Revolution and Leadership

"If personalities do not make history, then history makes itself by means of personalities."
Trotsky

Nietzschean "history" is something like personalities making history...a story about the peaks of humanity, great men. What is the role of the personality? I tend to agree with Nietzsche and Trotsky in the respect that action does not take place as anonymity. A collection of "firsts among equals" will never do anything. Strong personalities become part of the myth out of which worlds are created, and, in some instances, the personality can be the entire myth.

Free Will?

I have been thinking about 'Free Will' and how the concept develops throughout our lives. Shouldn't we be able to maximize our opportunities if our lives(waking lives) were ruled by free will? Or does the mind create its own games to inhibit our personal freedoms? Among these games, I wonder how Schopenhauer justified the suggestion that in death, our free will is more pronounced (because the will to live is irrational during life)... Is that because, in death, our true free will is reflected upon through one's past intellectual imprints on the world/society?
So I need more research on Mr. Schopenhauer... I quickly reviewed
http://academics.vmi.edu/psy_dr/Schopenhauer.htm

ah, but I see that Schopenhauer thinks that we are denied of the will do do whatever we want- or so this website says... however, if you review this particular page - the author falsifies Hume without much evidence.... I will look for more sources on FREE WILL

Regarding Schopenhauer's theory that there are motives for all courses of human action, there is an element that is very similar to Freud's concepts of the unconscious mind... OK done for now

Original Sin

Euphoric desperation-- that storming river that has risen over its banks, that has consumed its banks, that forgets it was ever once contained. This destructive and darkest of the dark stars is the source of our aestheticized violence. Only humanity could muster the energy, accumulate the force, that is needed to destroy on this scale.

Seeing the space between us and ourselves is the first destruction. Since then we have vacillated between joy, despair, and joyous despair. Witness the petty and vengeful second nature of this beast that seeks to rectify the gulf it has torn within itself by tearing apart all of existence.

Don't think twice...It's NOT alright

The House decided to ban pregnant girls from crossing state borders to receive an abortion. This has been done in the past when younger women don't have parental consent for an abortion in the state inwhich they live.
I am not sure how they regulate this law- but in seems to take the pro-choice movement another step back.
Also, a 13 yr/old living in a Florida state shelter was refused the right to an abortion by the Dept. of Children and Families (wouldn't a 13 yr-old mother living in a shelter make for a difficult family situation?)
but, the ACLU is to the rescue- and attepmting to convince the courts of the girl's constitutional rights- mmmmm I wish the court didn't need convincing for that

Let's think twice about electing representatives who make these decisions

Nietzsche's Prayer

Nietzsche saw his life's work as an announcement...incomplete. He was a herald. Anyway, this is a great, and extended, quote by him from the 2nd essay in his On the Geneology of Morals:

"The attainment of this goal would require a different kind of spirit from that likely to appear in this present age: spirits strengthened by war and victory, for whom conquest, adventure, danger, and even pain have become needs; it would require habituation to the keen air of the heights, to winter journeys, to ice and mountains in every sense; it would require even a kind of sublime wickedness, an ultimate, supremely self-confident mischievousness in knowledge that goes with great health; it would require, in brief and alas, precisely this great health!

Is this even possible today?-- But some day, in a stronger age than this decaying, self-doubting present, he must yet come to us, the redeeming man of great love and contempt, the creative spirit whose compelling strength will not let him rest in any aloofness or any beyond, whose isolation is misunderstood by the people as if it were flight from reality-- while it is only his absorption, immersion, penetration into reality, so that, when he one day emerges again into the light, he may bring home the redemption of this reality: its redemption from the curse that the hitherto reigning ideal has laid upon it. This man of the future, who will redeem us not only from the hitherto reigning ideal but also from that which was bound to grow out of it, the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism; this bell-stroke of noon and of the great decision that liberates the will again and restores its goal to the earth and his hope to man; this Antichrist and antinihilist; this victor over God and nothingness-- he must come one day.--"


First of all, this passage is thoroughly soaked in the Nietzschean, and it is therefore in great danger of misunderstanding. There are several words and phrases that evoke pages, even books of his philosophy. A keen eye will also catch several words that inspire entire schools of thought in 20th century Continental philosophy.

Mainly, what I wanted to convey is both the pure artistry and dexterity of the prose, but more importantly the hoping, even pleading thrust of the issue. One can hear Nietzsche begging at the end. Here, Nietzsche is more honest than he often is in the published works. Nietzsche here is not the Nietzsche who later says, "I am no man-- I am dynamite!" This is the "all-too-human" Friedrich Nietzsche...this is the Nietzsche who wrote in a letter:

"My existence is an awful burden-- I would have dispensed with it long ago, were it not for the most illuminating tests and experiments I have been conducting in matters of mind and morality even in my state of suffering and almost absolute renunciation-- the pleasure I take in my thirst for knowledge brings me to heights from which I triumph over all torment and despondency. On the whole, I am happier now than I have ever been in my life."


What is so striking about Nietzsche the artist and the man, as opposed to Nietzsche the philosopher and antichrist, is how he can powerfully juxtapose in the heart of the reader the depths of sadness and despair with the heights of power and hope. This is a philosopher who declared to say "Yes," to be a "Yes-saying" philosopher, but this is a man who cried please from within. I want to say yes to him from the heights, but I sink with him into the please...

The artist, according to Nietzsche, is one who challenges humanity with the immediate and sensual metaphor set against the whole rigid edifice of forgotten metaphors we have come to call "concept," "truth." The artist confuses man so that he no longer knows if he is in waking or dreaming. Has there ever been a philosopher who has so powerfully confounded the spectator like Nietzsche? When I read Nietzsche I tumble with him, I try to keep up with the dialectic, and I feel him laughing at me from beyond the grave...but ultimately, and you may not take me seriously, I forget if I am waking or dreaming. Nietzsche finishes with a denial of the embrace...he inspires anxiety, but the kind of anxiety that produces heightened fear and empowerment...

OOPS what I meant.... TITLE IX

Title IX

Collegiate Women sports in danger of sexism and lower funding levels. The Dept. of Education now requires colleges with womens sports programs showing low levels of participation, and little success, to fill out a survey regarding interest in that sport on the campus. Oh, but mens sports needn't bother with surveys of their programs.
The survey responses are meant to disipher whether or not the particular failing womens sports program should continue to receive the same amount of funding.
I understand that lack of interest in a sports program may entitle more popular programs to more money- BUT the new measure by the Dept. of Education ONLY applies to TITLE IX (created in 1970s to give equal funding to men and womens sports programs) - in other words, mens teams with low interest in success rates are NOT at risk because of the new measure....
WOW- I DON'T UNDERSTAND how theses alterations are filtered through a legislative body without public awareness or acknowledgement of blatant sexism. Even people who mess up blogs by posting a title can see it! :)

The 4th Century

The 4th Century

Cioran

We dislike following, or leading, to its conclusion a depressing train of thought, however unassailable; we resist it just when it affects our entrails, at the point where it becomes malaise, truth and disaster of the flesh. -- No sermon of the Buddha, no page of Schopenhauer fails to turn my stomach...

I think we find here one of the origins of Nietzsche's philosophy of health.

Emergency Contraception Bill (EC)

The Governor of Colorado vetoed a bill to require all hospitals to inform rape victims of the EC pill. Bill Owens said his Catholic faith did not influence his descision to veto the bill proposed by rep. Betty Boyd. So if a rape vicim is sent to a public Catholic hospital, I hope she doesn't want to be educated about what options are available for her unfortunate situation. BUT she should be allowed to access whatever medication that would better her situation; regardless of the religious affiliation of her local hospital. Needless to say, I think the separation of church and state is too progressive for many American politicians. (Good thing the US pres. leads the way by demanding that all schools fly their flags at half mast for the POPE)


It seems that a democratic state would support giving all possible information to the public, especially regarding life-changing decisions (as giving birth).

I hope that there will be more bills attempting to ensure ALL types of healthcare options to the public- and that keep religion out of politics
Though this might be a moot point- I feel that free voices often propel politics in a positive direction

Critchley on Derrida

Courtesy of enowning, a nice article by Simon Critchley on Derrida. This passage in particular was interesting:

At the heart of the many of the polemics against Derrida was the frankly weird idea that deconstruction was a form of nihilistic textual free play that threatened to undermine rationality, morality and all that was absolutely fabulous about life in Western liberal democracy. In my view, on the contrary, what was motivating Derrida's practice of reading and thinking was an ethical demand. My claim was that this ethical demand was something that could be traced to the influence of the thought of Emmanuel Levinas and his idea of ethics being based on a relation of infinite responsibility to the other person. Against the know-nothing polemics, deconstruction is an engaged and deeply ethical practice of reading of great social and political relevance.

What Critchley leaves unsaid, of course, is how these readings are ethically relevant, an important question about what it means today to do philosophy. Must our infinite responsibility (is this incurred or accusatory or taken freely?) to the other continually challenge our thought in such a way that every ethical decision is at once a failure?

I have no answer if there is no God.

Jacobi's remarkable letter to Fichte. I haven't read all of it, but it's really good and worth a perusal. (Came to mind while reading Heidegger on Nietzsche. The similarities are very interesting to ponder.) Here is a good part:

I do not see why I should not be allowed to prefer my Philosophy of Not-Knowing to the Philosophical Knowing of Nothing [i.e. to Enlightenment philosophy]. Truly, my dear Fichte, it would not vex me if you, or whoever it might be, want to call what I contrast to your philosophy, which I chide as nihilism, 'chimerism'. I have made a display in all of my writings of my Not-Knowing; I have so boasted of being unknowledgeable with knowledge.

A great and still timely piece.

Falling Into Metaphysics

Heidegger, The Word of Nietzsche:

Every metaphysics of metaphysics, and every logic of philosophy, that in any way whatever attempts to climb beyond metaphysics falls back most surely beneath metaphysics, without knowing where, precisely in doing so, it has fallen.

It would be nice to know if Heidegger is intentionally alluding to the sense of "falling" in Being and Time, and whether he is suggesting that as we fall into the They (the social world), in flight from dread and death and the frightening sense of our own being-in-the-world, we also fall into metaphysics? As Heidegger says "That dread is dread in the face of dread." If so, it would seem that being-toward-death itself becomes a means to recollecting Being. Also, with regard to the famous "God is dead" section from The Gay Science:

Perhaps we will no longer pass by so quickly without hearing what is said at the beginning of the passage that has been elucidated: that the madman "cried incessantly: I seek God! I seek God!"

Funny how often I myself have passed over these lines. What do they mean? Heidegger suggests that God dies because the people have forgotten Being in their metaphysical "idle babble." On this one thing I find myself almost always in agreement with Heidegger, for whom philosophy and thinking itself should become a humbling of oneself before God. And so the question, which retains all of its religious weight I think, is simply: where have we fallen?

Goethe

"Just have the courage to give yourself up to first impressions...don't think all the time that everything must be pointless if it lacks an abstract thought or idea."

Goethe to Eckermann

The Paradox of the Ego

When there is an "I" that looks at itself and says "mine" then questions of where worlds and heads reside go from being jokes to questions of metaphyisical immediacy.

"'I' you say, and you are proud of the word. But greater is that in which you do not wish to have faith-- your body and its great reason: that does not say 'I,' but does 'I'"
Nietzsche

Before one gets to the paradox of idealism, it may be fruitful to consider when and why the head stepped out of my head and said "I" in bold defiance!

The Paradox of Idealism

How can the world be in my head but my head be in the world?

Huh? Part Two

Thought I'd make a sequel to my original Huh? post. This one is from Niklas Luhmann, another legendarily difficult thinker, but though I don't expect this to make sense outside if its (considerable) context, the gist of it is pretty close to what Heidegger says in my original post. At the very least, it will give you an idea of what it is like reading a very interesting and fairly unknown thinker at the moment:

The system is formed out of unstable elements, which endure only for a short time or even, like actions, have no duration of their own but pass away in their very coming to be. Viewed chronologically, every event, of course, takes up a certain amount of clock time. But the system itself determines the length of time during which an element is treated as a unity that cannot be further dissolved; that period has a conferred, not an ontological character. Accordingly, an adequately stable system is composed of unstable elements. It owes its stability to itself, not to its elements; it constructs itself upon a foundation that is entirely not "there," and this is precisely the sense in which it is autopoeitic.

Whew! To be honest, though, that's one of the least difficult passages. Luhmann is a strange writer. He uses exclamation points more than any other philosopher (and I insist on this term for him) I have read. He seems to find his whole theory to be vaguely amusing (a bad sign?). On the other hand, I find reading him to be strangely pleasureable, and I believe someone somewhere said it's like a cold shower.

Emerson, Kant, Cavell

Hopefully this is just part one, but the idea is to do a series of posts on Cavell and Emerson. Here I just begin with Cavell's notion of skepticism.

Stanley Cavell, in Emerson, Coleridge, Kant:

Philosophy's essential business has become the response to skepticism, as if philosophy's business has essentially become the question of its own existence [here we might add to Cavell's statement a rejoinder from Luhmann that the business of all systems is their autopoietic reproduction];...that in philosophy the task is associated with the overcoming, or say critique, of metaphysics, and in literature with the domestication of the fantastic and the transcendentalizing of the domestic, call these movements the internalization, or subjectivizing, or democratizing, of philosophy; and that this communication between philosophy and literature, or the refusal of communication, is something that causes romanticism.

To understand Cavell you have to understand what he calls the "settlement" with skepticism that he finds in Kant. Thankfully, Cavell provides a 5 point summary of the entire Critique of Pure Reason:

(1)Experience is constituted by appearances. (2) Appearances are of something else, which accordingly cannot itself appear. (3) All and only functions of experience can be known; these are our categories of the understanding. (4) It follows that the something else--that of which appearances are appearances, whose existence we must grant--cannot be known. In discovering this limitation of reason, reason proves its power to itself, over itself. (5) Moreover, since it is unavoidable for our reason to be drawn to think about this unknowable ground of appearance, reason reveals itself to itself in this necessity also.

This settlement with skepticism has the effect of dividing us from the world, cutting us off from the ordinary, as Cavell might say, or encasing us in a "prison of glass" as Emerson would say. But by splitting the world in two like this, a third world is created, one of the middle. (I am reminded of Heidegger's remark in Being and Time that Dasein is in its ontic constitution an ontological being.) Cavell writes:

The dissatisfaction with such a settlement as Kant's is relatively easy to state. To settle with skepticism, to assure us that we do know the existence of the world or, rather, that what we understand as knowledge is of the world, the price Kant asks us to pay is to cede any claim to know the thing in itself, to grant that human knowledge is not of things as they are in themselves. You don't--do you?--have to be a romantic to feel sometimes about that settlement: Thanks for nothing.

"Freedom is necessary," Emerson writes in Fate. The antinomies are absolutely irresolvable, and yet they stand. Kant's vision is of two worlds,

"one of which is necessary to the satisfaction of human Understanding, the other to the satisfaction of human Reason. One romantic use for this idea of two worlds lies in its accounting for the human being's dissatisfaction with, as it were, itself. [Which perhaps reaches one of its highpoints in Schopenhauer, and, in a reverse fashion, Nietzsche.] It appreciates the ambivalence in Kant's central idea of limitation, that we simultaneously crave its comfort and crave escape from its comfort..as if the best proof of human existence were its power to yearn, as if for its better, or other, existence.

So the desire is concomitant with that desire's impossible satisfaction: to know the world. To know it sexually? Yes, in a literal and metaphoric sense. To know it as Hamlet and Othello wanted to know it, and as Lear was unwilling to face the illusions of his knowledge. Only Hamlet escapes his desire ("Let be"), but not his death.

The settlement with skepticism makes us homeless. Cavell memorably calls the philosopher the "hobo of thought." I like this line because of its humility. Philosophers are not wandering kings, but beggars. But the question that faces the skeptic, as it faced Shakespeare's protagonists, is how to face the world when it has hollowed itself out, when it becomes a dream, when I become a ghost that cannot but pass through the objects I wish to touch. What Cavell wishes to accomplish through philosophy is to place the question of your redemption (the possibility, the impossibility, of "knowing," in all the senses of that word, the world) before you. What he will ask of you is not an aversion, an active deferral (a deconstruction?), of the world, but its relinquishment. A passivity (Gelassenheit?) towards the world that, at bottom, and we must be frank here, accepts death. Perhaps we cannot seize hold of death (one interpretation of Heidegger) but we can be given it indirectly through a willingness to let our life pass away.

The question I'll try to turn to next time (if there is one) is what the stakes are in Cavell's attempt to retrieve Emerson for philosophy, and just what philosophy becomes under these conditions, a question that ultimately becomes about Wittgenstein's "outside language games" and their impossibility. There is no language of the outside, but can the outside be included as a necessary part of the inside language? The paradox of philosophy: you cannot indicate an "outside" and have it remain outside. But what if you suggest that outsides are a function of any number of particular insides? Could one system observe another and see the outside of that sytem? That's Luhmann's gambit.

Communism or Fascism

Here is an interesting article by Zizek. An old topic, really, and it simply rehearses the old leftist problem of how to oppose totalitarian ideologies without adopting (at least implicitly) their own. Kind of a pointless academic problem really, but I thought this passage pretty interesting:

Till now, to put it straightforwardly, Stalinism hasn’t been rejected in the same way as Nazism. We are fully aware of its monstrous aspects, but still find Ostalgie acceptable: you can make Goodbye Lenin!, but Goodbye Hitler! is unthinkable. Why? To take another example: in Germany, many CDs featuring old East German Revolutionary and Party songs, from ‘Stalin, Freund, Genosse’ to ‘Die Partei hat immer Recht’, are easy to find. You would have to look rather harder for a collection of Nazi songs. Even at this anecdotal level, the difference between the Nazi and Stalinist universes is clear, just as it is when we recall that in the Stalinist show trials, the accused had publicly to confess his crimes and give an account of how he came to commit them, whereas the Nazis would never have required a Jew to confess that he was involved in a Jewish plot against the German nation. The reason is clear. Stalinism conceived itself as part of the Enlightenment tradition, according to which, truth being accessible to any rational man, no matter how depraved, everyone must be regarded as responsible for his crimes. But for the Nazis the guilt of the Jews was a fact of their biological constitution: there was no need to prove they were guilty, since they were guilty by virtue of being Jews.

He goes on. What I think bothers me about these discussions, at bottom, is the need to pick the "the incomparable evil of the 20th century." The idea must be that if we can pick the most evil ideology then somehow we can have a solid moral foundation to stand on: we're against that. Absolute good is just replaced by absolute evil, but it's just a negative version of the same foundational belief. I'm also not sure I can buy the idea that Stalinism was the perversion of an "authentic" revolution while Fascism was from the beginning a perversion of one. Only a doctrinaire Marxist, a strict materialist, would be able to distinquish that sharply between racial and class antagonisms. I'm not prepared to do that, nor can I see any real basis for doing so that doesn't depend a priori on a flawed materialist theoretical position. This article seems like a last gasp to defend a worn-out totalizing ideology.

The Fall

"Nothing is more foreign to our way of thinking than the earth in the middle of the silent universe and having neither the meaning that man gives things, nor the meaninglessness of things as soon as we try to imagine them without a consciousness that reflects them."
G. Bataille

This is the catch of metaphysics. A metaphysics that concerns itself with its questions as objects tends toward either valuation or devaluation of those objects-- hence it is thrown into a dizzying vacillation between meaning and meaninglessness and is never capable of penetrating a constructed surface. What is needed is a metaphysics without parachutes that is capable of going down, a metaphysics of descent-- terrifying and plunging descent.

"Only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified."
F. Nietzsche

Nietzsche is still grasping for justification despite his humble claims of affirmation. It is probable that existence and the world, under the gaze of a conscious eye, will not be justified. Although existence and the world will likely never be justified as an aesthetic phenomenon, it may sing from the lips of a metaphysician of descent through an aesthetic medium.

"Poetry describes nothing that does not slip toward the unknowable...but this poetry is only a way by which a man goes from a world full of meaning to the final dislocation of meanings, of all meaning, which soon proves to be unavoidable."
G. Bataille

But what does it matter? Why should I concern myself with the songs of these new metaphysicians of descent? By posing the question I have already returned to that age-old refrain. I am spun into a desperate sickness. The question is really one of paralysis-- vertical or horizontal paralysis.

Derrida's Nietzsche

Contrary to Heidegger's. Truth is a woman, not false, nor true. The binary is dissolved:

The question of the woman suspends the decidable opposition of true and non-true and inaugurates the epochal regime of quotation marks which is to be enforced for every concept belonging to the system of philosophical decidability...The question posed by the spurring-operation is more powerful than any content, thesis, or meaning.
--Spurs

Of course, the question, and perhaps it is the question (can you tell by this horrible style that I've been reading Derrida?) is: how do you keep from making the undecidable the decision? Or, in the terms of systems theory, how do you justify (or avoid) making contingency a foundation? How do you dissolve the duality of thought (where the absence of the duck represents the rabbit as much as the absence of the rabbit represents the duck)? How do we deal with this ridiculous duck/rabbit monster? Outside of Buddhism (and the redemptive terms of that faith) you can't really. (And here systems theory may have the edge on Derrida, since this failure is built in to the system itself. You can't observe yourself, ever. You can only create new blind spots. This may be implicit in Derrida though, so I shouldn't shoot my mouth off.)

Note: everyone should be aware that in this book Derrida coins a hilarious new word: phallologocentrism. I intend to stick this in my next academic paper even if it takes a crowbar. Easy A!

A New Volunteer in Defense of Marriage!

I now vow to dedicate myself fully to the defense of marriage. Why you may ask...because, my God, I too "want a wife!" http://www.cwluherstory.org/CWLUArchive/wantawife.html

More Nietzsche

Michael Tanner on Nietzsche's last year of sanity and Twilight of the Idols:

And this is Nietzsche bravely talking about the joys of heaven from a position in hell--for this last year he says No as never before. One might even say that his affirmations are only, and this is his tragedy, the negations of negations. His faith--and it is remarkable to find him talking of faith at all in a positive way--is that it is possible to be someone who does not need to negate first. But he could never be that person, and the more dialectical cartwheels he turns, with wonderful and entrancing dexterity, the further he is removed from that ideal. The only Dionysus we can identify him with is the one torn into innumerable agonized fragments.

I think this passage does a pretty good job summing up my own misgivings about Nietzsche, while still maintaining the respectful awe I feel towards the writings he left us. And if we accept Tanner's idea that Nietzsche wanted to be someone who didn't need to negate in the first place then we have to think that perhaps Nietzsche's philosophy becomes a relentless and agonizing self-criticism (of the pessimist inside, perhaps) that simply enacts, over and over (the tragic irony!), the problem it seeks to solve. If only philosophy had the power to do away with itself...if only it would perish forever in an instant of joy, of pure Yes-saying, that abolishes all the little no's we say in self-defense against the universe.

Nietzsche and the Pre-Platonic Philosophers

"The intellect must not only desire serreptitious delights; it must become completely free and celebrate Saturnalia. The free spirit surveys things, and now for the first time mundane existence appears to it worthy of contemplation as a problem. The is the true characteristic of the philosophical drive: wonderment at that which lies before everyone. The most mundane phenomenon is Becoming: with it Ionian philosophy begins. The problem returns infinitely intensified for the Eleatics: they observe, namely, that our intellect cannot grasp Becoming at all, and consequently they infer a metaphysical world. All later philosophy struggles against Eleaticism; that struggle ends with skepticism. Another problem is purposiveness in nature; with it the opposition of spirit and body will enter philosophy for the first time. A third problem is that concerning the value of knowledge. Becoming, purpose, knowledge-- the contents of pre-Platonic philosophy."

Nietzsche The Pre-Platonic Philosophers

Gelassenheit

A strange term of Heidegger's that derives, according to the note in my book, from German Mysticism, particularly Meister Eckhart. I haven't read Eckhart, though I certainly plan to soon. Here's the key passage in Discourse on Thinking:

But will not saying both yes and no this way to technical devices make our relation to technology ambivalent and insecure? On the contrary! Our relation to technology will become wonderfully simple and relaxed. We let technical devices enter our daily life, and at the same time leave them outside, that is, let them alone, as things which are nothin absolute but remain dependent upon something higher. I would call this comportment toward technology which expresses "yes" and at the same time "no," by an old word, releasement toward things.

"Releasement towards things" is the translation of Gelassenheit in my edition, but I'm undecided what I think of that meaning. Don't we also have to hold back? It's almost a passivity that occurs as result of a denial (which, as far as I know, is consistent with Eckhart). Later on in the essay, even Heideger speaks of the fact that Gelassenheit only happens through "persistent, courageous thinking." Yes and no. But what constitutes the Yes? (Will? even Schopenhauerian Will?) And what constitutes the No? (Nihilism? Being-Towards-Death? Vattimo's "twisting"?)

Heidegger, it seems to me, has become almost explicitly religious here, if not in the sense of speaking of God, but of a "higher mystery." My own inclination is to read this in classic existentialist terms, as a "nothing" or "the absurd" but Heidegger's meaning I think is something much more....peaceful I guess. Ego-less? I don't know Heidegger's feelings towards Schopenhauer, but from a few comments here and there I gather he didn't like him much, and even found him petty in his attacks on Hegel. (Petty? probably. Funny? absolutely. Maybe that's just my sense of humor though.) He prefers Eckhart's positive version of this I think. But is there a difference? Is the nothing of Being taken as something? Isn't the idea that Gelassenheit opens us, more or less, to an experience of God in the form of a "higher mystery"? (And wouldn't this, in the end, simply be a version of the great sin of philosophy that Heidegger harps about so often in Being and Time: taking Being as a being?) I know that Heidegger knows this. He even, for a time, wrote "Being" literally crossed out. So what is he up to here?

I wish I knew more about theology, but I wonder if direct experience of god in a Fallen existence is possible or, indeed, orthodox. And wouldn't it just as likely be something terrible and frightening? Is the endless deferral of something like Gelassenheit (and perhaps Deconstruction, but I'm not sure) a form of world deferral that turns toward God? Or the Nothing? (Take your pick.)

The Resurrection of Christ as Eternal Return

"And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched." (Mark 9:43).

With "the body of Christ," Christianity has universalized its body. The appearance of the man-God in Jesus Christ refutes the dualism of body and spirit, "City of God" and the cities of men. All is flesh and flesh is divine, all is divine and the divine is embodied, and through the divine flesh of the One resides the Holy Spirit. The "Trinity" is the destroyer of worlds, what once found unity in its dualism is now shattered into an absolute union.

With "the body of Christ," Christianity has universalized its body. Yet, in the minds of men this body is too quick to "offend," and they are too quick to "cut it off." "The consequence is, unfortunately, not only the loss of an organ but the emasculation of a man's character...only the castrated man is a good man." (F. Nietzsche). First, perhaps the "emasculation," but now certainly the re-masculation. For a society constructed around the perspective of men cannot exist without men. Now the "castrated man" is not just the "good man," but he is the essential man through whose eyes all those who are not men are forced to the margins. These marginal not men are then threatened with social castration as the universal body prepares to "cut off" the parts which "offend thee."

With "the body of Christ," Christianity has universalized its body! Now the body must be repeatedly crucified in order to preserve our redemption...

Kierkegaard and Nietzsche

I am about halfway through Walter Kaufmann's seminal study of Nietzsche entitled Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, and I came across a very interesting comparison between Nietzsche and Kierkegaard.

"[Nietzsche] could not follow Schelling and Kierkegaard in accepting an entire revealed religion on faith. Nietzsche's fundamental attitude and method barred him from this course: for Kierkegaard not only failed to question an incidental premise but abandoned philosophy altogether to 'leap'-- as he himself put it-- into religion."
(Kaufmann 125).

Perhaps I should say something quickly about what Kaufmann is referring to by Nietzsche's "method." Nietzsche criticized philosophical systems and systematizing philosophers because he believed all systems relied on unquestioned premises. This is part of what he is getting at in many points where he refers to systems as the "ego" of the philosopher. What a philosophical system is, at bottom, is a betrayal of the biases or needs of the philosopher constructing it (this is similar to the "center" of structures). The truth value of these premises cannot be established within the system itself. Instead they must be ignored, or "lept over" as Kierkegaard suggests.

When these premises are removed we are faced with a massive gap in the system, you can call this gap "absurdity" if you like. Nietzsche's method was to question every premises, "to look out of this window, now out of that." It is a perspectivist approach that relies on accumulating many perspectives, and, where necessary, allowing your "will to truth" overpower your need for comfort by facing the absurd. That is a very incomplete re-hash, and I have skipped over the role of dialectics, which is rather important, but I think it suffices for the time being.

Nietzsche's response to this kind of Kierkegaardian "leap" was made without being acquainted with the particular philosophy of Kierkegaard:

"Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want any more: this created all gods and other worlds."
(Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra).

Wow! Maybe I just need to get out more (ok, we all know I need to get out more), but isn't it great when two thinkers seem to speak to each other without knowing it. In any case, this is a problem of fundamental importance to me. Is it "poor ignorant weariness" that causes people to make these leaps? Is it perhaps that our minds are designed in such a way that we cannot deal with absurdity, or spaciousness? Perhaps we have just been taught and brought up in a manner where we refuse to see, or cannot see, the possibility of the absurd? In other places Nietzsche seems to attribute this move to a lack of intellectual integrity, and in others, to a psychological need for comfort.

Here is the real question I was struck with after reading this section: could it not require immense courage to make this leap? Maybe it is weariness on Nietzsche's part, or panic even, that leaves him on one bank denying the existence of the other. In my study of Nietzsche up to this point, and its really just beginning, I find myself asking, and often out loud, "what would you have us do Friedrich?" Am I just asking him to sprout wings and carry me across?

Systems Theory

Not sure how easy this is to follow but out of context, but here goes:

Let us rephrase our question one last time. "What can we say we see?" might mean: Is there one single, accurate description of the world? Encore: Is the/a "correct" description of the world necessary, or necessarily contingent? The law of excluded middle demands an unequivocal answer: "Yes" (necessary) or "No" (contingent). Quine attempts to occupy that excluded middle ground and answers "Yo." But one can see that such an answer "sides," so to speak, with the original "No," for in accepting the relative validity of both positions, it denies the exclusivity demanded by the affirmation of necessity. And yet, though this middle position sides with the negative answer by excluding ultimate exclusion, it is not identical to it. In opting for "ontological relativity" (Quine 1969), one does not simply observe contingency as one might observe objects; rather, one presupposes contingency as an irreducible value. Put another way, if one can entertain competing descriptions of the world as incommensurable but equally valid, one does so not from a position that can see the adequacy of each position but rather from a position that posits the necessity of competing contingent descriptions. In a world where descriptions proliferate and faith in the authority of reason has gone the way of faith in the authority of God, contingency becomes the transcendental placeholder. "Modernity" is the name we have given to this necessarily contingent world.

--William Rasch, Niklas Luhmann's Modernity

Very interesting to compare the idea of occupying the middle ground with Heidegger's "ontological difference" and Vattimo's "interval" (which is exactly what I'm doing in a paper).

But does the "siding," as Rasch puts it, with contingency reveal the hidden transcendent (thus, impossible) point of view of systems theory? It would seem the validity of the theory would depend on the answer to that question--a question that is in addition enormously difficult to even think about, let alone answer. Can you posit contingency as "infinite" without immediately putting a limit on it by the very statement? It would seem that according to Luhmann this is a necessary pragmatic act as well as an unavoidable theoretical one.

To Quote Arendt At Length...

I cannot say precisely how much I enjoy studying Hannah Arendt. She is a most wonderful substitute for life, which life unfortunately has demanded that I seek!

Existentialism, the rebellion of the philosopher against philosophy, did not arise when philosophy turned out to be unable to apply its own rules to the realm of political affairs; this failure of political philosophy as Plato would have understood it is almost as old as the history of Western philosophy and metaphysics; and it did not even arise when it turned out that philosophy was equally unable to perform the task assigned to it by Hegel and the philosophy of history, that is, to understand and grasp conceptually historical reality and the events that made the modern world what it is. The situation, however, became desperate when the old metaphysical questions were shown to be meaningless; that is, when it began to dawn upon modern man that he had come to live in a world in which his mind and his tradition of thought were not even capable of asking adequate, meaningful questions, let alone of giving the answers to its own perplexities.

Hannah Arendt, Preface to Between Past and Future

This to me is a great sum of what has occupied my mind recently, and it ties this pre-occupation into the history of Western philosophy. What is one to do when the spaces, the "ontological difference," in metaphysics are laid bare? I am recently turned toward another question, also uncovered I think by Nietzsche. Is it not the case that "history," a story authored and told by human beings, can be fundamentally ruptured by certain happenings that defy formalization into the constructive narrative of human happenings? Are there spaces, "between past and future," where we must devise a new set of rules in order to complete the story, or at least that chapter of the story? Morality, demonstrated by minds much greater than mine to be tied to the same conditions that accompany/create history, is also disrupted, even violently disrupted, by these spaces in the historical narrative. How does one move past?

Two Quotes

The finitude of philosophy consists not in the fact that it comes against limits and cannot proceed further. It rather consists in this: in the singleness and simplicity of its central problematic, philosophy conceals a richness that again and again demands a renewed awakening.

--Martin Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic

As for the meaning of Being, the meaning that the question of Being asks about, there exists another nice Zen dictum, entirely in Heidegger's spirit. It states that before concerning himself with Zen, a man sees mountains as mountains and waters as waters. Once he has attained a certain inner vision of the truth of Zen, he realizes that the mountains are no longer mountains and the waters no longer waters. But once he is illuminated, he again sees the mountains as mountains and the waters as waters.

--Rudiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil

Zizek and Lacan

I didn't really understand this, but I thought it was interesting. In fact, I find every little bit I hear about Lacan to be interesting so I guess I should read him. Anyway, this is from Zizek's The Ticklish Subject:

Classic onto-theology is focused on the triad of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good. What Lacan does is to push these three notions to their limit, demonstrating that the Good is the mask of 'diabolical' Evil, that the Beautiful is the mask of the Ugly, of the disgusting horror of the Real, and that the True is the mask of the central Void around which every symbolic edifice is woven. In short, there is a domain 'beyond the Good' that is not simply everyday 'pathological' villainy, but the constitutive background of the Good itself, the terrifying ambiguous source of its power; there is a domain 'beyond the Beautiful' that is not simply the ugliness of ordinary everyday objects, but the constitutive background of Beauty itself, the Horror veiled by the fascinating presence of Beauty; there is a domain 'beyond Truth' that is not simply the everyday domain of lies, deceptions and falsities, but the Void that sustains the place in which one can only formulate symbolic fictions that we call 'truths'. If there is an ethical-political lesson of psychoanalysis, it consists in the insight into how the great calamities of our century (from the Holocaust to the Stalinist disaster) are not the result of our succumbing to the morbid attraction of this Beyond but, on the contrary, the result of our endeavour to avoid confronting it and to impose the direct rule of the Truth and/or Goodness.

To which I am tempted to reply "duh," but then, as I said, I don't know much about Lacan.

Anaximander and the Ontological Difference

Perhaps the earliest surving fragment in the history of philosophy is Anaximander's sentence:

Whence things have their origin,
Thence also their destruction happens,
As is the order of things;
For they execute the sentence upon one another
- The condemnation for the crime -
In conformity with the ordinance of Time.

More here, if you are interested.

I came across this while reading Vattimo on Heidegger. It is of particular importance for Heidegger's notion of overcoming metaphysics, which is also strongly tied towards being-towards-death and finitude as they are first expressed in Being and Time. It is an extraordinary fragment, extraordinary poetry really, and it is extremely difficult to make out the meaning of it. What is the crime? It would seem it is the "event" of my being, my singularity which only arises from the consideration of my death, that which Derrida notes in The Gift of Death is mine alone, the very thing which makes me "irreplaceable." My finitude is the condition for individuation (here I must say that Schopenhauer noted this in his way) and we might say that for Heidegger, and Vattimo, the "forgetting of Being" that takes place in metaphysics, the conflation of the ideal and the real, the ignoring of the ontological difference (the difference between Being and beings), is precisely tied to this notion of a crime: my Being in place of something else; the tying together of my being with Being, and therefore the origin of the idea of immortality.

As Derrida notes, to accept one's death, to give it and to be given it by God (Being), that which is not me, is to take on responsibility for the crime of being.

Note: This post hopefully explains to some extent my undoubtedly bizarre affection for Schopehauer. I see him as a thinker who went some way towards a rigorous distinction between Being and beings, someone who strenously observed the ontological difference. The problem is, if the distinction is rigorous it completely devalues beings (value is a function of Being). To completely devalue beings seems to me to be possiblly another metaphysical error, though a very odd one. This is, however, the opportunity I see in Schopenhauer.

For us ordinary mortals, Schopenhauer included, if not Jesus and Buddha (and Zarathustra?), this clear distinction is impossible. As Cioran said, "God is, even if he isn't." We have to live in the "interval," as Vattimo puts it, between Being and beings. We have to try, as Nietzsche wrote, to know that I dream and that I must dream. The gift of death, as Derrida sees it, seems to enable this.

It should also, finally, be noted that the terms Being and Nothing are interchangeable. It is beings that must vacillate between themselves and Being, their negation. To be or not to be. So in that spirit I will close this out with Hamlet's extraordinary meditation on his own death. Where else to end but Shakespeare?

If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all: since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is't to leave betimes? Let be.

"Fear and Trembling"

Sometimes when we are called to drown, to go under, in that terrifying breathless state we see for one instant that which we ought not see. Was it "God" who invented "lovingness?" I think the urge to God and the urge to "Love" (conceptually) are similar, and perhaps indistinct. In the same manner, yet on the other hand, "godliness" and "lovingness" are similar, perhaps indistinct dynamics, out of which is born "God" and "Love." Born of the compulsion to ask things in their chaotic and dizzying state to harmonize, the first step toward trying to "know." Godliness and lovingness both live in the spaces between phenomenal experience (the spaces which do not exist in the world "in-itself"). God and Love are the names we give to the bridges we construct across these "spaces" of phenomenal existence. I am frightened of both godliness and lovingness, I am so truly terrified. I do not want bridges, I just want to fall. I do not want to know, I want to have faith that a seemless and powerful current will be there to catch me and carry me along. I want to be in and among lovingness, I want to be love becoming! Sometimes when we are called to drown, to go under, in that terrifying breathless state we feel for one instant that which we ought to feel.

Loving As It Is

At times its good to have a disclosure, to provide for an openness with the people you relate to...its is quite pleasant on both ends. Being at one with myself, amongst people I love, is the greatest moment of wholeness in my life.

Of course "to love" denies knowing, anyone who thinks they have "known love" has at once not known a thing, and, what is infinitely worse, has not felt love. Knowing, in a specialized sense, is the most distant thing from feeling. Knowing moves across particularity with the ease of a leaf lifted by the breeze (Socrates was fond of equating thought with "wind," which tells you what perhaps history's greatest "thinker" thought about the corporeality of "thinking"). Knowing dresses itself rather elegantly in universality.

Loving is much more humble, real, and at once more powerful than knowing simply because it is incapable of universalization. Loving only exists in particularity...in this sense it has the peculiar feature of paralyzing knowing, which relies on a conceptual schemata for its fluidity. Loving, so unique and particular in its every incantation, is accompanied by the most intense feelings, feelings of abysmal anxiety...sometimes fear and alienation, yet at the same time the highest pleasure and sense of oneness.

One may object, "how can a oneness and pleasantness arrive with anxiety, fear, and often pain?" One ought not reduce loving to the rules of logic, why should it not be the greatest contradiction we ever experience? Loving, as dynamic particularity, stands in great defiance against mindfulness, it dances brilliantly upon "non-contradiction," it asks itself to be joined by the "excluded middle."

We are not accustomed to confronting particularity or dynamicism...we ask that things stop moving, and that they reappear to Mind as absence, that they become static images for mind to behold, to possess, apprehend, re-cognize (I will spare the etymology that accompanies the significance of the graspingness of cognition, but, put simply, the mind must possess, and nothing is so defiant of the urge to possess than the aesthetic feeling generated by the dynamic particularity of love).

Why are we so often frustrated, deceived, hurt, and disappointed by love? Because we refuse to soak ourselves in lovingness on its own terms. It will always defy categorization, it will never identify with a preconception, and it will certainly not stand still or universalize...the two great demands, and contributions, of knowing (I say "contribution" because nowhere in the world as it is will we ever find stillness or universality...these are things Mind contributes to the world as phenomena for its apprehension).

In short, to love will never be known so long as it exists...I warn desperately that it is we who create love and are well capable of destroying it.

I used to think love did not exist, I was partly correct and mostly wrong. Love will never appear before my mind so it is not part of the "intelligible world" as metaphysicians say, but love carries us along from time to time...it is perhaps what helps us cross the spaces of being that can be confronted so tragically, if confronted at all.

Well, I must end this stream of consciousness essay on loving before it gets "carried away," as only a meditation on love can.

Dewey and Nietzsche

Recently I was discussing with a friend how I have long been interested in the relationship between American Pragmatism, Dewey in particular,and Nietzsche. Some of you will remember back in college when I had, what History will remember as, my "Lear Episode." At once that play, coupled of course with my life at the time, helped to rupture any illusion that "the loyalties which once held me" had any relationship whatsoever to objective reality. The assumption that these objects of loyalty do arise directly out of the world gave them a sort of permanence or stability, a permanence whose existence one ought not question as "understanding" so prudently teaches us. The Lear Episode allowed me to realize, as Nietzsche so beautifully put it in "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense" (quoted from memory), that these "truths" I had clung so loyally to, had no real correlation to the world of being, that they were merely conceptual webs "spun delicately like a spider's web, flexible enough to be carried freely along the tumultous currents, but strong enough not to be blown apart by the gentl'st breeze."

Well, to put it squarely, King Lear, like life itself, is no gentle breeze, and once my web had been sufficiently destroyed I began to look frantically for something new to hold to (fortunately I was suffering from the most tortuous insomnia at the time which allowed me long spells of solitude to consume consolation from my vibrant German friend Nietzsche). I turned first to Nietzsche, in whom I found a healthy companion piece to Shakespeare and a deadly assassin to the "European Nihilism" that rode in on the heels of my awakening and threatened to lull me back into a circular sleep. Perhaps I would have enjoyed a more pleasant slumber (literally and figuratively!), but "for those of us to whom wakefulness is our task..."

In any case, Nietzsche was not forthcoming with a satisfying answer, although he was chock full of compelling questions, so I began a more sober turn for a guide to the "lived experience" (and anyway it is Nietzsche's counsel in Thus Spoke Zarathustra to "remain faithful to the earth"). Ultimately, via existentialism (particularly Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus, and Ryan White!), I found my way to pragmatism, and in that most fertile and American of philosophies I began to sense a way out. This has proceeded most fruitfully through Arendt, and I will not fully discuss it now because "what cannot be spoken of must be passed over in silence"(Wittgenstein).

At this point I will give an extended quote by John Dewey that I think well describes the problem, which is covered to an exhausting extent in Nietzsche's most urgent works, and most beautifully and frighteningly in the culmination of Lear that sees the King disrobed and open to the elements (Nietzsche is the philosophical "disrobing" of the West, and at once we are asked to laugh and dance in the spaces he has torn asunder...both him and Lear end up insane!).

"What here is meant by 'the lost individual' is, however, so irrelevant to this question that it is not necessary to decide between the two views.* For by it is meant a moral and intellectual fact which is independent of any manifestation of power in action. The significant thing is that the loyalties which once held individuals, which gave them support, direction, and unity of outlook on life, have well-nigh disappeared. In consequence, individuals are confused and bewildered. It would be difficult to find in history an epoch as lacking in solid and assured objects of belief and approved ends of action as the present. Stability of individuality is dependent upon stable objects to which allegiance firmly attaches itself. There are, of course, those who are still militantly fundamentalist in religious and social creed. But their very clamor is evidence that the tide is set against them. For others, traditional objects of loyalty have become hollow or are openly repudiated, and they drift without sure anchorage. Individuals vibrate between a past that is intellectually too empty to give stability and a present that is too diversely crowded and chaotic to afford balance or direction to ideas and emotion."

J. Dewey, Individualism Old and New (1930)

*These "two views" he alludes to refer to a cursory argument from a previous paragraph about whether it is the powerful few or the disempowered many whose individuality is most threatened by modern society. It is, as he says, irrelevant for the rest of the passage, but I included the sentence because it introduces the idea of "the lost individual," which is important and closely related to the many ways Nietzsche characterized such a state...one of which was "European Nihilism."

I wish I had some of my Nietzsche with me to draw a closer parallel with text, but to those of you who have spent a little time with Nietzsche you will clearly see the similarities. I am certain I could find an extended quote in The Will To Power, Between Good and Evil, and On the Geneology of Morals that would be substantially indistinct from the Dewey quote above.

Quickly, I like Dewey's line about drifting "without sure anchorage," but I urge that this is not a new phenomenon. These things have always been adrift, as the earlier quote from Nietzsche suggests, upon a linguistic web that has been drifting and floating since its very birth. So long as we relate to the world through thought, and thought through language, we will always be adrift because this is the very nature of language. The apparent stability of language is deceptive and relative, and whats worse is that its point of relation is itself, so it is also circular! In any case, what gives the appearance of a recent "setting into motion" is that the former drifting edifice seemed stable in relation to us because we were adrift upon it. We looked at a stable and unmoving "world" because we were conflating the "world" with that drifting vessel upon which we stood. It was only once we looked over the sides of that mighty, yet delicate, ship that we first saw the dizzying and flux spaciousness of "world." It was only when the first fool among us dared to jump overboard that we caught a fleeing glance of the "motioness" of our ship. So one says, "Dear God, it appears the anchor has been lost!" My answer to this brave fool is, "My friend, I fear we may have been misled altogether of the existence of an anchor from the beginning..."

And new philosophy calls in doubt,
The element of fire is quite put out,
The sun is lost, and th'earth, and no man's wit
Can well direct him where to look for it.
And freely men confess that this world's spent,
When in the planets and the firmament
They seek so many new; they see that this
Is crumbled out again to his antinomies.
'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,
All just supply, and all relation...

John Donne, "An Anatomy of the World," Lns. 205-214

Consumerism and Culture

"The point is that a consumers' society cannot possibly know how to take care of a world and the things which belong exclusively to the space of worldly appearances, because its central attitude toward all objects, the attitude of consumption, spells ruin to everything it touches."

Hannah Arendt "The Crisis in Culture"

I will be sparing in my comments because I am short on time, but as a warning I will suggest that many key terms in the quotation are of a special meaning. "World," "space of worldy appearances," "appearances," "things which belong exclusively to the space of worldly appearances" are all examples of concepts that have a meaning outside their normal usage. For the Heideggerians among us, first, we forgive you! Second, these ideas are very similar to the way similar concepts are used by Heidegger in his essays and sections on aesthetics.

Generally though, Arendt is trying to demonstrate how a consumer based society raised in "mass entertainment" poses a threat to cultural objects generally and works of art specifically. How the "attitude of consumption, spells ruin to everything it touches" is precisely by "consuming" them, by using them up. Being used-up deprives cultural and artistic objects of their vital element, the ability to hold and move people without a function or use, their ability to "endure" perpetually.

That is all I will say for now...it is a typically eloquent Arendtian comment. It suggests something I have tried to say about the commodification of culture for some time via my Kantian idea of aesthetics and Marxian idea of commodities. Arendt's aesthetics are clearly influenced by Kant and Heidegger, and Heidegger is very similar to, and strongly influenced by, Kant.

How do we say anything?

This problem of self-reference is not merely a logical problem, nor is it new. It continually presents itself as the defining problem of modernity. Once the apparently solid, external ground of tradition, God, and the monarchy was replaced by the exercise of rational self-grounding, self-reference in the guises of historicism (all statements, including this one, are historically conditioned), psychoanalysis (all intellectual achievements, including this one, are the result of sublimation), political philosophy (all philosophy, including this one, is ideological), and rhetorical analysis (all statements, including this one, rhetorical) becomes unavoidable. Of course, the "including this one" clause has generally been excluded: all other philosophies are ideological, etc."

--William Rasch, The Lyotard Archipelago

Dasein is the being of its basis, indeed.

More Nietzsche from an Insomniac

"For a typically healthy person, conversely, being sick can even become an energetic stimulus for life, for living more. This, in fact, is how that long period of sickness appears to me now: as it were, I discovered life anew, including myself; I tasted all good and even little things, as others cannot easily taste them-- I turned my will to health, to life, into a philosophy."

For it should be noted: it was during the years of my lowest vitality that I ceased to be a pessimist; the instinct of self-restoration forbade me a philosophy of poverty and discouragement."

Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: "Why I Am So Wise"


When you are up at 3:45 a.m. its inspiring to think that physical irregularities can be a source of brilliance. If only my insomnia, my daily violent stomach pain, my nauseating headaches could serve more than to make my life a constant hellish nightmare. In any case, this quote is one of the most clear demonstrations of the role that Nietzsche's physical state played in his philosophy. He turned his "will to health, to life, into a philosophy." That sentence is a wonderful quick capture of Nietzsche and how brilliantly inspiring he can be, because if I could explain in one quick statement what he is about I would say he was trying to become healthful and vital. Earlier he declares, "I am a decadent, I am also the opposite. My proof for this is, among other things, that I have always instinctively chosen the right means against wretched states...[I] betrayed an absolute instinctive certainty about what was needed..." This is precisely the task he had set for himself, ridding Western philosophy and moral life of "decadence."

Nietzsche was trying to make vibrant and joyful, to render alive the decadent. I was decadent when I first encountered Nietzsche, I still have spells of periodical decadence, but I have begun to be more vibrant because I have tried to make my own philosophy out of a will to health, to life, and ultimately to the most unceasing and irresistable power.

"Why I Am a Destiny"

"I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous-- a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.-- Yet for all that, there is nothing in me of a founder of religion-- religions are affairs of the rabble; I find it necessary to wash my hands after I have come into contact with religious people.-- I want no "believers;" I think I am too malicious to believe in myself; I never speak to the masses.-- I have a terrible fear that one day I will be pronounced holy: you will guess why I publish this book before; it shall prevent people from doing mischief with me."

Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: "Why I Am a Destiny"

V.I. Lenin on Communism and the Emancipation of Women

Lenin was considered, in his time, a champion of women's rights. Of course, Lenin was also a shrewd political operative, and in one of his earliest important writings, What is to be Done?, he urged Social Democrats to:

react to every manifestation of tyranny and
oppression, no matter where it takes place, no matter what stratum or class of
people it affects; [one] must be able to group all these manifestations into a
single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation; [one] must be
able to take advantage of every petty event in order to explain [one's]
Socialistic convictions and his Social-Democratic demands to all, in
order to explain to all and every one the world historical significance
of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat.

There is some evidence in Lenin's writings on the emancipation of women that his attempts to "take advantage of every petty event in order to explain his Socialistic convictions" may have blinded him to his most significant insights. Lenin presented evidence that the oppression of women and the oppression of the working class were two different, albeit overlapping at times, phenomena. Yet, he glances over this insight in order to squeeze the oppression of women neatly into a dogmatic Marxist paradigm. It is helpful to look at the contradictions that are never resolved by such an approach to better understand the way economic oppression works together and through other forms of oppression to maximize exploitation and retard the potential for change.

"Large-scale machine industry...refuses to tolerate survivals of patriarchalism and personal dependence, and is marked be a 'truly contemptuous attitude to the past.'" At first glance such an assertion seems to run against the contemporary leftist attribution of capitalist oppression and patriarchal oppression to the same reactionary source, but a closer look reveals the truth, or perhaps partial truth, of the above assertion by Lenin. Lenin is suggesting that capitalist production would pay little regard to pre-capitalist social arrangements like the patriarchical family. After all Lenin was being true to doctrinaire Historical Materialism, and such social institutions are mere superstructural epiphenomena that arise out of the economic structure of society. Pre-capitalistic social arrangements, like the patriarchical family, are impediments to the development of capitalism because it removes two classes of persons from the potential labor pool, women and children. The result is a lower supply of commodified labor available to meet the demands of the labor market, and, as anyone with an elementary understanding of market forces knows, a scarcity of supply raises the cost of a commodity including commodified labor.

Another reason that such an argument seems so counterintuitive to the modern progressive is because measures to limit the exploitation of women's and children's labor were seem as progressive regulatory measures in the West. Such measures did alleviate the wanton economic exploitation of women and children as laborers, but they also reinforced the constructed gender and age roles of the pre-capitalistic patriarchical family order. In fact Lenin states explicitly, "drawing of women and juveniles into production is, at bottom, progressive...endeavours to ban completely the work of women and juveniles in industry, or to maintain the patriarchical manner of life that ruled out such work, would be reactionary..."

In The Communist Manifesto Marx suggests that the "traditional family" will become obsolete once a communist social structure had abolished capitalism. Let us quickly run through the dialectical progression of such a claim. As Lenin suggests, the capitalist mode of production cares little for the gender or age of the labor commodity it expropriates in order to produce (not quite true as I will explain later) so long as it is able to perform the necessary work at the lowest possible cost. This fact is in direct contradiction with the patriarchical ordering of the family, which favors men prior to women and the eldest prior to the youngest. So for the proletariat the traditional family is destroyed under a capitalist regime that has laid open the unreality of the old familial constructions. Dialectically this is the emergence of a synthesis within the proletariat class but a contradiction against the bourgeoisie, which retains something akin to the patriarchical family because the mode of production does not require their commodification. Under a communist order the thesis and antithesis of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is synthesized into a new family structure whose seeds were borne in the latter stages of capitalism, as was illustrated by the breakdown of the proletariat family. Hopefully that was clear, the patriarchical family as a pre-capitalist social "superstructure" will be reordered partially under capitalism and then the dialectic will complete its movement when it arrives at communism and patriarchy has been thoroughly crushed.

Why has this not begun to be realized as we advance in late capitalism? Well, arguably in the lower strata of society the traditional family has almost completely broken down, and it is in the ideology of the middle class where it still "lives" if you wish. Still there is more to be said. Capitalist economic exploitation has found a willing partner in patriarchical gender and age exploitation. Capitalist production and the surplus value capital appropriates from exploited labor has an additional goal besides expanding the labor pool, which globally lowers the value of the labor commodity. In addition, capitalism seeks on an individual basis, in each individual relationship between owner and laborer, to keep the costs of that specific labor commodity down. The two goals are advanced by working in and through the oppressive relationships of patriarchy. Instead of destroying the patriarchical family order, it is most profitable to move such an oppressive set of relations into the economic realm. By doing so you have not just expanded the labor pool, but you have created a sub-class within the working class whose labor value is artificially held down by ideology. Furthermore, by creating a lower wage sub-class within the class of wage laborers you have created competition within the working class itself where the male sub-class feels threatened in a two-fold manner: 1) by the availability of an able sub-class of labor that demands a lower wages and creates a higher surplus value for capital, and 2) by reducing the substantial reality of patriarchy and maintaining its ideological form, you create a threat to the social superiority of men in their gender relations with women.

Capitalism relies on peripheries to keep the cost of labor down, and these peripheries need not always be national or geographical. Similar borders are drawn all over the social landscape of a given society creating a periphery out of race, gender, age, nationality, religion, etc... By lumping all these different forms of oppression under the monolithic Marxist paradigm of economic oppression socialists have helped perpetuate these other forms of oppression, and they have failed to educate the working class as to how such biases and power relations are counter to their long-term interest in economic emancipation. Marx's dialectic is like a bird's eye view of the societal landscape where only the largest items stand out. Upon closer inspection there are countless micro-dialectics that are working within and through the economic materialistic dialectic whose sum total has been powerful enough to fully thwart the march toward a rupture in the capitalist structure.

To better illustrate we return to the example of patriarchy in the working class of a capitalist society. By taking the ideological form of patriarchy and largely sapping it of its substance the capitalist class was able to set the working class against itself and thus prevent the unity that Marx foresaw as being the inevitable result of large-scale and socialized production. Within the working class you now have the patriarchical and short-term economic-corporate interests of the male sub-class set against the interests of women to go beyond patriarchy and to advance their short-term economic corporate interests. You have a micro-dialectic that must be overcome in order to achieve and sense of unity between men and women members of the working class, and this is just one of many micro-dialectics that result from the opportunistic exploitation by the capitalist structure of pre-capitalist ideologies to artificially deflate the value of labor.

Another example is the racial ideology that accompanied the pre-capitalist slave economy in the American South. It is evident to anyone who takes even the most cursory glance that any factuality of such an ideology has been completely disproven. What I mean is, regardless of the conceptual proclamations of race ideology, it is clear that racial orderings are artificial. Again though, there is an artificial deflation of the value of labor performed by racial minorities which creates another sub-class to compete for wages within the working class, and this sub-class cuts across, or intersects, with the aforementioned gender sub-class. You are provide white men and women with the tension of reinforcing the formal ideological aspect of racial oppression while ameliorating its substantive component; so they feel the ingrained ideological drive to maintain racial superiority in society while pursuing their short-term economic interests in the relations of production. These examples can be recounted ad infinitum I fear, which suggests that there are an incalculable number of tensions within the working class, which is an international class, before such a group is united enough for a thorough and final move toward socialism. Until these tensions are overcome they will be ready-made obstacles to the success of any socialist society.

I suggest that a strategic approach should place an immediate priority on confronting these social manifestations of oppression before moving on to the larger issue of economic oppression and not the other way around. Lenin was so saturated in Marxist dogma that he could not see that he had stumbled on evidence that challenged the traditional "structure-superstructure" formulation. Capitalism was programmed from the outset to maintain aspects of pre-capitalist social arrangements when such arrangements helped to produce a greater surplus value. It has been an added benefit to the maintenance of capitalism that these social arrangements have also placed numerous difficult, perhaps insurmountable, obstacles in the path of the emancipation of the working class. In effect, capitalism has created a bigoted Frankenstein out of the working class that perpetuates its own domination.

Later Heidegger

Only a god can save us.

--Martin Heidegger, 1966.

Why am I so drawn to the philosophies of old men, or more particulary the philosophies of brilliant young men grown old? Does the ever increasing certainty of death add weight to a man's words? I don't think so, we never feel death is near, we cannot ever really grasp it. It never really happens. I think instead that I am drawn to the sense of resignation, or more properly perhaps the endurance, demonstrated in old age. In any case, add these words to the long list of slightly disheartening utterances from great men grown old. (For even more read the late plays of Shakespeare, especially The Tempest: "We are the stuff that dreams are made of.")

Huh?

Continuing the new trend of short posts:

Dasein is not itself the basis of its Being, inasmuch as this basis first arises from its own projection; rather, as Being-its-Self, it is the Being of its basis.

--Heidegger, Being and Time
Just a taste of the sentences that you must continually try to get your head around while reading Being and Time. Surely a masterpiece of philosophy, but one that requires almost a new way of thinking in order to understand it.

The Middle American Myth

"People have always been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be until they have learnt to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises."
V.I. Lenin

Nietzsche and Marriage

I am quite exhausted today so I am going to post a couple aphorisms by Nietzsche from Human, All Too Human.

406

"Marriage as a long conversation. When entering marriage one should ask the question: do you think you will be able to have good conversation with this woman right into old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory, but most of the time interaction is spent in conversation."

BUT

426

"Free spirits and marriage. Will free spirits live with women? In general, I believe that, as the true-thinking, truth-speaking men of the present, they must, like the prophetic birds of ancient times, prefer to fly alone."

***

In some cases I agree with these, in others I disagree. They are both sexist in varying degrees...anyway, i don't feel like commenting on them.

Love

Love, my readers and brothers, is, in the world and in life, the most tragic thing there is. Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion. Love is consolation in desolation, it is the only remedy against death, since it is death's sister.

--Miguel de Unamuno

Pessimism

Every evening we are poorer by a day.

--Schopenhauer, On the Vanity of Existence

My god, how that man can cut right through your heart. I suppose there is an optimistic, or probably simply a more "rational," way to approach the situation he describes. Surely, one might say, we are a day richer in experience? (Maybe then we should tally up the bad and good days every evening, and keep a running score. Who would ever come out even, let alone on top?) How absurd.

No, the best response would be to say the premise is flawed, that to approach life from this sort of timeline perspective (Which, in fact, Schopenhauer does not do, preferring instead to approach it from the continual agony of an unending present moment. Not even death is an escape properly speaking. But let's stick with this quote for now) is ridiculous. But even were one to feel that a life lived in the present (another impossibility I think; we are always oriented toward the future with regard to our own possibilities of Being, we are bound to the timeline like a wheel of fire, with rare exceptions such as my inscrutable and never-to-be-explained philosophy of witnessing) is somehow worthwhile the response of Pessimism would be to think of that belief as a delusion bordering on insanity.

Where I come up short is whether it is really possible to judge this type of response as "valid" or whatever. I find most critical tools come up short in response to Pessimism, simply because it is irrational, or simply because it is dogmatic, I don't know. Bertrand Russell gets it right in simply stating that there is no more basis for a pessimistic philosophy than there is for an optimistic philosophy, since either presupposes erroneously that the universe is built to some purpose.

The Pessimist must, therefore, affirm just this irrational belief in a purpose. I think, contra Russell, that the idea that the universe is built to a purpose is not really irrational. In the sense that it exists for its own sake, it is to that purpose directed, and to that purpose we are chained: existence, our "mortal coil" is a prison from which there is no escape.

Consider the great Utopias written throughout history. It doesn't take much reflection to discover that each and every one of them is unbearable. Narratives of emancipation, in whatever form that emancipation takes, are in truth narratives of the emancipation from existence. Our happy endings are precisely that, endings. Unhappy endings imply precisely the continued prison of existence. (Tragedy occupies a third zone maybe).

There is one Utopian novel that proposes a viable solution. In fact, it is a dystopia, Brave New World. Let us numb ourselves with drugs and any and all distractions. Who's to judge? The fact is that the world Huxley presents is more appealing than all the real utopias could ever hope to be. Thus would life be bearable, but not for us, just our shadows.

Science can provide the solution. It really can, and we are on our way. Well, not precisely "we" since whatever beings will inhabit this planet after our unhappy sojourn here is over will not be "us" in any meaningful sense. The utopian world is not, and by definition cannot ever be, our own world.

I think, ultimately, the question of Pessimism rests on a pretty difficult question: What is the content of existence? Maybe it is contentless, as I suspect many modern philosophers would argue. Any inclination to assign an "essence" to existence would be seen as foolish at best, and reactionary at worst. If, for instance, one were to argue that life is simply suffering, this would betray a foundationalist bent that is unsupportable.

And so we are left in the rather curious position of being unable to say anything definitive about existence as such. In certain contingent circumstances, it is to be imagined that existence could even be a quite wonderful thing.

Something, I feel, is missing in this account, but I am not sure what yet. Perhaps it is the non-contingency of two factors: my simple existence (the foundation for contingencies) and my death. Are these, in fact, non-contingent? I don’t know. And I don’t think the matter is simple. The idea of an essentially contentless existence (thus an existence that derives its meaning from difference) seems to overlook the fact that existence almost continually strives for non-existence, in the many forms this would take. I can philosophize about my existence all I want, but I can’t make this headache go away. I feel stuck.

And so another day closes...

Jacques Derrida

At the end is a link to the best brief capsule of Derrida I have read yet, though have not read them all. I must say I have been astounded at the dearth of remembrance for a man who is not just an immensely important philosophic figure (no doubt one of the most important of the 20th century), but a man who also was tremendously influential on American life at all levels. Anyone who has had their eyes and ears open in American universities over the last 30+ years could not help but here the persistent echo of Derrida's '66 lecture "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." "Deconstruction" has even been popularized and appeared in the general discourse and in the popular arts.

I have encountered his fascinating, and more often frustratingly abstruse, work at almost every turn...even in that bulwark of American Philistine indifference, the law school. What was Derrida's impact on me intellectually? I am certain it is more than I know, just as I am certain that it is still sinking in. I have only begun to directly confront his work, and as a beginning it is most fair to say I have not yet begun!

I must say that the passing of Jacques Derrida has hit me rather hard and I cannot really put my finger on why. I suspect it is because I fear it is the beginning of a death much larger than this particular one, and I will leave the reader to guess what I feel has begun to breathe heavily in the face of its mortality with the passing of a great 20th century philosopher. In any case, here is the link...

http://chronicle.com/free/2004/10/2004101102n.htm

I have decided to include another I have just finished reading, much better than the first I think. Also I want to point out the quote it finishes on. It mentions a collections of eulogies that appeared in English under the title The Work of Mourning, but in French Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde...it translates, "Each time unique, the end of the world." How exceptionally beautiful!

http://books.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,11617,1324460,00.html

Arendt Considering Nihilism

In the essay I am working on right now ("Thinking and Moral Considerations," which I will quote extensively from), Arendt addresses nihilism in two different instances. First, is the concern by the "defenders of metaphysics" of the "danger of nihilism" that arises through recent philosophical contributions by the likes of Nietzsche. In the second instance, she addresses the real possibility that "thinking" will coincide with nihilistic "knowledge." I believe these two instances relate back to each other, and they are helpful in understanding the interconnectedness and implications of her theories on thinking, willing and judging.

I do not plan on explaining Arendt's theory of "thinking" here, but I do plan soon on a large post on Thinking, Willing, and Judging, the tripartite division that was to organize her last work on the vita contemplativa in The Life of the Mind. Unfortunately she died before its completion and never got to the Judgment section, which was probably the most important of the three because it proposes a solution to the problem formed by the first two sections (and in my opinion by the Nietzsche and post-structuralism problems). Fortunately, for my sake, her theory of judgment can be well gathered by an intense study of several essays touching on the issue, but I will not go into that now either.

For the purposes of this post you need only know that "thinking," according to Arendt, is a purposeless activity, it does not aim at producing anything. In fact, "thinking" is inherently destructive and even self-destructive, because when one thinks, one is always thinking anew. Thinking challenges "concepts," which are described as knowledge or "thoughts frozen by language, the medium of thinking." So when I mentioned earlier that thinking can coincide with nihilism, it would be wrong to gather that thinking "produces" nihilism because thinking does not produce anything. Production of knowledge is what "knowing" does (based on a distinction b/w "knowing" and "thinking" Arendt believes she has found in Kant), and thinking is characterized by the act which challenges knowing or knowledge. Thinking is where we take prejudicial categories of knowledge and turn them around, question them, ultimately destroy them.

The first instance where Arendt discusses nihilism in "Thinking and Moral Considerations" is with regard to the end of the distinction between the sensual and supersensual worlds and their hierarchical ordering given in traditional metaphysics. She points to the "cries of the defenders of metaphysics," urging that the collapse of this distinction poses the threat of the onset of nihilism. Arendt suggests that their concerns are well placed because "once the supersensual realm is discarded, its opposite, the world of appearance...is also annihilated." Arendt then points out that nobody knew this better than Nietzsche.

For a perfect example of this collapse and its effect, one need not look further than Nietzsche's alleged assassination of God in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Arendt suggests this oft-quoted and misunderstood passage was later clarified by Nietzsche in The Twilight of Idols where he stated that "God" was used to symbolize the supersensual realm as understood by traditional metaphysics. In this instance Nietzsche uses the term "true world" instead of "God" (as in the true world of things-in-themselves versus the "world as it appears"), and Arendt quotes him saying, "We have abolished the true world. What has remained? The apparent one perhaps? Oh no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one." The "death" of the "God" of traditional metaphysics does not affect "our ability to think" or "the sheer fact that man is a thinking being," it only means that the inclination to think does not need to be raised/confined by the traditional questions of metaphysics (as Kant believed). Unfortunately Arendt moves from here directly into another topic, and we are left momentarily unsatisfied with the fears of "the defenders of metaphysics."

The second instance can be related back to the first to complete a more satisfying picture of the existence of nihilism and its relationship to "thinking." In this section of the lecture Arendt has posed Socrates as the "example" of a thinker "thinking" (there is a role in "judgment" to be played by ideal types, examples or "exemplary thought" which will not be addressed here, one must only know that "example" has a specialized meaning). Socrates, like "thinking," does not propose results or truth. Socrates only incites reflection or thought as an activity of intrinsic value. We are reminded of the charges levied by the Athenians against Socrates for "corrupting the youth," etc., and of Socrates reply in the Apology. Socrates was guilty of challenging the traditional values of the city because thought is inherently destructive of received or unreflected categories, but Socrates never posed results as evidenced by the arguments in the dialogues, which are always "aporetic," either circular or without end. So what Socrates reveals is that "once roused from your sleep...you will see that you have nothing in your hand but perplexities, and the most we can do with them is share them with each other" ("each other," here may be the "me and myself" of the "thinking dialogue," it need not be "others" literally).

How does this destructive and purposeless activity possibly coincide with nihilism? Well, we can see for example certain members of Socrates circle, particularly Alcibiades and Critias, who, having been "aroused" by Socrates, "changed the nonresults of thinking into negative results." Alcibiades and Critias decide that since they cannot know what piety is, they shall be impious, and this is, by Arendt's account, "pretty much the opposite of what Socrates had hoped to achieve by talking about piety." We are warned that thinking, which "relentlessly dissolves and examines anew...doctrines and rules," can "turn against itself...produce a reversal of old values." See for instance Nietzsche, who seems to have forgotten while reversing Plato that "reversed Plato is still Plato." These negative results that coincide with the thinking activity will only serve to be the next set of dogmatically received values. Nihilism, according to Arendt, is simply the other side of conventionalism, negations of the current. Since thinking must go through a stage of at least hypothetical negation there is a tendency to try to "know" negated values, but "knowing" and "production" are not ends of thinking, which has no aim and is an end in itself.

What she seems to be suggesting here is not far off from Nietzche's criticism of "European Nihilism" in the first section of The Will to Power. Where nihilism is fallable, and inherently circular, is in its demand to hang to, or posit, ideas that exist only in relation to other ideas which it has recognized as destroyed. I am working from memory now, but I believe Nietzsche describes this as the person who denies values and then blames those very values for no longer existing, this is the error of nihilism. Nihilism always tries to hold to the shadows of things that it refuses to believe still exist.

This notion of nihilism relates to the Arendtian idea of "thinking," because thinking is supposed to be what is left when "values" can no longer be relied on (along with Willing and Judging). When thinking is blocked by "knowing" we reach an unreflective state where human beings simply apply, "sleepily," conventions or general rules to particulars with little regard for their substance. Its the "having a rule" that matters, and this explains why it is so easy to "transvaluate" or replace old rules with new rules. The flaw is in relying exclusively on concepts or rules, "determinative judgment" as Kant called it, in getting too used to "never making up [one's] mind." Nihilism is, as I believe Arendt would suggest, still holding to this flawed methodology but inverting, altering, or exploiting its arbitrary or contingent substance (she is relying heavily on Nietzsche here I think).

In conclusion, it appears the nihilistic threat posed by the collapse of the two-world metaphysics of traditional philosophy is rooted in this need for new categories. The collapse should have introduced the slippery nature of categories, the reality that concepts tend to "move about." Instead, it has simply led to a grasping for a new set of slippery concepts to hold to, since it is this "holding to" that really matters to most people. To Arendt, I think, the collapse of the two-world metaphysics did not demonstrate the flaw of this knowledge but the flaw of knowing itself. "What has remained?" asks Nietzsche. Arendt would perhaps answer "thinking, willing, and judging." I am not well acquainted with nihilism beyond Nietzsche's criticism of it and Arendt here, which I believe to be closely related to Nietzsche. I would be interested in knowing what those of you more acquainted with nihilism think since it will help my organization of Arendt for research purposes.

Two Quotes

These are both from a book by Michele Le Doeuff entitled Hipparchia's Choice: An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, Etc. The first speaks well to my current frustration with philosophy in general with its abstractions and cozy little systems. I read philosophy now like poorly written fiction since I am certain most of it has little to nothing to say about the real world that the rest of us have the misfortune of living in. The second I just enjoyed and it needs no explanation.

"We might as well acknowledge the gap between radical freedom of thought, which philosophy promises, and the narrower freedom of which "I" am (anyone is) capable."

"It is an illusion to think that one can be an absolutely free spirit, soaring high above convention and paying no attention to the 'rest of humanity,' a rest who feel uneasy when little girls are not dressed in pink slippers and little boys in blue. Like everyone else I need to recognize that the absurd strength of convention is within me."