Heidegger did not indulge himself into such "school philosophy". But, a knowledge vacuum left behind by him, it want to be filled.

Heidegger, as well as C.G. Jung, Rudolf Steiner and Levy Bruhl suggested their way of being was the participatio mystica.

I analyze such a stance at:The knowledge theory of an existentialist

Gigantomachia peri tes ousias!

Tudor Georgescu

Fascinating.

If you can reconcile participatio mystica with either Heidegger or the Greeks, you've got yourself a deal.

You may also write in Romanian or Dutch.

Best,
Peter Danenberg

Hallo,

i find it rather dubious when a man as Rudolf Steiner is mentioned in context with Martin Heidegger ... the "works of Steiner" is nothing more than a wild collection of pathological, "borrowed" and mixed-up pieces. The man himself is far from being a philosopher or a thinker as such.

At the end of the day, one will find the fine Rudolf Steiner wasn`t much different from the likes of David Koresh, L. Ron Hubbard or Sun Myung Moon.

Well, Heidegger rejected the notion of substance (more or less). If we admit this is wrong, then existential participation follows from his being-in-the-world, being-with and especially from Gadamer's developpement of Heidegger's ideas (e.g. horizons smelting).

Gigantomachia peri tes ousias!

Tudor Georgescu

In his books _Philosophy of Freedom_ (a.k.a. _Philosophy of Spiritual Activity_), _Truth and Knowledge_, and _Goethe's Knowledge Theory_, Steiner is much more of a philosopher than even anthroposophists admit, not to speak of us, people familiar with top philosophers, which we should agree hereupon even more.

Fact is that Steiner's empirical idealism is the only way of making sense of Plato's participation of things to Ideas (Forms), i.e. in the succession line of old metaphysics (phenomenology is seemingly out of this line).

For anthroposophers, Steiner seems to play the I card, but interpreted in the broader meaning of including all what awareness usually includes, his I (ego) concept is broader than they think. I think this is similar with Havighurst's concept of ego developpement, which pretty much includes the environment in ego's shaping process.

Gigantomachia peri tes ousias!

Tudor Georgescu

The scheme of evolution of philosophy, beginning with Greek antiquity:

Origins: pantheism (human as part of God)

Parmenides+Heraclites: something which changes
something which does not change

Plato: ephemeral
immutable

Descartes: real substance
mental substance

Kant: object
subject


Explications:

About pantheism we are able to read many beautiful things in the poets of
ancient Greece, but something happened there, something which broke the
beauty of the unity of this image. With Parmenides and Heraclites dualism
erupts in the primordial conception.

According to Heidegger, the metaphysics of subjectivity has its origins in
the beginning of Greek philosophy. Above is a scheme of the evolution (or
involution) of philosophy. The scheme is based upon the fragment mentioned
below, our originality being in the fact that we follow Heidegger's ideas to
the necessary conclusion, which escaped him.

In [SuZ] p. 205 (apud [FsT] p. 196) Heidegger speaks about the
"co-subsistence of physical and psychical" as wholly different from the
being-in-the-world. A little before he spoke of Kant as following Descartes'
ideas. What does Heidegger understand by his critique? In order to clear
this, we have to make reference to Descartes' two substances: mental and
real.

Descartes noticed that the phenomena are composed of two elements: objects
as formed of material substance and objects as they show themselves to the
soul (Descartes makes no distinction between soul and spirit; spirit
analyzes and synthesizes their perceptions, returning the result of these
operations to the soul in a feedback loop, and only the conceptually
organized perceptions do form the aware aspect of objects). He formalized
real substance as being the real composition of objects and the mental
substance as psychically composing the objects.

Kant did nothing else than follow this idea to its natural conclusion, i.e.
as the separation between thing in itself and phenomenon, by postulating
that we, subjects, we have no access to the things as they are in reality,
but we only perceive some appearance of them, which do not allow us to speak
of the things themselves.

Sartre further elaborated this dualism, in his formula "hell is the others",
schematically:

Sartre: others
I

This dualism became for the large masses a materialistic monism,
schematically represented:

Contemporaries: things
body

In Descartes, the two substances were disjoint, reaching communicating in an
unclear way, through the pineal gland. So, Heidegger, by criticizing the
disjoin of the two substances, he criticized the separation between soul and
matter in the way would have water and oil in a glass. Heidegger already
noticed that the real aspect and the ideal aspect of the object do fuse,
e.g. when I drink water from a glass, I have the water and the glass as real
bodies, formed of atoms, but also the water and the glass as perceptions,
and the gestures of lifting the glass up and drinking from it are each a
single gesture, true that performed on two planes.

He went even further with his critique, with a tendency to deny the concept
of substance. Based on Paul's saying in Hebrews 11:1 in King James Version,
which affirms the existence of substance, we reject such a conclusion as
erroneous. Accordingly, we maintain Descartes' idea of the substantiality of
the reality and of the soul (and spirit), but we correct it, having in mind
the above, with the superposition of the respective substances.

We notice that Heidegger practiced an wholly different dualism than that
following Plato, Heidegger refusing to admit that the human would be the
center of this duality, anyway not in Kant's way:

Heidegger: beings (beingness)
the to be (Being)

(Jiddu Krishnamurti also tried to cancel the duality, in a fraudulent way I
would say.)

A way of understanding what Heidegger's questioning terminology is about is
Lucian Iordanescu's system from _Ortho-Ontics_, schematically:

Iordanescu: dynamics
potential

We see that Iordanescu solves the equation set forth by Heidegger and he
defines the terms which Heidegger did not dare to define them. Fundamentals
in Iordanescu are God's definition as Total, Fundamental and Absolute, plus
the principle of dual ubiquity as God's fundamental structuring pattern.

Sources: [FsT]: Fiinta si timp, Jurnalul literar, Bucuresti, 1994 (Dorin
Tilinca's translation of [SuZ]); [SuZ]: Sein und Zeit, Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tubingen,
1977.

See also [URL=http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Intellect_Club/message/136 ]A Rejection of Solipsism[/URL] (the images therein are gone, it was a table inside the intersection of two circles, this all in a rectangle divided into three horizontal and parallel sections, which stand for body, soul and spirit).

Gigantomachia peri tes ousias!

Tudor Georgescu

Sorry for misspelling your name!

Gigantomachia peri tes ousias!

Tudor Georgescu

Hello,
This is my first post and I'm discovery this very nice site. I've noticed you underlined the question of subjectivity. This is a point I treat in my Ph-D. Though I refer to Heraclitus and Anaximander, I do not dwell very much on the Greeks to valid this notion. Could you please be more explicit and explain how you can see subjectivity by the Greeks ? Thank you !
Cathy Leblanc