Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2001 08:59:28 -0400 (EDT)


----- Original Message -----
From: Rene de Bakker <rbakker-AT-bs18.bs.uva.nl>
To: <heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu>
Sent: Thursday, April 26, 2001 11:06 AM
Subject: Re: indifference


GARY C MOORE:
I was just planning to get thoroughly drunk today, but, at least for the
moment, your letter has deflected me from this primary purpose of life. With
your usual brilliant incisiveness, you cut right to the heart of several
basic problems in Heidegger and several others.

RENE DE BAKKER:
In later writings, Heidegger states that when a transition from metaphysical
representation to the essence (Wesen) of metaphysics is at stake, we seem to
fall into an abyss. (Identity and difference, German p.28)  This abyss is
the one that in BT 'opens up' in authenticity.

GARY C MOORE:
I wish I had thought of this. Maybe I would have. I might have being going
in the right direction. But you got there. Heidegger in KANT AND THE PROBLEM
OF METAPHYSICS states literally the Da-sein is metaphysics, therefore
logically it can never be something you get away from or drop like an
outworn intellectual fad. Metaphysics is Da-sein. And I think he made his
point very well that Kant thought the same thing. In the second volume of
NIETZSCHE, The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, he again makes this point in
defining "the guiding question," but makes it clear that, except for the
great philosophers like Hegel and Kant, philosophers get stuck in a trivial
narcissism of playing with essentially pointless words without ever even
realizing that what the metaphysics of 'the guiding question" was guiding
toward was the utterly open, groundless, and 'eternally' unending "grounding
question," the only question that does not presuppose its answer. The
metaphysics is absolutely necessary, and stays necessary as it was used in
Hegel and Kant in order to keep open "the grounding question" which is
necessarily beyond metaphysics, but is only kept open by the metaphysics
that is Da-sein (I am not at my best now, forgive me). That what
'authenticity' is is this opening up states brilliantly in a few words that
I blunderingly have been trying to say in thousands. And necessarily therein
"the grounding question" ceases to have any metaphysical or linguistic
structure at all, and becomes the primordial passion literally. I will get
back to this.

RENE DE BAKKER:
Heidegger later said, that BT necessarily takes its depart from metaphysics.
Trying to catch being-in-the-world as a unity, leads to the abyss.

GARY C MOORE:
Again brilliant, and makes me feel very foolish. But it explains so many
things in Heidegger that merely seemed to verge on the mystical or even the
pompous and fraudulent. "Trying to catch" is absolutely perfect. That is
exactly what so many people try to make Heidegger do, and, to give them
credit, he does seem to lead them down the garden path, or like the fox in
the trap of Hannah Arendt's little story, tries to get them to join him in
his trap. But he does leave plenty of clues saying that what you catch is
literally nothing. And you can do nothing with nothing.

RENE DE BAKKER:
But, says H. ibidem: the abyss is not the empty nothing, nor dark chaos, but
Er-Eignis. Whatever that may be, it is in any case in-different with regard
to metaphysical difference. BT, German p.53: "Dasein exists always in one of
these modes [authenticity, inauthenticity], resp. in the modal indifference
toward them." So, indifference is not only in everydayness, but "is" also
between everydayness and authenticity. Where or when is that? You stressed
the identity of Dasein in both.
I got the idea of a hinge that is in between.

GARY C MOORE:
I have been trying to deal with indifference for some time now. I had just
stumbled on the term "in-difference" a week ago, but have not at all
developed it. I was going to approach it from the two aspects of "joy" - 1)
the joy from taking on deliberately the certainty of death in B&T, and 2)
the joy beyond comparison at the end of chapter 8 of the first volume of
NIETZSCHE, The Will to Power as Art - along with the technique of self-irony
and self-trivialization of Kierkegaard which would reduce the hermeneutic
circle to "idle chatter," and the "profound boredoom" of FUNDAMENTAL
CONCEPTS OF METAPHYSICS back in a 'circle' to Angst which is anxiety in the
face of nothing, or in the realization of the fundamental uselessness and
pointlessness of everything in the face of death - all of which in some way
were going to reflect  the even more fundamental mood of indifference which
is the passion  of the grounding question I mentioned above. That it is a
passion I was going to show through the passage about the strange mood
Heidegger mentions in B&T that should fit this quite well if done right with
what Freud says about "indifference" in The Interpretation of Dreams
specifically as observed in gorillas, i.e., that their "indifference" is
actually a state of intense observation (of you the other observer) combined
with an immediate readiness for aggressive display - alone with Camus'
Mersault in The Stranger, which I disliked intensely when I first read it,
but now I think I understand that the last page of the book literally
explains his murderous indifference as precisely a latent but intense
passion of searching for anything, anything at all, that could possibly be
truly important, and only finding it on the day of his execution. His
"indifference" acted with no intellectual or metaphysical structure
whatsoever to do the same thing as the "guiding question" does for the
"grounding question," and boils down philosophically to a triviality, that
the 'answer' is the quest itself, but one finds as Mersualt did that that
'answer' is your own particular life that has nothing to do with
abstractions, and when put in a bind like that, is the most important thing
in the universe. The concept of "indifference as the hinge" is possibly the
most brilliant thing in your letter: it is the "hinge" that keeps Da-sein
together that must always be inauthentic,yet whose "always already" call is
ever present as the call to authenticity - which is merely a modification of
inauthenticity. But you you understand clearly how both of these modes can
be genuine and ungenuine? I can get bits and pieces, but you seem to have
the answers. Please tell me.

RENE DE BAKKER:
In Contributions he says, that the Kehre, turning is between Entwurf and
Geworfenheit. (This is not Heidegger's Kehre, but the Kehre in Being itself)
Gelassenheit, German p.59: Entschlossenheit/authenticity is thought in BT as
the own undertaken opening up FOR the open. (das EIGENS uebernommene
Sichoeffnen FUER das Offene).
>
> Eigens - Er-Eignis
> Own - En-Owning
>
> Not property, but getting back to where you always were, but without
reaching it. An-denken: not taking into posession, con-cipere, but an-, near
to it.
Heraklitos' Anchibasie, in-die-Naehe gehen. (Gelassenheit, p. 69).

GARY C MOORE:
Once again, "I knew that." No, "releasement" would be the perfect unifying
concept for joy, triviality, boredom, anxiety, and murderousness. "Not
property, but getting back to where you always were, but without reaching
it, " is a beautiful summary of Heidegger. After all, when you accomplish
your ownmost in the face of death, he says you then must give up everything,
especially your "ownmost."
>

'Sincerely'
Gary C. Moore


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