Re: [heidegger-dialognet] Copula and Time?

John writes:
 

It seems that Jud & I have been talking at cross
purposes here.  I was not addressing the ontological
difference at all. I was talking about  how modern
logicians (as well as Aristotle perhaps) have
distinguished  different meaning of "to be," as in


1. There are giraffes in Africa.
2. My car is blue.
3. Paris  is the capital of France.

Heidegger thought that these could all be  viewed as
instances of an underlying being. My response to both
positions  on being is that for some purposes a more
unified conception may be  appropriate, for other
purposes a distinction needs to be made. That was  the
point of my zoological example.
 
Jud:
THERE ARE NO DIFFERENT MEANINGS OF "BE."
"Being" [a misunderstanding of the Greek "ousia"] is a  meaningless cuckoo in 
grammar's nest.
Therefore as a word DEVOID of meaning, [which is publicly admitted by  many 
Heideggerians] 
 it cannot qualify as a being "different" from  the BE  which HAS meaning.
 
It matters not whom is thinking or talking about "Being," whether that  person
was some old Greek thousands of years ago, a sweaty scholastic in his  
medieval masturbatorium,
or some modern "logicians, or some pathetic Nazi fanatic, it all boils down  
[as Michael has carefully pointed out]
to talking about absolutely nothing. 
 
Whether you like it or not — whether you are aware of it or not — when you  
address
how transcendentalists or people from the past think/thought about the  
Indo-European concept of  "BU" 
[the Sanskrit version of BE which has come down to us in its various forms]  
you are forced to think about 
what Heidegger called: "The Ontological Difference."
 
First look at your sentence 1. above. Have you ever thought it  fruitful to 
analyse the words and descry what they mean?
Why do you think in English the word "There" is necessary? Now back to your  
sentence 1. You have had more time to give it some thought — any ideas? Which 
of  the following concepts do you think is being communicated?
 
(a)  There are giraffes in Africa.   Giraffes exist in  the world, in this 
case in Africa.
Note: But they also exist in zoos all over the world, so in this case it is  
not simply a question of indicating the "bare or pure" physical existence  of 
giraffes, but includes information about the WAY or the WHERE that they  exist 
— in this case the way or modality singled out for our attention is the  fact 
that they exist in Africa. So the BE-word ("ARE") allows  us to attribute the 
information that entities we call giraffes  can be found existing in Africa.
 
(b) Africa exists as a place where giraffes can be found?  Is the  sentential 
priority focussed upon  existential modality of the giraffes, or  is it meant 
to tell us something about the existential modality of Africa? This  is where 
the word "There" comes in.  Interestingly enough this semantic  version of 
the word "there" is classified as a PRONOUN standing for the  word "giraffes" — 
it is what linguists call a preparatory subject, and in  modern Swedish 
[closely related to English] the equivalent word "det" is  still interchangeable in 
meaning between "it" and "there." Difficult to grasp?  Think of the answer to 
this question:
'What kind of animals is it that live in Africa?"  Answer: "It is  giraffes 
that live in Africa" Note: I use this form of sentence, which has  slightly 
different semantic implications, merely to illustrate the "preparatory  subject" 
role of the it/there pronominal device.
 
The role of the preparatory subject "There" is to alert us that the  "modal 
switch" (the existential focus) points to the way in which the giraffes  are 
existing in Africa, rather than the way that Africa is existing  with giraffes 
in it.



2.  My car is blue." This is very straightforward.  It  tells us that my car 
exists in the modality of being blue.  Again, the  BE-word ("IS") informs us 
as to one of the ways in which my car exists. It does  not directly bespeak of 
the "bare or pure" physical existence of the car — it  has no need to do that, 
because the physical reality [or lack of it in a  fictional sentence] has 
already been established or instantiated with the words  "My car."
 
3. Paris is the capital of France. Here again the "bare or pure" physical  
existence of "Paris" aka "The Capital of France" is one of existential  identity.
This means that "Paris" as a nominatum for that city is  interchangeable 
with: "The Capital of France," and has the existential modality  of existing with 
two names both of which are mutually understandable.  In  this way if you told 
me that: "I am going to the capital of France," or "I am  going to Paris" I 
would be equally aware of your destination which ever form of  sentence you 
used.

It can readily be seen that the role of the BE-Word in  all the above 
sentences is the same — the linguistic mechanism is such that  it allows us to speak 
of the existential modalities of the various subjects  — the giraffes that 
exist in the location of Africa, my car that exists as a  blue car, and Paris/the 
capital of France as existing as Paris and the capital  of France. In none of 
the examples does BE have the need to address the question  of the pure 
presence in the cosmos of the giraffes, my car or Paris/the capital  of France, 
because that information is provided and existentially  instantiated by the 
subject nominatives involved. [the words "Giraffe, my  car and Paris/the capital of 
France].
 
Therefore the BE-word has only one meaning — there is no task of  
"unification" involved, because there is no disparate parts to unite  in the first place.
So what does the BE-word communicate?  "BE" communicates  information that 
can be paraphrased like this: "exists is the  following way."  
 
1. Giraffes exist in the following way — in Africa.
2. My car  exists in the following way — blue.
3. Paris exists in the  following way — the capital of France.


That is the reason why the little word "is" has appeared so mysterious to  
mankind, for it packs into its two little letters all of human descriptive  
thought regarding the manner of the WAY the world exists around us.
 
All very straight forward and easily understood. The role of the BE-word  
helps describe the way objects exist and humans live [or die} 
 
Then the disaster struck. The invasion of the trannie body-snatchers —  
body-snatchers in the sense that they invaded the body of grammatical clarity,  
common-sense and logicality as described and set down in the greatest and most  
perfect grammar in the history of mankind — the great grammar of Panini the  
Indian scholar.  This logical and very straightforwardly  understood manner of 
existential description was disrupted and interfered  and undermined by certain 
Greeks with by the introduction of notions  of the existence of  nonentities —
 gods, transcendentalisms, spirits, which  necessitated the adaptation 
[hijacking] of the third person continuos  version of the BE-word conjugation 
"being" (the giraffes are being moved into  a Wildlife Park" as a synonym for 
"existence" itself, to mean that not only  does a giraffe exist or a human exist, 
but the existence of the a giraffe  or a human exists too.  This bizarre 
ontological duality — the existence of  that which exists and the additional 
[indescribable nothing] This Greek  aberration suited the early Christian church 
perfectly and the ontological  confusions of Plato were absorbed into the religious 
doctrines of a vicious  transcendentalism. 
 
This is the illogical and grammatical horror which Heidegger describes as  
"The ontological difference," the insidious "Being," which has no legitimate  
place in the conjugational nexus of existential attribution, but is a  
transcendentalist cuckoo in the nest of logicality which has  infected  the minds of 
western scholarship like some insidious lingual and cognitive,  virus dragging 
in its wake the wholesale reification of abstraction which has  lead inevitable 
to the ills of mankind, the internecine religious wars  throughout the 
centuries, and the latest manifestation — the immolation and  crushing to death of 
thousands of people of one transcendentalist faith in  "Being" by the believers 
in a competing transcendentalist belief system of  "Being."  I refer of 
course to the Twin Towers atrocity.
This is the result of the introduction of the transcendentalist notion of  
"Being" and the bastardisation and perversion of grammar itself in the  service 
of the forces of darkness. 


regards,
 
Jud.





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