Re: Existential death

Malcolm Riddoch writes:
>Is Presbyterianism a tranquilized fearful fleeing in the face of death? A
>strange question...is a sober humility towards death in general the same as
>a nervous refusal to contemplate death? I'm not suggesting that my
>antecedents were into contemplating an authentic relation to death in a
>phenomenological sense ie ownmost death as the limit of the possibility of
>experience, where existential death is not itself an event that can happen
>but that is nonetheless certain at any given moment and that therefore
>defines life as being towards death in a temporal sense...

malcolm,
      isn't religion in essential part  a displacement of death?
and, much more, is it even conceivable (as opposed to semantical) ultimately
to "stand" in the appropriation of being-toward-death (and that's to say not
fatalism, but, nihilism, no?)as heid would have it?
...isn't it a black hole metaphor into which everything that approaches,
collapses?
...and "frighted fleeing"  alone,  authentic care & disclosive?

       like you, heid's  metaphors  at bottom strike me as
quaint...reactionary... vestigially romantical; and those ironic ones, like
fearfullness and fleeing & co, his pejoratives, to have more of the heft of
truth...such as tends somewhat to queer the deal...cause thought to recurr
to nietzsche and the somme and weimer and herr schicklegruber....

     so i heartily concurr in both yer critique of heid's sensibility...
and the historically determined nature of his philosophy.

    er, say...that the possibility of impossibility should be ontological,
and the impossibility of impossibility, not, has after all
rather  the identical partiality as religion, that makes god,  god, and
the devil, not...no?

thanks
bob





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