Heidegger

Gary. C. Moore writes:

Dear Jud,
I am not at my best but I liked this letter very much as well as I can
understand it.

Dr Michael Eldred:
Yes, “*Being* does not *name* anything - for there is nothing to be named.”
Strangely, we agree that being is nothing, you in the form of denial, I in
the form of affirmation. Children, and most other people, do not need to know
anything about dimension to play out their lives. They take it for granted –
a luxury that those who practise ontological thinking cannot afford.

Jud:
Sorry Dr. Eldred, Look again. I did NOT say that *Being* is Nothing* - I
said *there is nothing to be named.*

GCM: I wish I had thought of that. I do not know about what your initial
communication was, but *there is nothing to be named* hits the spot precisely on
a number of items I have been struggling with and simplifies - which is
becoming more and more of a methodological principle with me - many kinds of
discourse enormously if taken as sensation, that is, the object that is
confronting one in its independence of your wishes and desires.

How much *wishes and desires* ordinarily forms individuals’ epistemology
[ontology]! No one is innocent of it because the inherited context of language
itself encourages it. You learn it sitting down at family breakfast as a
child. These forms that *wishes and desires* take become ethical/religious
abstractions containing an authority in themselves, at the very least that you
should respect them in other people. But, like *the Emperor’s New Clothes* you can
strip yourself of public expectations and simply say there is nothing there
to be named, that is, there is nothing even for language to discuss
legitimately. This is how Heidegger scholarship proceeds, that, because a words is
often used, it has a reality it refers to, disregarding the fact that if a word
has more than a mere grammatical function just within language itself, that
if a word is actually intended to refer to an external [not one’s self]
reality, it must necessarily refer to a material reality. Dr. Eldred wants *Being*
to have all the advantages of *Being* being a material reference while the
word actually avoids any specific material reference. His uses picks and takes
the best of what he desires and wishes without the inconvenience of having to
point to a material confirmatio of his abstract idea.

I am not putting this in the best way, but I would like to develop a
methodology that assumes A] if a word is used it automatically has a grammatical
reference of some sort since no word can ever be outside one‘s existence as
language, as propositions, and B] it necessarily has a material referent derived,
if not from rigorous logical thought, then from the time and context one
learned the word and have carried it with one as its background the rest of
one’s life. What does this mean? For one thing, one may have an Idealistic
definition of *Being* as Dr. Eldred does, but this is a moral context thing, a
*this is the way it should mean* as according to or justified by *wishes and
desires*. But if I assume that A] this is irrational from beginning to end, and
B] assume none the less there must be some material referent to the word
nonetheless - think of this, Why does he feel so compelled to use that word in
such a way that is rationally inappropriate? Since it is set up in such a way
Idealistically it cannot publicly have a material referent, then it must have a
private material referent all of his own, or not even of his own really
because here we come into Dr. Sigmund Freud’s territory of the brain’s automatic
memory system taking things that happen and automatically connecting them to
the real situation they happened it thus creating a natural system of
referents one very well may have no conscious [direct, straight forward, the object
of present intent and perception] knowledge of at all.

I think all words we learned as children have, at the beginning, nothing at
all like a dictionary reference and definition about them, but are learned in
action and reaction in the circumstances one learned it. Precise objective
definition is a sophisticated process only gradually learned so that, before
that, there is always a prehistory of the word only retained in the brain, and
rarely if ever open to objective observation and analysis. It would act,
literally, as a ghost haunting the word, giving it a significance and importance
not at all objectively evident

And such as *Being*.
Out of time.
Ciao,
Gary

Posted on Friday, September 1st, 2006 at 3:55 pm
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