Monday, June 21, 2010

Hegel and Heidegger

One of the oddities of Heidegger's published works is the lengthy chapter from Hegel published in Heidegger's 1957 Holzwege.  The small book includes the entire introductory chapter which follows Hegel's foreword to his Phenomenology of Spirit.

I have added a page at phil.aule-browser.com which contains both the entire passage and a viewport into the book Holzwege at Google Books. From month to month there is no saysing how many or which pages of the 1942/43 Hegel lecture will be visible at Google.

As with most other pages at aule-browser, this one requires the Curl browser plugin.

This is a rare chance to publish many pages of Heidegger with no concern for copyright on the German text of "Phaenomenologie des Geistes".

I will add an "aule" for selecting variant pages, such as a page with "Erfahrung" indexed.

Heidegger's works are notable for their lack of scholarly apparatus, such as a mere index of names or a bibliography. Such an apparatus would be a technique within the trappings of modern philosophy and was deemed in-the-way for "the path of thinking".

Had the French occupying forces denied Heidegger royalties from his wartime works or abrogated his copyrights, this would not be an issue today - but the published works remain in the hands of the Heidegger family.

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

A summer evening recital: Lindsey Johnson, soprano

   
In the midst of each day anticipating immanent, impending loss, an evening transfigured by song, sky and cosmos.

Our evening began with a recital by Minnesota-born soprano Lindsey Johnson, in Minnetonka, MN.

From Mozart, Rossini, Chauson, Poulenc through heart-felt sacred songs and convincing Gershwin, Lindsey does not just project feeling - she conveys felt emotion - her presence is not in the presenting, the expression of lyrical song - she sings!  Each song has the voice, tone, colour, texture that is its own and not hers, the singer, but that of the song in our traditions, sustained by such performances, such memorable evenings.

I will be making a page with the recital program and notes to accompany it at aule-browser.com

We left our oldest, Sarah Beth, to visit with Lindsey, and ourselves departed the hall to a sky that was beyond any anticipation, any expectation, just had been the songs of Brahms, Strauss and Dvořák only minutes before.  We drove west to be in the open as the sky was transfigured, parallel streets of waning grey nimbus, the most distant lying on the horizon rimmed in brilliant orange.

And then a chance reminder by our lovely youngest daughter, Claire Aimée, of  the setting third-day crescent moon which Claire had seen on returning home - this reminder led  me out to the suburban street under a sky so astonishingly clear it was easy to spot M13, and, looking off the fovea in a mere 8" SCT, I beheld the great cluster as never before - not salt glinting on black velvet, there is no simile for what cannot be seen for looking.  And then a mere stroll out of Hercules into the Lyre and the great ring nebula with shades of grey hinting at its known colours and structure and then to the double-double stars above that exquisite constellation. And all this as Mars and Saturn sank in the west embedded in Leo, while Pegasus rose in the east with Cassiopeia now clear of the rooftops and returned from her spring eclipse beneath the northern horizon of the early night sky.  Summer has returned.  And all that is in the offing, is only just that, and is not all that yet could be, may be, will be.

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Martin Heidegger's interview in Der Spiegel: English/Deutsch

Over at phil.aule-browser.com there is now an English-German presentation of the Heidegger Der Spiegel interview.

This lamentable interview appeared only after his death: it opens as if prepared in advance.
[...]your philosophical work is somewhat overshadowed by incidents in your life that, although they didn’t last very long, were never clarified, either because you were too proud or because you did not find it expedient to comment on them.
The two alternatives that we are offered would not match the pronouncements of Carl Schmitt on why not to expect his "apology" and there is no reason to think they were apposite to characterize the attitude of Martin and Elfride Heidegger.

It is alsos stated as fact that the "incidents" did not "last very long" - leading Heidgger to offer us the mere year, 1933.

Historians have now established a rather different picture of the philospher who took himself to understand the inner greatness of the Storm Troopers, his SA, or "Sturm Abteilung".

The interview is presented as scrolling English to the left and a scrolling Google Book of the German as found in the Heidegger family edition of his writings, the GA.

The technique used in the page is to embed Curl in HTML and then to embed a browser widget in the Curl applet.  In Curl 7.0 this widget is wrapping the Trident engine on Windows and Mozilla on linux, but we can hope for a WebKit wrapper in 8.0

The entire page presents two copyright items in Curl text markup and a Curl widget, so the VBox containing both widgets is read-only and printing is suppressed.  Other techniques can be added to prevent screen capture or snapshot (see aule-browser.com for examples of viewing eyes-only documents on the web.)

I am working on an alternate view to "slide" the German text portal along a full text companion English portal and another with "pages" and persistent note-taking (Evernote or local Curl persistence or SQLite local or server.)  This early page is not using a Curl style sheet and has not yet been paginated (indexed to the GA pages.)

The plan is to "generate" these views as Curl layouts on the server using Smalltalk Seaside 3.0 as an alternative to XML layouts.  Constraint resolution for Smalltalk is available as Backtalk or a DLL can be wrapped.