In-der-Blog-sein

LawPundit posts on Law, Bloggers, Truth and Legitimacy and concludes with this:

On a higher level of philosophy, we can look to 'the truth' as discussed by Martin Heidegger in Hegel and the Greeks, where he writes about historical (and thus political) truth:

'But every historical statement and legitimization itself moves within a certain relation to history. Prior to a decision as to the historical correctness of the representation it is therefore necessary to consider if and how history is experienced, from whence does it determine its fundamental traits.'

This statement brings us to Heidegger's analysis of Plato's Doctrine of Truth, translated there out of the German by Thomas Sheehan, where Heidegger writes:

'The story recounted in [Plato's] 'allegory of the cave' provides a glimpse of what is really happening in the history of Western humanity, both now and in the future: Taking the essence of truth as the correctness of the representation, one thinks of all beings according to 'ideas' and evaluates all reality according to 'values.' That which alone and first of all is decisive is not which ideas and which values are posited, but rather the fact that the real is interpreted at all according to 'ideas,' that the 'world' is weighed at all according to 'values.'

Heidegger concludes:

What always gets 'clarified' is merely some essential consequence of the uncomprehended essence of unhiddenness ... the original essence of truth still lies in its hidden origin.'

Therefore do not ask whether the internet brings us 'the real truth and nothing but the truth', for the answer is surely no ... regardless of what we read.

At best, we are only getting a part of the entire picture.

Although the internet is not a mechanism that can bring to us any ultimate truth, nor its 'original essence', it does seem to serve the notion of truth as correspondence; when the internet acts as a fact checker on the news media. Today we can rely on the eyewitness accounts of bloggers that are near a newsworthy event, or bloggers' specialized knowledge, to better understand stories--stories which journalists would rather filter through their prejudices. Alternative means of communicating, of revealing the facts, restrict journalists' ability to manage stories, and that is a good thing.  ¶ 11:39 AM 0 comments

  Stuck Inside the Mobile with the Martin Blues Again

From a review of a blues album:

I have always struggled to figure out what the exact significance of blues music is, how to define it and why it appeals to people of different walks of life. It was when listening to the closing number on Bare Bones, 'In My Time of Dying,' that it suddenly hit me. On the risk of sounding overly philosophical, the blues could be qualified as 'existentialism for the common man,' because if you boil down its themes to the most common denominator -- the bare bones, if you wish -- then the blues is all about articulating that most basic experience, of simply 'being.' The German Existentialist Martin Heidegger once said that we become most acutely aware of our own existence in moments of boredom, a feeling that often comes close to having the blues. Don't we all tend to become ponderous when we are -- having nothing else to do -- thrown back on ourselves, for example, while being on the road alone?

Of course, Dylan's always already anticipating death:

Grandpa died last week
And now he's buried in the rocks,
But everybody still talks about
How badly they were shocked.
But me, I expected it to happen

  ¶ 2:29 PM 0 comments

  In-der-alternate-Humor-sein

Today In Alternate History:

in 1889, German philosopher Martin Heidegger was born in Messkirch, Germany. Heidegger was one of the most vocal of Richard Tolman's followers, and wrote many papers on the subject of parallel universes crossing over into our own. Heidegger disappeared mysteriously in 1941.

From Sunday. May not have improved with age.  ¶ 7:49 AM 0 comments

  Went to Vancouver on Friday to see The Ister.

Caught the local bus into the city, next to the freeway on ramp in the fog at 6:26 AM. Found the Greyhound barn, got directed to the station, got on the bus, and got off a couple of times to stretch my legs. Customs was painless thanks to empty buses-only lane. Got to Vancouver, oriented myself with print-out map and sun, and walked to theatre, with enough time to quaff an IPA in the pub on the corner.

The movie is a travelogue from the mouth of the Danube up to its source(s). Along the way there are short interviews with an archeologist excavating a Greek city in Romania, an engineer rebuilding bridges in Serbia, and a German ecologist studying the river habitat--lots of great footage of the river. Great natural scenery, industry and its detritus, Romanians celebrating their entry into NATO, Croatian massacre memorial, Stalinist ex-model city in Hungary, a concentration camp, various monuments, and finally Freiburg, Messkirch, and Todtnauberg. Through out the movie we have short bits of text from Hölderlin amd Heidegger, and discussion from Bernard Stiegler, Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, filmed at their homes.

The discussions are on technology (by way of the myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus from Plato's Protagoras), being, Germany past and present, and much more. It was stimulating and though-provoking. My only complaint is that, like a live lecture, it goes by much to fast, and while I'm still trying to absorb something, it's on to the next theme. I look forward to the DVD, so that I can pause it and view it at my own pace.  ¶ 9:52 PM 0 comments

  This article on The Origins of Extremism in Islam (or others' perception of it) is quite well situated in the canon of Orientalism:

The practice is also popular amongst a great many Western intellectuals, journalists and academics who, reminiscent of 18th Century Christian missionaries, urge us to promote 'our' Western "values everywhere from Burma to Saudi Arabia, Iraq to Chechnya" as a leading columnist in the Guardian daily newspaper vehemently proclaims. Islam is thus transformed into a silent passive object laid bare before their gaze, stigmatized categorized and tried, a 'world-picture' to use the words of the well known German philosopher Martin Heidegger. In this vortex of comments and analyses, Islam's voice remains unheard.

Heidegger's essay on the Weltbildes is primarily concerned with scientific and technological pre-dispositions, but still, this is better use of Heidegger than most references in the media.

Unfortunately, the rest of the article devolves into mithering about the way Islam is portrayed in the Western media, with no acknowledgement of the daily reports of decapitations or the jihadista exudations in Friday sermons from those claiming to speak for Islam. It is incumbent on Islam to get its own house in order before complaining about how others picture the Islamic world.  ¶ 10:57 AM 0 comments

  Happy Birthday Leonard Cohen!

Seventy years producing 70 factoids.

This essay elaborating the Po-Mo in Cohen links Lenny to Martin, via the former's poem Waiting for Marianne, from Flowers for Hitler:

If there is a moment in Flowers that most perfectly encapsulates or enunciates the postmodern attitude toward media and technology, toward the interpenetration of technology and the body that McLuhan forecast and that we now call "cyberpunk," it is probably the opening lines to "Waiting for Marianne": "I have lost a telephone / with your smell in it." The lines are, as is a lot of Cohen in this book, faintly carnal and at the same time sentimental in the trashiest Harlequin romance sense. But they also announce a full break with the modernist fear of media and technology (a fear which, to be sure, is mostly to be found in the high modernism of Eliot, Pound, and Klein). That fear, as Roy Miki has shown in his stunning reading of Klein's "Portrait of the Poet as Landscape" (74-75), was tied up with a Heideggerian desire to determine somehow a real Being-in-the-World. As far as Cohen's poem is concerned, Being is now as curly as a telephone cord and all of its Sadean metonyms, or at least as marginal as the "crumbs of your breath," which lugubrious synaesthesia articulates what we call the materiality of language. Being has escaped the false unity of the human body and in turn layered the telecommunicational furniture:

Did you take the telephone
knowing I'd sniff it immoderately
maybe heat up the plastic
to get all the crumbs of your breath

The absent lover being addressed here has left her material trace in the crevices of the technological instrument, an instrument that then is treated as a metonym for the Other's body.

Or, perhaps, it is just an over determined desire for Sex-on-the-Phone.  ¶ 8:35 AM 0 comments

  Grim news for musicians from the legal arena.

The 'new rule' states that Hip-Hop artists must pay for every sample that they use to create their composition -- regardless of the size of the sample or how it has been altered.

Never mind Hip-Hopers that have the bling-bling to cough-up. What about drum-n-bass, an entire genre based on the break from an obscure soul single? The Winstons stand to serendipitously clean-up collecting royalties from all the tracks built upon cut-ups of a couple bars of drum solo from their single "Amen Brother".
  ¶ 8:11 PM 0 comments

  From a discussion of Bad Men and Good Books by the editor of The Common Review:

A different category of badness, and one that gives greater pause, pertains to writers with egregious political histories, such as philosopher Martin Heidegger or literary critic Paul de Man. Both men cooperated with the Third Reich--and both made significant contributions to the intellectual history of Homo sapiens. More over, in fields other than philosophy and literature we have countless examples of great minds whose political associations put their work under a permanent cloud. For beginners, think of Wernher von Braun, the father of the American space program, whose blueprint for travel to Mars is probably on its way to fulfillment. Von Braun cut his rocket scientist chops by inventing the V-2 rocket that rained death on Britain during World War II. Or take the case of Werner Heisenberg, the eminent nuclear physicist who continued to work for the Fuhrer for the duration of the war. This does not suggest whether or how these men should have been punished. It does, however, acknowledge significant intellectual achievement.

My undergraduate advisor was a brilliant scientist who do critical work figuring out how rocket nozzles and jet engines work by calculating the entropy at various points in the system. His worked allowed engineers to design the jet engines that fly us around. Had I opted for thermo instead of fluid dynamics, he would have been my graduate adviser too. Today he shows up in this FBI list of Nazi war criminals.

My maternal grandfather fought on Franco's side. During the civil war he would lead posses from the village into the mountains of Galicia to hunt down communists. "Why'd you do that?", I asked him once. "They were allied with the Anti-Christ--they burned down churches."

The answer was clear-cut for him, but many similar choices are obscured in historical contingencies. People are forced to make choices every day. They have imperfect knowledge about the past and the present, and they know that the future will unfold down indeterminable paths. Yet people still have to make those choices everyday. With hindsight it is too easy to pass facile moral judgments regarding decisions made in the past.

Sicilians in the 4th century BCE may have hated Plato for supporting Dionysius the Elder, the tyrant of Syracuse, but that doesn't prevent us from reading Plato today.

Thoughtful people must examine the past and reap the valuable from the diabolical.  ¶ 1:05 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein with the LDS

On the Times and Seasons blog Damon Linker summarizes Heidegger:

[I]t is, I think, quite misleading to describe Heidegger as an "Aristotelian." Heidegger's Aristotle is a radically Heideggerianized Aristotle. And yet he ultimately seeks to go behind even HIM, to find the primordial origins of the West that precede Socrates, the pre-Socratics, and even (one presumes) Homer. Yes, things went badly wrong with Descartes, but this error was prepared by Christian theological errors, which were prepared for by Aristotle's and Plato's, and Parmenides' error before them. All of them flinched in the face of Being; only Heidegger himself (and maybe Hoelderlin) could withstand the violent emergence of truth, which set the West out on its "first beginning" and might, if he and we are up to it, prepare the way for "another beginning."

Jim Faulconer reponds:

[T]his, too, is a mistaken, even caricatured reading of Heidegger. It is a common caricature, to be sure, but I think it is one nevertheless. Heidegger sees each thinker, including the bogeyman Descartes, as taking up again the question of being?and as doing so faithfully and fully. But we have to do what they did. We cannot be satisfied merely to repeat what they did, for to do so is not to take up the question of being. It is not to do what they did.

The other beginning occurs over and over again in the history of philosophy. As a result, I think it is too simple to say that for Heidegger “we can’t learn anything from it [the history of philosophy] in a positive sense.” If “in a positive sense” meant “taking what another has posited and repeating it,” that would be right. But the history of philosophy gives us any number of thinkers with whom we can engage in order to think the “same” thing they thought. Because they give us the material for thinking, they give us a great deal that is positive. There are a number of places to see that this is what Heidegger is doing. Perhaps one of the best is The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. But one can also see it in the essays on the Greeks, the books on Aristotle and Kant, the book on Leibniz, that on Hegel, . . . . In each of them we find him reading thinkers in ways that no disciple would countenance, but in ways that are remarkably true to the direction of the philosopher’s thought, ways that use the thinking of a predecessor as a ground from which to draw fresh insights.

Read the whole thing (including the comments) for a link-rich discussion of Heidegger, ethics, and theology.

[See this post's comments section for a little who's who.]  ¶ 10:57 PM 1 comments

  The 1424 Nautical Chart was made by cartographer Zuane Pizzigano in 1424. It shows the islands of Madeira, the Azores, and four islands further west: Antilia, Ymana, Satanazes, and Saya. Antilia, in 15th century Portuguese was combination of two words meaning "before" and "island", thus: "the island that lies before". Lies before what? Some have presented their reasons why the islands are present day Nova Scotia, New Foundland and surrounding islands. Others believe that these islands on the map represent islands in the present day Caribbean Antilles. Columbus referred to these islands in his proposal to the Spanish royals, speculating that China and India lay beyond them.

How do canonical historians correlate the existence of these islands with Columbus "discovering" America? Well, they simply label these islands as "mystical", and continue to promulgate the Columbian mythology.  ¶ 8:51 PM 0 comments

  Hey CBS and Dan Ra^ther!

Frank Zappa wrote a song for all y'all about them nit-picky bloggers:

Some people do it
Some see right through it
Some wear pajamas
If only they knew it

The pajamas people are boring me to pieces
They make me feel like I am wasting my time.

  ¶ 7:41 PM 0 comments

  The London News Review makes the connection between Bush and Heidegger:

Fear makes people stupid. Martin Heidegger, in Section 68 of Being and Time, has this to say about fear and stupidity:

Aristotle rightly defines 'fear' as... 'a kind of depression or bewilderment'... The bewilderment is based upon a forgetting... When concern is afraid, it leaps from next to next, because it forgets itself and therefore does not take hold of any definite possibility... It is well known, for instance, that the inhabitants of a burning house will often 'save' the most indifferent things that are most closely ready-to-hand. When one has forgotten oneself and makes present a jumble of hovering possibilities, one thus makes possible that bewilderment which goes to make up the mood-character of fear.

Bewildered, forgetful of facts, forgetful of its history and its principles, grabbing wildly at solutions (bombing Iraq, for instance) - this is America afraid. No wonder the Republicans are keeping the fear dial turned up to 11: because there is no voter easier to manipulate than a scared one.

Who's forgetting what again? If I understand this properly, they are saying: Don't fear terrorists. It is all a Bush-ist plot. Please ignore the airplanes flying into buildings.
  ¶ 8:57 AM 7 comments

  Longing-to-move-along-ness

Home-ing in while moving on.

The philosopher Martin Heidegger said that all of modern reality is an existential situation of homelessness and that our difficulty in learning to reside is actually our difficult in accepting our conflicted nature, because we will forever be torn between the need for the feeling of a home and the feeling of the need to be free of it. We are afraid to lose our home, but as in the story of the ultimate loss of a home - the expulsion from the Garden of Eden - sometimes the result of losing a home is the greatest gift one can receive: freedom and responsibility. On the other hand, because we were expelled, longing for a home, for the pleasure of striking roots, is forever engraved in our mind. Heidegger thought this longing is related to our urge to be released from the freedom we have obtained for ourselves,

  ¶ 11:45 PM 0 comments

  An NPR web piece, War Over War Records: A Losing Battle, tells the Democrats that they can't rely on the mainstream media to control the news any longer:

There was a time when the networks and the national papers formed a matrix of journalistic judgment that wielded this kind of influence. But that was when the broadcast nets held a near-monopoly on what TV news viewers saw each evening, and when their newsrooms derived much of their own attitude from a few elite news organizations in print.

It's been fun watching the mainstream media implode from the pressures of alternative media, but I believe that this message extends beyond just the news media. All forms of media will now have to adapt to instant scrutiny from everyone with access to the web. Whether it's a refereed academic journal or a history text book, specialists from all over the globe can now publish their critiques of what was published and share the information with who ever cares enough that particular domain. So authors cannot expect that their articles will only be read by the who can afford journal subscriptions, or have to sit in a classroom, and have no way to answer back. Today, if someone gets their hands on some text that they disagree with, and they are motivated enough, they can cheaply publish their criticisms, and like minded critics will connect with them. If the criticisms find a sympathetic audience, then the authors of the questionable texts will not be able to hide behind a veil of authority. We are living in an interesting time.  ¶ 4:46 PM 0 comments

  Richard Polt, author of the best introduction to Heidegger, lends his expertise to the CBS falsified documents debacle.  ¶ 11:49 PM 0 comments

  I read the latest Promethea comic (#31) on Labor Day. Latest and last-est, as it's also the final issue in the recent apocalyptic thread. In this episode the end of the world is explained by Promethea, and then life goes on. Except that now people (comic book characters, or is it the gentle reader?) have been enlightened--no need to read comics any longer then. After the end of the world it's a sunny, strife free, day, and the story ends, as conclusively as any comic book series ever has. I wonder where issue #32 will go. One shouldn't hold one's breath waiting for an Alan Moore comic to come out, but another issue of Promethea is promised.  ¶ 8:34 AM 0 comments

  Tariq Ramadan, scholar:

The author of a dozen books, Mr. Ramadan lets fly staccato-style, at the speed of an AK-47 on full automatic, quotations from Nietzsche, Heidegger and the Koran, to prove a central point: Decadent Europe will give way to an Islamized Europe.

Of those dozen books, three have appeared in English, and Amazon can sell you one. A web search indicates that Tariq Ramadan has published zero papers that mention Heidegger. He has however, mentioned Heidegger to dozens of journalists around the world.  ¶ 12:35 AM 0 comments

  West-stricken-ness in Azerbaijan.

Fars-zadegi is twin notion of what Jalal Al-e Ahmad had called in the 1960s Gharb-zadegi, which meant ‘plagued by the West,’ ‘West-stricken-ness,’ or Westoxication. In Al-e Ahmad’s view, Gharb-zadegi was a cultural illness that had stricken many Eastern societies, and Iran in particular. Al-e Ahmad adopted the term from Ahmad Fardid’s lexicon. Fardid was an oral scholar of controversial ideas and character who derived the term Gharb-zadegi from his interpretation of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s (1889-1976) critique of modern technology and the ways in which it was employed. In an essay titled "The Question Concerning Technology," Heidegger envisioned that The threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology. The actual threat has already affected man in his essence. The rule of Enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth.

The decadence of the world had already begun in the West, maintained Heidegger, and through Western technology and culture was fast spreading to the East. This was the idea that Fardid borrowed from Heidegger and coined from it his own notion of Gharb-zadegi or West-stricken-ness. The Western notions of liberalism, democracy, and technology were in opposition to Eastern notions of spirituality and unity of the realm of spirit with that of nature. The West had dominated nature and environment technologically. It was also in the process of dominating the East culturally, through the imposition of its understanding of technology, ethics, and humanity on the East. It was from these ideas of Fardid that Al-e Ahmad built up his own notion of Gharb-zadegi or Westoxication. In his usage, the term signified a sense of (toxic) contamination as well as a sense of intoxication, where it functioned as sweet, lethal poison.

I'll have a double Ghard-zadegi on the rocks, Jalal! Bring on the decadence of the world.  ¶ 11:52 PM 0 comments

  This article on popularizing philosophy states the most intelligent thing I've read in a newspaper this year (It is an election year, after all):

It took years - of scholarship and writing - for Martin Heidegger to write Being and Time and it is not unfair to suggest that to understand it takes a little more than a slick summary. That, hopefully, will give an accurate basis to work on - but to go further requires effort, time and the kind of reading you can't do on the gym's conveyer belt.

At least the first sentence is terribly correct. Regarding kinds of reading, well, I haven't tried conveyor belts, but I did my college reading while walking between the lecture rooms, laboratories, and bars.  ¶ 7:56 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Hermit's thatch considers solitude and boredom

Martin Heidegger discusses the human predilection for boredom as perception of the passage of time and the lack of attunement with the world and human environment.
...
Most people think of this experience as negative: melancholy, alienation, isolation. That is because what is actually experienced is cultural and social. Heidegger intends solitude as a condition of being and consciousness, a neutral description. But this fundamental solitude can be described as positive when we begin to re-engage individuation with nature and a harmonious universe.

Meanwhile, Theodore Dalrymple in the Spectator (dated two days in the future...) considers boredom to be all negative, and shares a pertinent quote:

In 1850, the famous French alienist Brierre de Boismont began his disquisition on the medical consequences of boredom, ‘The man who thinks, a famous philosopher once said, is an animal depraved; it had been better to say, an animal that is bored.’

Unluckily I am too busy to reflect on boredom.  ¶ 2:43 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Marginal Revolution asks Can we judge thinkers by their followers? and issues a challenge:

OK, now here is a challenge for real men. Can you tell me, standing on one foot, what exactly is both important and valid in the writings of Martin Heidegger?

Why might the most cited XXth century philosopher be important to men? Got me. I'm feeling un-really feminine this morning. Luckily two men have already replied.

Under The Sun notes his contributions to existentialism, technology, and poetry.

Internet Commentator notes his influence on architects.  ¶ 10:00 AM 0 comments