Oodles and oodles of life

[Gordon Fitch]

Gordon:
> Hence it will be perhaps unserious of me to persecute the
> legacy of Heidegger as if it mattered and point out that
> _death_ (in the sense of the annihilation of oneself) cannot
> be any particular thing for humans (or any beings) in general,
> because it has no subjective aspect; that is, one can't
> experience it from the inside.  The prospect of it is merely
> another category of phenomena, subject to the infinite vagaries
> of point of view, prejudice, and interpretation which taint
> all phenomena, all the moreso because there is nothing to
> grasp or refer to.  Death, publicly speaking, is a perpetually
> unfilled blank, at once everything and nothing, everywhere
> and nowhere.  One _can't_ turn away from it, any more than
> one can turn away from the pink unicorn.
> 
> I would rather have a more concrete explanation of the Naziism.

ChrisD(RJ):
> Actually, your comments on death are reminescent of Heidegger's: One's own
> death will never be grasped by one's own consciousness as an event, a thing,
> or anything else. It is, however, still given to consciousness _as a
> possibility_. And its everpresence is precisely one reason why H points to
> its apprehension as what guides one to being as a whole, to the world as
> such rather than to particular possibilities within the world (other
> phenomena H indicates elsewhere as providing this access include deep
> boredom, joy and love, by the way). Also, H would be in agreement that you
> can't _actually_ turn away from death -- but you can try to.

My similarity to Heidegger is what I fear.  Above, I can only
quibble with the _it_ (the apprehension of death), which, as
I said, is entirely subjective and not really an _it_ at all.
Having read a page and a half or so of H., I am pretty sure
he could engulf such a modest, clear objection with a great
surge of rhetorical protoplasm, which I could counter only
by opening the dikes of Theravada Buddhist literature.  Let
us avoid this catastrophic outcome. 


> As to Naziism, well, Heidegger was a pretty weird Nazi. ...

That could be, but he was still a Nazi, and his philosophical
work, however amusing or edifying, did not tell him not to be
a Nazi.  So any similarity between his thinking and mine
worries me.  I suppose I could give up thinking.

-- Gordon