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Remarks On Hugh Heysen
Remarks On Hugh Heysen
Remarks On Hugh Heysen
Heysen offers many phrases that attempt to disclose this basic structure
of experience, which is equivalently the basic structure of being itself.
He says that “the selfing of the world is the worlding of the self.” He
also says that “the self worlds and the world selfs.” He talks of the
“reelworld,” as if life or existence is a film. But it’s crucial to understand
that no one is watching this film. Being simply “shines forth” with
an ego-like motivational structure, structured also like a perspectival
painting.
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I’ll interject personally and say that Heysen (and his philosophical ally
Zassenhauer) are fun to read. The pleasure is related to that given by a
science fiction story. But it’s reality itself that becomes more rich and
open through exposure to such impractical philosophy. The mundane
begins to glow. It’s a bit like the magic of childhood returning, though
it’s all quite organized and sober. Heysen writes or attempts to write
nonfiction. He sides with the silly, radical, and possibly boyish tendency
in philosophy. He doesn’t let politics, for instance, guide him into a
Serious practical realism. I can only assume that Heysen agrees with
Stumpf that dragging philosophy into such banality is a general attack
on the transcendent and the sublime. Stumpf calls this a triumph of
the spirit of seriousness which is also a triumph of Burroughs’ “Ugly
Spirit.” For Stumpf, the sense of transcendence is one of the great joys of
being human. “Agency” is the state of being governed by a Cause that
cancels irony and innocence. “Spirit” is born from the contradictions of
agency, and Spirit is something like Schlegel’s infinite Irony, awkwardly
presented also by Stirner.
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Now I’ll offer a few comments on Heysen and Heidegger. Early Hei-
degger suggests we earnestly ask the question: “Am I [my] time ? ”
Gadamer claims that Heidegger claims that “being is time.” I take Hey-
sen to agree. He writes of an “ego-like worldstream”, also known as an
“ego-like lifestream.” So life and world and existence are one. Heysen
does write of our anticipation of the end of the stream (or the stream
including an anticipation of its cessation), but he doesn’t go on to insist
on its central importance. Living for thousands or even millions of years
is logically possible, no matter how implausible. So Heysen does not
accept the transcendental use of mortality. At most he’d acknowledge
the difficultly of clarifying the idea of living forever. I understand this
to be a theoretical position. Heysen very much expects to die before he
is 200 years old (or even 100 years old.)
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William James is important in the same way Mach is, seeming saying
the same thing in Does Consciousness Exist ? James, like Heysen,
answers no. Of course the concept exists, so the point is again to deny
either the subject or the object the status of being fundamental. Here’s
James : My thesis is that if we start with the supposition that there
is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which
everything is composed, and if we call that stuff ‘pure experience,’
the knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation
towards one another into which portions of pure experience may
enter.
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