Heidegger

—–Oorspronkelijk bericht—–
Van: heidegger-bounces at soca.ecu.edu.au
[mailto:heidegger-bounces@soca.ecu.edu.au]Namens Anthony Crifasi
Verzonden: dinsdag 5 december 2006 6:46
Aan: Discussions pertaining to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger
Onderwerp: Re: this medicine has/has not been tested on human animals

—– Original Message —–
From: “Bakker, R.B.M. de”

Aristotle says that “someone can himself
be for himself cause (aitios) of [his] health, being a doctor.” But adds
immediately that the identity of doctor and patient in this case is
merely
external: kata symbebekos. Health namely is sthing natural, it has to be,
or to be regained as ‘of itself’, and not as an artefact, a doctor’s
product.

==============
Sorry, I mixed up that text with the one at the end of Physics II.8, where
Aristotle says that “If the ship-building art were in the wood, it would
produce the same results by nature…. The best illustration is a doctor
doctoring himself: nature is like that.” There is compares the
self-emergence of physis to “a doctor doctoring himself,” since in that case
the medical art is actually in the patient himself.

What you are doing here, is turning Aristotle’s distinction physei - pros hemas
upside down. In the case of human medicine, man should turn *towards* physis
in order to understand health, but not turn nature into techne, as is factically
the case in modern medicine, of which i gave a smashing example, which is just
neglected as if it is nothing. So again: the pills that you and your children are
taking, as the food which you are eating etc etc are paid for by other men,
whose being has been reduced to mere Bestand. The contradictions resulting from
denying this, even calling it humanitarian, are fatal to those tending them: they
are sliced in two or more pieces, that is: they dissolve in the plurality of the
subject (Nietzsche), as it reigns now ever stronger exclusively. You, for instance,
cannot permit yourself to go back to our discussion of the beginning of the new
world war, 5 years ago. I would like to advise to anyone to watch again the meeting
where the blinking guy mongered war. Instead you once more made yourself ridiculous
with your reference today.

(for those interrested in Heidegger: in Of the essence and concept of physis
(1942), he speaks of techne as a force hostile towards the abysmal sense of being
as being-of-itself.
Via the Middle Ages, where nature becomes a product of divine creation, and modernity,
where techne is reclaimed by the self-conscient subject, the hostility has gotten full
coverage.
This is to be observed everywhere. Not in order to criticize - not even in all cases
abominable - , but in order to find out what ‘is’ today. That almost no-one,
or maybe even really no-one is ready to do that, does not trouble me at all,
because even then they are verifying the above said)

In the text to which you
refer at Physics II.8, he says that natural beings have an intrinsic
principle of motion, but “not in virtue of a concomitant attribute, because
(for instance) a man who is a doctor might cure himself. Nevertheless it is
not in so far as he is a patient that he possesses the art of medicine: it
merely has happened that the same man is doctor and patient-and that is why
these attributes are not always found together. So it is with all other
artificial products. None of them has in itself the source of its own
production.” So the doctor is only accidentally the source of his own
healing, not in virtue of what he is. A natural being, however, must be its
own source of motion and rest in virtue of what it is and not merely
accidentally like the doctor.
================

I referred to the beginning of Physics II, to where the distinction
physis - techne, as two different and opposed principles (archai/aitiai)
of reality, is brought. If one reads carefully what seems to be self-evident,
it appears that physis is not simply the beginning of a part of reality,
the things made vs the things grown, but also enables products (poioumena)
to be what and how they are. (to be hypokeimenon: really there)
Without physis, the eidos of a table, conceived of by the carpenter, must
remain conceptual, or cannot even be conceived at all. It is such that Aristotle
‘is’ still: without physis, techne becomes absolute design, or acts likewise
under the illusion of absolute design, as we can witness in the virtual domain,
which claims to be nature-independent. But where no engagement is, there can be
no feeding and growing, and so only decay. That also goes for philosophy following
the same illusion. This is getting ever more clear now, to ever fewer who understand.

rene

It is easily overlooked that, because Aristotle here opposes physis and
techne,
that according to him techne without physis becomes meaningless. Compare
Antiphon’s belief that a table wood, buried in the ground, starts to grow
again.

===============
nothing to do with the meaninglessness of techne without physics there -
Aristotle brings that up simply as an example of the view (which he rejects
in that chapter) that physics is *primarily* hyle of the bed (i.e., the
wood), since a planted bed grows as simply wood, not a bed.
===============

Systematic meaninglessness (nihilism) can be responsible for the
monstrosity that
the art of healing has become ESSENTIALLY a sickmaking and masskilling
art nowadays,
to which man is merely material.

The question would be: how can we get out of this murderous technological
notion of
health, back or forwards to health as physis, as Aristotle understood it.

All suggestions otherwise (incl. yours) can only strengthen the (tendency
to
total) machination inherent in technology.

Basically the same art of civil massacring as in Iraq or Chechnya.

As i said from the beginning: the aim is (the export of) civil war,
by overman to underman, nothing else.
Torture, kill, rape, destruction, weakening Verelendung, that’s it.
Ethics to cover these just stinks. As badly as those bringing them.

Posted on Wednesday, December 6th, 2006 at 3:35 pm
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