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.
Sunday, May 9, 2010
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
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
Saturday, May 8, 2010
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:
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.
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.
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?
Saturday, May 1, 2010
Temporalization and "forward-looking"
The cat - or, as I say, my daughter's cat - had not come back. In the drizzle it would not go far, so I had opened the door and had a moment's peace.
But the sun came out without my noticing, a few drops fell from the new spring leaves, and the evening was filled with a bright warmth which the day had lacked.
The distant sound of freeway traffic was pierced by blackbirds calling - the meow of the little cat was not to be heard. There is no silence on the rural edge of the city with its ring roads and bisecting highways.
The cat should live to see me an old man gone white, should we both be so lucky. But now it could not be found and my daughter would return from her evening with friends to the absence of the cat.
The neighbors and strangers out walking must have thought me strange. Why should they need to know the cat's name? (She comes when called - less often for me, always for my daughter or her mother.)
The search for a cat is a search along edges and under bushes - you walk watching for a slinking tabby in the shadows. Few cars comes down our quiet streets but each is too loud, too fast, each driver too distracted.
Each time I retrace my steps it seems surer that the cat has gone into the marsh land with is coyotes, racoons and feral cats. Two large dogs are not on a leash. A rabbit crouches under a pine.
Delphy has never left the yard before, never been seen to cross a street, but there are streets between this row of houses and those birds - the birds in the cedars north, the birds in the pines south, the birds scattered to the west. And east there are there are so many squirrels.
She has a current tag for the town on her collar, but the distant din of the highway crossing - unseen and hundreds of meters away - but too loud for any tinkling collar to be heard.
Not having a cat will be a relief - she is so demanding, such frightful claws, and as dense as she is also the smartest of cats. Her hind legs are jet black velvet. Black tuffs crown her ears. She is the most beautiful of small cats.
And now I know she is gone, and the embedded chip is no consolation, and now I am watchign the pavements north, south, west and listening for brakes screeching. Each car that rounds any corner is going too fast. Why could I not have been more patient? I always sit with her outside.
And there she is, over on the next avenue, sitting at the front door of a pale yellow bungalow - a ranch-style house - not at all like home.
A very long half-hour or so is over.
The reason S u. Z is not psychological-anthropology might been seen this way: the search for the lost child is not a formative experience in a typical life - but consideration of the search for a lost child might be the occasion for adumbrating some feature essential to illumined human existence. In Heidegger, unlike Marcel, the child is merely absent.
For the loving parent, the loss of a child is trully unthinkable, unimaginable - an unlivable outcome - a future history which we refuse to project. This is not biology, though it has its biological basis. This is not mere bonding and imprinting. It is not necessary for the good parent to ever even entertain such a loss in any but the most abstract, detached mode.
But the sun came out without my noticing, a few drops fell from the new spring leaves, and the evening was filled with a bright warmth which the day had lacked.
The distant sound of freeway traffic was pierced by blackbirds calling - the meow of the little cat was not to be heard. There is no silence on the rural edge of the city with its ring roads and bisecting highways.
The cat should live to see me an old man gone white, should we both be so lucky. But now it could not be found and my daughter would return from her evening with friends to the absence of the cat.
The neighbors and strangers out walking must have thought me strange. Why should they need to know the cat's name? (She comes when called - less often for me, always for my daughter or her mother.)
The search for a cat is a search along edges and under bushes - you walk watching for a slinking tabby in the shadows. Few cars comes down our quiet streets but each is too loud, too fast, each driver too distracted.
Each time I retrace my steps it seems surer that the cat has gone into the marsh land with is coyotes, racoons and feral cats. Two large dogs are not on a leash. A rabbit crouches under a pine.
Delphy has never left the yard before, never been seen to cross a street, but there are streets between this row of houses and those birds - the birds in the cedars north, the birds in the pines south, the birds scattered to the west. And east there are there are so many squirrels.
She has a current tag for the town on her collar, but the distant din of the highway crossing - unseen and hundreds of meters away - but too loud for any tinkling collar to be heard.
Not having a cat will be a relief - she is so demanding, such frightful claws, and as dense as she is also the smartest of cats. Her hind legs are jet black velvet. Black tuffs crown her ears. She is the most beautiful of small cats.
And now I know she is gone, and the embedded chip is no consolation, and now I am watchign the pavements north, south, west and listening for brakes screeching. Each car that rounds any corner is going too fast. Why could I not have been more patient? I always sit with her outside.
And there she is, over on the next avenue, sitting at the front door of a pale yellow bungalow - a ranch-style house - not at all like home.
A very long half-hour or so is over.
The reason S u. Z is not psychological-anthropology might been seen this way: the search for the lost child is not a formative experience in a typical life - but consideration of the search for a lost child might be the occasion for adumbrating some feature essential to illumined human existence. In Heidegger, unlike Marcel, the child is merely absent.
For the loving parent, the loss of a child is trully unthinkable, unimaginable - an unlivable outcome - a future history which we refuse to project. This is not biology, though it has its biological basis. This is not mere bonding and imprinting. It is not necessary for the good parent to ever even entertain such a loss in any but the most abstract, detached mode.
Ricoeur on recognition
The Vienna lectures on Recognition have a spectre which I cannot shake: Ricoeur and Gusdorf, Ricoeur immediately after the war and Ricoeur with Eliade.
The extent of the falsity and brutality of the post-war French purges is very sobering. de Gaulle is influenced not to commute a death sentence by the impression - the recall - that he had seen that man on a magazine cover in a German uniform (likely he was mistaken as to that magazine cover.) It was imaginable that André Gide be hanged (the doctine of homosexual and esthete weakness) when in fact the Wehrmacht may have triumphed because of the tyranny of military college maxims ("retreat to form a line") and misapprehensions of intent and counter-deception ("they will think that this is a ruse, so instead it will in fact be our intent ...").
Could Ricoeur not recognize himself in those "errors of his youth" ? He was already married. He was already a hero. This was not the case with Eliade in Romania.
His first tasks are paraphrase: paraphrase Jaspers, Marcel, then Husserl.
Mikel Dufrenne later had a falling out with the appropriation of Heidegger in France (he was himself a case in point) - but how much of it could he see at work in Ricoeur (Ricoeur sees laborious intersubjectivity constructions as an argument against such efforts - would such be an argument against linguistics? Evolution? Economics? The search to identify authors of the Old Testament?)
Husserl and Jaspers abandoned: the strange case of Dufrenne and Ricoeur in the early 1950's; the role of Merleau-Ponty, Jean Wahl and others.
note: Ricoeur on "gift", "giving", "receiving", "gratitude" at the close of the lectures.
The extent of the falsity and brutality of the post-war French purges is very sobering. de Gaulle is influenced not to commute a death sentence by the impression - the recall - that he had seen that man on a magazine cover in a German uniform (likely he was mistaken as to that magazine cover.) It was imaginable that André Gide be hanged (the doctine of homosexual and esthete weakness) when in fact the Wehrmacht may have triumphed because of the tyranny of military college maxims ("retreat to form a line") and misapprehensions of intent and counter-deception ("they will think that this is a ruse, so instead it will in fact be our intent ...").
Could Ricoeur not recognize himself in those "errors of his youth" ? He was already married. He was already a hero. This was not the case with Eliade in Romania.
His first tasks are paraphrase: paraphrase Jaspers, Marcel, then Husserl.
Mikel Dufrenne later had a falling out with the appropriation of Heidegger in France (he was himself a case in point) - but how much of it could he see at work in Ricoeur (Ricoeur sees laborious intersubjectivity constructions as an argument against such efforts - would such be an argument against linguistics? Evolution? Economics? The search to identify authors of the Old Testament?)
Husserl and Jaspers abandoned: the strange case of Dufrenne and Ricoeur in the early 1950's; the role of Merleau-Ponty, Jean Wahl and others.
note: Ricoeur on "gift", "giving", "receiving", "gratitude" at the close of the lectures.
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