autumn 2019

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May youth feel holistic power.

And make The Donald eat his sarcasm: Thunberg “jabs back,” notes the NYTimes, by changing her Twitter bio to mock the President's words, referring to herself in Trump's terms as: “A teenager working on her anger management problem. Currently chilling and watching a good old fashioned movie with a friend.” 



 Go, girls (different article: about teen political ambitions).

And may our heirs not have to emigrate from deserted hot Earth to Mars, though vacationing to Mars is surely to happen.

A posting this week on corporate concentration conveys a very different, yet complementary, context of holistic power.

summer 2019

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I transposed one of my comments at the NYTimes into a blog posting: “a venture in progressive pragmatism.”

China vs. the U.S.: The NYTimes top-picked my comment on Tom Friedman's column today, “Huawei Has a Plan to Help End Its War With Trump.” Business as war by other means echoes the fact that we’re on the way to a permanent condition of cyberwar. (That explanatory article didn’t allow for comment; so, see my comment here.)

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September 7 | I finished appropriating seven back years of notes offline, but the complexity of it all doesn’t transpose easily into the simple sense of website which I’m trying to maintain. And I’m more interested in new directions, which draw me far from here. I must let things emerge in their own time and way. But I’m confident about my direction. And I know that the result will be worth sharing.

a sense of cultural economy and global order

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When I decided last weekend to finish the spring “progressive practice” discussion, I discovered that cumulative notes were far more involved with unexplicated background material than I recalled. So, I decided to organize it all well for later use and, for now, write just short discussions for each part (linked below). Those discussions are merely synoptic of detailed thematic and bibliological scaffolding I have available for later use. (By the way, “goodG,” below, is the political-cultural aspect of a general conception of “the” Good, which I sketched earlier.)

• cultural economy

• goodG planetary order

Explanation of the many months of no new posting, February to now, may interest someone who hasn’t checked in here lately:

spring 2019

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April 21, I posted a comment at a NYTimes article on “progressive capitalism,” then did a brief discussion in light of it at the gedavis.com home page. That’s now a posting.

Then, I decided to pick it apart to use its elements for a new and better discussion, adding new aspects. But, as days passed, the discussion got too elaborate for near-term expansion. I’m going to develop it properly (unhurriedly): a sense of cultivating humanity through enablative society for a progressive politics of human ecology (humanistic ecopolitics).

winter 2019

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What do you read in a text’s silence? “For a sound silence” is about others’ “Heidegger.”

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March 4, 2019 | What do you read in the silent, attentive listener? Or the silent, attentive therapist? “Thinking of Heidegger teaching” is precursory (occasioned by a letter to someone), but a good introduction to my employment of Heidegger. I’ll perform some close reading of Heidegger-in-English, eventually; but probably not this spring. (I did so much close reading—from decades back to recent years of the “Heidegger affair”—that he’s part of the way I am. Yet, I don’t live in the middle of the 20th century.)

for a sound silence

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expanded November 29, 2021

I’m saddened that Heidegger’s texts are still objects for broad stroke journalistic polemic, rather than opportunities for philosophy.

Dec. 29, 2020: This posting was motivated by the appearance of a book that I won’t name, by an Assistant Professor who belongs to an academic group of Heidegger readers who prevalently believe that Heidegger owes them something unsaid—“prevalently” relative to the prevailing voices of the group.

Heidegger wasn’t being poetic when he appealed to the unmet need for thinking. He appreciated the realities of European nihilism that had led the German university to appease, if not vocally support, the transition of Germany into another war, leading to the Holocaust, echoing in Cold War tendencies toward military-industrial disaster.

Dec. 29: That’s a sweeping scale of comment, but exactly The Issue for Heidegger was the scale of “onto-theological constitution of metaphysic[al]” power that “rationalized” (naturalized) what became a juggarnaut of unfathomable, epochal tragedy.

These days, an air of continuing scandal about Heidegger is useful for academic careers that weren’t alive when the “Silence” in Europe was deafening.

In the face of what could not be stopped—and unfathomable disorientation by the scale of inexplicability—a horrified German saw that neighbors had so profoundly betrayed their own humanity that empathic capability left one stunned silent with sorrow.

What’s a good story of a “worthwhile” life?

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Basically, what matters is that living be worthwhile. Something like that is taken for granted, for most folks, without care about definitions. Life goes on, life is, and it’s all too busy too often for time available. The varieties of worthwhile life are too many to cover in any scale of journaling or literature.

I want to suppose an ambitious ideal, for my own purposes—not one I expect others to accept, but it’s admirable, I’m sure. I want to simply refer to “worth-while life” with some specificity that pleases me for other discussions that refer
to “worthwhile life” and merely link here.