Various varmints have worked themselves into a lather because President Bush invoked Albert Camus before assembled Eurocrats last week:

We know there are many obstacles, and we know the road is long. Albert Camus said that, 'Freedom is a long-distance race.' We're in that race for the duration -- and there is reason for optimism. Oppression is not the wave of the future; it is the desperate tactic of a few backward-looking men.

In Counterpunch they work themselves into a total tizzy, arguing that Bush's faith is the farthest point removed from the protagonist in Camus's early novel The Outsider. That's all well and good, but the quote is from Camus's later The Fall, which features a very different protagonist. Their article then pulls out assorted Camus quotes that they believe apply to Bush, but to my ear reinforce both Bush's point, and musty odor that emantes from Counterpunch's diatribes against any form of freedom that they haven't defined for the rank-and-file.

Balti and Vimto and Spangles were always crap, regardless of the look back bores.

--Mark E. Smith of The Fall.

That said, I must confess a liking for Balti myself...  ¶ 7:06 AM 1 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Terry's Philosophy Notes on cooking until the original ingredients are forgotten.

In 'The Origin of the Work of Art' I thought a really extraordinary part of that was his reference to the 'rootlessness of western thought ' that was really fascinating. It think he means that every time we take something and put it through the machinery (like Kant says) we change it, in some tiny way until eventually it becomes perverted. It's like cooking, things start out light and you add more -because well more is better isn't it? and you exchange this for that because you don't have this - and you get slop. So I see his point.

On the other hand, sometimes you might prefer to forget the original ingredients.  ¶ 4:15 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Speaking of Strauss and LaRouche [of whom we were just yesterday], Gay Insight, copies the Fellowship of the Vereide conspiracy:

One philosophical fellow traveler of Vereide was the German Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger, a colleague of Leo Strauss, the father of American neo-conservatism and the mentor of such present-day American neo-conservatives as Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. Strauss's close association with Heidegger and the Nazi idea of telling the big lie in order to justify the end goals...

From Conspiracy Planet. What's up with blogs that merely copy entire articles from other web sites? I suppose it helps to have extra copies of everything around because of bit rot and such, but still.  ¶ 10:36 PM 0 comments

  Men in black and the secret Platonic dialogues

Found this on a LaRouche website. They're having a go at Leo Strauss.

[F]or anyone who has read some Heidegger, some of the language may sound very familiar. I was recently reading through some, because Strauss is a student of Heidegger. Heidegger talked a lot about Plato, and very much from a secret kind of an approach. He was sort of a movie star of the professorship, dressed all in black, wowing and dazzling students with any kind of esoteric knowledge that he could throw out at them.

Sigh. I'm envious. My professors wore plaid.  ¶ 8:41 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Fides ex auditu has been looking at Van Gogh's shoes:

[R]eferenced in Heidegger's aesthetic treatise from the 1930s, 'On the Origin of a Work of Art', in which he described theses shoes as those of a peasant-woman. In the 1960s, Meyer Shapiro criticized Heidegger's reading of the work, challenging their ownership. He preferred the interpretation that they were a city-dweller's shoes, perhaps even Van Gogh's own shoes. He chalked Heidegger's reading up to the totalitarian tendencies toward romanticization of the pastoral life. But then Derrida came along in the 1980s (in 'The Truth in Painting [peinture]') and deconstructed them both.

We noted shoe related blogging last week.

Need more on those shoes? Get the book!   ¶ 8:07 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Titusonenine notes a connection to T.S. Eliot via A.N. Wilson:

The traditional epistemology of the enlightenment was turned on its head, as Heidegger went back to Heraclitus and the pre-Socratic philosophers for a language in which Being itself is apprehended. Eliot was in turn to turn back to the pre-Socratics at the beginning of his Four Quartets.

Which is not surprising. What has surprised me is the faux-connection between Heidegger and the left that paleo-conservatives make occasionally ("1968, it's all his fault."). It strikes me as silly because orthodox Marxists have always been rabidly anti-Heidegger--not surprising given his support for the Nazis that sent communists to the camps--and also because a large portion of Heidegger scholarship is done by theologians.

Here's another example of the Christian connection to Heidegger, from Fides et Ratio:

Only the Christian account of Being-in-the-world (using Heidegger's in der Welt Sein) can take seriously claims of embodiment and materiality. All other forms of Being-in-the-World may leave one temporally gratified, but in the end leave one with little more than Nihislistic Materialism.

Or historical or dialectical materialism.  ¶ 7:21 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-synchronicity

20th Century Philosophy notes that those shoes

are 'mere things' that the peasant woman relies on to do her work. The shoes can and do represent the earth. But does not represent her world.

All in a day's revealing/concealing of the world/earth.  ¶ 10:47 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

20th Century Phil. Blog on how art worlds:

It is only when the work is not looked at, but entered that one truely sees Heidegger's 'nature of the origin'. If you look at Van Gogh's painting of the peasants shoes and see a painting or a pair of shoes, you have not seen the origin or nature of the work- rather, you have seen a thing. If you see the work and are brought into the world of the peasant- you have seen the origin or nature of the work.

Here's a pair of pictures of peasant footwear. Don't see the boots, instead ponder their world.  ¶ 10:38 PM 0 comments

  In an interview published in Red Nova, the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk says:

I was also fascinated by a chalkboard drawing Martin Heidegger made around 1960, in a seminar in Switzerland, in order to help psychiatrists better understand his ontological theses. As far as I know, this is the only time that Heidegger made use of visual means to illustrate logical facts; he otherwise rejected such antiphilosophical aids.

Heidegger did make use of diagrams often. His lecture courses average at least one diagram or other visual aid that he drew on the chalkboard.

In the drawing, one can see five arrows, each of which is rushing toward a single semicircular horizon-a magnificently abstract symbolization of the term Dasein as the state of being cast in the direction of an always-receding world horizon (unfortunately, it's not known how the psychiatrists reacted to it). But I still recall how my antenna began to buzz back then, and during the following years a veritable archaeology of spatial thought emerged from this impulse. The main focus may have been Eurocentric, but there was a constant consideration of non-European cultures, in particular India and China.

Hence we orient ourselves, instead of occidenting.  ¶ 11:25 AM 3 comments

  You know you wanna listen to The Heidegger Paradox from the Sunspot. Cause you wanna live before you die.  ¶ 3:08 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Heraclitus sayz, the blog, has a good paragraph on Weltlichkeit.

Heidegger's "fragmentary reading" of Heraclitus has, at once, resolved some syntactical ambiguities and problematized anew some of the most important philosophical notions that were either taken for granted or had fallen into oblivion.

Go read the whole thing.  ¶ 2:18 PM 0 comments

  Heidegger is today the paradigmatic 20th century intellectual on the right. At least that's what I infer from this article in yesterday's LA Times, Feminist Fatale:

[E]ach side ... had its share of engagé intellectuals: Martin Heidegger on the right; De Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Andre Malraux and Albert Camus on the left; and Arendt on neither side.

Bound to upset some, on both sides  ¶ 2:05 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Thanksgiving Is Ruined translates Parmenides as Heidegger did. Crh to legein te noein teon emmenai, baby!  ¶ 11:22 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Photos Leave Home comes up with a new quote discussing how photography changes the way we see:

Heidegger analyses this as the "conquest of the modern world for perspective" and perspectival forms of knowing.

That makes Heidegger sound like the Brunelleschi of philosophy.

I'm more familiar with this from The Age of the World Picture:

The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture. The word "picture" [Bild] now means the structured image [Gibild] that is the creature of man’s producing which represents and sets before. In such producing, man contends for the position in which he can be that particular being who gives the measure and draws up the guidelines for everything that is.
P. 134

It's also about perspective, but not the spacial kind.  ¶ 11:11 PM 0 comments

  Mark Steyn, in a piece in today's Telegraph on many Europeans' disdain for Americans, notes

the traditional argument made by the Germans for the better part of two centuries, that they're an ancient volk while the Americans are an artificial uncultured mongrel 'half-degenerated sub-race' (Kant in 1775).

It's worth clarifying that Kant was of course referring to the Native Americans, and not to the ancestors of today's Bud drinking, NASCAR watching, largely ex-European, fascist stomping 'merkins.  ¶ 2:10 PM 0 comments

  The New God Cometh (Season Premiere)

Spengler Reviews Michael Wyschogrod's Abraham's Promise:

The philosophical view of love one finds in St Thomas Aquinas recasts the biblical god into a sort of Aristotelian prime mover, who loves spontaneously and universally, without cause or provocation. This is quite different from the god who loves Abraham first among all men, and extends that love to Abraham's descendants. The Thomist view is universal and philosophical, the biblical view concrete and historical. American Christianity hangs in the balance between the philosophical, or European, view and the biblical, that is, the American view. I believe that Wyschogrod has fanned a gentle wind in the direction of the scales, which ultimately will tilt the balance, by offering to American evangelicals a common biblical framework in which Christian and Jew can understand themselves as adherents of a common scripture.

Will a new god stand on this new framework? Will it be strong enough to overcome technology?

The times of the gods were the times of their revelation; the time when Apollo spoke through the oracle was the time YHWH spoke to Moses. Can it be that man lies in a "destitute time" because he lacks the consciousness of the god he is trusting, and lacks a revelation, lacks a god to speak to him? With the Christian God, man was used to believing he was believing. This happened in both the cases in which he was and he was not really believing. With Technology it is the opposite: man believes he is not believing in any god, or in some other god, while he, in fact, believes in and obeys Technology.

Stay tuned.  ¶ 1:21 PM 0 comments

 

The Machine and Machination (Technicity)
The machine, what is its ownmost, the service that it demands, the uprooting that it brings. "Industry" (operations); industrial workers, torn from homeland and history, exploited for profit.

Machine-training; machination and business. What recasting of man gets started here? (World--earth?) Machination and business. The large number, the gigantic, pure extension and growing leveling off and emptying. Falling necessarily victim to trash and to what is sham.
P. 274

Stuart Elden, in his paper Taking the Measure of the Beiträge, translates that final sentence like so:

Falling necessarily victim to kitsch and imitation.

To my ear the two sentences describe two different situations. Kitsch implies a decision made, a decision to avoid making a choice, after reading Kundera. Kitsch is

an inability to tolerate the essential relativity of things human, an inability to look squarely at the absence of the Supreme Judge.
P. 7

Earlier in the same essay Kundera notes:

[A]ll the great themes Heidegger analyzes in Being and Time--considering them to have been neglected by all earlier European philosophy--had been unveiled, displayed, illuminated by four centuries of the novel.
P. 5

Natch.  ¶ 5:03 PM 2 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

James Crystal triangulates elections, Ted, three, and "something Heidegger wrote about mathematics".

Full disclosure: I got Ted's autograph on a flight from Tokyo to Honolulu ages ago. Mom pushed the Tehran Hilton notepad and pen into my hand, "Get Mr. Kennedy's signature!" "Who?" "The melenas over there." Enjoyed flying with you, he wrote.  ¶ 6:56 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Last month I linked to a Guardian article on the lost iPod generation, which referred to Heidegger's thinking on technology.

Unfortunately, the article has spawned something even more insidious than an attack of the zombies "cocooned in their personalised sound-bubbles". That journalistic commentary is responsible for an instance of that most degenerative social meme which repulses even Cthulhu deeper into the non-Euclidean corners of R'lyeh. Behold that horrible event, the birth of a non-quote quote!

<nonquote>Technology is the art of arranging the world so that we don't have to experience it</nonquote>
Martin Heidegger

Goggle already reports 182 links to the non-quote, and MSN 232. I blame technology.  ¶ 3:42 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Ryan at the The 4th Century blog meditates on Gelassenheit, and earlier posted on Anaximander and the Ontological Difference and the Later Heidegger, accreting many comments.  ¶ 3:40 PM 0 comments

  What is Philosophy?

Final paragraphs

Now the request might quite justifiably be made that our discussion be resticted to the question about philosophy. This restriction would be possible and even necessary only if in the discussion it should turn out that philosophy is not that which it is now interpreted to be--a co-respondence which discusses the appeal of the Being of being.

In other words--our discussion does not set itself the task of winding up a fixed program. But it would like to prepare all who are participating for a gathering in which what we call the Being of being appeals to us. By naming this we are considering what Aristotle already says.

"Being-ness appears in many guises." Τὸ ὄν λεγέται πολλαχῶς.

Existence is revealed in many ways.

The penultimate quote is from B&T.

Lecture given by Martin Heidegger at Cerisy-la-Salle, Normandy, in August 1955.

Published in USA with original German and translation in 1958.  ¶ 7:53 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Konference announces a new one, Ultra-politics and political conflic:

In the late 1930s Martin Heidegger developed an analysis of "machination'' as the form of power informing contemporary political phenomena.

Fair enough, given that machination informs all political phenomena since Plato.

Such phenomena as 'total war' are indicative of the dwindling distinction between war and peace in which both become indifferent manifestations of a prevailing totality.

How so? The 'Total war' and 'total peace' of the prevailing totality should imply a stronger distinction between war and peace. The difference should be more dramatic--as opposed to the harder to distinguish difference between a low-level conflict and an uneasy peace, or a cold war and a hot war.

In doing so Heidegger anticipates the concerns of many post-war thinkers of ''totalitarianism" and frequently gives a more radical account of its source and prevalence.

Heidegger gives a radical account of totalitarianism? Where? When he broke his silence and talked about the totalitarian party he joined and its wars?

In assessing these analyses we are confronted with the issue of how this 'being-historical' thought comes to bear upon our understanding of political conflict.

More like confronted with understanding machination.

Words like machination appears in many Romance and other European languages with different meanings. In English it should perhaps have been better translated as scheming. Especially to avoid associating it with modern mechanical phenomena. Heidegger wrote:

In its ordinary meaning the word machination is the name for a "bad" type of human activity and plotting for such an activity.

In the context of the being-question, this word does not name a human comportment but a manner of the essential swaying of being.
...

Machination as the essential swaying of beingness yields a faint hint of the truth of be-ing itself. We know too little of it, even though it dominates the history of being in Western philosophy up to now, from Plato to Nietzsche.
P. 88-89

If anything, we should now, being further from Nietzsche, have moved on to a post-metaphysical and post-machinational age.  ¶ 8:34 PM 0 comments