On May 15, 2006, at 8:05 AM, Jerry Monaco wrote:
> On 5/15/06, Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> What the fuck do I bother?
>>
>> Good God Jerry you have just demonstrated that you
>> know jack shit about the subject you are talking
>> about....
>> apparently to the ears of the deaf or the
>> really, really stupid,...
>> If you came to a hypothetical class of mine with such
>> bullshit I would give you a flat D and recommend you
>> change your major. I hear basket-weaving is a big
>> draw.
>
>>
>> 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
>
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