A constantly re-occurring complaint found amongst anti-Heideggerian critics and commentators concerns the fact that if one disagrees with Heidegger's ontological fantasies one is immediately accused of not reading the 'Master's' texts with a sufficiently 'open mind.'

What REALLY upsets non-transcendentalist, non- existentialist, non-Heideggerian thinkers is when the cultists say patronising things like:

"The first requirement is to understand what is meant by metaphysical existence."

Like religious maniacs, these Heideggerian trailer-park transcendentalists just cannot get it through their heads that it IS POSSIBLE to read right through *Being and Time* and all the rest of the Heideggerian drivel which they believe automatically provides the key to an understanding of Heidegger's mumpsimus of *Being*  - and TOTALLY UNDERSTAND IT.

Such an understanding and rejection also includes the adolescent implications of the gerund *existence* or *dasein* as the Philosopher of Nazism labelled it, and having  taken account of such ontological fraudulence- simply to reject it out of hand as the most immature load of philosophical and ontological juvenilia ever encountered.

Like all fanatics they believe that to understand Heidegger presupposes an acceptance of the metaphysical reifications and Heideggerian type baby-language, and that to reject it means that a true understanding has not been experienced, or that the unconvinced reader lacks a magic intellectual ingredient that *sets aside* the cognoscenti from *the unknowing ones* or *the herd.*

They find it impossible to comprehend that such weird opinions as theirs requires *faith* rather than intellectual ability as a route to acceptance. They completely miss the subtle way in which Heidegger the seminarist, after being thrown out of his Catholic seminarial brainwashing regime, simply transposed the Jesuitical approaches of his seminary childhood from theology to ontology and re-constituted the conceptual instantiation of *God* as *Being.*  

In fact this is dramatically highlighted in one pastes the text of *Being and Time* into a text editor and instructs the *replace* function to substitute all occurrences of the word *Being* with that of *God.* Try it for yourself.

It is tempting to retort, that on the contrary, it is those who lack the ability to see through the transparent rubbish and wild assumptions of Heideggerianism (the biggest being the unquestioning nature of the Heideggerian approach, where the acceptance of  the non-question of *Being* as a valid question worth questioning is not addressed.

No matter how many times one protests that on the contrary, the texts have been read and re-read closely - even hermeneutically with the aid of a yod, and that one perfectly understands his theories and notions but reject them as patently puerile, they still act as if you were the dope instead of them. We can further add, but it makes no difference, that we reject as laughable his outrageous and risible  employment of the grammatical gerundial mechanism'Dasein', or do not recognise the so-called 'ontological difference' other than as a BASIC ERROR of thinking in any 'thinkers thinking.'

       We can endlessly repeat that it matters not HOW MANY TIMES one reads the material, or if one spends HOURS poring over every single word with a magnifying-glass, one doesn't come any closer to ACCEPTING the gross mistakes of the thinker, but only come to understand more clearly the clanking mechanisms and the farm-yard cart turning of this ponderous peasant's geared cognitive wheels, and the coiled springs of the ontologically  confused mind of the thinker as he thinks, and how he manipulates and improvises, extends, explicates and defends his original befuddled Grundbegriffe as he whizzes round the ontological 'cup and ball' chicanery of his Daseinic trickery.

      The response, and the method of rebuttal typical of all Heideggerians, and indeed all cults and cultists, whether they be of a philosophical, religious, or political nature, or members of the flying saucer and the alien abduction lunatic fringe macumba, is the same monotonous, boring mantra:

(1) 'You haven't read enough of his books.'

" But...err...I've read them all..."

(2) 'It's because you haven't read 'XYZ' - [a particular book of his.]

"If it is in print - and it has his grubby name on it - then I have read it..."

(3) 'It's because you don't allow yourself to "get into the mind" of the thinker of the writings and 'go along with the thought.'


"I don't  believe  that juvenilia about the existence of a *mind* - I'm a grown-up."

Heidegger's Techniques

    I have been studying the language of Heideggerianism for some time [or the 'Heideggerian Mantra' as it is sometimes described] which is worryingly similar to the "voice roll technique" used by preachers, North Korean 're-educators,' cross-examinating lawyers and hypnotists to achieve 'agreement results.'

    The de-cognition process - 'clear your mind and start again' method [exemplified in the Nazi-style address to his students in his 'Basic Concepts' or 'Grundbegriffe' lecture] - is precisely akin to the 'constant arsenic-drop' of word repetition typical of Heidegger and all Nazis, and identified by Klemperer in his quote:

Then there is the "sell it by zealotry technique," which one often encounters on the Internet's Heidegger discussion forums. The outrageous 'taken as a given and move on' technique of Heidegger as he treats the primitive concept of 'Being' in the introductory chapters of Being and Time, and the ontological fait accompli of the Gerundial wheeze 'Dasein,' and [sadly] Sartre, who I had always thought of as more intelligent than his German fellow transcendentalist, speaking of 'property' and 'essence' as if they were an accepted axiomatic component in any thinkers tool-kit.

Then we arrive at 'the end of the world' and "only hope for the salvation of humanity" technique, employed by the increasingly hysterical evangelist Heideggerian 'John the Baptists' or the ontological Stormtroopers of
the *Beserkers of Being  Brigade.*

     The doleful fact for me, perhaps the saddest fact of all, and the greatest disappointment for me personally, was that when,many years ago  [not knowing much about existentialism at the time] I first came to Sartre, and later Heidegger erroneously thinking that it was about personal freedom, independence of thought, and creative ideas, I instead found that on the contrary it was a tightly-knit band of fanatics, yet another boring cult of philosophical Hari Krishnas chanting meaningless metaphysical mantras, who, for the most part occupied themselves hermeneutically poring over the sacred texts with fingerless gloves in an effort to prove to other cult members that they were wrong in their interpretation of some minor and fatuously irrelevant aspect of 'the Great Sage's' pronouncements.

     And so it came to me that the most basic of all facts about brainwashing in the entire history of man, is that no one has ever been brainwashed and realised, or believed, that he HAD been brainwashed. Auto-brainwashed Heideggerians who have had their mental gearing and balance interfered with in this way will usually passionately defend their Heideggerian manipulator, claiming they have simply been "shown the light" . . . or have been transformed in miraculous ways, and it doesn't matter what criminal activity the guru has been up to, or how many Rolls Royce's the Yogi owns and operates out of the funds supplies by participants or dupes supporting the particular Yogi Industry, or how many foul and evil statements the black, red and white beflagged Guru has made in his private life, and how much of his private obsessions are introduced into the body of his doctrine — they follow the Master for they don't recognise that they have been brainwashed and have become transmogrified into irrationalist automatons whose grey matter and the areas which process language have been invaded and become infested with an insidious ontological ga-ga-speak which renders them incapable of normal communication.

Obeah Figure

The Heidegger cultists do not realise they have 'seen the light' because of the textual nature of their Obeah's material with its specialised 'loaded anti-intellectualisms' [known as 'Heidegger-speak' to the long-suffering anti-Heideggerian cognoscenti] is laid out in such a fashion, typical of the American classic: 'How to Win Friends and Influence People' by Dale Carnegie, (essential reading for all salesmen, in order to brainwash themselves to the value and efficacy of the product they are asked to foist upon a suspicious public,] and they have in fact become victims of the most pernicious form of brainwashing ever - brainwashing by proxy - or brainwashing by academic acolytes and theo-ontological thurifers paid for out of the public purse, or the alternate Heidegger Industry mail-order brainwashing, or by the treble whammy combination of the three methods making it certain that the minds of our youth are well and truly laundered by this insidious and mentally debilitating ontological dualism.

The Wiffling of the Waffler.

They believe that they have formed the forming of their own opinionated opinions [which in a strangely strange way they have] and have arrived at the arrival of their own conclusions conclusively and independently of the self of themselves, by first engaging in a wide reading of other sacred textualising texts, and then coming so prepared in their preparation and suitably mentally equipped to the inner sanctum in the cleansing clearing - in the lighting of the Lichtung - in the mythical Wagnerian Wald of their metaphysicalist Master - where hollow-eyed Zarathrustra forever limps in his limping towards the distant fluttering flitter of the Hakenkreuz on the Hütte on the hill, and blonde-haired wood-nymphs dwell in the dwelling [who lay with Hölderlin before he was mad.]

And there of a sudden, there in the thereness of the there, in the Da-ness of the Da, near the very open ontological orifice of the cavity of the cave of the Die Nibelungen, in the land of the Daseinic Dämmerung they became enraptured in enrapture, and captured in their capture and bondaged and subverted by goat-footed Pan and the liquid honeying of the honey of 'Heidegger-speak,' and they knelt in their kneeling at the feeling of the footing at the feet of their Master and the meat of their Vater, and pumped crystal water from his special spouting spout, and licked his calloused toes with hot darting Daseinic tonguing tongues, and anointed his sore solipsismic soles with oil of Lavendel.

And thus they drifted apart from the naturalising nature of the natural speaking of speaking of humankind, and the words spoke for them in their spoking of speaking, and their jokes jeaked for them in their joking of jeaking, and their teaks did the tokes in their toking of teaking.

Then, caught in a shaft of light - in that momentary moment - kneeling by the Shepherd of 'Being's' burning bum-fold - there within the crooked crutch of his crooked shepherd's swastika crook - THEY SAW THE LIGHT LIGHTING - and partook of the wafer of waffle-speak, and their lips became moist with the metaphysical moisture of moisturing, and their grammar became ridiculous with the ridiculing of ridicule and the dar dar dar of the dar dar dar and the dar dar dar dar of the ...it's OK - Relax -  I don't REALLY talk like this - I'm only taking the Mickey.

(B) BEING AS A COMMON NOUN:

This version of being is picked out in red.

This different version of the word being (note lower case) means a noun that denotes any or all members of a class. As in - an alien being, a human being, Angela was a being of absolute beauty, etc., having the meaning of a res extensa, or an object, a material entity, a living thing that has (or can develop) the ability to act or function independently.


    ***************************************************************************************************************

(C) *BEING* OR *EXISTING* AS A "VERB":

VERB: (INDICANT)

Being. This is the third-person continuous version of the indicant */be/ which indicates or points to the existential modality (the way or manner or mode in which an entity occurs) example: *Billy is being naughty again.* Much of the linguistic tradition calls this the property of a entity being in an existential state or modality. This is the version which is improperly ontologically appropriated and gerundialised into the verbal noun or gerund we know as *Being* which refers to the pure state or bald fact of existing (as described in (A)

But when /be/  is used sententially  in the present continuous third person sense as in:  *The cat  is black* it uses the conjugate /is/ rather than being which is the simple present form it presents in the gerundialised examples which follow. We can state a a xxx that *BE* in any of its forms can only ontologically refer to an existential modality of an object - and NOT ever to the (simple Heideggerian) fact

Consider:  

*Just being there with Dorothy was happiness enough for Stanley.
Bill was blamed for being there at the time of the accident.*
Nurse Williams, being there at the time of the crash, was able to offer immediate medical help.

Here are some copuletic examples of *is* where the word acts as a device signalling the present tense and for indicating a predicate of the subject of a sentence. In the sentence that follows  being refers (points to) to predicate which informs us that Alice exists in the mode of being or existing as short-sighted and refers us to some antecedent situation in which her bad eyesight proved unhelpful.

*Alice being short sighted did not help.*

*Birmingham being a hundred miles from London made transport difficult. *

Da sein (*there being* or *human existence*) is a gerundial phrase which is confused with and is represented as a common or proper noun. *Being there* obviously falls under the semantic and grammatical category of a gerund, abstract noun or verbal noun, originally derived from the third person continuous conjugation of  being there.

Consider the quotation from Being and Time below.

Martin Heidegger:
Dasein revealed itself to be that being [1] which must first be elaborated in a sufficiently ontological manner if the inquiry is to become a lucid one. But now it has become evident that the ontological analysis of Dasein in general constitutes fundamental ontology, that Dasein consequently functions as the being [2] that is to be interrogated fundamentally in advance with respect to its *Being.* [3] If the interpretation of the meaning of *Being* [4] is to become a task, Dasein [5] is not only the primary  being [6] to be interrogated; in addition to this it is the being [7] that always already in its *Being* [8] is related to what is sought in this question. But then the question of *Being* [9] is nothing else than the radicalisation of an essential tendency of *Being* [10] that belongs to Dasein itself, namely, of the pre-ontological understanding of *Being.* [11]

NOTES
[1] Notice Heidegger reifies Dasein (human existence) as a concrete being in the sense of a common noun as in (B)

[2] Again Heidegger crudely reifies (thingifies) *Being* and thingifies and maps Dasein (the gerund *being there* or *human existence*) as a member of putative a class of beings called Dasein. From the manner in which it is employed here and elsewhere is obviously a word that remains the same in the plural as the singular.

[3] Here Heidegger attaches the so-called  *Being* (*human existence* or the state or fact of existing) to the gerundial *being there* of Dasein (human existence) as a property (existential modality) of a existential or locative behaviour which is the gerund *being there*. Thus Dasein (human existence) is ridiculously characterised here as: THE BEHAVIOUR OF A BEHAVIOR.

[4] At this point Heidegger reverts to *Being* (the state or fact of existing,) which it is important to remember is not a (B) and does not exist in itself.

[5] Here Dasein (*being there* or *human existence*) is blatantly concretised again, Heidegger thingifies human existential behaviour as a primary common being as per (B)

(6) An outrageous reification and conspicuously pseudo-academic thingification of *act* as *fact* - and *fact* as a res extensa as the nominatum of a common noun.

[7] We finally arrive in a fantasy Munchhausen world, where the concretised experience of *being there* or *being here* (*human existence* ) which, by virtue of its falsely attributed concrecity in [5] and [6] is said to relate to...yes...wait for it...*its *Being* in...
[8] ...which it is being what it already is in... [5].

[9] Heidegger now reintroduces the verbal noun version of (A) which is now characterised (in [10] as...

[10] ...the tendency or pre-dispositional desire of the class of cognoscenti of beings known both collectively and individually as Dasein to uncover, reveal and return to an understanding of *Being* by *Being* before it was made the muddle it now is by people who lack the Heideggerian genius of correct ontological/ontic discernment.


Heidegger's fantastical gerundial phrase Dasein is a concept which, due to its obfuscational ontological character, can only be clarified as to its meaning with patience and a good understanding of the subtle semantic interchange between the various meanings of the word being.

Perseverance pays dividends, for it reveals the essential absurdity and danger  of using  Dasein as a tool for ontological understanding

Jud Evans.



For a more in depth study of reification and its corrosive effects on philosophy and ontology see my:  

                                          Philosophy and the Reification of the Unreal