe multiple attributes to inanimate objects
according to different personal narratives and ontological interpretations
and appetites. Such unfortunate exposure to persistent reification is a key
feature of habituation of the religious. To become accustomed to repeated
reificationary instantiation of the irreal, is to internalise the insubstantial
and the imaginary and diminish the desire and the appetite for any serious
consideration of alternative ontological versions of reality.

My own theory is that the reification of abstraction has a biological basis
in which cognitive and communicative word meanings and sentential structures
are grounded in a pragmatic physical dynamics which is associated with and is
an aspect of the human, species-specific process of natural selection. Such
pattern-producing mechanisms as are spooned out in church, temple and
synagogue have played and continue to play a vital positive/negative role in the
struggle for dominance and the accumulation of advantage in the process of
natural selection, which has facilitated mankind’s ascendency over other life
forms and is a feature in the determination of individual success in the
competitive arena (ask any politician.) But reification can also have seriously
prejudicial, socially retrogressive effects with inherent negative implications
for scientific, societal, political and religious stability as we have witness
throughout history and we can see in the Middle east right now.

Your philosophical reification and instantiation of abstract concepts into
quasi-entities, by treating them semantically and syntactically in some degree
as if they were objects, when in reality they are fundamentally separated
from embodiment, is detrimental to the rational investigation of the truths and
principles of the human experience, knowledge, and conduct. That is why your
ontological needle is stuck and you feel unable to accept what the cooler
members of the rabbinate are coming up with - new, fresh ideas, that could
re-invigorate Judaism and rip the joy of being Jewish from the palsied hands of
the intimidatingly black-garbed, dreadlocked and Homberged ones who believe
they have an exclusive personal, proprietorial and custodial right to say what
is *Being Jewish and Hating Heidegger* and what is not.

Nunc:

Nietzsche’s amor fati, on the other hand, is reduced to an acceptance of
deterministic inevitability.

Jud:
And what pray is the difference between Nietzsche’s pleasure in accepting
the inevitable and the religious person’s acceptance of the *will of God?
The number of religious phrases which characterise this view are legion: *It
is the will of God - Man supposes - God disposes - It is the will of Allah,*
etc.

Nunc:
thereby squeezing all the juice out of Michael’s rendition of the concept
and disconnecting its( as well as your own) essential connection to the eternal
return., leaving you to live and die just like everyone else.

Jud:
*Eternal return?* What do you think the cosmos runs - a non-profit making
bus company? When you arrive a’puking and a’squalling into this old world
dear Nunc you are clutching an ammoniac-fluid-stained *one-way ticket to ride.*
No amount of lighting bolts, human salt pillars or burning bushes is going
to change that one iota. My advice? Get wise, stretch back in your seat,
wiggle your toes and enjoy the ride - you will reach the terminus quicker than
you think, for the God’s foot presses harder on the accelerator as the buffers
get closer. Can’t you see the malevolent look in his yellow, piggy eyes -
he LOVES death - glories in other’s pain and can sit back and watch his
favourites die in millions - like little boys pull the wings off flies on suburban
window-sills.

Nunc:
” Poor Jud is dead. . .”
With deepest sympathy,

Jud:
Jud is very much alive and kicking. It is God who is dead, as Freddie
Scissor-hands said - and a bloody good thing too!

Regards,

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

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

Posted on Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 at 6:55 pm
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