Date: Mon, 3 Mar 2003 00:35:59 -0800 (PST)
Subject: ON SARTRE'S CRITIQUE OF DIALECTICAL REASON, TIME, THE KAPALIKAS, ABHINAVA, & HUMOR IF POSSIBLE


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INTRODUCTION

 

Dear Jud and Sunthar,

I was going to make this much more elaborate, overdoing it as usual, and had most of this typed up Saturday. But the old lady said Friday she had the intestinal flu and by god she was right. So I’ll just try to edit it and complete the response to various letters, especially Sunthar’s and Jud’s. One must remember that in treating popular bestselling authors like Tony Hillerman and Thomas Harris that Fyodor Mikhailovitch Dostoyevsky was a popular bestselling author too. Trying to convey things clearly and simply, obviously too simply to many highly sophisticated scholars, is actually a philosophical commitment to the proposition that all human beings have a fundamental grasp of what is “the truth of the case” as Ludwig Wittgenstein would put it. And he would be the first to agree. Mystery novels utterly fascinated him, and Dostoyevsky’s greatest novels, CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, THE IDIOT, THE POSSESSED or THE DEMONS, and, most of all, THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, all were primarily murder mysteries revolving around not only how the murderer will be caught or who the murderer is but, even more so, why there was a murder in the first place as if murder is a fundamental act that basically reveals, at least in one fashion, what human nature is and, this is certainly true of Dostoyevsky, Harris, and Hillerman, how all human beings have something in common nature with the murderer. Ludwig Wittgenstein himself certainly contemplated murdering real people though just in fantasy . . . or maybe he just never was caught? And one must remember he was a highly trained and terribly experienced killer. Neither Sartre nor Heidegger nor even Dostoyevsky (?) looked a man straight in the eye and killed them, but Wittgenstein did numerous times. And one must always remember a successful murderer, in the ‘criminal’ sense of the term, is not even suspected much less caught. And one must remember especially in THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV motives and passions for murder are so amply spread around that even the ‘innocent’ begin to wonder if they really did it. And remember the prosecutor’s interrogation of Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov. The prosecutor knows he cannot prove Raskolnikov committed the murders, so the only way he can ‘catch’ him is to demonstrate to Raskolnikov he thoroughly understands his thinking and motives so that Raskolnikov can no longer think of himself as unique and a ‘superman.’ That ‘polite discussion’ between equals was a great demonstration of Sartre’s understanding of the dialectic. The facts are there. In fact, that is just the problem – they are just there, lying there, not making any connections all of their own. They are just “this” and “this” and “this” and “this” . . . . just like in daily, trivial, dreary everyday reality. A human being has got to come along and connect them, i.e., incorporate them into their universe to give them ‘meaning’ which is always and only can be human meaning. “Meaning” and “human being” are synonymous. That utterly destroys the absoluteness of “meaning” --- it can no longer have anything to do with ‘God’ or ‘reality’ as something outside of human being --- but it does place absoluteness in its proper and only place. God is always in human being by contextual definition, i.e., “It is always the case.” Human being can never be in ‘God.’ The whole cannot be in the part. I think I shall have to break this letter into parts.

 

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HTML VERSION:

INTRODUCTION

Dear Jud and Sunthar,

I was going to make this much more elaborate, overdoing it as usual, and had most of this typed up Saturday. But the old lady said Friday she had the intestinal flu and by god she was right. So I’ll just try to edit it and complete the response to various letters, especially Sunthar’s and Jud’s. One must remember that in treating popular bestselling authors like Tony Hillerman and Thomas Harris that Fyodor Mikhailovitch Dostoyevsky was a popular bestselling author too. Trying to convey things clearly and simply, obviously too simply to many highly sophisticated scholars, is actually a philosophical commitment to the proposition that all human beings have a fundamental grasp of what is “the truth of the case” as Ludwig Wittgenstein would put it. And he would be the first to agree. Mystery novels utterly fascinated him, and Dostoyevsky’s greatest novels, CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, THE IDIOT, THE POSSESSED or THE DEMONS, and, most of all, THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, all were primarily murder mysteries revolving around not only how the murderer will be caught or who the murderer is but, even more so, why there was a murder in the first place as if murder is a fundamental act that basically reveals, at least in one fashion, what human nature is and, this is certainly true of Dostoyevsky, Harris, and Hillerman, how all human beings have something in common nature with the murderer. Ludwig Wittgenstein himself certainly contemplated murdering real people though just in fantasy . . . or maybe he just never was caught? And one must remember he was a highly trained and terribly experienced killer. Neither Sartre nor Heidegger nor even Dostoyevsky (?) looked a man straight in the eye and killed them, but Wittgenstein did numerous times. And one must always remember a successful murderer, in the ‘criminal’ sense of the term, is not even suspected much less caught. And one must remember especially in THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV motives and passions for murder are so amply spread around that even the ‘innocent’ begin to wonder if they really did it. And remember the prosecutor’s interrogation of Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov. The prosecutor knows he cannot prove Raskolnikov committed the murders, so the only way he can ‘catch’ him is to demonstrate to Raskolnikov he thoroughly understands his thinking and motives so that Raskolnikov can no longer think of himself as unique and a ‘superman.’ That ‘polite discussion’ between equals was a great demonstration of Sartre’s understanding of the dialectic. The facts are there. In fact, that is just the problem – they are just there, lying there, not making any connections all of their own. They are just “this” and “this” and “this” and “this” . . . . just like in daily, trivial, dreary everyday reality. A human being has got to come along and connect them, i.e., incorporate them into their universe to give them ‘meaning’ which is always and only can be human meaning. “Meaning” and “human being” are synonymous. That utterly destroys the absoluteness of “meaning” --- it can no longer have anything to do with ‘God’ or ‘reality’ as something outside of human being --- but it does place absoluteness in its proper and only place. God is always in human being by contextual definition, i.e., “It is always the case.” Human being can never be in ‘God.’ The whole cannot be in the part. I think I shall have to break this letter into parts.