[lbo-talk] Dustup - final installment

[Charles Brown]

"we have also warded off the other opinion, according to which the ode recounts the development of humanity from a wild huntsman and a traveler by dugout canoe, to a builder of cities and person of culture. These are notions from cultural anthropology and the psychology of primitives. They arise from falsely transferring a science of nature that is already untrue in itself to human Being. The fundamental error that underlies such ways of thinking is the opinion that the inception of history is primitive and backward, clumsy and weak. 
^^^
CB: With due respect to Ted ( and Chris) , if I understand Heidegger's meaning here, and in the following two sentences, I agree with H.
Culture, tradition, custom - "what is most uncanny and mighiest" - is there at the human origin defining it. The original humanity is communism. Our name should be _homo communis_ . Marx and Engels , by the time Engels writes _The Origin_, understand that the "primitive"/original human society is "primitive" communism, without private property.

^^^^

The opposite is true. The inception is what is most uncanny and mightiest. What follows is not a development but flattening down as mere widening out; it is the inability to hold on to the inception, it makes the inception innocuous and exaggerates it into a perversion of what is great, into greatness and extension purely in the sense of number and mass. 
^^^^^
CB: Yea. Bigger is not necessarily better.  The qualitative change was introduction of private property and exploiting and exploited classes. 

^^^^

The uncanniest is what it is because it harbors such an inception in which, from over-abundance, everything breaks out at once into what is overwhelming and is to be surmounted (das Überwältigende, Zubewältigende)." (Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, pp. 165-6) 

Ted 

This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com