Showing posts with label Hannah Arendt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hannah Arendt. Show all posts
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Proto-ghazals and limerence
Dorothy Terrov's concept of 'limerence" would seem to find confirmation in the earliest form of the ghazal, prior to Islam.
With the recent unremarked passing of lupercalia, we have the one link to Marburg through Elizabeth of Hungary (married at 14, died aged 24.)
Imagine how different Sein und Ziet might be if only one or the other had behaved differently: Martin, Hannah or both.
From his letter, we see clearly the limerent moment.
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Banality of Evil, or Banalität des Bösen
The banality of the torture of Irena Sendler?
The film did not dare reveal what was done to her, nor the truth of how she happened to survive: shoddy, without a bullet to the head.
Basic reference: Ernst Klee, Das Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich, Frankfurt 2007.
The execution of Zuzzana Ginzburg may have been simpler.
see: Zuzanna Ginczanka or Zuzanna Polina Gincburg or Susanna Ginzburg
The notion of banality was well-established with Heidegger long before his SA enthusiasms and his reunion with Arendt.
Compare: Hannah Arendt on Walter Benjamin and Stefan Zweig, the suicides.
A suicide of a less than banal psychopath: Theodor Dannecker (Camp de Drancy and other.)
Never interviewed by Arendt as "journalist": Alois Brunner.
Never trained as social scientist: Hannah Arendt. Never trained as philosopher: her second husband, the buffoon of Bard. The end of the tradition of philosopher Hermann Cohen's Marburg: Heidegger mocking philosopher Ernst Cassirer* at Davos.
For a Heidegger, what could be more banal than the death met by Afra Geiger?
Was the world reading the words of Heidegger as a phrase "coined" by Arendt?
See Dresden HAIT.
* whose work gave us Susanne Langer
Note: there is a Paul-Natorp-Strasse in Marburg an der Lahn, but no Hermann-Cohen-Weg.
Sehe: Landkreis Marburg-Biedenkopf
Sehe: Marburg marks the location of the Synagogue of the Middle Ages.
Sehe: the 19th Century Synagogue in Marburg burning on Kristallnacht.
My testimony: 1985, one plaque for Hermann Cohen at the old University; one plaque for "fellow citizens who FELL in the war"; no sign of the great synagogue or the missing Jews or any indication on any home that it had been the home of a Jew in during the 1938 pogrom.
Compare: mezuzah found on the doorposts of peasant houses in Poland in filming "Shoah".
Missing: Judengasse, Marburg, Hessen.
Present: a great many American tourists for Grimm Brothers and the Elizabeth Church.
Facts: one bomb fell in the railyards of Marburg causing one death, but all handicapped and mentally ill murdered; no data on citizen or boys lost among troops, youth troops or SA members or other. But note activity to deny wrong-doing in 1949 at the Uni-Marburg on visit by Niemoeller.
Story of note: Erich Frank, a death in Amsterdam, 1945.
Today:
Jüdische Gemeinde Marburg
Liebigstr. 21A, 35037 Marburg, Germany
+49 6421/407430
http://gcjz-marburg.de
http://www.jg-marburg.de/eng/cooperation.htm
http://www.landsynagoge-roth.de/
http://www.alemannia-judaica.de/marburg_synagoge.htm
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Heidegger, Arendt, Jaspers
I have not seen a plain word spoken on Heidegger handing his willing Arendt to his friend Jaspers.
Heidegger remarks somewhere about Jaspers refusal to leave his Jewish wife. Did Heidegger imagine in some way that they would share his wood nymph?
Ambiguity remains in just how Heidegger and Arendt negotiated her transfer from Marburg to Heidelberg. Jaspers response to Arendt's disclosure decades later was something of a surprise. Was he inept at feigning ignorance?
The "transfer" to the esteemed Jaspers has its counterpart in her loveless marriage to the despised Guenther Stern. And with regard to both Stern and Arendt, the name of Hans Jonas.
In Heidegger's Children, Richard Wolin seems to indicate that there was nothing more to say about Jonas seeking out Arendt: there is no reference to a source. Heidegger simply sent him.
Heidegger remarks somewhere about Jaspers refusal to leave his Jewish wife. Did Heidegger imagine in some way that they would share his wood nymph?
Ambiguity remains in just how Heidegger and Arendt negotiated her transfer from Marburg to Heidelberg. Jaspers response to Arendt's disclosure decades later was something of a surprise. Was he inept at feigning ignorance?
The "transfer" to the esteemed Jaspers has its counterpart in her loveless marriage to the despised Guenther Stern. And with regard to both Stern and Arendt, the name of Hans Jonas.
In Heidegger's Children, Richard Wolin seems to indicate that there was nothing more to say about Jonas seeking out Arendt: there is no reference to a source. Heidegger simply sent him.
"The Image of Hell": Arendt on the "factories" of the Holocaust
The "factories" of Heidegger's one mention of the Holocaust are already in Arendt's 1946 "The Image of Hell".
But these "factories" - if one were to use that term - came later. Arendt is not a witness from Poland or Lithuania. She had not seen that photographic documentation of human slaughter, open, in public, of the early days of Operation Reinhard (Einsatz Reinhard) and the like.
She uses the word "cattle". She is mistaken. We owe a debt to Oliver Sacks for his chapter devoted to Temple Grandin on the slaughter of cattle.
When mobile units were first in use, we have Eichmann's testimony (see Ernst Klee, The Good Old Days) of how slaughter proceeded.
The failures of engines generating exhaust fumes have no counterpart in the slaughter house, the abatoir.
Her account is utterly flawed: the mother sheltering her child has not been reduced to "organic life" - she may have fated her child to a death of having been buried alive.
Nor are these naked women filing into a shallow ravine to be likened to sheep. These are not the buffalo driven over the cliffs on the prairies of the new world.
When Arendt humiliated Mary McCarthy by saying that she had been in a concentration camp, her lie betrays a wound to narcissism. Somehow her vulnerable admission ties into their friendship. Arendt was not there, was not truly a survivor. To some extent, in some respects, she will be a poseur.
Concerning slaughter and Schlacht: Elias Canetti on the camel market; Robert Walser on the march to Sempach.
But these "factories" - if one were to use that term - came later. Arendt is not a witness from Poland or Lithuania. She had not seen that photographic documentation of human slaughter, open, in public, of the early days of Operation Reinhard (Einsatz Reinhard) and the like.
She uses the word "cattle". She is mistaken. We owe a debt to Oliver Sacks for his chapter devoted to Temple Grandin on the slaughter of cattle.
When mobile units were first in use, we have Eichmann's testimony (see Ernst Klee, The Good Old Days) of how slaughter proceeded.
The failures of engines generating exhaust fumes have no counterpart in the slaughter house, the abatoir.
Her account is utterly flawed: the mother sheltering her child has not been reduced to "organic life" - she may have fated her child to a death of having been buried alive.
Nor are these naked women filing into a shallow ravine to be likened to sheep. These are not the buffalo driven over the cliffs on the prairies of the new world.
When Arendt humiliated Mary McCarthy by saying that she had been in a concentration camp, her lie betrays a wound to narcissism. Somehow her vulnerable admission ties into their friendship. Arendt was not there, was not truly a survivor. To some extent, in some respects, she will be a poseur.
Concerning slaughter and Schlacht: Elias Canetti on the camel market; Robert Walser on the march to Sempach.
Sunday, May 9, 2010
Valéry and distance: the absence of Weil and Noether in Arendt
Given the curious role of Antigone in Heidegger, I thought a note on Valéry was in order.
Arendt in Chapter VI of The human Condition makes a great deal of distance and size. Like Arendt in Heidegger and Heidegger in Arendt, Antigone in Heidegger is notable for her absence.
In Valéry's "On Speaking Verse" you will find a remark on distance and theatre.
At what point does a huan figure appear insignificant? Imagine a small boat on a river with the boatman poling along. Imagine the boat seen arriving at a small pier in the morning - and later that afternoon you look down on the river from a great height at such a distance that you even wonder - could that be the boat on its way yet again? You take out your spyglass.
If you view a man beating a donkey from a distance, is it less vile and wrong than if you are there within reach of his arm? Fallacious notions that the size of the universe or the age of the planet or the size of the population affect human values have been popular among journalists for some time.
A murder occurs at a country fair. A murder occurs in the crowded stands of a great stadium. A murder occurs yesterday. Or we discover the body of a victim a week later or a year later. Suppose for a moment that lack of regard for the value of human life can be seen as a characteristic of the Eastern Front of World War II. It may have bearing on the need to revise and enforce international law, but it is not clear that mass slaughter affects our pursuit of a single heinous murderer in an otherwise civil setting. No more than if the murderer be tall or short or the victom slight or heavy.
If we had learned that the sun was twice as large and that we are four-times as far away - or if the earth were twice as large or twice as old - would any recent single act of deliberate murder be the less or the more wrong?
What Arendt may not have understood was that although we do not add Kilograms to Meters we can multiply Kilograms by Meters. One way to approach this - if the issue arouse your wonder - is to start with recent Category Theory. And here again is a connection missing in Arendt: to Emmy Noether. Structure-preserving functions might have been off-putting to Arendt as she held to Heidegger's opinion of what happened to geometry in a collision with algebra. Was the 1950's work of René Thom in any way accessible to Arendt? Yes: André Weil, who, like Arendt, was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation (see my page on the Acknowledgements in The Human Condition at aule-browser.com)
For the poverty of Arendt on wrong doing, see Heidegger on Heraclitus and her Gifford Lectures.
note: this copy of The Art of Poetry was loaned to me by Walter Bruce Sinclair in 74 or 75 at a time when he was preoccupied with Wheeler on Gravitation and other matters. Mea culpa.
note: I was in a small room with Thom in 1980: Arthur Fine was in discussion with Abner Shimony, but I do not now recall Thom's remarks. Weil was no less accessible to Arendt. I, for one, had the good fortune to sit and chat with 3 affable persons active in Category Theory by the time I was age 30 - and not even in New York or Chicago - and with no great effort on my part.
Arendt in Chapter VI of The human Condition makes a great deal of distance and size. Like Arendt in Heidegger and Heidegger in Arendt, Antigone in Heidegger is notable for her absence.
In Valéry's "On Speaking Verse" you will find a remark on distance and theatre.
At what point does a huan figure appear insignificant? Imagine a small boat on a river with the boatman poling along. Imagine the boat seen arriving at a small pier in the morning - and later that afternoon you look down on the river from a great height at such a distance that you even wonder - could that be the boat on its way yet again? You take out your spyglass.
If you view a man beating a donkey from a distance, is it less vile and wrong than if you are there within reach of his arm? Fallacious notions that the size of the universe or the age of the planet or the size of the population affect human values have been popular among journalists for some time.
A murder occurs at a country fair. A murder occurs in the crowded stands of a great stadium. A murder occurs yesterday. Or we discover the body of a victim a week later or a year later. Suppose for a moment that lack of regard for the value of human life can be seen as a characteristic of the Eastern Front of World War II. It may have bearing on the need to revise and enforce international law, but it is not clear that mass slaughter affects our pursuit of a single heinous murderer in an otherwise civil setting. No more than if the murderer be tall or short or the victom slight or heavy.
If we had learned that the sun was twice as large and that we are four-times as far away - or if the earth were twice as large or twice as old - would any recent single act of deliberate murder be the less or the more wrong?
What Arendt may not have understood was that although we do not add Kilograms to Meters we can multiply Kilograms by Meters. One way to approach this - if the issue arouse your wonder - is to start with recent Category Theory. And here again is a connection missing in Arendt: to Emmy Noether. Structure-preserving functions might have been off-putting to Arendt as she held to Heidegger's opinion of what happened to geometry in a collision with algebra. Was the 1950's work of René Thom in any way accessible to Arendt? Yes: André Weil, who, like Arendt, was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation (see my page on the Acknowledgements in The Human Condition at aule-browser.com)
For the poverty of Arendt on wrong doing, see Heidegger on Heraclitus and her Gifford Lectures.
note: this copy of The Art of Poetry was loaned to me by Walter Bruce Sinclair in 74 or 75 at a time when he was preoccupied with Wheeler on Gravitation and other matters. Mea culpa.
note: I was in a small room with Thom in 1980: Arthur Fine was in discussion with Abner Shimony, but I do not now recall Thom's remarks. Weil was no less accessible to Arendt. I, for one, had the good fortune to sit and chat with 3 affable persons active in Category Theory by the time I was age 30 - and not even in New York or Chicago - and with no great effort on my part.
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Acknowledgments to The Human Condition
Over at my aule-browser blog I have added a note on philosophy text markup for the web.
While that blog will track more canonical texts in philosophy, here I will attend to the 1958 Arendt "The Human Condition" and the debt of Arendt to Heidegger and its high cost.
The first Arendt item added to phil.aule-browser.com/arendt.htm concerns the Acknowledgments, which occur just before the absent bibliography and the woefully inadequate index (rectified only in 1998 after many, many reimpressions by U. Chicago.)
They are worth reading for anyone interested in the politics of intellectual funding in the USA of the 1950's and the lack of quality peer feedback to the funding bodies.
Of particualr concern to me:
Rockefeller Foundation
Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
Charles R. Walgreen Foundation
And with regard to support outside Chicago and New York - what a travesty: The Christian Gauss Seminar in Criticism of Princeton University bears no relation to the Gauss of Göttingen, Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss.
See: philosopher Sophie Germain
Comment: A non-professor detailing bullsh*t in recent philosophy (20th Century+) must take pains to let the texts speak for themselves as much as possible - in the case of the web that means ensuring that no accusation can be founded that a quotation is taken out of context or illustrates the reporter's lack of erudition in philosophy of the period or any period referenced or alluded to in the text.
In the past, the "little people" with means could be mere readers: electronic text should mean that intelligent educated readers have access in locus to comment and critique and not be left to fend with inadequate bibliographies, notes, references and indices. Perhaps this could be seen as a product of the Reformation. I see it more as a parallel to more accessible long-distance travel -- with a likely return home. The first step is to move beyond the Baedekker's and the Fodor's and wikipedias as guides to slightly foreign, somewhat remote, philosophy texts.
While that blog will track more canonical texts in philosophy, here I will attend to the 1958 Arendt "The Human Condition" and the debt of Arendt to Heidegger and its high cost.
The first Arendt item added to phil.aule-browser.com/arendt.htm concerns the Acknowledgments, which occur just before the absent bibliography and the woefully inadequate index (rectified only in 1998 after many, many reimpressions by U. Chicago.)
They are worth reading for anyone interested in the politics of intellectual funding in the USA of the 1950's and the lack of quality peer feedback to the funding bodies.
Of particualr concern to me:
Rockefeller Foundation
Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
Charles R. Walgreen Foundation
And with regard to support outside Chicago and New York - what a travesty: The Christian Gauss Seminar in Criticism of Princeton University bears no relation to the Gauss of Göttingen, Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss.
See: philosopher Sophie Germain
Comment: A non-professor detailing bullsh*t in recent philosophy (20th Century+) must take pains to let the texts speak for themselves as much as possible - in the case of the web that means ensuring that no accusation can be founded that a quotation is taken out of context or illustrates the reporter's lack of erudition in philosophy of the period or any period referenced or alluded to in the text.
In the past, the "little people" with means could be mere readers: electronic text should mean that intelligent educated readers have access in locus to comment and critique and not be left to fend with inadequate bibliographies, notes, references and indices. Perhaps this could be seen as a product of the Reformation. I see it more as a parallel to more accessible long-distance travel -- with a likely return home. The first step is to move beyond the Baedekker's and the Fodor's and wikipedias as guides to slightly foreign, somewhat remote, philosophy texts.
Sunday, May 2, 2010
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:
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?
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 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.)
...
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.
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?
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Sources and viewpoint
I think it very likely that Heidegger repeated to Celan what he had put in writing to Marcuse.
It is now known that the inflated estimates of the Ost-Deutschen feared to have fallen victims to the Soviets were highly exaggerated by historians who themselves had been variously compromised during the war and who should have been barred from this important task of estimating the numbers of the dead.
Just as we now know that the loss of refugee lives in Dresden was not likely at all what had been feared, there is no longer any excuse of avoid the question of why the Würzburg bombing was permitted after Dresden. Numbers are not what is at issue now. The pracice of "total war" is at issue.
It is perhaps ironic that Heidegger who despised zealots armed with numbers, fell prey to improper estimates of the dead.
But would a statistical critique have changed his thinking on essentials? The Teutonic fate was clear: the cataclysm for south Germans would come regardless. The recent past could even be ignored if the immediate future were clearly utter devastation such as has never been witnessed.
Heidegger was never a witness to slaughter - Schlacht - in human Stoßen. There is no reason to think that his acquaintance was anything but second-hand. It is one thing about which he appears not to have lied.
In the current assessment of the sources used by Arendt for her books, it is essential to come back to her Plato, Augustine and her access to the Rahel correspondence. Just when is a letter to serve as "grounds"? The letters exchanged with Jaspers betray a confidence in insights which was quite foreign to, say, Husserl - regardless of his published writings, he, personally, remained very unsure [see Fink and Cairns]. He was anything but resolute, as Heidegger learned and exploited. Arendt had never gone through the confrontation of a Christian believer with the work of Bultmann. She had no such relationship with texts. Neither was she trained as an historian and certainly not as a political scientist. She writes as an intellectual - the artist crossed with the seer. Only when the occasion requires it of the speaker, does she speak as one of the Jews. Her Rahel is likely the key to how such grotesque misappropriations could occur as are now imputed. Her actual conversations with Heidegger appear not have left indications in notes jsut as her days spent with Jaspers in Basel are perhaps not revealed not in notes.
Where is the Heidegger-Arendt correspondence on the altruists who risked hanging for sheltering the sub-human? Were they unaware that acts of great heroism had occurred? Was not someone arriving at a door, an event? What greater moment for Sorge to envelope an irruption into daily life? A neighbour is phenomenologically first a neighbour and only secondarily, derivatively, a Jew let alone an orthodox Jew. Arriving first with a bucket of water at your burning cottage or barn, do you ask him to wait until all of the Christian neighbours have arrived and had their turn? Having been thrown from your horse, do you ask him to desist and leave you to your fate to drown in the ditch? How many variations are needed? Is your first fear that he will rob or murder you because he is other? Will he ruch to rape your mother, wife or daughter because he knows where to find your house? Or is he first their as your fellow, your nearest neighbour?
Jaspers persistent folly is to ask Arendt about the "German". As if he were asking Raymond Aron whether he were indeed first a Frenchman or first a Jew [see France and the double allegance hysteria.] It is essential to see what an utter fool Jaspers could be armed foremost with Max Weber and only secondarily by history and the historians. Arendt was absent from Germany during the decisive years; I am not aware of her working with Polish scholars. She did not live to see the unfolding of the trial of Klaus Barbie or the film, Shoah, of Claude Lanzmann. At the critical juncture for her work, Jaspers was in retreat in Basel.
Arendt's Men in Dark Times should have had a Heidegger chapter: instead it has two Jaspers chapters. Her remarks on his book of 1931 [letter Dec 2, 1931] appear to have been lost. By 1948 she appears anixious to see a new addition of his Die Geistige Situation der Zeit - as if the book were not as problematic as his response to the Freiburg address ( we have only his word for his response to the inflammatory Heidegger address at Heidelburg - and I believe he, Jaspers, has lied in that regard.) It is almost as if she failed to read entire passages - perhaps believing that she knew already what he was saying.
When I was twenty-one the importance of Arendt is difficult to convey today: not fundamental as was Heidegger, but rather essential. Today I consider them both to be fair-game: no holds barred.
Jaspers is held to be timeless by his sycophants. He would have found that rather sickening. But can there be a more troubling prospect than that of replacing Heidegger with Jaspers - as if the "Philosphy of Existenz" were thereby validated? As if Philosophical Anthropology were so easily to be side-stepped?
It is now known that the inflated estimates of the Ost-Deutschen feared to have fallen victims to the Soviets were highly exaggerated by historians who themselves had been variously compromised during the war and who should have been barred from this important task of estimating the numbers of the dead.
Just as we now know that the loss of refugee lives in Dresden was not likely at all what had been feared, there is no longer any excuse of avoid the question of why the Würzburg bombing was permitted after Dresden. Numbers are not what is at issue now. The pracice of "total war" is at issue.
It is perhaps ironic that Heidegger who despised zealots armed with numbers, fell prey to improper estimates of the dead.
But would a statistical critique have changed his thinking on essentials? The Teutonic fate was clear: the cataclysm for south Germans would come regardless. The recent past could even be ignored if the immediate future were clearly utter devastation such as has never been witnessed.
Heidegger was never a witness to slaughter - Schlacht - in human Stoßen. There is no reason to think that his acquaintance was anything but second-hand. It is one thing about which he appears not to have lied.
In the current assessment of the sources used by Arendt for her books, it is essential to come back to her Plato, Augustine and her access to the Rahel correspondence. Just when is a letter to serve as "grounds"? The letters exchanged with Jaspers betray a confidence in insights which was quite foreign to, say, Husserl - regardless of his published writings, he, personally, remained very unsure [see Fink and Cairns]. He was anything but resolute, as Heidegger learned and exploited. Arendt had never gone through the confrontation of a Christian believer with the work of Bultmann. She had no such relationship with texts. Neither was she trained as an historian and certainly not as a political scientist. She writes as an intellectual - the artist crossed with the seer. Only when the occasion requires it of the speaker, does she speak as one of the Jews. Her Rahel is likely the key to how such grotesque misappropriations could occur as are now imputed. Her actual conversations with Heidegger appear not have left indications in notes jsut as her days spent with Jaspers in Basel are perhaps not revealed not in notes.
Where is the Heidegger-Arendt correspondence on the altruists who risked hanging for sheltering the sub-human? Were they unaware that acts of great heroism had occurred? Was not someone arriving at a door, an event? What greater moment for Sorge to envelope an irruption into daily life? A neighbour is phenomenologically first a neighbour and only secondarily, derivatively, a Jew let alone an orthodox Jew. Arriving first with a bucket of water at your burning cottage or barn, do you ask him to wait until all of the Christian neighbours have arrived and had their turn? Having been thrown from your horse, do you ask him to desist and leave you to your fate to drown in the ditch? How many variations are needed? Is your first fear that he will rob or murder you because he is other? Will he ruch to rape your mother, wife or daughter because he knows where to find your house? Or is he first their as your fellow, your nearest neighbour?
Jaspers persistent folly is to ask Arendt about the "German". As if he were asking Raymond Aron whether he were indeed first a Frenchman or first a Jew [see France and the double allegance hysteria.] It is essential to see what an utter fool Jaspers could be armed foremost with Max Weber and only secondarily by history and the historians. Arendt was absent from Germany during the decisive years; I am not aware of her working with Polish scholars. She did not live to see the unfolding of the trial of Klaus Barbie or the film, Shoah, of Claude Lanzmann. At the critical juncture for her work, Jaspers was in retreat in Basel.
Arendt's Men in Dark Times should have had a Heidegger chapter: instead it has two Jaspers chapters. Her remarks on his book of 1931 [letter Dec 2, 1931] appear to have been lost. By 1948 she appears anixious to see a new addition of his Die Geistige Situation der Zeit - as if the book were not as problematic as his response to the Freiburg address ( we have only his word for his response to the inflammatory Heidegger address at Heidelburg - and I believe he, Jaspers, has lied in that regard.) It is almost as if she failed to read entire passages - perhaps believing that she knew already what he was saying.
When I was twenty-one the importance of Arendt is difficult to convey today: not fundamental as was Heidegger, but rather essential. Today I consider them both to be fair-game: no holds barred.
Jaspers is held to be timeless by his sycophants. He would have found that rather sickening. But can there be a more troubling prospect than that of replacing Heidegger with Jaspers - as if the "Philosphy of Existenz" were thereby validated? As if Philosophical Anthropology were so easily to be side-stepped?
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Kristeva on Heidegger: colours
In his Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, Heidegger invites the students in his Marburg lecture to consider what it is to think on the wall. He cannot tell them how, when she first entered his office, that he asked her to removed her hat, her raincoat - or did not. Husserl insists that when the thing is present, the backside is present in consciousness in the horizon, a phenomenon well-known in the worldwide demand for denim.
Colour. Denim was originally colored using Newton's absent shade (just as the sun and the moon with the known planets numbered seven, so must his colours of the prism) - indigo - and not Genoa blue.
Kristeva draws our attention to the turn from green to brown in his thought of his saucy wood nymph. Here is a possible clue: Trakl "Die Raben".
In Die Raben we find the Schatten, the doe, the braune Stille and the furrowed acre.
Colour. Denim was originally colored using Newton's absent shade (just as the sun and the moon with the known planets numbered seven, so must his colours of the prism) - indigo - and not Genoa blue.
Kristeva draws our attention to the turn from green to brown in his thought of his saucy wood nymph. Here is a possible clue: Trakl "Die Raben".
In Die Raben we find the Schatten, the doe, the braune Stille and the furrowed acre.
Über den schwarzen Winkel hastenOr not. But what awaits the doe (hind), if not the buck (stag, Hirsch) in rut (Brunst, Hirschbrunst)?
Am Mittag die Raben mit hartem Schrei
Ihr Schatten streift an die Hirschkuh vorbei
Und manchal mal sieht man sie mürrisch rasten.
O wie sie die braune Stille stören,
In der ein Acker sich verzückt,
Wie ein Weib, das schwer Ahnung berückt,
Und manchmal kann man sie keifen hören.
Und ein Aas, die sie irgenwo wittern,
Und plötzlich richten nach Nord sie den Flug
Und schwinden wie ein Leichenzug
in Luften, die von Wollust zittern.
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