Erotik Rilke

Erotik is not absent from Sein und Zeit: Rilke lies under so much weight, but the erotic layer is there, and although quite clearly preserved, requires to be read through a certain indirection.

physis, natura and natality between Heidegger and Arendt

If it offends Heideggerians to consider Arendt and Heidegger bodily, so be it.

Other students of Heidegger are struck by her emphasis on natality.  A fate may be unknown, but a birth is historically conditioned in a rather different sense.

Heidegger's etymology of the Latin translation of Greek physis leaves no doubt.

What is more difficult is the link with Galileo and the phenomena: that were critical: the phases of Venus.  Not the depictions of Venus by artists through the ages.  The Galilean phases of Venus cast Venus into the orbit of Apollo: the modified geocentrism could not be evaded once these observations becames bold assertions exposing an inconsistency.  Perhaps the sun went about the earth: but Venus went about the sun.  Then came the transit of Mercury.

Could an exceptionally acute human eye, armed only with a filtering glass, have detected the phases of Venus?  Visual acuity can be astonishingly surprising.  Galileo's spyglass was built from spectacle lenses.

What should be kept from sight?  For the Japanese, the taboo has sometimes been pubic hair.  The flowing hair of Venus, the head of Venus: das Hymen.  Venerate. Ehren. Irren. Die Hymen Hoelderlins. Diotima.

Heideggger never addresses Einstein's achievement concerning the orbit of Mercury: mere measurements made using instruments.  And Eddington was no philosopher.

Bolzano: on the State and war as acute observations.
Ricoeur: a rhapsody of ideas (random sodomy)

Leah, the gorilla with the walking stick

The gorilla in the elephant pool is documented at PLOS biology.

Descriptions of novel tool use by great apes in response to different circumstances aids us in understanding the factors favoring the evolution of tool use in humans. This paper documents what we believe to be the first two observations of tool use in wild western gorillas (Gorilla gorilla). We first observed an adult female gorilla using a branch as a walking stick to test water deepness and to aid in her attempt to cross a pool of water at Mbeli Bai, a swampy forest clearing in northern Congo. In the second case we saw another adult female using a detached trunk from a small shrub as a stabilizer during food processing. She then used the trunk as a self-made bridge to cross a deep patch of swamp. In contrast to information from other great apes, which mostly show tool use in the context of food extraction, our observations show that in gorillas other factors such as habitat type can stimulate the use of tools.

Elsewhere it is noted that the gorilla testing the depth of the pond is nick-named Leah.

No viable account of lived-experience, Erlebnis or Lebenswelt is now defensible which is not also adequate to expliate the world of at least great apes, elephants and perhaps also dolphins and whales, our porcine companions and the crow.  Husserl, perhaps under the influence of Heidegger, did phenomenology (at least as a propaedeutic to a philosophy of leved experience) a disservice in his attack on Galileo as much as in his misplaced Cartesianism (which has so little to do with Descartes.)

The day of a Peter Geach speaking of "brutes" in a text on mental acts is at an end (at least outside the confines of theology.)

One step in the right direction has been taken by Colin McGinn (also an atheist) is restoring some of the terms of conscious experience, awareness, attention and reverie.

The ethnological accoutn will be that Leah acted without thinking and without awareness or experience. But without regard for Heraclitus she steps into the pond a second time but not as she did the first time.  At what point did she become cognizant of her predicament: when the water proved deep or when she noticed the stick?

The challenge is laid out quote clearly in a Merck manual for veterinarians on swine:

Postweaning sows and prepubertal gilts should be kept in the sight and smell of a boar to induce synchronous estrus (the Whitten effect). They also experience a dormitory effect (the McClintock or Fraser-Darling effect) with regard to synchrony due to the presence of other females. Sexual behavior in pigs is almost universally associated with the “chant de coeur” or song of the heart. Courting pigs are vocal. Boars have a gape response (flehmen), and some boars can detect estrous females through olfactory means. Boars will nuzzle the head, shoulders, flank, and anogenital area of sows during courtship. If the pheromonal cues are present, boars progress to pushing on a sow to see if she will move. If she stands, she is willing to mate. Boars exhibit a unique, pheromonally based solicitation behavior toward females: they “champ”—chewing and gnashing their teeth, producing frothy saliva that is rich in the pheromone androstenol. Androstenol is also present in preputial fluids. Courting boars mark trees with urine and saliva produced by champing. Boars are naturally slow to ejaculate (up to 30 min), which may be a correlate of their long courtship, but mate best if raised in a rich social environment. Boars raised in isolation have decreased sexual performance later in life.

The pheromone explanation would have appealed to the Viennese neuroanatomist who reassured Ludwig Binswanger that he would find a place for his higher concepts in the chemical basement. What a philosophy of the self-aware organism must achieve is not a rejection of reductionism, but an alternative in which reductionism is side-stepped or at least taken out of the focus. In past years, history was thought to offer such an explanatory example.

A pheromone explanation is also relevant in many human contexts: but it is not the singular determinant for most human action in the arena of eros, sexuality and sexual relations.

Until we have studies of porcine social groups in relatively natural settings, we will be ill-positioned to assess the behavioral determinants in boar and sow behaviour.

When the Mangalitza pigs recently arrived in Great Britain, some may have been unaware of what necessitated their delivery. The last Lincolnshire curly-coated pigs are reported to have been sent to slaughter when they lost interest for a "large firm" and its "research purposes".  That was in 1972. Hopefully such action would be unthinkable in the western world today.

Heidegger the Fox, in the words of Arendt (die nackte Venus)

Arendt on Heidegger as Fox has a curious slip:

and now that not one intact piece of fur was left on him, so to speak,

we have the naked fox.

The fox is almost as old as literature itself, perhaps coming to us from Persia.

There is something a play here: the fox and the vixen, die nackte Venus.

The cheap woman is wearing the fox stole: there is a double play as she easily casts off this fur, will she reveal another or will she present as the prepubescent child?  Heidegger is always about unveiling.

Was there ever a boa of fox fur? (see: Mr. Fox, wearing his tail as a cravate; voice of Ge. Clooney)

In French the animal is the cat, for which there is the feminine la chatte. And French has the ready slips to chastise and chaste.

We almost have a burrow in the Venus Flytrap and the buzzing flies.

It is not a simple parable; it is an involuted tale of an involution which is not.

I pass by "Fuchs" without mention.

I once charmed a fox kit from a burrow with vocalization: when the vixen bounded back minutes later it was not to the burrow opening to confront me, but to the dense brush behind the exposed den: the kit went to her there, not back into the burrow.  What did Arendt know of foxes?  Mere literary allusion to parable?

Galileo's Starry Messenger in Curl web-content markup

Over at http://phil.aule-browser.com/ there is now a text of Galileo's Starry Messenger complete with marginal glosses.

The page requires the Curl plugin for your browser, which is available at http://www.curl.com/download/rte.

Galileo's text, also known as Sidereal Messenger or Sidereus Nuncius, recounts his construction of his telescope, his noting the surface of the moon, some nebula as themselves stars, the Milky Way as stars and the 4 great satellites of Jupiter.

I was able to find two other text versions on the internet, but both had deficiencies.

The marginal glosses had disrupted the OCR scan of the PDF images: they were restored manually using a custom Curl text procedure. Documentation on these can be found at the Curl site of Cambridge, MA. Curl Corporation, a subsdiary of Sumisho or by visiting an SCS web site.

Each marginal gloss is wrapped simply in {gloss } and placed before the text, itself wrapped in {para }.
Here is the gloss definition used at this time:

{define-text-proc public {gloss ...}:any
  {return {paragraph font-size = 12pt,
    font-family = "serif",
    paragraph-left-indent = 8pt,
    text-preserve-whitespace? = true, {italic {splice ...}}}}
}

which is found in the top-level curl file which includes the Galileo text as an scurl file. A reference to the top-level Curl file is embedded as an OBJECT in a regular HTM page at http://phil.aule-browser.com/messenger.htm

My versions of Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition on Galileo and his telescope can be found at http://phil.aule-browser.com/
Mention of a telescope is in Eugen Fink's Conversations with Husserl. For Husserl on Galileo, see his Krisis. For Heidegger on science and the instrument makers, see his Technik lecture. For excellent telescopes at fair prices, see http://www.astronomics.com/

Balderdash or Hyperbole? Canovan's Arendt.

Cambridge U. Press Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought by Margaret Canovan opens with this gem:

Hannah Arendt is one of the great outsiders of twentieth-century political thought, at once strikingly original and disturbingly unorthodox.

In fairness to Arendt I would like to say that much of her thesis on technique in The Human Condition, Chapter VI, need not be traced to her master and lover, Heidegger - it can be taken from Husserl's Krisis.  But some insist that this Husserl material itself came from Heidegger.  Some of the Husserl passages seem closer to the Arendt text, so I will get them up in Curl markup over at http://phil.aule-browser.com/ along with links to browse the Canovan quote in Google Books (she wrote the preface to the posthumous second edition of The Human Condition.)

While I'm trying to be fair: the buffoonery of a Blücher lecture can be traced almost word-for-word to a paragraph in Max Scheler's Man's Place in the Cosmos.  Only Blücher did not see fit to tell his Bard undergrads that he was quoting Scheler - if his bombast can be termed 'quoting'. Call it 'playing the part' of the professor. So I will try to get around to posting that, as well.

Arendt and Blücher considered the Americans to be less than their intellectual equals - caveat emptor as ever. So few pronouncements are new under the sun - or any critical light.

Arendt, Venus and Telescopes: Galileo or Kepler or Newton?

In Chapter VI of The Human Condition Hannah Arendt makes no distinction between the refracting telescope of Galileo and that of Kepler (let alone the Newtonian reflector.)

There is, of course, a world of difference.  Galileo's "telescope" was an improved "glass" or "tube" - a spyglass - such as an artillery officer might use.  He likely first constructed one using spectacle lenses.

Heidegger - when he first taught on science and instrument-makers - was not wearing spectacles.

What Galileo was reporting to Castelli was that Venus had the phases of the moon. This was a crucial defeat for geocentrism as a theory (as a fact - as opposed to mere theory - the Earth and Sun move approximately about their common center of mass - which happens to be within the radius of the Sun.)

What Kepler predicted was the transit of Venus across the face of the Sun (but it was not in fact visible in Europe that year of 1631 (and Kepler already dead) - but the transit of Mercury was.)

The next transit of Venus is June 6, 2012 after which there will not be another for more than 100 years.

What Arendt soft-pedals is that these phases of Venus and transits of the Sun were phenomena in the very sense in which that word was used by Greeks speaking of the night sky. But in Kepler's case, his telescope was not a mere spyglass: the "image" was not the "normal" view of a spyglass. Kepler used a subjective lens with a short focal length and an objective lens with a long focal length; Galileo's subjective lens was concave; Kepler's was not. Kepler's "image" was inverted - but the field of view was wider and provided eye relief - essential to those wearing spectacles. But Kepler's view of Venus would have been plagued by false colors (unlike Newton's.)

Heidegger would have noted that an early telescope maker was none other than an instrument maker. But was Galileo's inclined plane an instrument distorting the things as given?

And those who sought to be the first to name the moons of Venus?

Some of these remarks I will add as annotations at http://phil.aule-browser.com/arendt.htm

cf: Heidegger, "Die Frage nach der Technik" in Vortraege u. Aufsaetze

Arendt on Schelling

June 18, 1972, Arendt writes to Heidegger.  His husband, Heinrich Blücher has died, and in this year she is reading Merleau-Ponty (who died about a decade earlier) and still lecturing.  The next year she will give her Gifford Lectures on the Mind and the Will. She speaks of Heidegger on Schelling and quotes Stefan George.

In her letter she says that she kept Schelling out of her current lecture.

I have never been able to handle him by myself

She notes the need for an index to the published work. She is writing to the man who taught her to "read". It is rather more sad than pathetic.

Balderdash in Arendt's The Human Condition

This is just a quote from Chapter VI of The Human Condition:

Since then, scientific and philosophic truth have parted company; scientific truth not only need not be eternal, it need not even be comprehensible or adequate to human reason. It took many generations of scientists before the human mind grew bold enough to fully face this implication of modernity. If nature and the universe are products of a divine maker, and if the human mind is incapable of understanding what man has not made himself, then man cannot possibly expect to learn anything about nature that he can understand. He may be able, through ingenuity, to find out and even to imitate the devices of natural processes, but that does not mean these devices will ever make sense to him — they do not have to be intelligible. As a matter of fact, no supposedly suprarational divine revelation and no supposedly abstruse philosophic truth has ever offended human reason so glaringly as certain results of modern science.

The conjunction of conditionals is false, so the rest may be neglected. Here is that conjunction in bold:

Since then, scientific and philosophic truth have parted company; scientific truth not only need not be eternal, it need not even be comprehensible or adequate to human reason. It took many generations of scientists before the human mind grew bold enough to fully face this implication of modernity. If nature and the universe are products of a divine maker, and if the human mind is incapable of understanding what man has not made himself, then man cannot possibly expect to learn anything about nature that he can understand. He may be able, through ingenuity, to find out and even to imitate the devices of natural processes, but that does not mean these devices will ever make sense to him — they do not have to be intelligible. As a matter of fact, no supposedly suprarational divine revelation and no supposedly abstruse philosophic truth has ever offended human reason so glaringly as certain results of modern science.

Placing such a falsehood in BOLDFACE may help a reader.  But it would also help to have links to those who supposed the age of the sun to be some scientific "unintelligibility" or the need for medical practitioners to wash their hands when going from anatomy or pathology lab to patient rounds (Semmelweis).

This alternative treatment of a text is rather easy using Curl as the web-content language.

For a philosophy course, it might mean that, for the first n days of an assignment period, an online text would be "plain" and then on days following would be annotated progressively as the maximum grade for a paper on that text also changed - in a downward direction from 100% to, say, 65%.  Think of it as a variant of "no student need be left completely behind."

Other variants are easily imagined for a philosophy course with a mixed group of undergrads and graduates.
Here is a variant with simple falsehoods in bold:

Since then, scientific and philosophic truth have parted company; scientific truth not only need not be eternal, it need not even be comprehensible or adequate to human reason. It took many generations of scientists before the human mind grew bold enough to fully face this implication of modernity. If nature and the universe are products of a divine maker, and if the human mind is incapable of understanding what man has not made himself, then man cannot possibly expect to learn anything about nature that he can understand. He may be able, through ingenuity, to find out and even to imitate the devices of natural processes, but that does not mean these devices will ever make sense to him — they do not have to be intelligible. As a matter of fact, no supposedly suprarational divine revelation and no supposedly abstruse philosophic truth has ever offended human reason so glaringly as certain results of modern science.

Obviously for some presentation tasks, BOLDFACE will not be adequate: a stripped-down text placed in parallel or simply converting some text to whitespace may better serve ones purpose.
High-lighting what little may be true in the Arendt text is sobering:

Since then, scientific and philosophic truth have parted company; scientific truth not only need not be eternal, it need not even be comprehensible or adequate to human reason. It took many generations of scientists before the human mind grew bold enough to fully face this implication of modernity. If nature and the universe are products of a divine maker, and if the human mind is incapable of understanding what man has not made himself, then man cannot possibly expect to learn anything about nature that he can understand. He may be able, through ingenuity, to find out and even to imitate the devices of natural processes, but that does not mean these devices will ever make sense to him — they do not have to be intelligible. As a matter of fact, no supposedly suprarational divine revelation and no supposedly abstruse philosophic truth has ever offended human reason so glaringly as certain results of modern science.

But such is the work of the famed author.

Philosophers, presence and disclosure

We are no longer confined to refer to the songs of the humpback whales: for some time it has been known that African elephants emit low frequency sound which travels long distance.

This is so much unlike smoke signals or flashing mirrors.

One imagines a foghorn when lost, a foghorn indicating the coast.  Or a alphorn resounding in a valley. Or a distant carillon.  But all of those are as signs of us or them, the others.

These elephants are not "beings", the philosopher tells us.  Bluecher's contemporary, Peter Geach, still speaks of "brutes" in his Mental Acts.

And now we have elephants known to pass the mirror test of self-recognition. Oh, but not a "self", of course. Even Richard Hughes in his Jamaica tale remains quite Cartesian.

It is as if Heidegger almost reaches the body: he speaks of the body, but he is limited to the voice, the hand. The hands of Hitler. The voice of Hitler. The unveiling of of his Hannah.

cp: Michel Tournier, in "Le Roi des Aulnes" - a book not listed as in Arendt's library.

Northwestern University Press and Hugo Friedrich

When Northwestern University Press published Joachim Neugroschel's translation of Hugo Friedrich's Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik in 1974 they included a page "About the author" and a multi-page timeline.

Page ix tells us that Friedrich became a professor in Freiburg in 1937.

It goes on to tell us that iin 1957 he became a regular member of the German Academy of Language and Literature.

His habilitationschrift was on anti-romanticism in France.

There is no mention of Heidegger, Benno von Wiese or Hannah Arendt.

The note on the author in this translation presumes to tell us that he owe the most to a long list - including Jaspers  - but where is Heidegger.  Another absence.

We are left to determine whether the French occupying forces arrested Friedrich in 1944 or 1945 (as reported by Hugo Ott.)

We are left to puzzle over his lengthy absence from the rolls of the Academy.

His book, now something of a classic, has no mention of Hoelderlin or Heidegger.

Klaus L. Berghahn in his article on Celan offers a clue concerning Friedrich on expressionism.  As Arendt would declaim in The Human Condition, "Expressionist art, but not abstract art, is a contradiction in terms."

It was none other than Hugo Friedrich who put Arendt in touch with Heidegger in 1950, providing his address.

Feyman and the the "atom" of Bluecher

One useful contrast would be to put the careers of Feynman and Bluecher side-by-side.

Arendt knew nothing about Feynman's achievements - nor did Heidegger.

The two-way trail or parallel paths would run from 1952 to 1967: where did Bluecher get to in his teaching and where did Feynman get to in his mere physics.

Posterity got the Feyman Lectures and the Feynman diagrams. That can go in one column. And in the other?  Clap-trap about "matter" and "energy" this many years after Weyl, 1918?

Note: Feynman's peers were not averse to talking with philosophers at conferences on philosophy of science.

Contrary to the picture painted by Arendt and Bluecher, what had been achieved - was being achieved - was truly remarkable.  And much of it by an atheist, with an atheist.

Note: Like Arendt, Heisenberg gave a set of Gifford Lectures - but by then his work as a physicist was basically over and his eloquence of little intrinsic interest.  As with Arendt, Heisenberg's reputation has been seriously tarnished: but in the 1950's she felt herself on sure ground in quoting his views.

Bard and the philosopher

When Bard hired the autodidact Heinrich Blücher, they got a thinker. Here is an excerpt from his thinking (it may come as a surprise to those familiar with the work or Michael Martin or Colin McGinn or other mere "professional" philosophers:

[...] How was it possible and how did it happen that man believed in God almost up to 1800 and then suddenly stopped--replacing this dropped belief with a merely negative belief that God did not exist.

This we will try to find out, but first lets start with this negative belief--for a belief it is--that God does not exist. Since Kant showed us that we cannot know whether God exists or not, it means that the atheist cannot possibly know that God does not exist--so he is really a believer in nothingness. This brings us immediately to the question of faith and to the distinction between faith and belief. Pure faith (which philosophy can accept as such) means that you believe in God although you know that you cannot pretend to know that He exists. Belief on the other hand implies that you pretend to know that God exists (or, as in the case of the negative belief of the atheist, that God does not exist). In faith you cross the borderline from reason to faith, but so long as you never try to convince anyone else of your faith, it can be a question of pure faith, and as such something that philosophy (free philosophy) can accept; the minute you try to convince anyone else of your faith, it means that you have to try to argue philosophically and to pretend to believe. The medieval mystic could still try to talk of his own experiences because they were so strong and because he still lived in an age of belief, but now the situation is such that a philosopher like Karl Jaspers has said that if a mystic would come to him, he would have to say: "I am sorry, but I cannot talk to you about this. I am not in a state of grace."

The negative belief of the atheist brings up yet another point with his "I believe that I do not believe.", we come into the realm of the demoniacal. Old theologians always said that the denial of God was done by the Devil, but this denial of the atheist is not diabolical. It concerns an inner human experience which has much to do with the principle of the demonic. Thinking in the West (Heidegger, etc.), combining with the thoughts of psychology, has lately found that there is such a thing as being possessed. Scientifically explained, this means that a man is possessed by his own mental processes which he cannot control--like the idee fixe, for example, where the man is not thinking, but is "being thought." Since Nietzsche a branch of psychology has developed in which an analysis has been made of certain motives human beings use--especially of inferiority and the development of the quality of resentment as a negative form of action. Relating this to the atheist, we see that while he claims not to have a mystical experience as the saint does, actually he does. The atheist after being driven into a corner will suddenly pop out with "But I believe that I do not believe in God." A terrible inner action is taking place here: the atheist has experienced his own inner nothingness; he denies God compulsively because he feels himself to be nothing--and the relation with the demonic is clearly there.

In philosophy we would then have to say that with this we have an answer and would have to ask: What makes this reaction possible? and why do most people who have had the inner experience of their own nothingness react so wildly and so especially against God? They react this way because if a man feels himself to be valueless and is penetrated by that feeling (the personal nihilistic experience), then the will to destruction of all values is the immediate reaction. Destruction of all values means to aim at the thing always valued most highly by man: God. It is not the Devil in action but man who has been robbed of all feelings of his own personal quality; man who has been driven into the feeling of no qualities of his own whatsoever along with tremendous resentment against himself. But we are very bad self-destroyers for human beings have also a quality of grandeur--which Pascal put forward as one-half of man's basic condition (the other being misery). The quality that makes for man's grandeur is that he can love somebody else more than himself. This is one of the peaks of the possible creativeness of man, but on the other hand, man can never take anyone else more seriously than himself. This is automatic because man lives with himself, even in dreams, mirroring himself continuously, and he cannot possibly spend the same energy on anyone else. If he is in a state of love, loving someone more than himself, then he is safe. But this borderline man we are talking about has paid for this nothingness with the loss of the capacity to love. So he is only left with the other quality--the inability to take anyone else more seriously than himself--and he must deny the worth and value of everyone else.

These have all been preliminary probings into the question in order to give you an idea of how philosophy proceeds, but before I go on I must say that I have a funny feeling in starting this course. I have always felt that I would never give such a course; in fact I have always made it a condition in taking a job not to give an introductory course in philosophy--for that is impossible, and the man who does is either a fool or a teacher of a science (the history of philosophy). An introductory course in philosophy is doing that which philosophy teaches--teaching life (which is all that philosophy can teach). Then the modern situation forced a thinker, Karl Jaspers, to give a series of lectures on the "Way to Wisdom: An Introduction to Philosophy." I had supposed that he would take the position I have always taken, but then I saw why he could do it. Jaspers is an existentialist who comes from psychology. His position is that philosophy cannot be taught, but philosophizing can be taught.[...]

These transcripts must be compared with the available recordings of his lectures. For some students, this would be their first encounter with philosophy.  Mine was with T.Y. Henderson and such BS as this would not have gotten far with him.  But that was a mere prairie University and he was merely from Georgia. Heinrich was a Mensch from Berlin and Paris. And married to Hannah Arendt.

The irony is that Jaspers came to philosophy from medicine where he was the author of a respected textbook on psychopathology.  Bluecher was the author of nothing.

When Bluecher says

In philosophy we would then have to say that with this we have an answer and would have to ask: What makes this reaction possible? and why do most people who have had the inner experience of their own nothingness react so wildly and so especially against God?

he is playing a role - trying his hand at being a Sartre or a Heidegger or even a Jaspers.  He may have heard is wife talk in this way. He has heard about Binswanger and Boss.

In philosophy we would have to say that

might better translate as

Here at Bard I am able to state that

Compare his drivel to the writing of most any thoughtful American or British or Canadian or New Zealand or Australian philosopher of the day: they would have first given a talk before their peers, defended their assertions and arguments and objections and conclusions and interpretations and only then after re-writing and re-writing arrive at something possibly worth publishing to be read and to be retained - some small part of which has been worthy of being retained for its own merit, not merely as historical documents of an academic discipline.

It has taken years to dispel the teachings of European pretenders from Erickson to Bettelheim.  We had our own, the quack Harry Stack Sullivan.  There will be others. Today they are more often found teaching in Third World universities or in America in comparative literature and less often in Departments of Philosophy.

What was the insignificant young student to say?  How could this young virgin have casually discarded the Episcopalian tradition of his father and his mother or the Orthodox Judaism of the grandparents? An atheist!?!

the atheist cannot possibly know that God does not exist--so he is really a believer in nothingness

But the truth is that the young student is able to have his belief without claiming to know the truth of any such negative existential proposition.

How reassuring it must have been to have such a philosopher as ones professor!  How glad his students are to continue to celebrate his gift to them!

These have all been preliminary probings into the question in order to give you an idea of how philosophy proceeds ...

This is not how philosophy should proceed outside the seminar of a tyrannical Wittgenstein or a tyrannical Heidegger.  This is philosophy for the seminary, the theological college, and not a liberal arts college in America.  The buffoon invokes Kant and what Kant has shown us.  But unimportant philosphers have quietly proceeded to show that on this point Kant was over-confident: a very good case can be made that an omnipotent God does not exist and a very good case can be made that an omniscient God does not exist and an even better case that the manifest existence of evil is inconsistent with the existence of a benevolent God.  And all of that independent of first causes, creation or "transcendence".

Bluecher may have had no idea how dialectical materialism was taught in the Soviet Union but he could have transitioned with ease into that curriculum but for his unease with the purges of Stalin.  Oh for the days of Lenin!  The mere creation of the Cheka and re-institution of the death penalty! Phooee!  A man of action has nothing to fear there!  But I lapse into polemical ad hominen and dare to mock a thinker!

But simply quoting Bluecher is not enough to debunk him.  Bard's folly is to put his lecture transcripts on the web - but they have not provided any useful tools for annotating his pretentious drivel.  That is what this web technology should provide: the ability to annotate.  And to trace his borrowing.  And to flag any original contribution if such can be found in the transcripts ( although what I find is second-hand and decidely second-rate.) But to show this it would help to be able to lay his text side-by-side with the text of a more modest and better educated thinker.

Notably Blücher was not a father so had never felt any guilt for having bullied a son or daughter with such bombast.  He had never participated in his wife giving birth, never sat up with a sick child, never thought what he would say to reassure his grandchildren concerning his death. So there was little to temper his buffoonery. His claims for we and philosophy when there was no such "we" and he was no such philosopher. Did he imagine Jaspers hiring him in Basel? Heidegger suggesting him for a post at Marburg or Freiburg or Heidelberg?  A buffoon. At Bard.

Somewhere there will be a summer course for those who want to improve their teaching of introductory philosophy courses: clearly showing what was wrong with Blücher's bombast would be a start.

Truth and web-content markup

My preference has been to work with smart languages and smart markup.  My early bias was for Prolog and I am still hopeful of using Rebol + Curl or Oz + Curl or ObjectIcon + Curl.

But the challenge of markup is marginalia - not so much notes as my preferred vertical lines, double vertical lines and lines with a horizonal "proof" bar.  Not to mention the long curly brace pointing to a question mark.

If you have tried to convert PDF to text you will know that - especially in the case of foreign languages - Adobe is no match for any vertical line running in the margin close to the text.

But the more basic issue is markup versus "plain text".  I argue that if you look at text by a poet or philosopher, there is no "plain text".  There are sections of text. One text section may relate to another through mere allusion. Arguments are not confined by paragraph indentation. Suppressed premises are critical by there very absence.

I have not wanted to retreat to text-as-array where the text becomes enumerated "lines" or enumerated sentences. Let me offer a sentences example:

This is what Schopenhauer wrote. And it is not so.

This is two sentences? Consider this variant:

This is what Schopenhauer wrote.

But it is not so.  This paragraph ...

Now I have traversed both lines and paragraphs.  Matters are worse for sentences across editions and translations.

I was in a grad phil course of a Quebecois philosopher - a polyglot - who was convinced that all philosophy texts reduce to a hierarchy of numbered propositions and our task as readers was to reproduce these propositions as a sequence of hierarchical statements.  A mono-mania if ever I encountered such.

Even if Carnap's Aufbau reduced to such propositions, a poem does not.

Two stanzas of a poem do not map as do two equations.  And even two equations sharing identical bracketed portions relate in a manner very different from two sequential equations sharing variables or constants.

A chapter is not a proof and not likely even a single self-contained argument (compare Arendt's use of section numbers in The Human Condition to Wollheim's use of section numbers in Art and its Objects.)
I continue to look at variants of reST (reStructuredText) as an alternative to hierarchical markup.

One clue may lie in marginalia itself: to embrace this form of outer-markup.  This is non-trivial.

Consider a vertical marginal line traversing sentences A,B,C and D. Suppose the intended lines were B and C.  But the end of A is "covered" as is the beginning of D. Then there is line thickness. Pen versus pencil. Erasures.

In many ways this would be more of a challenge that leaving behind the one-character-per-byte in moving from ASCII text to UNICODE (see my posts elsewhere on the challenge faced by swi-prolog, Rebol and UNICON.)

Absent in Arendt: Semmelweis and Boltzmann

Ignaz Semmelweis and Ludwig Boltzmann are two figures missing in Chapter VI of Arendt's The Human Condition.  Arendt may simply have been unaware of the opposition Boltzmann had faced.

Semmelweis is not remarkable in being missed: Pasteur is not there.  And yet arguably the changes in public hygiene have been the single most remarkable change in the "global" world which she is considering.

Arendt mocked those who might dream of living to be one hundred (had she had a child late in life, she might have wished to see grandchildren graduate from university...)

With very little to say about childbirth - the act of giving birth - but more to say about "birth" in the abstract (Heidegger was not present for the birth of his son Hermann, paternity aside) - and perhaps Arendt was never witness to a birth - it is remarkable that the man of science who spoke for such a simple truth would go unmentioned.  Semmelweiss fared worse in asylum than had Hölderlin and worse than would Heidegger.

Also remarkably absent is Edward Jenner, his methods and the near eradication of smallpox by the time of Arendt's research.  Had Arendt been the lone surviving child of a large family, her attitude and her book might have been different.

Did she in fact understand the difference between a bacillus and a virus?  Had she switched to filter cigarettes based on the mistaken belief that this would reduce the health risk? She and Heinrich both succumbed  to infarcts likely caused by a lack of exercise combined with heavy smoking. Would she have considered the science relevant? The case against filters is not obvious and is based on the nature of nicotine addiction.  Had she not seen how emphysema or lung cancer could reduce the range of action? In her case, she was prevented from writing her book on Judging and prevented from delivering a Heidegger eulogy.

Is it mostly common sense that is lacking n Chapter VI?

Also missing: the concepts of information and noise (Claude Shannon's "Theseus" dates from 1950.)
Prior to 1960, Arendt was unlikely to hear of non-linear dynamics in her circle.

See: Heidegger's bizarre broadcast of his opinion about the science behind radio and television (available on youtube.com)

A web  search of the 4000 volume collection of Arendt at Bard reveals no title by Boltzmann or Bolzano - nor Brentano or Ingarden - nor any Milosz poetry - although Celan and Char are there - and Hans Baumann's translation of Akhmatova's Requiem.

One very odd absence is the first volume of the Ricoeur which is suppoed to be modeled on Jaspers: only the small second volume is there.  Joel Feinberg, Doing and Deserving, is there but I have not been able to confirm that it is hers and not Bluecher's.  Another odd absence is the 1964 Explanation of Behaviour by Charles Taylor - as is the absence of the 1971 von Wright Explanation and Understanding - both books very familiar to me as a student of philosophy years before her death.

Note: her personal library had very little Husserl, no Levinas, no Canetti, no Tournier - and for her friendship with Randall Jarrell, a curious absence of American poets: even Denise Levertov is absent.  Michael Hamburger's translation of Baudelaire prose poems is there.  Broch is there, but only an English translation of Musil as "Five Women" - not a single volume in German.  The only Murdoch is the Black Prince: Iris Murdoch as philosopher is missing.  A great deal of British philosophy from the post-war 50's and 60's is absent (but there are at least 2 of the 4 R.G. Collingwood that one might expect.)  There are 4 volumes by Oakeshott - but the critical volume, his 1933 Modes of Experience is not there. Cassirer is of course there in multiple volumes, but Susanne Langer is missing.  Russell is missing.  The main works on Whitehead are missing (on small set of excerpts.)  But Bergson is there - even the T.E.Hulme translation of his Introduction to Metaphysics. Popper is missing (there is a Bryan Magee paperback.)  But Melville is there. Binswanger is there, but not Boss. Santayana is there in one volume as is Ortega, as is Unamuno.  Merleau-Ponty is not there in French.  But most of the Raymond Aron is there in French BUT NOT his work as a philosopher, which is truly amazing: not his 1961 (or the 1964 edition) or his 1969 - and her name is sometimes associated with his! Missing: La philosophie critique de l'histoire and Dimensions de la conscience historique.  The only Hayek is The political ideal of the rule of law. Rawls' T of E is there. As I look about my shelves of philosophy from the 50's, 60's and early 70's I wonder what more she had parted with, or given to students ... but no Canetti - and Arendt an authority of sorts on Broch?  Levi-Strauss is there -twice in French and twice in English. Calvino is not there. Valéry is there (an often in French) as is Gide. Piaget is not. Luria is not. Vygotsky is not. But The Master and Margarita is there. Pepys is not. Boswell is not. But Keats and Shelley are there.  They were playig catch-up with Americans, not with Brits. Emil Fackenheim, 1967, is there. Quine is not. The only Carnap is Der Raum. Ein Beitrag zur Wissenschaftslehre - Die Logische Aufbau der Welt is not. But Weyl, Symmetry, 1952, is there - but nothing from 1913-1940.  There is no indication what year she acquired it, but the archive reports that it has ephemera and marginal lining. Her Freud includes the Standard Edition. Of a little Wittgenstein, only the Tractatus is reported as annotated; the Investigations are not listed in English or German. The only Ayer is the 1972 Russell. There is no Moore. No sign of a single American pragmatist. Kafka fares better. There is no signs she loaned out Tillich or Jonas or Löwith. Wollheim's Freud is there, but not his Art and its Objects - but Oakeshott on poetry is there (remember - she gave the Gifford Lectures on life and mind.) And as I said: the missing poets. Williams. Stevens. But there is Alvarez and Pound.  But no Beckett. Not in French or English. OF de Beauvoir, only La force des choses. As with Tournier, Roman Gary is absent. Is it possible that she missed both Le Roi des aulnes and Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique - the 1967 Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française? But she must have had a copy of The Painted Bird because she has notes about the author. But not Steps or Being There or Cockpit.  Did she read them and discard them? Sell them second-hand? Leave them in the college cafeteria? In an airport lounge? Where is Gravity's Rainbow?

Where are the two books by Raymond Aron on philosophy and history?  Arendt, who told Heidegger that she was only now reading Merleau-Ponty in 1972.  Marx, Heidegger and Jaspers will only take you so far.

Next: the curious parallel between a transcript of a lecture by Bluecher and writings of Jaspers. When is thought borrowed? (Bluecher, a Bard professor, was an autodidact and not a writer - and so perhaps not schooled in citations and references.)

Gutenberg and Spectacles

Arendt in The Human Condition, Chapter VI, singles out the Reformation, global navigation and the combination of the telescope as technical instrument and astrophysics as "universal" science.

Any reader might ask why not spectacles and the printing press?  When the early phenomenologists adopted the slogan "To the things themselves!", no one was expected to be excluded by having to rely on spectacles: phenomenology was not exclusively or primarily focused on perception and appearances.

In one early text, "Phenomena" are roughly what we would call the constellations visible in the Mediterranean sky - a sky somewhat different from ours as the northern celestial pole was not Polaris as it is today, some two millenia later.

A more important phenomenon is the "moon illusion" as it is not dependent on either telescope or spectacles. This illusion need not be subsumed under issues of apparent numerical measure.  It is quite possible that Arendt was not aware of the illusion and how it was resolved - the nature of this appearance, if you will - by science and critical dialogue.

In the arc of the sky, the full moon, high in a winter sky, subtends less than a single degree of arc - about the width of your little pinkie extended above you at arms length.  Call this by some neologism such as "lunar-spatial-form-in-high-sky-hand" for some non-numerical astronomy.  The rising full moon at the horizon appears to be - is said to be - much larger. If the high moon is a "dime-size" then the rising moon is a "nickel-size" - or sleeve-button-sized versus front-button-sized, to address Heidegger's numeric phobia.  Pupil-of-lion versus iris-of-lion.  What you will.

The telescope is another matter: the "sickle" Venus is larger in the field of a given telescope than the "full" Venus.

At the time Arendt was writing - during the 1950's - there was no star that appeared larger when in focus at high-magnification within a given star-pattern or asterism than when at low magnification in that same field.  This is not so for a planet, a cluster or a nebula.  With allowance for the distinct differences between the resolved image at optical limit in a refractor and in a reflector telescope, stars remain "points" of light.  Only recently has the "surface of a star" been explored - other than the sun.

What was critical was the discovery that so many stars are in fact double stars and some even triple.  To Herschel we owe the confirmation that true binary stars - not virtual or "optical" apparent doubles (one star appearing near another (only due to our relative alignment of star-A and star-B from earth at some point in her orbit) - obeyed Newtonian mechanics (to a good approximation given his instruments.)

Our understanding of our solar system is that it might more readily have been a binary arrangement of a yellow star with a smaller star - perhaps a brown dwarf comprised of what today are our four gas-giant planets.  Our sun likely began in a cluster of stars: the fate of the solar dust ring was to be a mix of rocky planets, asteroids, gas planets, icy debris and residual dust.

It is not an illusion that Venus appears larger in one phase than in another.  Nor does it require Arendt's "Archimedean" standpoint to think about this. Insight alone will not resolve this - did not resolve this.

The moon illusion is a critical absence in Chapter VI of Arendt's book - as much are the concepts of acceleration, limit, group and symmetry - not to mention the orbit of Mercury.

If only Arendt had written a book on Emmy Noether, Edith Stein and the destiny of the thinking woman at Goettingen!

see: Dorian Cairns recall of Husserl on near, far and astronomy.
also see: Sonja Kovalevsly (Sofia Kovalevskaya); Sophie Germain
more recently: Maria Skłodowska, Julia Robinson, Louise Volders
among philosophers: Susanne Langer, Susan Stebbing, E. Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch

Chapter 6 of The Human Condition: The Vita Activa and the Modern Age

I have posted a first pass at annotating Chapter 6, "The Vita Activa and the Modern Age" of Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition. The posted versions are: plain text and text with my emphasis added.

For all of Arendt's attention to homo faber she has no mention of garments or clothing.  She comes close: mentioning "weave" and "silk".  She does mention the "toga" in a footnote on slaves.  This may be because she escaped before the requirement to wear a yellow Star of David.  The word "naked" occurs a few times but not "nursing" or "breast-feeding". The word "rape" occurs twice. She speaks even of "the labor of the woman in giving birth" but may herself never been engaged in the deliberate effort to act so as to increase her own chance of becoming pregnant.

She says: "women who with their bodies guarantee the physical survival of their species" but has no comment to parallel those of Heidegger on her own clothing when she first entered his office, wearing a hat which obscured her face.

Quote:

The fact that the modern age emancipated the working classes and the women at nearly the same historical moment must certainly be counted among the characteristics of an age which no longer believes that bodily functions and material concerns should be hidden. It is all the more symptomatic of the nature of these phenomena that the few remnants of strict privacy even in our own civilization relate to "necessities" in the original sense of being necessitated by having a body.

The depth psychologist would be struck by the term "remnants". The experience of the body is neglected by this student of  post-phenomenology.

She speaks of "marble torn out of the womb of the earth" but her consideration reification is pre-feminist. She speaks of "tame animals" as if oxen were parakeets or Syrian cats or gerbils - as if horses are "tamed" and not "broken".

The one occurence of "sex" is in "the odd notion of a division of labor between the sexes".

The word "gender" is absent.

The word "procreation" is present and birth is analyzed in the abstract: but what in experience precedes procreating is absent.

Had she lived to re-write or revise her book today, she could not ignore the two healthful activities of vigorous sex and vigorous exercise - both of which she, a heavy smoker, may have viewed as lacking telos.

There is no question that her marriage to Guenther Stern began as loveless and certainly was for some time sexless before she met Blücher.  Heidegger's language both in his letters and elsewhere makes it very clear what she, his "saucy wood--nymph" disclosed to him.

Sex without disrobing was practiced in a variety of communities in the western world in the early decades of the 20th Century.  The issue of nudity is documented by Bertrand Russell with regard to his first marriage.  Heidegger, like Wittgenstein, was very particular about his garb (both so unlike, say, Iris Murdoch.) but there is no reason to think that his "open marriage" with Elfride was any too modest (and the recent claim that Hermann Heidegger is not his son may be seen as confirming this.)

The current view of Neandrathal is that both sexes hunted, had elementary animal hide garments and decorated their skin.  It is too little appreciated that grooming for lice and skin decoration lie at the heart of the hominid social life as much as the hunt or seeking shelter: they were very important activities.  Unlike the apes, whom she mentions, the hominid female does not have an estrous cycle: experience and procreation are different activites in homo sapiens than in distant hominid species.  What is now clear, is that the "tool-maker" hominid may have come much earlier than previously thought.

In the annotations to Chapter Six the limitations of the Heideggerian view of man and technique should be made clear in so far as his standpoint constricted her view on topics ranging from the advances in arrow heads in the New World to the place of calculation in science.

The Human Condition Chapter VI "World Alienation"

When Harry Frankfurt published his book "Truth" he may have been thinking of this book.

Chpater VI of The Human Condition opens with a quote from Kafka.

The opening section of the chapter is "World Alienation", which I quote:

Three great events stand at the threshold of the modern age and determine its character:
...
the invention of the telescope and the development of a new science that considers the nature of the earth from the viewpoint of the universe.

The 3rd great moment is the telescope in astronomy (we ignore that the events that matter in the early history of observational astronomy concern establishing certain facts by description and by drawings prior to testing any hypotheses.)

Initially Galileo's importance was to the military - for the angle at which to set a canon for greatest distance. Galileo's improved telescope was a boon for the artillery and the tactical commander.

But was the invention of the telescope on a par with global navigation and the Reformation?  There she is almost certainly mistaken as we can see with the continued rejection of Darwin based on the age of the sun until Gamow, Hoyle and others had explained that the Sun is not oxidizing a fuel (and so can be more than 5000 years old and not have "burned up" its own mass as fuel.)

What was important was the inclined plane experiment and the concept of acceleration seen in terms of distance and time.  Next in order may be Lavoisier defeating Phlogiston by experiment.

It is not that I have an experimental bias - far from it.

Arendt repeats the old saw that Kopernik had no great impact (spread by another popularizer without regard to the historical facts: the documents, once reviewed by an historian of ideas, now show otherwise.)

What is worse is her sheer ignorance on so many historical matters critical to any phenomenological contribution to astronomy and modes of experience in natural science.

The solution is to present in adequate layout her texts - both the 1st and 2nd edition ( the 1st edition has a worthless index) and just ignore the introduction pasted onto the 2nd Ed.

Geophysics: 1956 marks the major break-through in plate techtonics.

Evolution: Arendt conflates the evolution of the earth with that of our species in one and the same sentence.

Arendt conflates all relativism with Einsteinian relativity.

Arents conflates mathematics and mathematical physics (wholly ignorant of Bryn Mawr's Emmy Noether and the role of non-arithmetic symmetries and groups to GTR.)  See Heidegger on science as classification, measurement and calculation.

Arendt conflates mathematical physics with experimental physics across both celestial mechanics and particle physics.

Arendt shows no sign of knowing what Maxwell had achieved (she repeats Heideger's claim which he made on television of what can no longer be comprehended.)

Arendt conflates "fixed point" with ":Archimedian point" with Mach on no privileged point.

Arendt repeats misconstruals of Galileos' own views.

Arendt appears not to know that two orbiting masses orbit about their commonpoint of mass (would she have known where this point lies?)

Arendt appears not to know that Plato knew the view of Pythagorous that Hesperus is Phosphorus.

Arendt seems to believe that uranium does not occur naturally (and so was ignorant of the actual WORK done by Pierre and Marie Curie with pitchblende.)

The 1st ed. has no reference to Heidegger but is riddled with almost direct quotes from him and includes the capitalization of Being.

Arendt appears not to know the basis for Einstein's Nobel prize (see her comments on matter and energy.)

Arendt appears not to have read books which she quotes based on her remarks about relativity: the role of invariants is lost on her.

Arendt seems unaware of how non-Euclidean geometries arose (this is not a matter of arithmetic, measurement or calculations but an issue which her Plato would also have acknowledged concerning a premise.)

The work of a seminal thinker.

Arendt was as anthropocentric as Heidegger- perhaps even more so.  The use of her word "creature" could mislead the naive reader.  See Heidegger on animals.

Arendt has amassed in a single chapter such a wealth of falsehoods, false dichotomies, fallacies, suppressed premises, pointless polemics, deliberate distortions and yet not a reference to her source: Heidegger.

As a philosopher she fails to distinguish instrumentalism, pragmatism, mechanism, physicalism, naturalism - all in the Heidegger tradition (see Heidegger on Erich Frank.)

Heidegger never sat his exams in science and math.  Arendt was a political ignoramus before 1930.  She bungled her work as a commentator on some of the most appalling events and outcomes of the 20th Century and she utterly bungles her learned assessment of the "modern age".

Any poet who has ever looked at the moon through a telescope will know what I mean.

With regard to Galileo, even an a world with no moon (no tides - so likely no tidal pools so likely no terrestrial life) and with a thick atmostphere with no view of a sun - and especially a foggy world in need of telescopes and accurate artillery - would might have an experiment in acceleration of lead shot on a smooth inclined plane, navigation using the polarization of light and Maxwell.

The answer is to layout some of her most outrageous claims in plain view in web pages designed to facilitate the documentation of bullsh*t.  This I will get rolling at http://aule-browser.com/

The reviews of the book at SEP, IEP and wikipedia should bring all of those encyclopedist efforts into question -especially the "peer-reviewed" bullsh*t.  Truth is worth the effort and the work required - and collaboration, not singular individuals as is the model at SEP and IEP.

see Jocelyn Benoist and others on the triumph of Heideggerian bullsh*t as philology, etymology and classical scholarship in French philosphy.  Theology in disguise is a dark travelling companion.

Humor: Arendt also warns that we may explode the entire planet.  Luckily the CERN collider was not named in her honor.

Arendt seems to think the phenomenology of "heaviness" is impugned by distinguishing weight from mass.  She was not a student of Stumpf or Lipps but did spend a few months attending Husserl's lectures (himself a former assistant to Weierstrass and influenced by Bolzano who is something of a parent to "modern" science and to the theory of the militarist state.)

Is there any indication that Arendt ever read Mach, Poincaré or Bolzano?  Was knowing Aristotle in the Greek a basis for a critique of twentieth century physics let alone mathematical physics in the western world?  If she only knew Mahomet in Arabic, it might be enough: see the Fatwa that helped end new science in the Islamic world.  Compare the view of the Vatican on astronomy during the past 150 years and its current contributions to astronomy.
See: Robert Musil dissertaion on Ernst Mach
See: Arendt on the watchmaker.

Truly curious: Arendt quotes Russell from a secondary source.

Fact: in a letter to Heidegger Arendt claims to read Merleau-Ponty only in 1972.

For a defence of Descartes see various. On the claim that the early is superior to the later, see Heidegger.  Compare this view to Locke as a Cartesian versus Hume (Locke being "prior" to Hume as were Parmenides and Heraklit prior to Plato and Aristotle. CF Heidegger on Aristotle's physics in Wegmarken/Pathmarks)

Humor: the great collection (assemblage) of Seba becomes the first museum (Kunsthaus) of Peter I's Saint Petersburg.  Linnaeus follows shortly thereafter.  See the role of classification and the Cepheid variables in the discoveries of Edwin Hubble.

Remark: see the evidence for dark matter with regard to the role of patient, observant women in astronomy.
A seminal thinker and seed spilled on the ground.  Or was it on the bench?

Günther Stern, Günther Anders and the first marriage

What Heidegger says about Günther Stern in the letter to Hannah Arendt of Oct 18, 1925, makes it hard to believe that she later becomes Hannah Stern.  As she says in her letter of 1929, Heidegger might understand least of anyone.  The letter is undated, and it is not clear to me if it is before or after the wedding.

In the next letter in 1930 she is placing Stern beside Heidegger - one can imagine the "Heideggerian" prattle that she must have been listening to from his sycophant.

But in the 1929 letter, already with Stern, she is telling Heidegger that her love for her Martin will always be the love of her life.

Once divorced, Stern would later help her to escape from France to America with her new husband, the political activist, Heinrich Blücher.

Stern would later be known as Günther Anders and would continue to write on the themes from the Marburg lectures.

The first marriage surely shows what harm has been done to the young student by the predatory professor whose wife was so often absent from Marburg.  And yet Blücher goes on to establish some sort of friendship with Heidegger in the post-war years.  Or was he just making things bearable - normalizing the bizarre -refusing to be bourgeois, possessive, jealous or protective.  So it had not been exploitation of an impressionable young woman, alone in Marburg.  Or had he not read the letters?

lowbrow Heidegger

From the published letter of Martin Heidegger to Hannah Arendt, May 4, 1950

Andrew Shields English transl: "... the woman is hidden in the girl, the girl in the woman. And the essential thing is: this concealment itself growing bright."

The eroticism of Heidegger on concealment and Ereignis could not be clearer: it is addressed to his "saucy wood nymph".

He here speaks of "Time gathered in to the fourth dimension of intimacy, as if we had stepped directly out of eternity -- and returned into it."  In merely alluding to the past intimacy he is able to validate his early insight on the occasion of her first entering his office: "only then do I know that life is history." [Mar 21, 1925]

These need to be set side-by-side with the originals and with other of his pronouncements.