Author Archives: M D

Chaos

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Tell me all of this, you Muses who have your homes on Olympus, from the beginning, tell who first of them (the gods) came-to-be.

First of all Chaos came-to-be; but then afterwards Broad-breasted earth, a secure dwelling place forever for all (the immortals who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and misty Tartara in the depths under the wide-wayed grounds and Eros who, handsomest among the deathless gods a looser of limbs, in all the gods and in all human beings overpowers in their breasts their intelligence and careful planning. And from Chaos came-to-be both Erebos and dark night, and from night, in turn, came-to-be both Aither and day, whom she conceived and bore after joining in love with Erebos. But earth first begat, as an equal to herself, starry sky, so that he might cover her on all sides, in order to be a secure dwelling place forever for all the blessed gods, and she begat the tall mountains, pleasing haunts of the goddess-nymphs who make their homes in the forested hills, and also she bore the barren main with its raging swell, the sea, all without any sweet act of love; but then next, having lain with sky, she bore deep-swirling ocean.

Hesiod, “Theogony”

From:

Drew A. Hyland;John Panteleimon Manoussakis. Heidegger and the Greeks: Interpretive Essays (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 9). Kindle Edition.

Language: Animism and Illusion

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When Nietzsche writes of ‘going under’ he does not refer to some sort of Buddhist extinction, sunyata. He refers to Zarathustra’s descent. From the coldest of heights Zarathustra, drawn by compassion, over-rich with pity, descends into mortality, the all too human. From beyond good and evil and nursed from the nausea of eternal recurrence of the same, Zarathustra goes under with the weight of gravity.

In “The Gaze of Orpheus” Maurice Blanchot’s essay “The Narrative Voice” tells us,

“What Kafka teaches us – even if this expression cannot directly be attributed to him – is that storytelling brings the neuter into play. Narration governed by the neuter is kept in the custody of the “he”, the third person that is neither the third person, nor the simple cloak of impersonality. The “he” of narration in which the neuter speaks is not content to take the place usually occupied by the subject, whether the latter is a stated or implied “I” or whether it is the event as it takes place in its impersonal signification. The narrative “he” dismisses all subjects, just as it removes every transitive action or every objective possibility. It does this in two forms:

1) the speech of the tale always let us feel that what is being told is not being told by anyone: it speaks in the neuter;
2) in the neuter space of the tale, the bearers of speech, the subjects of the action- who used to take the place of characters – fall into relationship of non-identification with themselves: something happens to them, something they cannot recapture except by relinquishing their power to say “I” and what happens to them has always happened already: they can only account for it indirectly, as self-forgetfulness, the forgetfulness that introduces them into the present without memory that is the present of narrating speech.” (page 140, paperback)

What Saussure tells us is that language referentially turns in on itself. Language can only refer to itself; semantic is nothing other than syntax. What is present in language is pure signification. Signifiers do not signify ‘things’; signifiers only signify other signifiers. Presence, as one signifier among many, is the rustle of il ya (there is), the neutrality of a-temporality, Platonic recollection without forgetfulness. Perhaps this could be thought as the physics of eternal reoccurrence; the sub-atomic particles the never rest, never die, only exist and not-exist, be and not-be without temporal reference: perhaps a neo-Kierkegaardian kenosis, the new genesis of God and man, the absurd paradox that incites the passion of dread. From these cold and desolate heights that only the noble can endure we only have one choice – to go under.

To act as if action has meaning is a Beginning. To separate the firmament from the void, to “become like one of us”, marks retreat from no-thingness and fall towards density. The God-particle gives mass to emptiness, writes from noise; the appropriating event. The precipice from which we stare into the void and blink is façade and truth – all the while the void stares back. The “he” or “she” of narrative which only masks the unbearable lightness of neutrality and the choice – the choice that must act to choose forgetfulness for Truth, put other before dialectical process. The ‘uber’ of going under is simultaneously animism and illusion, Being and beings, death as the impossible depths of life and transcendence as the erasure of the other*.

*see https://www.mixermuse.com/blog/2012/01/05/footnote-to-language-animism-and-illusion/

Going Home Again By DAVID BROOKS

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My comments regarding the New York Times story…

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/opinion/going-home-again.html

The story about Rod’s sister is certainly a painful tragedy. Emmanuel Levinas, a French philosopher, was a concentration camp survivor. He thought of the other as an absolute singularity and the death of the other as an unrecoverable loss. I am a Dreher also from Louisiana and have experienced this pain with the long painful loss of two older brothers. My brothers were lost in the Vietnam War. They both returned but left their young spirits in the jungle. They suffered intensely and were never the same after they returned. One recently died. He told me he woke up many nights with the Vietnamese women and children he had to shoot from his helicopter standing around his bed even after he was fully awake. The enemy shot at their helicopters with the women and children surrounding them. The other has been almost totally a hermit since he returned. Since Vietnam, he has never been ‘normal’ in any since of the word. While they were not counted as part of the body bag count they and our family’s life was never the same after they returned from Vietnam. Rod’s sister tragically died from cancer. Cancer strikes the victims loved ones as well but as helplessness. We each die inside when our loved one dies and cancer only reminds us of our absolute finitude and vulnerability. War is a human act. War can be prevented in many cases. When our loved ones are victims of war we feel pain and helplessness but we also feel anger. When our politicians start wars that are clearly not a matter of absolute and imminent necessity for survival or by mistake, this error may be abstract to most Americans but to those of us that directly experienced the resulting pain, we are angered by the glibness of such abstractions and everyone that made such tragedies possible from voters to political decision makers. Rod and I are on opposite sides of the political spectrum but pain is universal for mortals. We will carry our tragic losses every day for the rest of our lives but PLEASE folks do not think of war as one political issue among others, it is horrible tragedy that we can prevent – If you are grateful to our veterans please take our pain to the voting booth.

What is a “Postmodern Conservative”?

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There used to be a conservative website, some of its content is still around, called “The Postmodern Conservative”. I read a little content from this site as I am a little intrigued how one could maintain the conjecture of a ‘postmodern conservative’. On the surface, this is an oxymoron. Perhaps it is intended ironically. It is tantamount to thinking of Nietzsche’s nihilism and Christianity together in positive terms. Postmodern thinking seeks to overturn constructionism and its resulting epistemological result, structuralism. Postmoderism cannot be thought as a coherent, autonomous and positive philosophy. It is a symbiotic philosophy. It preys on structure and narrative. It is a methodology that deconstructs structure based on the specific structure’s own content, its counter narratives that contradict and undermine its canonical determinations. No philosophical system of thought is immune from the oxidizing effect of its most ardent iron. Deconstruction is the tool of the nihilist. In light of this, how would a ‘conservative’ postmodernists be thought except as ironically?

Their claim is further confused in their assertion that a ‘conservative’ postmodernist is more coherent that a ‘liberal’ postmodernist. This is like thinking that a Lucifer is more Christ-like than an Antichrist. What would one ‘conserve’ as a postmodernist? Why would the content of their conservation be immune from their own devices? How could a postmodern recommend ‘conservative’ content over ‘liberal’ content? Haven’t we established a canon, a ‘logocentrism’, by maintaining conservatism? If the thought is one of a sort of Darwinian mind-beating as opposed to the more conventional chest-beating in the belief that survival of the fittest is established, these folks should re-read Derrida’s essay on “Force and Signification” in “Writing and Difference”. Derrida writes, “To comprehend the structure of a becoming, the form of a force, is to lose meaning by gaining it.” 1) If the structure of ‘conservatism’ is meaningful and is to be recommended over ‘liberalism’ then, for deconstruction, its meaning is lost at the same time that it is achieved.

If, on the other hand, ‘conservatism’ here is meant to designate brute force, mystification of raw power, then power becomes that text that Derrida writes of when he states, “To say that force is the origin of the phenomenon is to say nothing” 2) He goes on to state that Hegel clearly demonstrates that force is a tautology. Force can only assert itself. Force and language amount to the same thing, the same identity. Nothing new or different is added in thinking either word. To rejoin this notion to conservatism is reminiscent of Ayn Rand and her elitist dogma; a tautology of power makes right, history IS the narrative of the conqueror. Without regard to any moral or ethical disjoins, this assertion merely redundantly marks itself. Its only claim is to force or the structuralism that it establishes. To deconstruct its specific narrative is the task of postmodernism. To deconstruct deconstructionism is to revert to constructionism and thus re-establish (or never have de-established) its myopic insistence, its force. In other words, it is to say nothing using a lot of words. While this trend has certainly not been alien to philosophy it seems to rise to the level of infinite nonsense in the thought of a “Postmodern Conservative”.

 
1) Writing and Difference, Force and Signification, page 26 (paperback)
2) Ibid, page 26 (bottom)

Bloggers Get Ready for 2012 – Dealing with the Radical Right

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I am always amazed at right-wing efforts to revise history to fit their canonical wish for purity. The most absurd attempt I can think of is “Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning” by Jonah Goldberg. According to Goldberg, Democrats should feel right at home in their local KKK meeting. Don’t you love all those bleeding heart, white supremacists? They are so touch feely and came out in huge numbers for Obama. In this parallel universe it is easy to feel revulsion from the collision of our universe and their fantasy land.

I must admit I am fascinated as to how these folks can reach these conclusions with both oars in the water. I have exposed the Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini myths elsewhere

(https://www.mixermuse.com/blog/2010/01/03/fascism-is-liberal-and-squares-are-circles/)

with lots of data and direct quotes from these guys showing their love for nationalism and their violent hatred for socialists and liberals. Every serious historical scholar I have found has nothing but absolute disdain for Goldberg and his illusions. Most average folks shake their head when they hear such nonsense. However, as in any unfalsifiable claim, they have an explanation for rejection of their wackiness, it is the liberal press, scholars associated with communist universities, antichrist-secular-God-haters and so on that have deluded average folks and revised history. Their version is the sanctified version and you are either in their church or not, holy or profane.

I have also found this pathology on the sanctified version of Southern history, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and how the Republicans were the saviors of Southern blacks and the Democrats were the racist bigots that opposed Civil Rights. This is a prized list these folks love to pass around:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-gop/1499184/posts

Here is their entry for 1964…

June 9, 1964 Republicans condemn 14-hour filibuster against 1964 Civil Rights Act by U.S. Senator and former Ku Klux Klansman Robert Byrd (D-WV), who still serves in the Senate
June 10, 1964 Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen (R-IL) criticizes Democrat filibuster against 1964 Civil Rights Act, calls on Democrats to stop opposing racial equality
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was introduced and approved by a staggering majority of Republicans in the Senate. The Act was opposed by most southern Democrat senators, several of whom were proud segregationists—one of them being Al Gore Sr. Democrat President Lyndon B. Johnson relied on Illinois Senator Everett Dirkson, the Republican leader from Illinois, to get the Act passed.
June 20, 1964 The Chicago Defender, renowned African-American newspaper, praises Senate Republican Leader Everett Dirksen (R-IL) for leading passage of 1964 Civil Rights Act

There is nothing here about that guy LBJ, he was the lowly Democratic president at the time that signed the bill. I have responded to this topic elsewhere:

http://mixermuse.com/blog/2010/03/29/the-democrats-filibustered-the-civil-rights-act-of-1964-and-performed-southern-lynching/

http://mixermuse.com/blog/2009/12/15/of-all-the-varieties-of-virtues-liberalism-is-the-most-beloved-aristotle/ (this has the actual vote counts fro the bill)

If you notice there is a distinct difference in the way I approach this topic and Goldberg and the Republican white-washed list approaches the topic.

I think it is great that Republicans starting with Lincoln were against slavery and for Civil Rights.

I know there was post Civil Rights Democrats that were racists in the South. It is only logical that a Southern Democrat would hate the party that won the war and killed them in large numbers. Of course, there were Northern Democrats that equally hated slavery and supported Civil Rights. I am willing to give credit where the historical record demonstrates credit is due.

I also know, being from the South that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 turned white Southerners against the party that sided with them in the Civil War. The real issue for white Southerners was not Republican or Democrat but white and black. When busing started in the South white, Democratic Southerners became white Republican Southerners. Initially, they voted for the Dixiecrats and retained their party affiliation in the Democratic Party. Eventually, they started voting Republican and were DINOs (Democrats in Name Only). In the eighties and nineties they changed party affiliation.

Today, in Louisiana the clan groups are in northern Louisiana where the WASPs are dominate. Most of the north is Republican. In the south where the Cajuns live, it is typically Catholic and Democrat. I used to debate David Duke on the LSU campus. He and his Nazis always came dressed in Nazi uniforms and expressed only violent hatred for the left. He actually won a seat in the House of Representatives as a Republican. Only a crazy idiot would tell you that KKK’ers are Democrats. They make no bones about what party they vote for (if they haven’t been convicted of a felony of course). Much of the blogging you will find on the internet about those liberal fascists comes from white supremacists and many times from prisons. The internet is a perfect media to peddle their goods.

The revisionist right is fond of claiming Republicans voted more for Civil Rights than Democrats. On the surface, percentage wise (the Republicans were in the minority) this is true but as the data shows in the link above, the actual votes fell along the Mason-Dixon line. Southern Democrats and Republicans voted against it. Northern Democrats and Republicans voted for it. Note that Southern Republicans voted unanimously against it and Democrats were mixed.

Here is the point. Whenever a zealot tells you about history there are ‘tells’ (i.e., poker) that will inform you when they are revising history to suit their needs. They want to convince you that they are keepers of the truth and everyone else is trying to deceive you. It is pure manipulation. Here are the tells:

1) Everything they did was historically correct.
2) Everything the opposition did was historically incorrect (otherwise called political correctness).
3) They use “proofs” a-temporally. In other words, for all time they were politically correct and for all time the opposition was politically incorrect.

These techniques were raised to a fine art by the Nazis. The bottom line is that to get to the truth you need an open mind and a resolve to work. The real data is typically out there with these kinds of issues but it is not easy to find. Include references in your proofs. Go with reputable sources. If you use Wikipedia you must check the references.

If you know of demographic data by region from the sixties to the present for party affiliation please let me know. I have checked Pew, Gallop, The Census Bureau and others but no luck yet. I know I can dig election data out of the Congressional and Presidential official government records and that may be what I need to do. I am not interested in books about the era only hard data.

When zealots try to sell you on their truth they are insulting you. They think you are too stupid to check their ‘facts’. I think of it as part of my civic duty to check the data if I do not have it handy and get back to them whenever I can about my findings. I never insult them personally but I am often the brunt of personal insults. If you return their rude insults you lost the argument so don’t give them that pleasure; that is what they want. The political stalemate in our country will not be solved on either side by war but by rationality. The majority of folks will learn and make wise political decisions while the zealots will always have their church. If they get violent we pay our taxes to law enforcement to deal with them.

Here is an interesting quote from Newt:

“Johnson shattered his party, Gingrich went on to say, because he had “grotesquely overreached” in four areas: mismanagement of the economy, the failure in Vietnam, the cultural divisions that emerged in part over Vietnam and later civil rights initiatives. Johnson’s mistake on civil rights, he said, was not in signing major legislation but in later getting ahead of the country by supporting school busing and failing to take a firmer stance against racial violence in the cities.”

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2010/03/gingrich-like-lbj-obama-risks.html

Some other interesting links:

http://www.tagalogshortstories.com/civil_rights_act_of_1964/encyclopedia.htm

http://100days.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/how-kennedy-won-the-house-and-lost-the-south/

Fantasy and Lies OR Reality and Facts

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It is odd that Republicans how found religion on the debt after the Bush administration ran the debt up 85% while President Obama’s administration has only run it up 41%.

http://mixermuse.com/blog/2011/12/08/all-you-need-to-know-about-politics/

Let’s not even think about discretionary and non-discretionary parts of the budget.

In any case, I think most of us can agree debt is important.

I guess the next thing in line after debt for Republicans would be quality of life or as they would have it, the misery index.

For me, the next thing would be life or the lack of it, death. For Iraq and Afghanistan, 7,648 of our children have been killed.

http://icasualties.org/

Bush started these absurd wars. I know from personal experience with two older brothers that wars create misery and death. Additionally, the cost of both wars is estimated at $1,284,743,552,321.

http://costofwar.com/en/

http://nationalpriorities.org/en/blog/2011/08/16/How-Safe-Are-You/

The cost of the wars, make the national debt look insignificant. I am not a Ron Paul supporter but I like his stand on foreign engagement. He is the only Republican candidate that is not itching for another war. If you really care about the debt, misery and/or body count you should vote to re-elect President Obama.

What Republicans Want…

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Mitt recently stated, “The president says he wants to transform America, I don’t want to transform America into something else. I want to restore it”

Mitt Romney along with Sarah Palin is fond of mocking President Obama for his promise of “hope and change”. So, what is the alternative to hope and change? Is it hopelessness and changelessness?

Or

Let’s see, restore it to…

…the Bush administration

Bush started two wars and bankrupted the economy. President Bush increased the national debt more than twice as much as President Obama. During his administration unemployment went up 90% more than during the Obama administration.

http://mixermuse.com/blog/2011/12/08/all-you-need-to-know-about-politics/

…prior to Medicare and Medicaid?

“Before Medicare, only 51% of people aged 65 and older had health care coverage, and nearly 30% lived below the federal poverty level.”

http://www.usgovernmentbenefits.org/hd/index.php?t=define+medicare

…before women had the right to vote and blacks and gays were hung for entertainment?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States

…before Social Security?

“the best estimates show that the elderly poverty rate in 1935 was probably somewhere in the range of 70 to 90 percent.”

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/aug/17/eddie-bernice-johnson/texas-congresswoman-eddie-bernice-johnson-says-soc/

…before the civil war

Slavery

…from the beginning

In 1800, the mean life span in the United States was about a quarter century

In 1900 the mean was about 50 years

http://www.longevity.ca/info_life_expectancy.htm

Do you REALLY want to go there?

The Republicans are painting a fantasy picture for voters that need to believe fantasies of the past – it NEVER happened. The fact is that we have progressed from a dark past albeit in a bumpy and messy way. It is absolute insanity to want to go back to the way it really was. There was no earlier, greater time than now for the United States. Yes, a few things may have been better but don’t let them fool you, things are better now than they have ever been for folks.

So, here is the question, do you want to transform our future or restore our past?

Thoughts Concerning Being and Other

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The Other is radical only if the desire for it is not the possibility for anticipating it as the desirable or of thinking it out beforehand but if it comes aimlessly as an absolute alterity, like death.

John Heaton ‘The Other and Psychotherapy’ in Provocation of Levinas

New research on the unconsciousness is reviving discussions of Freud and his relevance. Some researchers have talked about the unconscious as “background processors” as threads of tasks that run in background mode set off by sensations, historical associations and future-oriented stress and anxiety. These ‘threads’ constantly provide alternative vias for consciousness. They texture and fill out the tenure of conscious behavior. Many areas of the brain are ‘lit up’ by unconscious activity and consciousness appears to unite these various internal ‘dialogs’.

In Heidegger’s discussion of the thing he wants to, in true phenomenological fashion, get away from ‘theorizing’ about Being from a pre-ordained, ‘mathematical’ project and let the thing show itself from itself. So, for example, when we think about spatiality instead of thinking about it as empty space with physical dimension he would have us think about regionality. To say that the chair we are looking at is geometrically further from us in terms of feet and inches than the spectacles we are using to look at them is surely correct mathematically but when we are focused on the chair, the region we inhabit in that lived experience is much closer to the chair than the spectacles on our face we are viewing it with. Heidegger called this lived space. Thus, for the case of space we can see that the traditional, historical way we think about it obscures the way we actually ‘experience’ space. This is how Heidegger lets the thing, space in this case, show itself as itself.

The showing of phenomena gets more interesting when Heidegger starts discussing the “closedness” of things. Dr. Wendell Kisner makes this point:

“However, if “closedness” or the withdrawing of being into concealment is the crucial point at which the possibility of truth as such is first opened, then the elimination of all closedness in the mathematical project does not indicate what things are as such, but rather how things are manifest within that project. Phenomenologically speaking, things are manifest in the mathematical project as nothing more than what they show themselves to be in its terms. But it can readily be seen that such a mode of disclosure presents a profound challenge to any attempt to thinking about things outside of this horizon insofar as, in its banishment of any and all closedness, it mitigates against any other possibility of disclosure. Things are just this and nothing more.” 1)

One way of thinking about the mathematical project might be in terms of the history of physics. Physics has certainly formulated theories about motion and space in such paradigms as Newtonian physics. Newtonian physics demonstrates a certain ‘correctness’ about things. It provides a predictive model for understanding the motion of cannon balls and planets. Thus, a ‘mathematical project’ has consistency within itself; it is not random ravings of a madman. It also has a kind of correlation with the thing it abstracts from. Heidegger referred to this as correctness. However, when thought from the perspective of Einstein’s space-time, quantum mechanics or dark matter and dark energy, we see a kind of scientific evolution that layers the earlier mathematical enterprise with radically different and uprooting understandings such as absolute time and space with relative time and space. Quantum mechanics has not found a way of resolving itself with the macro-physics of Newton and yet, integrated chips would not be possible without it. The search for dark matter and dark energy which is thought to comprise most of the universe and even more, keeps the universe from collapsing in on itself, would make Newton’s critique of spooky action at a distance seems mundane in comparison.

What all this indicates is that the mathematical project has consistency, correlation (visa vie predictability) but never captures the thing itself, the closedness and refusal of the thing to final resolution or disclosure. When one adds in the notion of spatiality as Heidegger discusses or Freud’s discussion of regression (as a form a spatiality) we can see that while the thing can lend itself to disclosure, finality is always lacking. The inability of things to ultimately disclose themselves in light, the mathematical project, is a phenomenal showing of refusal or closedness. This caught Heidegger’s attention and ultimately was rooted in Aristotle.

It would be difficult to make the claim that the mathematical project is simply a kind of narcissistic, mental and purely individuated process as some idealists might claim. There is an opening up of things, an invitation that participates in our mathematical projects but the thing can never be taken to account in its entirety. Its presence is always together with its absence, its refusal, its closedness. This uniformity and manifold plurality was the direction of thought for Aristotle. In this, the ontological distinction of Being and beings is thought by Heidegger.

Dr. Kisner writes,

In the mathematical project Heidegger asserts that, as opposed to the Aristotelian account in which natural bodies had a telos or an inner goal-oriented impetus, what now constitutes a natural body has no hidden interior: “Bodies have no concealed qualities, powers, and capacities. Natural bodies are now only what they show themselves as, within this projected realm.” 2)

Later thinking about Aristotle made telos a kind of animism, another property of a thing but that sifts the thinking of things through a retrospective, historical reduction. This becomes evident when one reflects on one of Aristotle’s mentor. In the Anaximander fragment, Heraclitus maintains that one cannot step into the same river twice. The river as ‘the same’, transformed as a property, does not show the river of Heraclitus but covers it up. It mediates the river as a repeatable, truncated concept. This kind of historical turn came at the same time as Hegel thought Christianity first announced subjectivity and reflection and Heidegger criticized the objectification of Being that frames (Gestell) beings as a property, a substance, an abstract thing. Properties in this sense came through the historical notion of static substance, of stasis that underlies things. A kind of dualism results from the substance/not-substance distinction; thus, the Cartesian split of mind/body, subject/object, natura/artifice.

Anaximander thought that all things rose from apeiron translated as limitless or indeterminate. Simplicius, writing of Anaximander’s notion of apeiron, states “Things perish into those things out of which they have their being, according to necessity.” (Phys. 24. 13) 3) Being is given by necessity standing out from indeterminacy and limitlessness. ‘Necessity’ here is not explained or named as in ‘God’ as that would come way too late and as an afterthought for the delicacy of this thought. Things originate (arche’) of necessity but not from immutability and sameness such as substance. Things stand out in their unity given from necessity but born from no-thing. No-thing here is not given merely as the negation of thing but as not yet determinable. Heidegger writes in “What is Metaphysics”,

But are we entirely sure what we are presupposing here? Is it really the case that “is-not,” negatedness, and thus negation, are the category into which the nothing fits as a specific case of “the negated”? It might be the other way around. Maybe the occurrence of the nothing does not depend on the “is-not” and the act of negating. Maybe the act of negation and its “is-not” can occur only if the nothing first occurs. This point has never even been explicitly raised as a question, much less decided. 4)

Heidegger goes on to think of no-thing in terms of the phenomenal experiences of boredom, anxiety and dread and in so doing step away from a more Kantian reference of the thing-in-itself. He also wishes to distinguish his ontology from onto-theology, the thing from which all things proceed. In this tactic Heidegger tries to uproot the common notion a thing as known and reduced to property and think from a more Greek ground to re-awaken the question of beings and non-being. On this more sure footing Heidegger would later reflect on the fourfold: earth, sky, divinities and mortals.

In Heidegger’s discussion of the bridge we are not ‘be-thinged’ by pre-cognitive notions of things as substance. We step away from a kind of Hegelian master-slave dichotomy wherein we (the master) ‘thing’ ourselves (become the slave) in our hasty reduction of ontology to things. Dr. Kisner points this duality out in his discussion of natura and artifice in which artifice has become natura and natura cannot be distinguished from artifice. In “Building Dwelling Thinking” things are confluent. They flow together in what I perceive as a kind of musicality. They do not arise from static eternal notes that play through the Latinized, Aristotelian potentiality and actuality, the dunamis of existence. They co-arise spontaneously and gracefully from apeiron, indeterminacy and limitlessness.

This is not to imply randomness and disconcert. Things necessitate, set bounds and measure. They co-relate and mingle with purpose that open themselves to science and mathematical projects all the while maintaining their suspension from no-thing, their concealment, their withdrawal from beings. This way towards thinking is reminiscent of current discussion of unconsciousness and the relation to consciousness.

“The New Unconscious” 5) explores recent studies in the unconscious mind. Scans of the brain indicate various parts of the brain are continually running threads of pre-conscious assimilation and differentiation in the background. These threads may be initiated by sensations, regressions to personal histories and language cues. However, much of the initiators are still shrouded in mystery. Consciousness is thought to occur as communication ripples throughout the brain texturing disparate and autonomous threads of pre-cognitive, syntactic and semantic content. Some psychological maladies and pathologies such as dissociative personality disorder, multiple personalities, narcissism, regression, repression and depression seem to occur more when the neural networking pathways that ripple through the brain break down.

In opposition to a hierarchy of agency, consciousness seems to bubble up from a ‘low-arche’, a cauldron of independent, non-synchronized, contradictory background ‘noise’ in the brain. The appearance of consciousness is a posteriori and ad hoc. Research has shown that will and causality is a ‘magical illusion’ that can be manipulated experiementally 6). Consciousness shows itself as a unified necessity from a concealed plurality which might be thought in the notion of apeiron. These non-synchronous nodes of content do not exist in a vacuum but are played as the cacophony of confluent initiators such as sight, taste, auditory, kinesthetic memory, etc. Since many of these initiators appear as shared in environment (umwelt and horizon) and what is more co-arise as phusis of beings, they have the appearance of shared coherence and correlation. The logic of identity, agency and causation seems to be an assent to the effacement of radicalize alterity. The proper notion of Being as noun rooted in non-changing, immutable substance arises without proper agency from the background noise of the disparate, pre-synchronized (anachrony) unconscious. The semblance of sameness given ad hoc in unity as peros, limit and boundary ecstatically stands out in apeiron. What get lost in sameness is the ‘other-poor’ as thought with Heidegger’s notion of ‘world-poor’, anachrony of the many, the self as radical passivity. The negation of other becomes me.

If consciousness is not rooted in an absolute identity then the other can only be mediated as an object of consciousness, a moment of self-determination and hypostatic, auto arousal 7) fascination. However, the erection of the sanctum of self is built on the shifting sands of unconscious confluences, incommensurate and uncorrelated ‘manifold pluralities’ (polumeres). The self in this case is not a moment of identity but a step away from our own dissolution, the intolerance of radical homelessness, no place.

In view of this refusal for disclosure, what faces us when we face the other, look in their eyes, when they speak to us? When the other faces us we gaze upon our sheer nakedness, “it comes aimlessly as an absolute alterity, like death”. The other in this case is not no-thing but the erasure that ever faces me and undoes me.

This is a work in progress… https://www.mixermuse.com/blog/2011/12/28/about-this-blog/

1) “The Fourfold Revisited: Heideggerian Ecological Practice and the Ontology of Things”
The Trumpeter ISSN: 0832-6193 Volume 24, Number 3 (2008), Page 7

2) “The Fourfold Revisited: Heideggerian Ecological Practice and the Ontology of Things”
The Trumpeter ISSN: 0832-6193 Volume 24, Number 3 (2008), Page 6

3) http://www.abu.nb.ca/Courses/GrPhil/Anaximander.htm

4) What is Metaphysics? In Basic Writings, ed. David Krell. San Francisco: Harper. Page 99

5) The New Unconscious
Edited by Ran R. Hassin, James S. Uleman and John A. Bargh
Oxford University Press, Inc.
ISBN13: 9780195307696ISBN10: 0195307690Paperback, 608 pages
2005

6) The New Unconscious
Edited by Ran R. Hassin, James S. Uleman and John A. Bargh
Oxford University Press, Inc.
ISBN13: 9780195307696ISBN10: 0195307690Paperback, “The Illusion of Conscious Control”
2005

7) http://www.pnas.org/content/101/17/6333.full.pdf

Regarding the Payroll Tax Reduction Bill:

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The flagrant and merely politically trite politics that folks clearly despise is evident in the House of Representatives if any reasonable person looks at the facts. I have compiled the pertinent facts with links to the official House of Representatives site and the U.S. Senate site. If you want your politicians to act different you need to vote different. If you keep acting the same you will get the same result. Know the facts then, base your opinions on the facts not visa-versa. We will all benefit from informed voters.

The House of Representatives passed HR 3630 on December 13.

224 Republicans voted for it.

14 Republicans voted against it.

10 Democrats voted for it.

179 Democrats voted against it.

3 Republicans and 3 Democrats did not vote

93% Republicans voted for it and 5% Democrats voted for it – Why?

http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2011/roll923.xml

Besides Payroll Tax Reduction, Unemployment Insurance Extension and the Medicare “Doc fix” I counted over 100 provisions not in any way related to these 3 issues. Other issues include EPA, flood insurance, education, drug testing, housing, highway, FCC provisions and oh yes, the Keystone pipeline. This “poison pill” is what Republicans used to call “earmarks”. Why do you think the Democrats did not go for it?

The Senate bill was a fairly “clean” bill with only the original three issues and the Keystone pipeline.

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/R?r112:FLD001:S08749

Harry Reid Sponsor, Mitch McConnell Cosponsor – Number: S.Amdt. 1465

http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=112&session=1&vote=00232#name

89 yeas, 10 nays, and 1 no vote

7 republican nays, 2 democrat nays, 1 independent nays – as close to unanimous as it gets

If the House of Representatives could bring itself to write a bill like the Senate’s bill this whole thing would have been resolved a long time ago.