THE THREE PSYCHOPATHIES OF HEIDEGGER'S ONTOLOGICAL DIFFERENCE Copyright © 2007 Jud Evans. Permission is granted to distribute in any medium, commercial or non-commercial, provided author attribution and copyright notices remain intact.

In the weird metaphysical grotesquerie which constitutes Heidegger's  so-called "ontological difference," the Philosopher of Nazism distinguishes between an entity (das Seiende) and the being (das Sein) of an entity. He calls this distinction the "ontological difference." An entity, [a being] for Heidegger is on the one hand, anything that is or can be, whether it be physical, spiritual, or whatever -  for example, God, human beings, socialism, and the number nine  are all entities. On the other [ontological] hand, he posits the "Being" of an entity, which has to do with the so-called "is-ness" or "existence" of whatever is. For him, "Being" designates what an entity is or entities are, how it/they is/are, and the fact that it/they is/are at all.

Heidegger's psychopathy originates is his deranged Jesuitically internalised insistence upon his own idiosyncratic meaning of the word "entity*, as being anything that is or can be, whether it be physical, spiritual, or whatever. For example, God, human beings, endurance, being, socialism, Dasein, angst, the girl next door and the number nine are all entities according to Heidegger. Such ontological confusion is at the root of his inability to discern a difference between a denotatum and a designatum. Heidegger was severely denotatively challenged. He failed to grasp that while every sign has a designatum, not every sign has a denotatum.

SOME LINGUISTIC TERMS

1. Denotatum - definition - The actually existing object that the linguistic expression labels.

2. Designatum , any object or class of objects — whether existing or not — that the linguistic expression labels.

Etymology - The word  denotatum derives from the Latin denotatum, the neuter past participle of denotare, to denote. Oxford English Dictionary.

Its first citation is from 1938: "Where what is referred to actually exists as referred to [,] the object of reference is a denotatum. It thus becomes clear that, while every sign has a designatum, not every sign has a denotatum .."(C. W. Morris in International. Encyclopedia. Unified Sci. I. 83) similar: referent see: exemplification designatum aka: denotat plural: denotata.

For the average man or woman the word "object" means: "That which is perceived or known or inferred to have its own distinct existence* (living or nonliving) like The Archbishop of Canterbury, The Eiffel Tower or your left toe (if you have one) and is not to be confused when used in the "corporate" sense, when it is coupled with an adjective such as "business" as in: "a business entity," which is a technical term, and means something entirely different - a body corporate (a company), a corporation sole (an ongoing paid office, for example -  a bishopric, a body politic, a partnership, an unincorporated association or body of persons, a trust, or a superannuating fund. This is in direct conflict with the dictionary definitions in all human languages.

THE HEIDEGGEREAN BELONGING OF /IS/

With breathtaking jejuneness Heidegger demonstrates a total inability to understand the syntactic function of the word "is." For him (see below)  /is/ "belongs" to the apple that is red, or the leaf that is green and the word /is/ both  (correctly) refers to how it is: (red or green) and (incorrectly) performs the semantico-sentential  redundancy that proposes its presence in the cosmos in the first place.

Plainly it is the sign (the name: apple or leaf) initially employed by the utterer in designating/nominating the subject of a sentence which instantiates and indicates whether the utterer believes the object labeled by the the linguistic expression actually exists (is present as an instance in the world.)

Ultimately all uttered sentences are ontological propositions which  the addressor constructs in the hope/belief that an addressee will agree.  Not all ontological propositions are acceptable to all recipients of such claims. Heidegger's so-called "ontological difference* is a complete misnomer - objects simply exist in everchanging configurations.

There is no Shakespearean: "to be or not to be."   There is no non-existent to mae on - (that which is not) which is opposite or heteronically  the non-being-other'  of to on (that which is.)

The concept of something which is ontologically different or ontologically diametrical  to that which exists in the primitive Platonic sense, is something which the cognitively attenuated Heidegger preferred to struggle on with long after he was kicked out of the Jesuitical seminary which imprinted his young brain with such nonsense.

There is no state of either "being" or "not being" - all objects exist in states of becoming.  Matergic "change" lacks any interstices.

In other words Heidegger lacked any understanding whatsoever that the indicant  *is* does not automatically act as a magic twizzle-stick which automatically existentialises conceptually instantiative examples and that instancing function of a noun does not automatically entail the actual presence of an existential entity.

PURE EXISTENCE

Many transcendentalists claim that pure existence is instantiated in so-called "hanging or orphanic copula" sentences such as "God is." - "I am what I am."  etc.,

Anyone familiar with absolute signification - the old term for indicating  pure existence in cases of orphanic, isolated, abandoned, stranded or the predicatively deserted copula together with the phenomena of covert predication can dispose of this claim with ease.

Absolute signification refers to cases where the so so-called complement  (predicate) is intermitted and the subject and copula are left in sentential states of  transcendental aposiopesis. (covert predication or unfinished speech - a sudden breaking off of a thought in the middle of a sentence, as though the speaker were unwilling or unable to continue.)

The utterer's version of excluded predication is of course implied by the addressor  and the recipient's version supplied by the addressee.

Thus: "God is...insert your own predication here..."

as in:

1. "God is...the all-powerful creator of the universe."

or

2. "God is a useful  fiction dreamt up by humans."

THE DREADED GERUND - BEING.

My researches and analysis of *IS* show that the orphanic copula is NEVER EVER involved in mapping to entitic (pure or property-vacuous) entities. In my view it is humanly impossible ( psychologically infeasible) to neurologically map to an existential nullity. In other words humans would never attribute names to entities (either assumed to be factual or known to be fictional) that are property-bereft (so-called pure entities) , otherwise they would be unmappable and meaningless. The mention of ANY NOUN automatically initialises a neurological search for an appropriate hit or semantic template. Such a referential retrieval process throws up associated semantic associations - whichever associate data presents first is a property-based allusion to the subject noun involved which stimulated such a neurologically reticulate cross-reference  Such predicative templates can be described as privately covert, opinionated postulation. If no such connection was made the attributee's eyes would simply glaze over in incomprehension.

THE MYTH OF THE FREGEAN " IS OF EXISTENCE."

English has no *spurious *is of existence* or *is of isness* at all - such a notion is psychologically impossible other than by using the suspension of logic we call *faith.*

The so-called *is of existence*  the myth of the gerundial  "being" are historical left-overs from the pre-Roman period before the introduction of *exist* (see Parmenides, etc.)  Such conceptual crudities was seized upon by the religious/transcendentalist community as providing  a method of perpetuating the fiction that entities exist without the need of any properties whatsoever. In other words the *is of existence* [or *isness*] is a sentential device used in order to switch from a psychological *logic mode* -> to an internalised -> *faith mode,* in the sense of acting as a suppression-device for subjugating the principles that guide ontological reasoning within a given field or situation, particularly in the area of ontological analysis of faith claims and their existential inference.

He was also guilty of being the most outrageous obfuscator of the onto-semantic differences between the infinitive form: /be/ - the present participle /being/  - and his beloved gerund or verbal noun /Being/ upon which the whole tottering Grundbegriffe of his ridiculous ontological pantomime was founded.

WHAT DOES "IS" MEAN?

What follows is probably the most astonishing confession of ontological ignorance in the history of philosophy Heidegger admits that he is TOTALLY confused and that he has no idea at all what "is" means. Heidegger admits that he  is TOTALLY confused and that he has no idea at all what "is" means.

The existential modality of an entity, on the other hand, has to do with the "is" of whatever is instantiated by the nominative indication of the denotatum. For example: "The apple is red."

"Being" for Heidegger designates an additional ontological dimension, (a) what an entity is, (an apple)

(b) how it is, (red) and (c) the ("pure") fact that it is at all. This is his high point of confusion, for the fact that it is at all [its "pure" or "entitic"¹ existence] is a chimaera, for no entity is a thing at all without being the "entiatic"²  entity it is. The way it is and the fact that is is not an existential modality of the entity. The way it exists and the fact that it exists in an existential modality of the perceiver - not the perceived object. So the fact that "it is at all" [its "pure" or "entitic"  existence] is an ontological redundancy.

    NO entity can exist "purely" (as an an ideal - a featureless template - a stripped being - an esse expoliatum) without existing in a particular fashion, way, form, combination of states or modalities, or without what the scholastics referred to as an "essence," or "properties," for otherwise it would be nameless - a nameless non-existing unspecified non-entity.

      Heidegger's risible ontological difference simply recapitulates the esse expoliatum banality of traditional religion and philosophy. The medieval scholastics, for example, had already clearly distinguished between ens and esse, just as the ancient Greeks before them had distinguished between to on and ousia. But Heidegger gives this tradition a "phenomenological" dimension, and switches the understanding of "Being" from the mere "thereness" of entities, their simple existence in space and time (this is what he calls Vorhandenheit, [Existing-ness] the "mere presence" entitic of entities).

     Obviously Medieval/Scholastic thinkers were aware of this notion of the modal aspect of the /be/ conjugation, but only did so with reference to a distinction between ‘being’ and ‘existence’ within the assumption that ‘being’ refers to all the possible modes of a thing's existence, whereas ‘existence,’ refers only to the ‘mere fact’ that it exists, and hence the second is only a ‘lowly predicate.’

     In other words, ‘Being’ refers to ‘that by which something exists,’ the underlying "substance" which makes entiatic reality possible, and ‘existence’ tells us ‘whether it exists,’ as the basis of the Latin distinction between essentia and esse respectively.


     Heidegger, a stunted product of the Jesuit seminary where he spent his formative years was never able to grasp that this distinction is a grotesque product of the a warped ontological imagination, which stemmed from his original inability to understand "is."

His eventual cringing recognition of his incompetence, which he amazingly committed to paper in Basic Concepts which is probably the most humiliating  philosophical public confession of frustration, ignorance  and defeat in academic history.

                                                                                         Notes

1.  Entiative - something that has a real existence; a thing; a corporeal entity. Random House Unabridged Dictionary.
2.  Entititive - something considered as a pure entity; abstracted from all circumstances. To be considered as a pure entity; abstracted from all circumstances. Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)

Commonsense informs us it is physically impossible to exist purely or entitively - bereft of any existential modality or property at all. It is infeasible to be here in the world and be physically propertyless at the same time, in the absence of a single characteristic, attribute, essence or state.


Jud Evans