In-der-Blog-sein

n*a*t*a*l*i*e or Da dudette, the blog, gets to the roots of the matter:

I'm reading a conversation of him with his japanese mate on 'what's the essence of being and language'. This is just too much for me, i'm blonde, i can't think that deep!

Whither the volk when wither the volk?  ¶ 8:22 AM 0 comments

  What is Philosophy?

Paragraph 48

It would be very superficial and, above all, very un-Greek, if we would believe that Plato and Aristotle are only determining here that astonishment is the cause of philosophizing. If they were of this opinion, that would mean that at some time or other men were astonished especially about being and that it is and what it is. Impelled by this astonishment, they began to philosophize. As soon as philosophy was in progress, astonishment became superfluous as a propelling force so that it disapeered. It could disapeer since it was only an impetus. However, astonishment is ἀρχή--it prevades every step of philosophy. Astonishment is πάθος. We usually translate πάθος with passion, ebullition of emotion. But πάθος is connected with πάσχειν, to suffer, endure, undergo, to be borne along by, to be determined by. It is risky, as it always is in such cases, if we translate πάθος with tuning, by which we mean dis-position and determination. But we must risk this translation because it alone protects us from conceiving πάθος in a very modern psychological sense. Only if we understand πάθος as being attuned to, can we also characterize θαυμάζειν, astonishment, more exactly. In astonishment we restrain ourselves (être en arrêt). We step back, as it were, from being, from the fact that it is as it is and not otherwise. And astonishment is not used up in this retreating from the Being of being, but, as this retreating and self-restraining, it is at the same time forcibly drawn to and, as it were, held fast by that from which it retreats. Thus, astonishment is disposition in which and for which the Being of being unfolds. Astonishment is the tuning within which the Greek philosophers were granted the correspondence to the Being of being.

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  In-der-Blog-sein

Empire Wilderness juxtaposes Heidegger and American poet Hart Crane on the subject of hands.  ¶ 9:50 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Muckley Opinions in a counter-appreciation of Eagleton states that it was Heidegger

who developed the preformative nature of the human and its radical historical "nature"

According is Dictionary.com preformative is a formative letter at the beginning of a word, and Encarta's never defined it. Rarely is Heidegger's importance to orthography noted.
  ¶ 9:39 AM 3 comments

  In an article in MIT's Technology Review Heidegger is the archetypical generalist anti-technologist:

[F]or the most part, modern critiques of technology have focused not so much on specific, bad technologies as on what Heidegger called “the question of technology”—that is, the impact of technology on our humanity.

  ¶ 7:45 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

I lost a piece of my history, the blog, examines consciousness:

Heidegger provides us as the only philosopher with an understanding of the mind that points towards an ontological understanding rather than individual understanding. He does this without turning it in to psychology or psychiatry for that matter.
Take anxiety, it you interpret anxiety most people will (the people I have meet and talked whit in Heidegger terms) se the perspective in understanding anxiety the way he does as a feeling that calls people back to life in stead of understanding anxiety as an incurable decease that clams for only medicine or medicine combined whit cognitive therapy – and only that.

Anxiety, it's a feature, not a bug.  ¶ 9:38 PM 0 comments

  This page has a cool image of the grudge match with light sabres from the video game Polemos of Seyn III: Heidegger v Descartes.  ¶ 10:14 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Infiniumetal is thinking about the oozing pus of thinking:

The memorial address is a perfect example of the courage Heidegger himself speaks of, the speeches interaction between critical thinking and calculative thinking is purulent exudate filled with the very elements required to meditatively think.

Not that Heidegger is usually considered a paragon for courage, mind you.  ¶ 9:00 PM 1 comments

  What is Philosophy?

Paragraphs 46 and 47

Astonishment, as πάθος, is the ἀρχή [the beginning] of philosophy. We must understand the Greek word ἀρχή in its fullest sense. It names that from which something proceeds. But this "from where" is not left behind in the process of going out, but the beginning rather becomes that which the verb ἄρχειν expresses, that which governs. The πάθος of astonishment thus does not simply stand at the beginning of philosophy, as, for example, the washing of his hands precedes the surgeon's operation. Astonishment carries and pervades philosophy.

Aristotle says the same thing (Metaphysics): διὰ γὰρ τὸ θαθμαάζειν οἰ ἄνθρωποι και νῦν και τὸ πρῶτον ἤρξαντο φιλοσοφεῖν. "Through astonishment men have reached now, as well as at first, the determining path of philosophizing" (that from which philosophizing emanates and that which altogether determines the course of philosophizing).

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  In-der-Blog-sein

Phil's Life on things not to bring up during important interviews:

Screw that history professor who interviewed me during my Fulbright scholarship application (note: not the same thing as my Fulbright teaching assistantship). -- "Why is it so important that you study Heidegger in the German?" -- "Because meanings cannot be translated literally. Meaning necessarily changes when carried from one language into another. If you want to understand German philosophy, you must learn German and read it in the original." -- "Didn't the Nazis say something similar when they asserted that to understand the German mind you must have come from the German soil." -- Silence. Effectively the end of my interview.

  ¶ 8:34 AM 0 comments

  What is Philosophy?

Paragraphs 44 and 45

Above all, however the reference to the essential disposition of correspondence is not a modern invention. The Greek thinkers, Plato and Aristotle, already drew attention to the fact that philosophy and philosophizing belong in the dimension of man which we call tuning(in the sense of tuning and attunement).

Plato says (Theaetetus): μάλα γὰρ φιλοσόφου τοῦτο τὸ πάθος, τὸ θαθμάζειν. οὐ γὰρ ἄλλὴ φιλοσοφίας ἢ αύτη. "Very much is this especially the πάθος of a philospher, namely, to be astonished; for there is no other determining point of departure for philosophy than this."

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  In-der-Blog-sein

Psychoethology ponders the construction of meaning.

Every understanding is always the expression of a point of view. This point of view is anchored in the environment and it is constringed by a system of dispositions (attunements or moods, levels of a priori conditions), or as, by a principle that generates and organizes the practices and representations that can be adapted to an objective as, for example, understanding. This system of dispositions works as a fundamental element in the construction of meaning and sense; understanding that works as an attribution of meaning to reality. However, the system of dispositions that structure this understanding never contributes to a vision from nowhere, but always to a point of view: "all explanation is thus rooted in Dasein's primary understanding" (Heidegger, Being and Time: II.IV.68.385).

Sounds right. Nowhere man sits in nowhere land, and doesn't have a point of view.  ¶ 5:14 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Cunctipotent Cunctator considers the even vs. odd conundrum:

It was then that Herr Heidegger proposed his "Solution to the Integer Problem": every person was to be permanenty plugged into a giant computer, their minds immersed in a digital simulation in which even numbers seemed really to exist.

Cunctative not and read the whole thing.  ¶ 4:38 AM 0 comments

  The Philosopher's Magazine has an article on philosophers behaving badly, or sinning like mere mortals.

The saddest case of a philosopher behaving badly may be Martin Heidegger who, as rector of Marburg University in 1933, become a notorious propagandist for the Nazi regime. He did so in spite of the fact that his mentor, Husserl, was Jewish, and he had been having an affair with a Jewish student, Hannah Arendt. Sadly, long after the fall of the Third Reich, Heidegger could not bring himself actually to repudiate his support for National Socialism. If anything, he felt let down by Hitler, who had failed to live up to his expectations. Heidegger was a remarkable thinker by any standards. But his argument that we are thrown into particular situations and are required to respond to them with authentic commitment, encourages a self-affirming drive, without giving direction. Harnessed to German nationalism and the rise of Hitler, he felt that authenticity for the German people was to be seen in National Socialism, and let his philosophy endorse the most brutishly unphilosophical of regimes.

Nazis. I hate those guys! They give enowning gas.



Pathetic humans.  ¶ 4:20 AM 0 comments

  eBay has a CD of Heidegger reading Die Kunst und der Raum (GA13). It was translated in 1973 for the journal Man and World, and is otherwise unavailable in English.

That's a pity because it is Heidegger's main discussion of sculpture:

[S]culptures are bodies that contain an emptiness that "plays in the manner of a seeking-projecting instituting of places". In other words, the vehicle of the art object reflects or projects the surrounding place/space rather than emanating something that is inherent to it.

And the theme of space is significant beyond sculpture:

In this text, Heidegger recognises space as a sort of Ur-phenomenon and attempts to describe existence in spatial terms. As a natural consequence, the primacy of poetry among the arts is also questioned given the new centrality of this role of space, which, in the later writings, Heidegger gives to sculpture the site of the happening of truth. This rediscovery of the dimension of spatiality is a decisive step taken on Heidegger’s path towards a philosophy that is truly beyond the metaphysical.

A bit of it is available here as part of an art project.

Clearing-away is release of places.

In clearing-away a happening at once speaks and conceals itself. This character of clearing-away is all too easily overlooked. And when it is seen, it always remains still difficult to determine; above all, so long as physical-technological space is held to be the space in which each spatial character should be oriented from the beginning.

A bit of it is recited here by a couple sitting in a car.  ¶ 3:33 AM 0 comments

  Vinay emailed some questions.

A couple of years back, when I was in college, I had done a term paper on 'Question of Being' in the course 'Critical Thinking'. For this, among other texts, I had studied 'Being and Time' by Heidegger (english edition but do not remember the translators) and 'Introduction to Metaphysics'. At that time I felt that even though I had got a good taste of Heideger's thought, I had not grasped Heidegger well enough, probably was immature then. Now after two years I plan to read Heidegger again. I came across your website while surfing the net. Could you answer a few questions about Heidegger? First, how and why are you interested in Heidegger?

Two things, a general curiousity about ontology and happenstance.

As a kid I was curious about how the universe works and why things are the way they are. As a teenager my interests changed from science and cosmology to the human condition in particular. I wasn't inclined toward religious explanations for things, so I looked for writers that tried to explain things without falling back on divine intervention to answer questions about the universe and how one should behave. I developed an interest in philosophers as the non-theological explainers of the world. I was first attracted to Camus and Sartre, and from them went on to read about the philosophy canon and the existentialist tendency in particular. My high school in Sussex didn't have a professional librarian so I got myself appointed head librarian my junior year. That let me order whatever books I wanted to read next, and I read widely. Reading De Beauvoir's diaries in India the summer after high school, I came across the name Heidegger for the first time. I went to college and got a couple engineering degrees but kept reading philosophy from the university library. I lost interest in Sartre reading his later stuff and turned to Wittgenstein and Nietzsche. At that time the popular philosophers in the university bookstores were French writers. I found them entertaining, but mainly literary and sociological, and not addressing the fundamental questions I was interested in. I also started to get interested in the proposition that machines could think and started learning how to write programs for purposes other than solving equations. After college, while looking for something new to read in philosphy, and picked up Heidegger's Basic Writings. I dipped into that for a while and some of it was interesting. Then I got Introduction to Metphysics to read on a trip to Rome, and the ideas in that book resonated with me. I thought Heidegger was asking good questions, even though there were passages I couldn't decipher. After that I started to read other writer's explanations of what Heidegger was saying and began reading the Greek philosophers again.

When Mosaic and Winsock first appeared on PCs, I decided to learn how the web worked by building my own web site. And that's covered in this posting.

What would be your approach to study Heidegger, say the order in which to read his various writings, the preparation/background required?

I think Heidegger has a few fundamental insights which he then elaborates from different angles, or along different paths, as he would put it. Many of the introductory books these days are quite good at explaining his major insights. Although none of them are perfect, and pays to read around and look for a congenial writer. I would start with Polt's book. Ultimately you want the read Heidegger himself. Once you're bootstrapped and have a general understanding of how he thinks, it pays to read his words, and learn more that way. I would also suggest reading Heidegger about some philosopher you are already familiar with. Heidegger had a full university career, lectured on many parts of the canon and about several key philosophers, always in light of his thinking, and dozens of his lectures have been published.

Do you think the translations are enough to understand Heidegger, or is German necessary?

There are places where it is necessary to look at the German to realize that Heidegger is using two German words that have been translated with a single English word. It is also helpful to read why translators chose the words they did and what the alternatives are. There are those who claim that Heidegger can only be understood in German, but I find that many translations and commentrary are intelligible and consistent enough to presume that Heidegger's thinking carries over into English.

It will be helpful if you could answer these questions. I am going to answer them for myself too, but having another's opinion would only help. We could discuss about things after my second reading is done.

Cheers and may your reading open things up.  ¶ 10:01 PM 0 comments

  In an appreciation of Quine, KC Mulville gets snippety:

Philosophy shouldn't be a difficult subject. What makes it difficult is reading the poor writing of philosophers. Anyone who reads Hegel or Heidegger winds up on the floor, clutching the rug in agony. (An example: "The nothing of Nothingness nothings..." Deep. Get me a noose.)

Hey, tautologies tautologize. Or it might just be the absence of love.

So we don't know anything
You don't know anything
I don't know anything
about love
But we are nothing
You are nothing
I am nothing
Without love
--The Death Of Ferdinand De Saussure, The Magnetic Fields

  ¶ 7:52 PM 2 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Mormon Metaphysics has a post Heidegger on Time, quoting from a book that delves into Time and Being. A lecture on the temporality of being delivered in Freiburg in 1962. Go read the whole thing.

Traditionally time is seen a series of nows, or a single vector in space-time, and the present is a single point (or an indeterminate position) on the vector. Heidegger describes the past, present and future as their own vectors. And presence as a fourth that binds them all.

[T]he unity of time's three dimension consists of the interplay of each toward each. This interplay proves to be the true extending, playing in the very heart of time, the fourth dimension, so to speak--not only so to speak, but in the nature of the matter.
True time is four-dimensional.
P. 15

He calls this 4th dimension nearing. In modern times nearing is manifest as presencing, which, in bringing the three vectors near to each other, causes them to repel or deny or conceal one another. In a paper on presence Carol J. White says:

Heidegger says presencing holds on to What-has-been but as a “denial” and to What-is-to-come but as a “withholding.” He adds that this sort of nearing unifies in advance the ways in which What-has-been, What-is-to-come, and the present reach out toward one another. In doing this, nearing “preserves what remains denied in What-has-been, what is withheld in What-is-to-come” (TB 16/16). Heidegger describes our particular form of nearing as keeping “open What-is-to-come out of the future by withholding it in the coming of the present.” Nearing as presencing also “preserves what remains denied in What-has-been” (TB 15/16).

But whereas the four dimensions are true for all Daseins in any culture, how the four interact has changed over time, and the denials and withholdings are peculiar to our times.  ¶ 11:11 PM 0 comments

  What is Philosophy?

Paragraph 43

As something tuned and attuned, correspondence really exists in a tuning. Through it our attitude is adjusted sometimes in this, sometimes in that way. The tuning understood in this sense is not music of accidentally emerging feelings which only accompany the correspondence. If we characterize philosophy as tuned correspondence, then we by no means want to surrender thinking to the accidental changes and vaccilations of sentiments. It is rather solely a question of pointing out that every precision of language is grounded in a disposition of correspondence, of correspondence, I say, in heeding the appeal.

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  In-der-Blog-sein

existentialism @ concordia, a group blog for a class, has definitions of several terms from Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Sartre and Ortega. Plus check the blog's main page for tentative answers to course questions.  ¶ 8:29 PM 0 comments

  Maverick Philosopher contrasts existentialists on action and says that:

for Heidegger, only we are cases of Dasein. Thus we don't have the Being of tools (Zuhandenheit) nor the Being of naturally occurrent items like rocks (Vorhandenheit): we have a unique mode of Being that cannot be understood in terms of these other modes of Being. Thus, human beings cannot be adequately understood in Aristotlean terms as rational animals, for, on such a scheme, man is apperceived as a thing at hand in the world possessing a fixed essence.

We are not merely rational, but specifically:

Dasein is a being that does not merely occur among other beings. Rather, it is ontically distinguished insofar as this being in its being is concerned with this being itself. In that case then constitution of the being of Dasein is such that having a relationship of being to this being belongs to this constitution. And this in turn means, that in some way and with some explicitness, Dasein understands itself in its being.

From Being and Time, via Parvis Emad.  ¶ 8:33 PM 6 comments

  Elfriede Jelinek's Noble Lecture last week, videocast from her home, mentioned Heidegger on Trakl:

My language calls over to me, over on the sidelines, it likes best of all to call over to the sidelines, it doesn’t have to take such careful aim, but it doesn’t have to, because it always hits the target, not by saying something or other, but by speaking with the “austerity of letting be”, as Heidegger says about Trakl. It calls me, language does, today anyone can do it, because everyone always carries their language around with them in a small gadget, so that they can speak, why would they have learned it?, so it calls me where I am caught in the trap and cry out and thrash about, but no, it’s not true, my language isn’t calling, it’s gone, too, my language has gone from me, that’s why it has to call, it shouts in my ear, no matter out of which gadget, a computer or a mobile phone, a phone booth, from where it roars in my ear, that there’s no point in saying something out loud, it already does that anyway, I should simply say what it tells me; because there would be even less point in for once speaking what was on one’s mind to a dear person, who has fallen down on the case and whom one can trust, because he has fallen and won’t get up again so quickly, in order to pursue one and, yes, to chat a little. There’s no point.

Heidegger wrote in his essay on Trakl's poetry:

The dialogue of thinking with poetry aims to call forth the nature of language, so that mortals may learn again to live within language.
The dialogue of thinking with poetry is long. It has barely begun.
P. 161

Trakl wrote in a poem:

the Vanishing
broken off by static

Avital Ronell wrote on the two of them

A thinking dialogue with poetry runs the risk of interfering with the saying of the utterance, instead of allowing it to sing from within its own inner peace. The response to the call of the poem, however thinkingly grasped, still resonates the alarm that stated the thinking which has roused the thought from its reserve. The poem reciprocatingly cuts into thinking's place of inner peace.
P. 173

  ¶ 6:39 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Pharos posts an article on Nihilism and Human Rights by Rais Abu Bakr Rieger.

In 1949 the European death camps were described by Heidegger as ‘the technological production of corpses’. From this point on Heidegger speaks of the ‘danger of technology’ and the way mankind has ‘abandoned being’ (Seinsverlassenheit). In the world of technology, the political will of man, and thus his freedom, become meaningless. This same philosopher speculated that “We do not have technology in our hands, it has us in its hands,” and then added, “Only a god can save us.” Heidegger was searching for revelation, for a clearing. The “language which speaks to us” became for Heidegger the place of the last possible kind of freedom. Only the person who finds his source and origin in language is still capable of receiving revelation.

The point about the manufacture of corpses is wrong on several levels. It's factually wrong in that technology was brought in to dispose of the corpses, and not to produce them. The SS didn't need technology to kill people, just to clean up afterwards, and they hired the engineering firm of Topf and Sons, to solve that problem. It is also wrong in that the phrase only appears apropos to what Heidegger was saying, that farming had become a purely technological exercise, forgetting the farmer and being. Further discussion and relevant quote at philosophical conversations.

The proposition that the only path to revelation going forward is through language is an interesting one, and I wonder if someone has elaborated such a position from Heidegger. How was revelation receiving earlier when not through language? And what changed things to reduce language to the sole source of revelation? The forgetting of being in ancient times? Modern subjectivism?  ¶ 6:18 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Sunrise, Sunset makes an appeal:

I am having a hard time linking Heidegger's view of modern technology with his early ideas of Dasein as a being that is primarily engaged with the world pragmatically. Did I lose you yet? If not, please come help me. I will feed you.

It's Xmas; give generously, and demand the trimmings.  ¶ 10:14 PM 0 comments

  What is Philosophy?

Paragraph 42

Now I shall only try to express a foreward to the discussion. I should like to turn the discussion back to what we touched upon in connection with André Gide's words about "fine sentiments." Φιλόσοφία is the expressly accomplished correspondence which speaks in so far as it considers the appeal of the Being of being. The correspondence listens to the voice of the appeal. What appeals to us as the voice of Being evokes our correspondence. "Correspondence" then means: being de-termined, être disposé by that which comes from the Being of being. Dis-posé here means literally set-apart, cleared, and thereby placed in relationship to what is. Being as such determines speaking in such a way that language is attuned (accorder) to the Being of being. Correspondence is necessary and is always attuned, and not just accidentally and occaisionally. It is in an attunement. And only on the basis of the attunement (disposition) does the language of correspondence obtain its precision, its tuning.

[Next]  ¶ 10:05 PM 0 comments

  After disastrous adaptations of the classics (Troy and Alexander) and contemporary classics (From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) it appears that Hollywood is aiming for more butchery:

The forthcoming Hollywood adaptation of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy is to sacrifice many of the film's anti-religious sentiments in an effort to avoid a backlash from America's Christian right.
Director Chris Weitz has upset fans of Pullman's Carnegie-winning books after he admitted in a website interview that the books' Authority - a malevolent but feeble deity - will appear in the planned films as a representation of "any arbitrary establishment that curtails the freedom of the individual".

A key appeal of the story is the alternate reality of a Reformation-less world where the Vatican and puritans join forces, so that's evaporated from the film. And exactly how do they plan to handle the pivotal death of God? I expected the story will be reduced to a girl's adventure with cute, plush, Happy-Meal ready, deamons animals.  ¶ 9:08 AM 0 comments

  The essay The Stanza of the Self: on Agamben's Potentiality in the new Contretemps online journal says this about Dasein and the world it's in:

[T]he elementarity, if not the purity, of Dasein is only potential in that its own very existence as 'Being' requires it to be thrown into the world of others where its original and elemental language, its identity, is traded for participating in and belonging to a community, a common language and a common identity. The intelligibility of the common space, its meaningfulness, is predicated upon the erasure of the original individual and the disappearance of what made it so unique, that is its original and pure language (Heidegger calls it 'voice'). Dasein cannot be seen and understood other than 'Being' in that as an individual sign with its unshared language it does not make sense; it does not have a meaning. Its 'Being' comes to fruition when Dasein chooses to enter the 'game' of the community and to be part of a set of linguistic and cultural trajectories and vectors amongst which its own trajectory and vector become lost and invisible, ultimately opaque.

So this vector of Dasein, it's variables are the ontological existentials: projection, thrownness, and being? And is forgotten a boundary condition of the being existential?  ¶ 9:54 PM 0 comments

  What is Philosophy?

Paragraph 41

This is, indeed, the case. But if this is the case, then we can no longer say that we first have to attain this correspondence. And yet we are right in saying so. For, to be sure, although we do remain always and everywhere in correspondence to the Being of being, we, nevertheles, rarely pay attention to the appeal of Being. The correspondence to the Being of being does, to be sure, always remain our abode. But only at times does it become an unfolding attitude specifically adopted by us. Only when this happens do we really correspond to that which concerns philosophy which is on the way towards the Being of being. Philosophy is the correspondence to the Being of being, but not until, and only when, the correspondence is actually fulfilled and thereby unfolds itself and expands this unfoldment. This correspondence occurs in different ways according to how the appeal of Being speaks, according to whether it is heard or not heard, and according to whether what is heard is said or is kept silent. Our discussion can result in opportunities to reflect upon it.

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  In-der-Blog-sein

Determinate Negation has a post on understanding and objectivity:

The "ambition for transcendence," for Heidegger, can only be redeemed by first establishing the possibility of a system of freedom, i.e., of autonomous adaptive systems, or, upon the failure (a failure fated, according to Heidegger, by the very project of constructing such a system symptomatic of the meaningless willfulness of modern "technologism" and so the "culmination" of metaphysics) of this establishment, by beginning to discern a more fundamental freedom that resists any systematization.

The system of freedom for Heidegger in this instance may be determined by the reading of Schelling, who was discussing a system of freedom or onto-theology within which to judge evil in a God determined world. Earlier Heidegger has said:

Only where there is freedom is there a purposive for-the-sake-of, and only here is there world. To put it briefly, Dasein's transcendence and freedom are identical! Freedom provides itself with intrinsic possibility; a being is, as free, necessarily in itself transcending.
P. 185

  ¶ 7:34 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

le_deja_dit muses on authenticity and subcultures:

[A]uthenticity was around long before Heidegger analyzed the concept, and it flourishes among people who have never read Being and Time, let alone heard of its author.

But is the term Heidegger uses your common run-of-the-mill ("Bruce is more authentic than Britney") keepin'-it-real authenticity?  ¶ 5:07 PM 0 comments

  Todays Washington Square News has another appreciation of Derrida:

Deconstruction evolved from the ideas of German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Writing in the 1920s, Heidegger argued for a radical reinterpretation of human consciousness. He believed the "scourges of modern life" - namely science, technology, and industrial capitalism - wrongly put man at the center of creation and, in turn, alienated him from the fluid essence of everyday experience.

I believe "scourges of modern life" is a Mark Lilla-ism. It was actually modern philosophy that privileged the human subject.

[T]his anthropologically oriented generic philosophy of the Enlightenment first formalized by Descartes in 1637 and still dominant at present. It understands knowledge fundamentally as a property of the individual, as in the rationalism of Descartes, the empiricism of Hobbes and Hume, the transcendentalism of Kant, the existentialism of Kierkegaard, and the empiricism and positivism of the twentieth century.

Grasping the fluid essence of everyday experience is a piece of cake if you have the right boundary conditions.  ¶ 6:46 AM 0 comments

  The Knights Templar are demanding a Papal apology for their persecution in the 14th century:

The Papacy and the Kingdom of France conspired to destroy the Order for reasons which modern historians judge to be primarily political. Their methods and motives are now universally regarded as brutal, unfair and unjustified.

They were killed and their property was confiscated, in France. And don't forget that in the early 1300s the Papacy was in Avignon, France.

The Knights Templar officially ceased to exist in the early 1300s, but the order continued underground. It was a huge organisation and the vast majority of Templars survived the persecution, including most of their leaders, along with much of their treasure and, most importantly, their original values and traditions.

They didn't go too underground. They reacted to the Papal bull outlawing the Kinghts Templar by changing their name.

Elsewhere in Europe, where many Templars escaped persecution, the Order adjusted its positions. The Portuguese Templars simply changed their name — like a modern business might change its name in order to avoid previous debts. They became the Knight of Christ, who later became famous for their explorations in Africa and the West Indies. The famous King (sic) Henry the Navigator was a known Grand Master of the Order, and explorers like Vasco da Gama were members. Christopher Columbus’ father-in-law was a Grand Master, and Columbus sailed across the Atlantic with the familiar Templar cross emblazoned on his sails. The Order of Christ survived until 1830’s. Similarly in Germany, Spain and other parts of Europe where the Templar purge was less successful, there is plenty of evidence that they just joined other Orders — the Hospitallers or Teutonic Knights in Germany, or one of the local military Orders in Spain.

Going underground.

[Note: Prince Henry the Navigator was never king.]  ¶ 10:13 PM 0 comments