zeitvox

April 17th
10:12 AM

3 notes

"Could it be that people both make religion and are made by religion? Could raw, young humanity be an object worked over by religion? A nebulous medium which ultimately depends on the individuals it breeds in order to become concrete. Is there an “individual” that is just magically a pure doer outside of some metaphysical medium? And, perhaps more importantly, could one say a big categorical “no” to any of these questions without covertly reflecting metaphysics or “religion”??

Of course “religion” is such a wild term. Just defining it for purposes of discussion is quite problematic. Something, for instance, that we see in “scientists” defining religion as that which people who call themselves “religious” say religion is. An odd move whereby they brazenly accept a big fat premise from those who they say are ruining the world. But whatever it is, it’s older than any of us.. especially any of us as individuals. There are other things like that too, language, Reason… and they all seem to be involved in the most queer cross pollination.

Strange biology"

— XHerakleitos

April 9th
5:42 PM

4 notes

"Nietzsche wasn’t the first or last heavyweight targeting of a naive faith in the truth, the lifting of truth into a pure beyond which puts rationality and/or ethical truth outside human ken and culture - teasing us into some View from Nowhere. A keen eye can catch Socrates teasing at the possible sting of taking some stories (perhaps valuable in a manner akin to role models) too seriously. Hegel lets us see this kind of naivete crush itself over and over again in a fateful encounter with the nonsensical result that follows when any figure of consciousness mistakes its limited conceptual milieu for the whole, and where the the true comes to know itself as a “Bacchanalian orgy in which no member is not yet drunk.” Closer to our own time, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus essentially exhausts this notion from inside out… less a mistaken period than a magnificent Spannungsbogen and release into an account “hard to follow: because it says something new but still has egg-shells from the old view sticking to it.” Immanent shards of a “great mirror” worked into flesh as though from some catastrophic big bang…. perhaps irritating us enough to provoke mythologizing and making up bottles to fly into."

— XHerakleitos

April 6th
3:47 PM

1 note

The Atheist Bus

Francis Spufford | Guardian »

The atheist bus says: “There’s probably no God. So stop worrying and enjoy your life.” All right: which word here is the questionable one, the aggressive one, the one that parts company with recognisable human experience so fast it doesn’t even have time to wave goodbye? It isn’t “probably”. New Atheists aren’t claiming anything outrageous when they say that there probably isn’t a God. In fact they aren’t claiming anything substantial at all, because, really, how would they know? It’s as much of a guess for them as it is for me. No, the word that offends against realism here is “enjoy”. I’m sorry – enjoy your life? I’m not making some kind of neo-puritan objection to enjoyment. Enjoyment is lovely. Enjoyment is great. The more enjoyment the better. But enjoyment is one emotion. To say that life is to be enjoyed (just enjoyed) is like saying that mountains should only have summits, or that all colours should be purple, or that all plays should be by Shakespeare. This really is a bizarre category error.

… A consolation you could believe in would be one that wasn’t in danger of popping like a soap bubble on contact with the ordinary truths about us. A consolation you could trust would be one that acknowledged the difficult stuff rather than being in flight from it, and then found you grounds for hope in spite of it, or even because of it, with your fingers firmly out of your ears, and all the sounds of the complicated world rushing in, undenied. >continue<

Too astonishing, too adroit, too thought provoking to be missed, regardless of wherever an engaged regard might lead one. At the same time, it is all that in a manner which obviates any trite introduction. Again… >continue<

h/t The Electric Typwriter

April 3rd
6:00 PM

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jinofcoolnes:

“The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

3:34 PM

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"It is well-known that an automaton once existed, which was so constructed that it could counter any move of a chess-player with a counter-move, and thereby assure itself of victory in the match. A puppet in Turkish attire, water-pipe in mouth, sat before the chessboard, which rested on a broad table. Through a system of mirrors, the illusion was created that this table was transparent from all sides. In truth, a hunchbacked dwarf who was a master chess-player sat inside, controlling the hands of the puppet with strings. One can envision a corresponding object to this apparatus in philosophy. The puppet called “historical materialism” is always supposed to win. It can do this with no further ado against any opponent, so long as it employs the services of theology, which as everyone knows is small and ugly and must be kept out of sight."

— Walter Benjamin - On the Concept of History

12:33 PM

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jinofcoolnes:

“We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

March 28th
10:20 AM

7 notes

“You never know for sure if there’s anything in the search… it’s just, it’s an endless search without knowing what your quest is”

“Of course, I could be wrong…”

Socrates shows up in a suburban back yard in Washington

[filmed by ziahassan]

March 21st
10:41 AM

5 notes

"The reconciling Yea, in which the two ‘I’s let go their antithetical existence, is the existence of the ‘I’ which has expanded into a duality, and therein remains identical with itself, and, in its complete externalization and opposite, possesses the certainty of itself: it is God manifested in the midst of those who know themselves in the form of pure knowledge"

— Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit §671

March 20th
2:47 PM

10 notes

How can people seriously argue against "I think, therefore I am"?

All of the arguments I’ve seen trying to refute this statement has just been people playing semantic hokus pokus. I can see how it might not be “me” that exists, but how can you possibly say that you can’t prove that at least one thing exists from the fact that you are conscious, and how do you refute the fact that you are thinking?

Best I remember, one can allow that one thing exists and yet argue against the import and/or suggestion of the statement. One can work up the claim on the contrary that identifying reflective thought with existence - or construing an ontology on the basis of certainty is a form of hocus pocus in its own right.

Phenomenology of various stripes strains to let a life world of precognitive existence show itself - bracketing or suspending ideational conceits (an emphasis on certainty among them).

‘Course, prejudications and conceits about existence are already in play regardless of philosophical angles. And, if for instance we suspect that existence is what it is by going beyond itself, then ironically we can celebrate DesCartes for at least having indirectly pointed this out. Even if the cogito is a reflective, second order, negation… it, then, exists as that nothingness whereby existence becomes itself. But this is no more modern than Heraclitus, than Socrates. That irony, picked up by Hegel, whereby we must come to the recognition of that “pure contradiction”, of “pure self-recognition in absolute otherness”, is a variation upon something older - a reproduction of the beautiful whereby our most proper form - our real existence - comes in the ethical labour of moving (mistakes, warts and all) not only beyond nature & precognitive immersion but also beyond ourselves.

The cogito can be both an error and an echo of the true even when seen as derivative - if, that is, translation is the absolute

XHerakleitos

March 5th
4:03 PM

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"Science, however, cannot create ends and, even less, instill them in human beings; science, at most, can supply the means by which to attain certain ends. But the ends themselves are conceived by personalities with lofty ethical ideals and—if these ends are not stillborn, but vital and vigorous—are adopted and carried forward by those many human beings who, half unconsciously, determine the slow evolution of society.

For these reasons, we should be on our guard not to overestimate science and scientific methods when it is a question of human problems; and we should not assume that experts are the only ones who have a right to express themselves on questions affecting the organization of society."

— Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?

March 3rd
7:50 PM

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When Ye Go Away

by the Waterboys

…the Spirit whose self is an absolutely discrete unit has its content confronting it as an equally hard unyielding reality… This world is, however, a spiritual entity, it is in itself the interfusion of being and individuality; this its existence is the work of self-consciousness, but is also an alien reality already present and given, a reality which has a being of its own and in which it does not recognize itself.

… Nothing has Spirit that is grounded within itself and indwells it, but each has its being in something outside of and alien to it. The equilibrium of the whole is not the unity which remains with itself, nor the contentment that comes from having returned into itself, but rests on the alienation of opposites. The whole, therefore, like each single moment is a self-alienated actuality.
- Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit § 484-486

February 28th
7:06 PM

7 notes

"Consciousness… is something that that goes beyond limits, and since these limits are its own, it is something that goes beyond itself. With the positing of a single particular the beyond is also established… Thus consciousness suffers this violence at its own hands: it spoils its own limited satisfaction. When [it] feels this violence, its anxiety may well make it retreat from the truth and strive to hold on to what it is in danger of losing. But it can find no peace. If it wishes to remain in a state of unthinking inertia, then thought troubles its thoughtlessness, and its own unrest disturbs its inertia. Or, if it entrenches itself in sentimentality, which assures us that it finds everything good in its kind, then this assurance likewise suffers violence at the hands of Reason, for, precisely insofar as something is merely a kind, Reason finds it not to be good. Or again, its fear of the truth may lead consciousness to hide, from itself and others, behind the pretension that its burning zeal for truth makes it difficult or even impossible to find any other truth but the unique truth of vanity… This conceit which understands how to belittle every truth, in order to turn back into itself and gloat over its own understanding, which knows how to dissolve every thought and always find the same barren Ego instead of any content - this is a satisfaction which we must leave to itself, for it flees from the universal, and seeks only to be for itself."

—

Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit §80

Here, with a rejoinder echoing the core Platonic/Socratic counter to mere sophistry, Hegel begins a key shift, which will punctuate the Introduction, toward a movement of thought prefiguring elements of chaos theory and the reiterative dynamics of fractal geometry.

1:46 AM

9 notes

"The flesh is not matter, is not mind, is not substance. To designate it, we should need the old term “element”, in the sense of a general thing, midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea, a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style of being wherever there is a fragment of being. The flesh is in this sense an “element” of Being. Not a fact or a sum of facts, and yet adherent to location and to the now."

—

Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

This final and unfinished work radiates a remarkable energy, “a style allusive and elliptical” - and daring. It’s as if its verve and complexion is always on the verge, limning out a secret, an “interior armature” already before our very eyes, straining as it were to conjure awareness of an ethical pulp - a new manner of waking us to phronesis.

February 21st
1:04 AM

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The horror, the exhalation of gathering cognition, that flash of “one single catastrophe”. A simultaneous fulfillment, debasement and fecund rot of progress, impudently filling the sails of a terrible trajectory. We are on the way to ourselves.

February 15th
12:52 PM

4 notes

Bewegung

This “sole subject matter”, die Sache Selbst, cannot be a position. That is, can’t be a fixed point of view, immutable, and unresponsive. It can’t be a position in a catalog of stances one might find limned out in a text book - the sort of thing that students of philosophy prattle on about, say in American University programmes when talking about ethics.

For Hegel, the ethical shows itself in and through all possible positions or knowledges… But this absolute is a knowledge itself - yet - in the same way that knowledge is the “valid coinage” at Phaedo 69a-b: knowledge as phronesis.

In the Preface to the PhG, §51, Hegel goes on about missing the inner life and self-movement for the sake of constructions… and pigeon holing everything such that the living essence, die Sache, ends up “stripped away and boxed up dead.” So, it is a great danger I think to use the term “position” with regard to Hegel, since the “untutored mind” will tend to take this in the same way as a “report clear as noonday”, the kind of soulless labeling that dominates the external cognition of philosophy still to this day.

One misses the movement, even the astonishing irony we see at paragraph §52, where even the error, fate, and/or superficiality of stances, positions and monochromatic determinations are yet, at the same time, though in a different respect [Metaph IV 3 1005b19–20], faces of the activity of the absolute.

The latter shows itself in and through the former. Each position in the PhG is a marker along a highway of despair, as each figure of consciousness, each Gestalt, in taking and holding on to a position sees it slip away. That’s what I meant by “forever flawed and [undoing] itself”.

Moreover, by showing itself the constellation of positions are faces of Spirit’s self-presentation. This Darstellung (the actuality or playing out of the Kantian Transcendental Deduction) is not something that Hegel contributes. It’s not his “position”; it’s not even his movement.

Now, we have a peculiar contrivance or framework in the PhG that might be loosely called a position, that of the Phenomenological Observer… the “We see…” However, I would submit that it’s more of a case of a ladder being pulled up behind itself akin to Tractatus 6.54, and that taking that too seriously as a “position” would be nonsensical.

In short, everything in Hegel is about seeing the real thing step forth, a negation of negation, whereby any alienation into positions and fields of objectivity is, in turn, surpassed in an ethical necessity. The torsion of this necessity reduces all to nothing insofar as a limited position cannot let go and tries to maintain itself however rigorously. Perhaps that necessity comes to grasp itself in a higher amplitude, becomes at home with itself, so as not to totally forget and lose itself the next time it will sunder itself in the existential realm of its ongoing movement.