>
> Jesus Christ, how pathetic. Good bye
Chris Doss's need for personal abuse speaks for itself. It obviously emerges from a deep, almost religious personal investment in a certain way of thinking. It is not much different than his previous response to me, viz.
On 5/9/06, Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>You probably don't
> understand what that means, but that have less to do
> with the words or content but with you possibly just
> not being very smart.
>
> Frankly you're coming aross as a real twit, lazy and
> "willfully ignorant." Actually a bit of a
> pseudo-intellectual.
>
> That said, I'm not going to engage with you the
> subject, cause you don't know what the fuck you're
> talking about.
Perhaps all of this is a result of deep anxiety resulting from his fugitive relation to Being-towards-death. I apologize for my stupidity, especially since Chris Doss's rhetoric exhibits a high level of intellectuality that I can never hope to approach. I am obviously his inferior. But perhaps he needs email reading practice.
>
> Heidegger does not have a theory of history. The
> Seinsgeschichte has no explanatory power and is not
> intended to have one. It is an interpretation of the
> history of western metaphysics, not a fucking theory
> of history. Somebody who can't see the difference has
> no business even talking about it, much using it as a
> club to try to bully people better-informed than him,
> such as Justin.
As far as I can tell I never said that Heidegger has a "theory of history." What I said was the following:
On 5/14/06, Jerry Monaco <monacojerry at gmail.com> wrote: "The authoritarian Volk or Hobbits and Heidegger:
"My problem with Heidegger is not his lack of intelligence. It is that his deep ontological history is bound inextricably to an authoritarian ethos-ethnos of a romantic Volk-Nation. I believe that it is silly to try to make sense of Heidegger by disentangling Heidegger from his anti-enlightenment authoritarian and reactionary "agrarian" context. For those of you who care, Heidegger's attitudes toward the agrarian world is a late reaction to industrialism that is quite common. Just like all of Heidegger's "interesting" attitudes on death can be found in any good hard-boiled private eye novel, all of Heidegger's "interesting" attitudes on agrarian society can be found in Tolkein's "Lord of the Rings." If anyone wants a benign example of Heidegger's utopian society, if such were possible, look at Hobbit society.
"Deep History and its substitutes: "Ultimately, Heidegger's deep history of Being, makes no sense to me at all. His deep history of Being is a "master narrative" that can suffer no counterexample from any interpretation of history, self, story, poem, or from empirical observation of human language, biological evolution, etc. Since I see everything else in Heidegger (his ideas about art, technology, death, anxiety, violence) in tow to his narrative of Being, I don't see much sense in talking about his beliefs about other subjects as if they could subsist on their own. Derrida tries to disambiguate Heidegger's ontology (and his authoritarian romanticism) by putting Saussure's views of language in the place of "Being," and thus creating an eternal cycle of meaning to substitute for Heidegger' s deep history. Language and "meaning" become a fetish (almost in a Marxist sense of the word); where ontology was once the "under"-ground of history, language is not put into its place. (I use the term "language" very loosely here in order to comprehend Derrida's conception.)"
I also said previously: "When you read Heidegger ask yourself if there is anything, any criteria or empirical counterweight, discovery, change in the world, reconstruction of an ancient text, that might invalidate, or even modify, anything that Heidegger says. The answer is no. And the reason the answer is not is because nothing specific that Heidegger says actually makes a difference to any specific "subject" or "text. What Heidegger is uncovering is not something about "technology" or a discovery about how humans relate to death, but "the secret heart of Being." It is his genius which gives him insight into the secret history of Being. ""
My only reference to "theory" at all was my subsequent paragraph which stated:
"Basically, read literally, Heidegger is writing an "ontological conspiracy theory." It is a philosophical version of Holy Blood, Holy Grail. A DaVinci code for the ontologically minded."
I stick to this point and I can provide quotes from Heidegger to back it up if you wish. His analysis of "Being" from the Greeks onward is about how man's relation to existence has been subverted, hidden, perverted by metaphysics. This is his contribution to the history of philosophy.
In the above I talked about the impossibility of disentangling his "irrefutable" critique of metaphysics from the rest of his attitudes. I am very sorry if I treat Heidegger rationally, as if he actually makes arguments. I know that he doesn't. He merely asserts his deep thoughts about Dasein. That is all. But when actually trying to make sense of a writer it is necessary to actually ask the simple question:
"Is what the writer says true in any way that I can accept?" And in order to find this out you actually have to pretend that something the writer says has some relation to the world that we live in.
Of course it is rather "funny" to judge Heidegger in this way. It misconceives his project. But Heidegger's ontology is mostly empty of anything of significance and once you try to save anything of value you realize that what is of value in Heidegger can be reduced to "attitudes."
>
> The early H's concern with death has nothing to do
> with anything "hard-boiled." As I HAVE EXPLAINED
> BEFORE, apparently to the ears of the deaf or the
> really, really stupid, it is due to the little fact
> that Heidegger is analysing the structure of human
> self- and world-understanding, which, since it is
> TEMPORAL and FUTURE-DIRECTED, automatically ends in
> GUESS WHERE? Hey, that's death, isn't it? Hot damn!
You make Heidegger sound less intelligent than I do.
As I said in analyzing Heidegger's attitudes toward Death in "Being and Time" much of it reduces to one thing: "What it comes down to is that we as humans have foreknowledge of death." There is nothing really profound in it when stripped of its ontological covering. I would advise you to go back and read what I actually wrote.
I must thank you for your responses. They are appreciated.
Let me ask you Mr. Doss. Do you think that Heidegger was a very polite person when he went out of his way to ruin Karl Jasper's life by pointing out that Jasper was not fit for a German professorship because of his Jewish wife? Do you think that politeness has any is a value that should be pursued? Or is it just another aspect of "everydayness" that should be dispensed with in our pursuit of
Jerry Monaco