Michael quoth:
I have to say that I much prefer Heidegger's weapons of missed
deconstruction: at least they point to further attempts at rethinking rather than just
pointing back to the same old song (however amusing and comfortingly familiar) and
thus a sense of failure (through repetition and rear-view mirroring) and
dis-ease (thus: resentiment).
Jud:
The pointing back to the same old senescent song is a Heideggerian
inclination I'm afraid Michael, not a Judderian one. You see it all goes back to
Heidegger's early exposure to the Catholicism of his youth in his seminary days -
and his later involvement with the obscurantism of Duns Scotus and others of a
similar spooky-wooky visceral ilk
Putting it bluntly Heidegger was a lousy Hellenist - and this is not just
Juddy speaking - it is common knowledge. He didn't pay enough attention to the
quite different way in which the Greeks used the EINAI-word and its
conjugational pals and nominal derivatives including ousia. I mean for a man who wrote so
much about the cognitive non-starter Being, and was continually pointing
backwards to the Greek â??incipienceâ?? as he called it, [in an effort to connect
his seedy political appetites to the glory of Greece] and who was intent on
committing his conclusions to paper in the form a book on the question of Being,
one would have thought the least he could have done is to have properly studied
the REAL meaning of the word that he based his whole life's work upon? It was
not quite back-of-an-envelope stuff as regards to ousia - but it wasn't far
from it.
He was aware that the notion of Being has played a significant function in
the philosophical tradition, and had he truly wanted to deconstruct the
metaphysical mess in which he found himself, the first thing he should have done is to
complete an in-depth analysis of what the word Being actually meant when used
by such guys as Parmenides, Protagoras, Herodotus and the dreaded Plato
himself. Instead all that the great deconstructionalist Heidegger did was to
uncritically take on board the pseudo-concept Being, with the mythic medievalist
misinterpretation of meaning together with the stained semantic baggage of ousia
left intact, just as it had been passed down liturgical line by the
foot-soldiers of the church through the medieval period right down to modern times. His
misbegotten deconstruction was in fact a careful and assiduous reconstruction
of a myth - a taxiderminological exercise in stuffing new life into dead
ideas.
Heidegger was fond of asking questions - the problem was - he never asked the
right ones.
Heidegger the would-be iconoclast fell hook line and sinker for the old
locutions of an existential duality, and emerged spluttering from the Daseinic
ducking-stool as the Marburgian midwife of a more insidious form of modern
metaphysics. Insidious because it threw a lifeline to a floundering metaphysics
already moving dangerously closer and closer to the vortex of the modernist
plughole and the dasein-death of almost complete irrelevancy.
Reificational rubber-stamper of the Seinsfrage that he was, he simply
regurgitated the Platonic notions of a mysterious ontological difference twixt the
fact that a man exists, and the way in which he exists, whilst coyly jettisoning
Plato's preposterous idea that his non-spatial entities or forms could be
found in a new kind of place, [vontos topos.] Our doughty deconstructionalist
preferred his own version of shadowy forms to be being there without actually
being there at all, but rather lurking like somebody new to a list - being there
somewhere, but as good as not being there at all.
Another thing that our counterfeit quester after quaint contradictions did
was to unthinkingly accept the traditional notions of nominal abstractionalism,
with the result that Heideggerian deverbal nouns hop about the fish-tank of
his Daseinic vivarium like half dead metaphysical mudskippers, amphibiotic
gudgeons spawning in the surrealistic alphabet soup of his tortured text.
In fairness to Heidegger, he wasn't the only one to continue to subscribe to
the nominalisation of actions so beloved of religion, and as he professed to
be a theologian, at least had an excuse for retaining these systematised and
internalised ontological absurdities.
The fact is that even when the divorce of church and thinking-brain finally
occurred, when the cognoscenti began to turn away from the Almighty Being and
God was finally declared dead, most of the analytic and non-analytic fraternity
of the Godless continued to apply the Being Bunco and the Gerund Gag as if
nothing had happened other than that the Mister Big of Being had finally hit the
buffers and had been removed from the frame.
Whatever the amount of ink and paper and hot-air expended at Heidegger
conferences on endless and recursive â??examinationsâ?? of the pseudo concept of Being,
the fact remains that in English and American philosophy at least the
sham-concept of â??Beingâ?? is regarded with various degrees of disdain ranging from
suspicion to outright hilarity, and is for the most part viewed as no more than a
dissonant disarray of several discrete ideas.
One bizarre aspect of Heidegger's â??ontological differenceâ?? is the presence
of some strange analytic bedfellows like Frege and Russell and others caught
out unwittingly sleeping with the metaphysical enemy, for there seem to me to be
similar grave ontological errors in the logic of many modern logisticians,
where by introducing a spread of false ontological categorisations, a
prefabricated solution to the apparently diverse IS-word problem is wrongly analysed as
designating not TWO but MORE [as many as FOUR] ontological denotations - those
of identity, existence, classification and existence. Entities exist in the
moment-to-moment manner in which they exist. They too have not sufficiently
grasped that the function of BE is to unify the existentiality and state of the
subject with which it is identified. The BE-mechanism is unchanging and
univocal in all languages, and acts autocatalystically to process the same message in
all of the languages of the world now, and as it did in the past, as in the
days of Herodotus and Parmenides, and the code encrypted nowadays is the same
as the code of Einai or the tongue of Hammurabi: and it says: â??exist in the
manner ofâ?¦â?? as einai did in the Greek of Aristotle's day:
â??EXISTS IN THE MANNER OFâ?¦â??
(A) PREDICATION. "The leaf is green"
(A) PREDICATION "The leaf exists in the manner of green"
(B) CLASSIFICATION. "The giraffe is an animal." -
(B) CLASSIFICATION. "The giraffe exists in the manner of an animal."
(C) IDENTITY. "The boy is Bert."
(C) IDENTITY. "The boy exists in the manner of Bert.
(D) EXISTENCE. A restaurant is on top of the mountain.
(D) EXISTENCE. A restaurant exists in the manner of on top of the mountain.â??
So the metaphysicians and analyticians are uncongenial ontological
belly-brothers,
Neither of them are no less wrong than the other, for where the denotated
actuality of a referent is concerned, an entity can only exist in the way that it
exists, and the way that it is existing is not the way it is talked about as
existing though it may well suit our purposes to talk of it thus, but the way
it actually exists, and the IS-word points to the predicate of what exists,
and a man could sit at the keyboard typing sentences which include â??isâ?? for a
thousand years and [presuming that English hadn't changed too much] the meaning
of IS would remain constant and unchanging. Though the entitic subjects of
comment might change, and what was said about them predicationally would alter,
the IS-word would remain inviolate throughout with its mechanism in normal
function and its internal meaning intact, although, chameleon-like, it adopts the
predicational camouflage of the predicate with which it is semantically
associated, and because of that is erroneously considered to change its own meaning
because of the descriptional phrase with which it is associated changes from
one statement to the next. Like a sign with â??THIS WAYâ?? painted upon it - the
meaning of the sign doesn't change if a prankster swings it round so that it
points the other way.
The logical sign '[backward E]x which means: â??There is something of which the
following is trueâ?? is not really a sign of simple or pure existence that some
people think, but of existential modality, for â??somethingâ?? bespeaks of a
thing of some kind, and to be referred to as a 'thing' [even in a symbolic
notation] presupposes existing in the manner of a thing', of which more is usually
revealed when the propositional predicated is added.
It is IMPOSSIBLE to produce any comprehensible utterance or issue any form of
meaningful written sentence without avoiding some existential modalic
reference - for the moment a name is mentioned the name itself proclaims either an
actual or sentential existentiality, and with it the modality of which it exists
as a named subject. The pure or simple existence of metaphysics and analytics
is an ontologically impossible myth.
The IS-word merges and unifies entitic existence and state. The coalition of
the syntactic mechanistic function of IS with its payload of semantic
predicational connotation into a single and unitary existential synthesis can be seen
in the concurrence is integrated in this single-message device-word'
There is an implicit acknowledgment of the intrinsic existential state or
mode of its subject entity, together with the attachment of predicational
immanency to its accompanying sentential descriptive clause.
On this reading therefore we now understand the meaning of Parmenides' Being
â??being not as some ethereal 'spirit of existence,' but as meaning that the
path of truth, conviction and knowledge is the path of â??what is,â?? or â??that it
is' [hosti] and that ousia for an ancient Greek meant nothing like the
confabulations of Heidegger's missing weapons of mass deconstruction, but in a
Protagorasean, Parmenidean and Herodotusean sense meant: â??That which is the case,â??
or â??exists in the manner ofâ?? with the implication of an underlying state of
veracity or truth.
The bottom line? What is the illusive â??meaningâ?? of Being that Heidegger
searched for so vainly?
â??Beingâ?? means: â??The manner or mode of someone's existential case or
situation.â??
'Being and Time?' Better rename it - â??That which is the Case and Time.â??
But â??Timeâ?? doesn't exist does it? Now where do we go?
Tell you next 'time.' ;-)
Cheers,
Jud.
<A HREF="
http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/ ">
http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/</A>
Jud Evans - ANALYTICAL INDICANT THEORY.
<A HREF="
http://uncouplingthecopula.freewebspace.com";>
http://uncouplingthecopula.freewebspace.com</A>
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