But neither does it make any sense to worry about "the originary ontoljogical domain of Man" - I am tempted to say that even Charles's mechanical biologism is more sensible than that..'' Carrol
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Gee, Carrol, what do you want. a full blown graduate seminar in the history of 19thC philosophy and its political ramifications in Germany? Believe me, I would love to write that book.
But see I have this bummer job, fixing wheelchairs. So when I write during a week day like today, I am also in between two cranky customers who want their equipment fixed right---meanwhile the boss is screaming how she can't get paid from MediCal and Medicare for what I do... etc. etc. In other words I write fast using a lot of short hand phrases like rational system.
That's short hand for the Enlightenment project of state, the core axioms of creating the modern state, including most especially the United States and France---England is in there too, but much more mixed bag (Locke, Hobbes, Mill, et al). That big E tradition in Germany was built on Kant and Hegel, and later Marx (still much too simplified, but good enough for email).
Okay, fine. Here's the intro to the grad seminar on early 20thC euro history, philosophy and political consequences....
Dot, dot, dot, even as late as the build up to WWI it was rare to find any discussion that human society was not build on rational rules, or at least should be. Of the big four powers who began that war, only one, France was a republic. England was still primarily a parlimentary monarchy. Regardless of the technicalities of their constitutions, their political establishments all believed they were highly rational men steering the ships of state. The interlocking treaties that evolved from the 1812 Treaty of Vienna was considered the rational foundation for stability in Europe. (The winners of the defeat of Napoleon held a gun to the French and said, sign! The French signed. Then the English, Austrians, Germans, Dutch, and Russians proceeded for the next century to try to out manuver each other in endless colonial wars... The Italians were mostly irrelevant although they got back Lombardy from the Frence and the big three gave Austria control of Tyrol, and allowed the Turks to control the weirdly shape strip along the coast of the Balkens, partitioned Greece, and other details that lead to a whole century of low grade wars over territory within this grand design. Pussia for example just took over most of Poland, but left the dutchies of a pan German state to whether or prosper as they would... Looking at the map of this treaty, you can see WWI a hundred years before it happened.
There is a great book that describes this history, ``The Struggle for the Mastery of Europe 1848-1918'', Taylor AJP, Oxford, 1954. I would also strongly suggest this book for anyone interested in how the modern states of central and eastern Euro evolved---well from Poland, through Czechoslovakia onto Austria, Hungry, the Balkens, Rumania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, and North Africa. The scope is awesome....
The monumental disasters of WWI with its utterly irrational slaughter of millions, blew away the entire conceptual universe of rational progress through state reform and the imperial paternalistic rational development of Africa and the Middle East. The whole basis for so-called liberal democracy was gone. It was this geopolitical fact that effected almost every intellectual community in the West. Almost everybody who was somebody at that moment was flabbergasted, to say the least. It turned the entire upper eschelon of the intelligencia to question the foundation of everything they thought. You can read about it in Bertrand Russell, Paul Valery, Andre Gide, Thomas Mann, Ernest Cassirer, and certainly Martin Heidegger. the newer generation including Horkhiemer, Adrono, Marcuse, Strauss, Kojeve and others had their own reactions---but also of foundational levels.
The whole reason I am so intensely interested in this history is because the neoconservatives were so sure of their own rational powers, their intellectual prowess, their own inner knowledge of how things work in the world, they, supposedly with only the best of intentions have driven the US political establishment into a complete nightmare of mass mayhem in war, politics, and the economy. We can all chut, chut about Capital. Short answer? No, capital does not like where we are. In fact, I suspect the power elite are worried sick that following the neocons has uncovered the PE's own irrational basis, and that awareness, now public, may very likely lead to reforms that are not capital friendly.... A question, the answer to which remains to be seen.
Very well, now back to the earlier post..
``But Being is merely a label for anything and everything, a trick of language as it were, and the chase after it or its "manifestations" can only lead to nonsense...''
Well, Being is the term used in metaphysics, whether you think it is nonsense or not. What it stands for in this context, the Heideggerian context and in the context of German idealism is `the essence of things in themselves.' When Heidegger and others attempted to resurrect metaphysics, they believed they could penetrate to the core essence of things in themselves, particularly Man, exactly because we are our own essence and have completely unmediated access to ourselves. We are then not talking about finding the essence of a rock, but of what it is to be human. The essence of a rock may be unknowable to us, but there is no such perceptual problem with our knowledge of ourselves, particularly through the phenomenological presence of conscieousness---which it is argued has no other form or content given to it aprior, except itself. (Remember here I am making Heidegger's argument. I do not agree with it. I am trying to present it as it presented itself to me as a student long ago...)
As the bard proposed, Know Thy Self. Heidegger took that advice and pursued it backwards into the pre-Socratic realm, the primordial ground of essential questions that gave rise to Greek philosophy, well to western philosophy. What is? What is it made of? How does it work? Carrol open your metaphysical imagination. Ask again, as if you knew nothing. It was precisely that romantic impulse that attracted students to Heidegger and it still does.
Once upon a time, back in the 70s I met a disabled philosophy grad student who was studying Heidegger. Carol White was her name. She worked under Feyerabend and later moved over to Hubert Dreyfus. I envyed her freedom and accessibility to the temporarily great UCB philosopy department. To read, to write, to drink coffee, to get loaded, to talk about anything.... Even after she got that long sought after teaching job down at the University of Santa Clara, she would come back to Berkeley to get her chair fixed and we would pick up our conversations as if no time or distance had passed.... Carol was wonderful. She looked like a nun, and drove a terrible powerchair, but her mind was as limber as a prostitute in the borderlands of no where.
Now Muricans, real Muricans, don't like words like Being. Real Muricans reach for their guns, when they hear a word like Being. There is something wrong about that kind of word. It's clearly a commie faggot sissy word.
Most American and English intellectuals don't like this word either. Who am I talking about? The mostly progressive liberal intellectual establishment. In art history we can mention Gombrick as an example. He didn't like talk about the essence of art or the being or presence of a painting.... (I've got Popper's The Open Society, and Hayek's Individualism and Economic Order on my desk, in order to pursue exactly this anathma to the word Being.) Anglo-American discourses don't talk about Being. That's a sure sign of Hegel or something worse.... There could be some penis or maybe virgina stuff in there, probably really sicko wet Freud things, god knows, even Judith Butler, or Michael Foucauld after a long night with penises of various shapes and sizes. (Think zucci here.) I love the idea of Jean Genet as a boy fondling---too suggestive to be philosophy? What about Phaedrus?
Hey, let's dance.
Sick Polish joke follows.. A Polish ballerina did the splits and stuck to the floor... Get it? This was my favorite high school joke. I never got over my ontic twelve year old phase...
``To speak of society as based on "some rational system" is of course a vulgar idealism, a matter of taking the metaphor of a social contract too seriously and fantasizing a bunch of utter strangers coming together out of nowhere to sit down around a table and begin excogitating a contract by means of which they can form a society where none existed before. Why in the world would someone devote a lifetime to demonstrating the falsity of that...''
Carrol, think. That's all the US political establishment does, 24/7, speak about the fundamental rationality of our system, and its ultimate good. Demonstrating the falsity of that is tantumount to a green card for radicals.... Unfortunately, it turns out that anti-rationalism is no warrant of left credentials, i.e. Heidegger. So you have to be very careful about how you go about this form of critique.
Of course we are dealing with a vulgar idealism---that's what nationalism and gingoism IS. To examine the underlying philosophical assumptions of this rational mantra is one of the principle projects for anybody who wants to critique the system...
CG