what is it good for?
May 31st, 2009, search relatedRelated posts :: Germans outplayed by Ahmadinejad in their own Spiegel/Mirror :: Trannie *Logic* :: biography :: The Parable of the Tree and the House
Tags: Gelassenheit
In a message dated 5/25/2009 11:50:19 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
michael at sandwich-de-sign.co.uk writes:
BernX:
Hi Michael;
In all of the above you (qua Heidegger) attempt to re-invent the less
mentionable ( to moderns) agency of the Devil renominalized (abstracted) as
gestell. And then to balance the deck and lubricate the conscience the
pleroma of angels is entered as gelassenheit. And is it no more as such than
so much dialectical double-speak to avoid calling a spade a spade?
“Because the world is round
It turns me on…” [Beatles]
Hi Bernard, in your above, for me, you don’t come close to what is meant by
gestell&gelassenheit as I understand them: they have absolutely nothing to
do with the fairy-tale (dialectical or otherwise) of devils and angels (both
beings you note, whereas I have characterised gestell as be-ing);
gestell&gelassenheit have as much to do with devils&angels as those yummy
snacks devils on horseback and angels on horseback (oysters and prunes resp
wrapped in bacon and placed on toast) do.
Michael, you arer disposing too easily of the fuller ur-gestalt of
Heidegger. Keep in mind that would include his Roman Catholic background, his later
interest in Meister Eckhart’s understanding of gelassenheit and then his
regression to the devilization, or I should say the Wotonization, of the
enframing will to power by the Third Reich. In that case gelassenheit was not even
a thought if at all ever party to a “thinker’s” understanding.
The thing is that gestell&gelassenheit belong together (non-dialectically
as far as I can see)
as in Parmenides’ dictum that be-ing and thinking belong together (are the
same): gestell (be-ing, the way beings are) needs gelassenheit (thinking,
the revealing of be-ing) in order for it to be displayed, brought out,
exposed as such; and gelassenheit needs getsell in order to think the think
that is needed, most needy food for thought.
Indeed, the most needy food for “thinking” is “feeling” which languishes as
the inferiority of the pro-thinker bias. Goethe saw it more clearly when he
assigned thinking to his philosophical endeavors and feeling to his
poetical aspirations where gehful ist alles. The latter of course, from the
thinker’s standpoint, is predicated as womanish and not as how a man ought to
think. Or as Herman Melville put it: “I stand for the heart; to the dogs with the
head.”
Thus gelassenheit is needed for
gestell to be clearly what it is beyond the caustic of both technologically
oriented scientific thinking and that of common-sense both of which aim to
dissolve the so-called ‘problem’ of the total mobilisation of every thing
(whether successfully or not); dissolution in this case is merely
distraction and the entire set of apparatuses for such dissolution is
exactly the weapons (and whereupons) of mass distraction, i.e., the news.
Without the one trembling in the proximity of the other, nothing can be
different in this age of the total mobilisation of everything; anything
other merely intensifies the grip of the (non-deviled) gestell; the
non-thinking-aright is the horror, not the gestell its self.
I can appreciate you de-devilization of gestell as a means of
decontaminating the delemma of thinking in its subduction of gehful, however it is
apparent that gelassenheit is the negation of gestell. This would immediately
allow gelassenheit as at par with gehful and the pouring of some water on the
hot and inflated pneuma
of denken, an sich. Thus we see in the protracted, unrelieved and
uninterupted gestell, such as that driving the Third Reich, must find gelassenheit
as simply death and destruction, notwithstanding *die destruktion als ursache
des wirdens.* It may thus be clear that the dialectical polarity of
enframing and open-ness by no means indicates they are apriori in contingency.
Gelassenheit does not exist without the arche-thrust of the will to power and as
if in and by itself it represents the angels of the heart. Its antithesis
is the original sin of Cain and Able where only gestell qua trangression
perdures in and by itself and where gelassenheit asserts itself simply as Death,
the greatest evil known to humankind. But gelassenheit allowed
transcendence brings the realm of Angels into being and in effect overcomes the
permanency of Death and nihil evermore.
sincerely;
Bernard X Bovasso
Thus, gelassenheit must be grasped first (if you like): Heidegger’s seminal
‘Conversation on a country path’ {part of ‘Gelassenheit’) should be
consulted for this — anyone interested in a close reading?
regards
michaelP
