Sunday, September 14, 2014
summer 2014
September 14: protean daze
Ever wonder why the old Greeks would fabricate such a god as Proteus?
I have a story about that, way beyond what They Say about a king—who so loved Helen before Troy?—who became the Old Man of the Sea who would always tell Truth, if he could be captured.
September 7 | If I’m forgotten by you due to my introversion (too little updating here?), OK. My learning curve matters; recognition of that by others doesn’t matter.
Being worthwhile to be read matters. Satisfying idle curiosity’s want of novelty doesn’t matter.
Interpersonal rapport matters. (Email keeps writing alive!) Display for strangers matters less, but yes.
Making time worthwhile, being worthwhile matters, yet in my own loving time.
August 31: new semester! | I’ve done much offline, thinking of far horizons that clear writing would lead to. You do want clarity. I have to ensure that my path reaches somewhere well—which I’ve been prospecting intensively (to be in terms of others’ inspiring work, my partnering).
So, little turns up here so far, except too many prospective notes, old material, some revision of old material, and long postings in light of influences that I’m leaving behind (remaining implicit to anything new).
“Does prefacing ever cease? When is there circumspection enough? Where’s the ‘global community page’ you promised?”
It got postponed for the sake of prospecting a lifeworld-oriented conception of globality and value holism, which I want to explicate first. Flourish!—purposefully, Project-ively, fruitfully.
Trends in the news—being in Time—get more of my time than I anticipated. Would engaging news please just stop?
Crises may come and go before good sense of what’s really happening leads to posting that’s more than ephemera. We do have enough ephemera in our time.
In the cosmic scale of things, Our epoch is ephemeral, of course.
Yet, we love life anyway—we must do so—like tall trees reaching for sky despite all weather, beyond intelligent humans’ living and dying: another generation of darlings, then another. The same trees outlast intelligent lives, still swaying with Time.
August 17 | I do not want to get more involved now with Heidegger's political times. But I’m drawn into it some more, reticently: “Nearing fear and trembling in Germany, 1938-1941.” | August 24: And I'm drawn out of it, gladly: "Dialectical defaming." I'd much rather write through my preferred pathway of Heidegger's work published by him (while he was alive), which deeply influenced me years ago (decades ago, albeit in English translation done in consultation with him). Someday.
My pathway with him would also be an introduction for new readers, which is actually a matter of thinking deeply about your life. The listing at that link is my response to a query from a grad student of philosophy who wanted a beginning. I could do an introduction with good fidelity to Heidegger's Project. But I too prefer going my own way to want to explicate the difference between Heidegger's Project and my own, in long light of his. I do have a clear sense of the difference. But that includes knowing that he wished his work to be brought into futures—appropriated into later eras. So, he would welcome an insightful "confusion" of the difference (presuming I might do that very insightfully—let's pretend—no, I would do a new path well).
July 29 | “Philosophical living as event of appropriation” is a thought experiment done in light of close attention to a June 2014 interview of Habermas that exemplifies a condition of distance between philosopher and public intellectual. Communicative bridging is an event of appropriation (philosopher in public), yet also an ongoing invitation (philosopher to public) to dwell more broadly or intimately or complexly with respect to lifeworlds' real complexity, potential, and scale.
July 20 | This site hasn’t really begun yet. But I’m getting close! Old material (“...born before 2012”) is here. Renderings of what I want to do during the coming season (“currently”) is much clearer, and lots of work has been done offline the past year, which will serve coming years well (yet, growth is never finished). I hope to blog substantively—surely to do more than archive site updates! But this is summer, and I am a little crazy (thank goodness.)
As the footer below my signature now indicates, update notes of recent weeks and months are to be here. I hope to have substantial updates each weekend, but days are finite, and I’m still doing lots of development before writing rather incessantly again (like I was doing in late 2011 elsewhere).
July 12: fun with intellectual gossip | You’ll be glad to know that searching 50 years of the New York Review of Books on ‘Heidegger’ results in 230+ articles. Most of the mentions are passing, which makes the name an eerie meme running through the half century, very little of it involved with understanding. Yet, much of this suggests that his importance to history is a presumption.
Most of the mention is associated with Hannah Arendt. Her romance with him is more interesting than his philosophical work. His administrative Moment is more interesting than his philosophical work. Gossip is as prevasive to high brow reviews as to tabloids, but with better vocabulary. Yet, tens of articles dramatize others’ great thinking of their era, in which Heidegger is integral.
Two American academics’ dispute with Derrida, 1993, is very entertaining. Their vanity about immunity to error implicate careers invested in misreading Heidegger. The dispute got ridiculous, involving several issues of the Review, even causing a long riposte by Derrida a year later, in the back of his book, Points...Interviews, 1994. Derrida (Jewish) defends Heidegger against vacuous presumptiveness. The vain Americans don’t like it that Derrida is right; and they don’t like being shown that they’re wearing no clothes.
July 6: fun with Heidegger | This past week, I let myself become very involved with showing a few paranoid Heidegger professors how Heidegger’s private notebooks (his Considerations, written during the 1930s) are not the notes of someone who is anti-Jewish. This resulted in several long discussions by me, particularly in detailed terms of suspect passages from his Considerations, which I’m not going to integrate soon into a presentation here. But, I’ve clearly shown how good faith reading works, in light of phenomenological maturity (Heidegger’s) and critical appreciability (his, too). My time was well spent. Yet, it’s saddening how misreading is necessary for some folks.
Eventual integration of my discussions will be part of transposing my long blog post on the matter into a multi-section (linked set of pages) site project on Heidegger and reading political times, which will address many contexts that aren’t part of the present posting’s non-attention to some readers’ construal of anti-Jewishness. Such is not in Heidegger’s texts (nor in his life).
June 29 | I want to have some kind of worthwhile update message here every Sunday, on this page at least. So mark your calendar (ha!). (It’s an auto-recurring item in my own calendar software.) If I don’t have an update, that won’t be because I forgot the intent. I promise not to “fail” two Sundays consecutively, but milestones can’t be scheduled. Some updating will be trivial, but I dislike that as much as anyone else. I’ll avoid it.
Currently, I want to make good on “philosophy for good” and “healthy regions”; and revise “humanistic union” such that it’s less spacey. I’m a policy “wonk,” but conceptual prospecting initially goes its own way.
I’m going to use the site blog for archiving site updates, probably early July onward. New pieces on this site (revised from earlier years off site and new off site) will continue to appear above this column in the “new in site” space, but I’ll maintain an archive of that—and forgettable notes such as this—via blog.
The tenor of academic writing is very different from the rigorous informality I want here. I love rigorous writing, yet I enjoy imagining that a typical academic reader might easily infer lack of credibility by informality. I’m doing some “stuff” privately that’s very difficult. So bear with me about updates. This site will be worth remembering someday—I hope.
