The Hegelian Dialectic



In the end, somehow I came out with a Bachelor of Arts degree from an accredited college. My concentration was modern philosophy and comparative religions of which nearly all the contents have been misfiled somewhere in the card stacks in my noodle. This simply means that you could ask me a question about dinner and I could give a totally unrelated bit of archaic philosophy as an answer before I catch myself. Luckily, the chances of that happening are getting slimmer as the librarian in there is switching over to digital and those old oak drawers are up on castors. But the data-transferrence takes time and ever since my chihuahua moved to California there is no one quite fast enough at Excel spreadsheets. So it is, dear friend, that you might still hear me mumble something about antinomies, noumenons or seindes during an otherwise friendly game of strip poker.

7 comments:

kelvin freely said...

seindes is a word I don't know. what is it?

Caeli said...

man, your prose keeps getting more amazing by the day. I'm not kidding. Are you writing this stuff off the cuff? Your sentences are so musical and poetic, but lucid too.

Anonymous said...

Kev, I don't know really. Something from Heidegger or someone like that. I think it has to do with existence or being. I bet Wikipedia can explain it. They know everything.

Christ Caeli, now I am feeling the pressure. Off the cuff, sure, but I don't know if anything is really off the cuff. It just jangles around in there for a while.
Coming from you? Damn, thanks.

Anonymous said...

What is "being" asks Heidegger in Being and Time? His answer was to distinguish what it is for beings to be beings (Sein) from the existence of entities in general (Seindes). Seindes was "ontic" — i.e. makes reference, allows us to talk about things. It was simply a "place holder" and applied to relations, processes, events, etc. Sein was more fundamental: Heidegger was concerned with something he felt had been overlooked since the pre-Socratics. Descartes, for example, simply sidestepped the problem of ontology (philosophy of being) by dividing the world into three (God, the exterior world, and mental processes) and depicting the essentials of the exterior world in terms of time and the three spatial dimensions. This leads him in all kinds of difficulties, and evaded the question we must ask as to what being really is.
- some website (not Wikipedia)

Anonymous said...

Um... happy birthday and stuff.

Toddy said...

Thanks Dave.

I've been thinking about what Caeli wrote all night and damn that was s nice thing to say. Seeing that this thing is supposed to be an exploration of photo-anamnesis and that by doing so I am practicing to be better writer and all, and added on top off that that Caeli is an author herself and all that she does, well, I am still glowing a little.

soapy t said...

now i get why you earn your living as an editor and i am nearly unemployed. i graduated too. i'd still be wearing my cap, but it blew off my head 2 years after graduation from the university of wisconsin, madison when i was living in chicago. i was just walking down the wrong alley on the wrong day. they don't call it the windy city for nothing. fuck you liberal arts, major: sociology.